"From Enemy Territory" by Mladen Vuksanovic [3]

Pale Diary - 5 April to 16 May 1992

This first section of the diary covers the period from the beginning of Vuksanovic's confinement to Pale and increasingly to his house, to the reunion with his wife (who left for Sarajevo on April 29 in order to help their children--still stuck in the city--get out) on May 16. The text of the diary is largely unedited and only annotated with occasional footnotes to explain references in the original which would not be clear to the general reader.

As a result, the text is somewhat impressionistic, referring to immediate circumstances, events, observations and conversations; sometimes giving a reaction, sometimes not. Vuksanovic never dwells on any one incident or observation for more than a paragraph. I suspect this is partially because the slow-motion horror is too much to bear.

Several motifs develop over these fifty-plus pages. The craven and criminal nature of the local authorities of Pale in action; whatever their rhetoric, and whatever is actually going on on the "front lines" (Vuksanovic reminds the reader how absurd the very idea of a "front line" in a multi-ethnic city suddenly wrenched along crudely nationalist lines), the reality on the streets of Pale are stolen cars without plates and shuttered homes waiting to be looted.

Another motif are the many personal betrayals and friends and colleagues suddenly reveal themselves as arch-nationalists firmly committed to an insane cause; a cause that commits them to destroying their own city and murdering their own friends. It's one thing to study the rise of nationalism and xenophobia in the abstract; Vuksanovic illustrates what is it like to experience that process on the personal level.

I used the phrase "slow-motion horror" above, and that is as close as I can come to explaining the overall feel of this section. Vuksanovic is not in Sarajevo, experiencing the bombing, the snipers, the growing desperation firsthand. Instead, he experiences the war through his radio, through reports from passers-by and neighbors, and most surreal of all through his telephone connection to Sarajevo, which is still working through the entire war. Nothing can illustrate how perverse a reversal of the normal order this war is better than the frequent references to his use of the telephone to call people he knows in the city a few kilometers away; people who are being attacked daily by the same soldiers Vuksanovic can see walking by his house in broad daylight. The Bosnian Serb government is not unaware of this connection--rather than shut down all telephone lines, they subject phone users to a constant barrage of nationalist music and radio broadcasts, so that both parties must listen and talk over this Orwellian audio backdrop.

Vuksanovic does not try to analyze the growing horror or to rationalize it in the larger context of politics and history. He simply expresses disgust and a growing fear that he has damned his family by not acting sooner to get his children out of the Old City. When this section ends, his wife and daughter have finally made it to the family home to join him--the son stayed behind for fear that he would certainly be drafted into military service if he was found. Vuksanovic notes that he has asked his wife to record her impressions of her two weeks in the Old City; those impressions form the next section of the book.

"Sudden Nationhood" by Max Bergholz

The latest issue of The American Historical Review--the quarterly publication of the American Historical Association--includes an article by Max Bergholz, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. The article is entitled "Sudden Nationhood: The Microdynamics of Intercommunal Relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina after World War II". The article approaches the subject of nationalism at the local level, specifically the Kulen Vakuf region in northwestern Bosnia during the 1950s and early 1960s. This was an area of mostly Serbs and Muslims, with a small Croat minority, which had been scarred by violence and atrocities during World War II. First, a number of local Serbs had been murdered by a group of Muslims who had joined the Ustasa. According to Bergholz it seems most of these killings were carried out for personal rather than ideological or racial reasons. This led to wider-scale retaliatory killings by Serbs even as the Partisans tried to build multi-ethnic solidarity in the region. This is a familiar story throughout Bosnia in World War, but the context is important because the author is arguing that the wartime experience of particular individuals heavily influenced the way in which they, and their immediate descendants, would conceptualized these "nationalist" incidents in the immediate post-war era.

Bergholz utilizes source documents from League of Communists reports about incidents of "national chauvinism" and inter-ethnic violence to determine patterns of ethnic violence between individuals or groups in the region. The article is a micro-level examination of how nationalism "happens."

The idea of nationalism as a process which happens rather than a fixed identity is crucial here; the incidents Bergholz studies describe situations in which often petty (and sometimes violent) incidents involving individuals are conceptualized as conflicts between national groups either by the participants or members of the surrounding community. Yet these conceptions often do not dictate day-to-day interactions within those communities. Rather, conflict triggers an automatic and seemingly unconscious configuration of a particular conflict into generalized, national-group defined terms. National identities, at least in terms of defining relations between groups and between individuals of different ethnicity were not fixed, nor were they the determining factor in communal relations. Rather, incidents of violence or conflict would sometimes trigger this "sudden nationalism."

Also of note--the author's contention that contrary to conventional wisdom (heard all too often from Western observers during the Bosnian War), it is not true that ethnic violence is the product of antagonistic national identities. Rather, incidents of violence create those opposed national identities; and that individuals will sometimes revert to those identities in times of conflict or strife. Bergholz also suggests that the Titoist focus on national coexistence might have had the counter-productive effect of encouraging Yugoslavs to conceptualize personal, social, and political disagreements in nationalist terms.

It's a well-researched and well-reasoned article, and I recommend it to anybody who has an interest in Bosnia, or in the development of nationalism and national identity in general. The citation is below:

Max Berghoz, "Sudden Nationhood: The Microdynamics of Intercommunal Relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina after World War II". The American Historical Review, 118, no. 3, June 2013, pp. 679-707.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [11]

Chapter 5: August 1991-May 1992: Bosnia-Hercegovina--Paradise of the Damned

Glenny's account of the war in Bosnia proper begins with a trip across the Sava River from war-torn Slavonski Samac in Croatia to as-yet untouched Bosanski Samac on the Bosnian side. This gives him an opportunity to note how unprepared for the war Bosnia was; not just militarily and politically, but also at the level of daily life--most people simply did not seem to really believe that the war would cross over from Croatia.

It also gives him a chance to briefly explain who the Bosnian Muslims are, and what their relation to the surrounding Serbs and Croats is. I do mean briefly, by the way, and by spending only two pages explaining how the Muslim Slavs of Bosnia and Sandzak became the Muslim nation in Tito's Yugoslavia in such a cursory fashion, Glenny raises more questions than he answers, some of which are troubling.

He essentially regards the creation of a Muslim nationality as a Titoist move to create leverage against Serb and Croat nationalism in the late 60s and early 70s. He points out that they are a nation who are solely distinguished by their religion, but ignores how much Catholicism and Orthodoxy define Croats and Serbs, respectively.

Lastly, he refers to the problems this creates under the convoluted 1974 Constitutions, which defined Yugoslavia as a federation of both constituent republics and constituent nations. He argues that republics could not leave Yugoslavia without the consent of the all nations. The objection is obvious--neither Croatia nor Bosnia had the right to leave, as the Serb nation in both republics refused to cooperate.

How Glenny will square this legal objection with Western notions of individual liberty (who decides how "the nation" feels?) and minority rights (minorities were not "nations" in the Yugoslav Constitution) will be interesting.

I am not suggesting that he is misreading the Yugoslav Constitution--I am merely curious as to whether or not he sees the same problems with it that I do; and also how he thinks the situation should have been managed. Under Glenny's logic, only Slovenia and Macedonia had the right to leave Yugoslavia, given the objections of the Serb "nations" within Croatia and Bosnia (let alone the fact that the Albanian minority in Kosova were not a "nation" and therefore lacked such rights).

"Dangerous Games" by Margaret MacMillan

Author and historian Margaret MacMillan's latest book, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History is a short and readable polemic arguing that History--used properly and fairly--has an important role to play in society and culture. MacMillan assumes very little here--she is willing to back the debate up to fundamental questions along the lines of "What is History for?" and "Is the study of History worth the effort?"

I don't agree with all of her opinions--I supported the Iraq invasion, for example--but there is much here to agree with and take heart from. More to the point for this blog, MacMillan may not have actively supported military intervention in Bosnia, but she certainly sees the rationale. The former Yugoslavia comes up with some frequency throughout the book, and it's quite obvious that MacMillan's understanding of the situation was grounded in reality.

Which would be of only marginal interest except for the primary reason she was able to understand the root causes of the war and to identify the correct perpetrators of the ethnic violence unleashed against the people of Yugoslavia. Chapter Five (the chapters are more like related essays, making selective reading no obstacle to fully appreciating each separate piece), entitled "History and Nationalism", should be required reading for anyone who wishes to discuss the "ancient tribal hatreds" of the Balkans, or indeed anyone who wishes to pontificate on historic claims to land in the region, or to the centrality of Kosovo to "Serbdom," and so forth.

MacMillan understands--as far too few observers and pundits and self-appointed experts--that national identities are artificial constructs, and that generally they are a product of the modern age. The connections between modern national identities and earlier tribal, ethnic, religious, or linguistic identities are, of course, not created from whole cloth; those connections exist, but they are only the foundation of a deliberately created national identity, which always relies on a grand narrative which is part history and part nation-building mythology.

There is nothing wrong with this, of course, as long as we do not allow the claims of less self-aware nationalists to replace sober history with a wholesale acceptance of national mythologies, especially when one nation's myths come at the expense of their neighbors own right to self-determination.

Comparing MacMillans sensible, even-handed, and (to repeat myself) sober illustration of the nation-building function of national mythologies to the tendency of Balkan revisionists and apologists for Serb nationalism to accept such myths as that of the Battle of Kosovo Polje at face value is almost unfair, as if one were comparing an essay on Western Christmas traditions to a child's letter to Santa Claus.

"Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict" from Greenhaven Press [3]

Chapter 1: Is Nationalism Beneficial?

This chapter is evenly split--five 'pro' articles and five 'con.' One implicit theme in this section is the ambiguity not only of how we define nationalism, but also whether or not there are different types of nationalism. In general, it seems that the writers in the 'pro' camp believe that there can be positive, even liberal, strains of inclusive nationalism, or that nationalism can be a positive oppositional ideology for an oppressed or disenfranchised group--even as they acknowledge the possibility that nationalism can have negative and destructive consequences.

On the other hand, the 'con' writers seem to recognize only the most negative, xenophobic, and reactionary forms of nationalism; there seems to be little room for a concept of liberal nationalism in the essay by Ernest Erber, which concludes with this paragraph:

"AS we come to the end of the 20th century, the democratic left should see the nation-state, separatist self-determination and nationalism as road blocks to the progress, if not the survival, of humanity. We should begin with fierce opposition to all forms of nationalism--theory, doctrine, politics, and movement. It has outlived whatever usefulness it had and, like an unburied corpse, its continued presence contaminates the body politic wherever it is tolerated."

This seems to be a progressive and enlightened statement of cosmopolitan inclusiveness; but the harsh realities of the world as it is have a way of throwing ideological certainties out of whack. While I may hope for a world without borders, that hopeful future is some distance away and in the meantime the nation-state--hopefully increasingly bound by an international body of law intended to hold states responsible for the human rights of its citizens--remains the least-worst socio-political entity we've managed to successfully implement. The proper purpose of the state is to defend the economic interests of the citizens of the polity, to defend and respect their human rights, their property rights, and so on. The nation-state is not perfect, and the "nation" like all conceptions of human groupings is limited and far from universal; but it is far superior to any tribal notions of defining 'us versus them', nor does nationalism need to be as reductive as any purely ethnic or 'racial' definitions of inclusiveness.

Considering the totalitarian aspects of most universal social conceptions (whether religion or Communism), the nation-state is about the best we've been able to come up with so far. Once considered against the imperfect reality of the human condition today, Erber's uncompromising stance begins to look less like staunch idealism and more like unforgiving dogma.

"The Nationalist Serbian Intellectuals and Islam: Defining and Eliminating a Muslim Community" by Norman Cigar

One of the two essays from the book The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy that explicitly addresses the plight of the Bosniak Muslims. Cigar is also the author of the essential work Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing and comes to the subject with a wealth of knowledge and a clear perspective.

The gist of Cigar's essay is most likely familiar to most readers of this blog, as the influence of Serbian intellectuals and writers like Cosic, Draskovic, Karadzic, Raskovic, Plavsic, and many others is well-known to even a casual student of the last Balkan wars. Here (in line with the theme of the book), Cigar focuses on the demonization of Islam and ethnic Muslims by Serb nationalists; the opening sentences of his essay:

"Recent events in Bosnia-Herzegovina provide significant material for a case study on the impact that external images of Islam can have on Muslims as a community and as individuals. Perhaps there was no more striking aspect in this process of creating images than the role that Serb intellectuals played as they exercised their craft of developing and disseminating knowledge and engaged in political activity."

Cigar goes on to show that Serb nationalist intellectuals were consistent in creating an "in-group/out-group" mentality regarding the Serbs versus the "others." What is of note in the context of this book is how Serbs tried to play to outside (particularly Western) sensibilities by playing off stereotypes about and fears of Muslims and Islam. What is also striking is how ridiculously crude and irrational much of this "intellectual" rhetoric was. Consider this quote from writer Dragos Kalajic, speaking of the allegedly "unmanly" nature of the (allegedly "Serb") converts to Islam after the Ottoman conquest:

"..it is appropriate to point out that effeminacy and symbolic or actual homosexuality are not the only means by which to escape from a manly nature that is threatened with violence, terror, or death. The Serbian experience shows that there are many other ways of avoiding duty and responsibility stemming from too onerous a fate, which history has imposed on the Serbs. Historically, the first and easiest path of avoidance from unavoidable fate was actually opened up by the Ottoman occupation...[and] drove many Serbs along the road to treachery"

This is, of course, a load of nonsense, but it's the sort of nonsense that people like Diana Johnstone and Julia Gorin take very seriously. To say nothing of the quote from Radovan Karadzic wherein he tries to distinguish which Muslims could still be converted to Orthodoxy--apparently, religious conversion is a matter of genetics:

"When it is a question of the Serbs of the Islamic faith, there was always a great divide that determined whether they were to be more Muslim or more Serb. Those in whom the religious element predominated, and orientation toward Islam's fundamentals, were lost forever to the Serbian nation."

It goes on, but even that short quote is enough to make the obvious parallels to the Nazi efforts to determine which people in the occupied East had sufficiently "Aryan" characteristics; Cigar rightly notes that in this day and age nationalist extremists know better than to express their beliefs in explicitly racist terms, but there is really no other way to interpret Karadzic's gibberish about collective memories and achieving "that level of development to become Serbs while also having the Islamic past of their families." These are the words of a man described with no little warmth by the 39th President of the United States as I noted last fall.

Cigar's analysis is keen, but it is difficult to do this essay full credit without all the quotes he includes; the above passages are typical, but hardly exhaust the range of crackpot theorizing, pseudo-science, mytho-romantic pontificating, and sheer psychopathic lunacy on display here. Cigar convincingly demonstrates that among Serbia's intellectual elite there was a strong tendency to portray Islam as a corrosive, and thoroughly evil force which fully defines all followers of that faith; Muslims are at all places and all times defined primarily if not exclusively as members of a vicious, violent, and implacably anti-Western (and anti-Serb) movement. No wonder Samuel Huntington was so popular among them.

"Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" by Branimir Anzulovic [2]

INTRODUCTION

After noting that lamenting the loss of Kosovo has been a genuine element of Serbian culture for quite some time, the author further acknowledges that "significant loss of power is always a traumatic event." This is fair, as is the following observation that the "strong expansionist trend" Serbia displayed after gaining independence was typical of the countries which achieved independence as nation-states in the nineteenth century "after a long period of foreign domination or political fragmentation." It is important to maintain a measure of balance and to avoid demonizing an entire nation or group. One of the primary themes of this blog is the evil of collectivism, specifically collective guilt. Any attempt to deal with recent events in the former Yugoslavia, unfortunately, risks charges of being "anti-Serb" from various hysterical factions. I want to take special care not to lend any legitimacy to such charges.

At any rate, Anzulovic is careful to note that theories of a certain "fascist psychology" are wanting at best; the psychological impulse we need to understand is not some individual pathology shared by many members of a particular group but rather the universal trait of strong group membership, a trait which is not exclusive to our species but which in our case may have outlived its evolutionary usefulness. There is a pathology at work, but it is not an abnormal psychological trait peculiar to members of a particular group. The author notes:

"Thus, the primary driving force leading to genocide is not the pathology of the individuals organizing and committing the genocide, but the pathology of the ideas guiding them."

Anzulovic wants to examine how

"the old myth of an innocent, suffering Serbia, and the concomitant myth of foreign evildoers who conspire against its very existence influened the behavior of Serbs at the close of the twentieth century."

The rest of introduction summarizes each chapter rather neatly; if you ever come across a copy of this book while remaining unsure if you want to read it, I encourage you to at least read the Introduction, which serves to at least encapsulate the theme Anzulovic covers.

Foreign Affairs Article on Ethnonationalism and Partition

The cover story from the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine explains much less than it promises:

Us and Them
The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism by Jerry Z. Muller

Muller is certainly not defending ethnic bigotry or other prejudices, nor is he calling for ethnic partition as a desirable result; I certainly don't want to imply any dubious motives or beliefs on his part. However, if Muller possesses any particular expertise or wisdom in the admittedly broad area of inquiry, I see little evidence here.

Before I criticize the article's weaknesses, I should acknowledge the strengths Muller possesses. He certainly knows the sweep of modern European history well, and understands that forced population transfers and worse have been an integral part of the creation of modern European nations. His initial argument--that ethnonationalism is a more powerful and deeply-rooted force than Americans have often understood--is persuasive. He is absolutely right to note that dismissals of ethnonational identity as a "construction" are misleading, since what gives ethnic nationalism its power is the perception of legitimacy.

However, the conclusion he draws--that a humane, internationally sanctioned partition might be the least-worst option in certain cases--seems very rushed, and ill-supported by the preceding pages. Explaining that forced population tranfers and genocide have generally accompanied the creation of relatively homogenous nation-states in the past does little more than illustrate a prior disregard on the part of the international community to assume any responsibility for the rights of affected individuals.

Ultimately, Muller can only lamely conclude that the separation of ethnic groups within a multiethnic state, while an expensive undertaking, will ultimately be less expensive than humanitarian intervention, and will lead to greater stability. Some of the points he raises are worth further exploration--the idea that Western Europe has enjoyed peace and stability at least partially because the work of "partitioning" ethnic groups into their own nation-states should not be dismissed out of hand, even though I remain unconvinced. But the concluding thoughts on partition seem hasty and almost predetermined.

"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 [10]

CHAPTER FOUR: MASKS OF OTHERNESS

In the opening section, Sells draws parallels between the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995 and the outbreak of genocidal violence in the former Yugoslavia a few years earlier. In broad terms, the two events were spawned by similar movements motivated by similar ideologies nursed in similar cultural/intellectual climates. The difference, Sells rightly notes, is that in the United States such extremist elements are, for the most part, highly marginalized, socially, culturally, and politically. In the former Yugoslavia, on the other hand, such elements had had access to--and even control of--mass media outlets; powerful backing in government and the military; and all too often the support of major religious institutions.

Creating the Perpetrator

Despite all that had been done to lay the groundwork for genocide, nationalists and their allies still needed to do more in order to unleash the monster of ethnic violence. Milosevic and his allies took many steps in the final months and years of Yugoslavia's existence to create the compliance and willingness needed in the general population.

The purge of the Serbian communist party, the betrayal of Ivan Stambolic, purges of the Yugoslav army in order to create a Serb-dominated (and nationalist-allied) force, and increasing support for and ties to paramilitary militias--these were some of the many steps taken at the Federal level in Belgrade.

At the grassroots level, the work of turning ordinary Serbs into soldiers for racial separation and hatred was carried out by more brutal and direct means. Sells documents a few incidents where ethnic Serbs were punished, imprisoned, tortured, and/or killed for refusing to commit acts of violence against their non-Serb neighbors, or for speaking out against the fascist violence. He also discusses the well-documented process by which Serb nationalists would try to provoke revenge killings by Muslims against Serbs in order to harden the divisions between the two groups.

Young soldiers were numbed to the violence they were ordered to commit by being plied constantly with booze. Muslim civilians were degraded by being held in concentration camps without adequate food, water, sanitation facilities or privacy. And, of course, the use of derogatory names such as "Turk" and "balije". The wide distribution of looted good tended to muzzle curiosity among Serbs about what was being done in their name since most people preferred not to think too deeply about where the looted goods in their homes came from. And the practice of opening concentration camps to local sadists with a grudge to settle spread the complicity in the killings throughout the community.

Militia leaders such as Arkan and Seselj weren't merely given extensive material and financial support; they were given control over civilian resources and markets as well, enabling them to muster support through patronage and access to staples and consumer goods.

Sells concludes this section by noting the ubiquity of masks and facepaint in the ranks of the Bosnian Serb army and its allied paramilitary squads--the masks:

"...transformed identities. Before he put it on, the militiaman was part of a multireligious community in which Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, Slavic Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, and others had lived together. These were his friends, his work colleagues, his neighbors, his lovers, his spouse's family. Once he put on the mask, he was a Serb hero; those he was abusing were balije or Turks, race traitors and killers of the Christ-Prince Lazar."

The Forgotten Serbs

Sells rightly notes that the nationalists did not speak for all Serbs--as the frequency of their violence against 'bad Serbs' who wanted no part of the war of violence being waged against their neighbors bears out. He lists many examples of Serbs who--often at risk to themselves--showed kindness to their non-Serb neighbors, and took actions which saved lives. Bogdan Bogdanovic, the mayor of Belgrade, is one example.

Sells also notes that in 1995, most Bosnian Serbs did not live in Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia--not an insignificant number were still in the government controlled remainder of the country, and many more were in Serbia proper. Milosevic allowed the Bosnian Serb military and the militias access to refugee camps so that 'disloyal' Serbs could be rounded up--these were often sent to the front lines without proper military training as punishment.

Sells concludes with this example, which I must confess I was unfamiliar with:

"In Bosnian government areas, the Serb Civic Council was formed to work for a multireligious society and to articulate the concerns of those Serbs loyal to a multireligious Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Civic Council pointed out that the total number of Bosnian Serbs living under the control of the Republika Srpska was less than 50 percent; over 150,000 lived in Bosnian government-controlled areas and some 500,000 had fled abroad. The council criticized the international community for treating the religious nationalist faction as the sole representative of the Serbian people."

How outrageous and depressing it is to reflect that, despite having followed events in Bosnia with interest at the time, I had never once heard of the Serb Civic Council or of its alternate view of Serb ethnic citizenship in Bosnia. Then again--the Bosnian war would not be the last time Western observers would dismiss civil violence in an unstable society by pointing to violent, armed extremist groups as somehow representative of the larger social group they claimed to speak for. Think about that the next time a news anchor on TV describes what "the Shiites" or "the Sunnis" in Iraq want.

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

I will conclude my review of Chapter four in my next post.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [4]

CHAPTER TWO: CHRIST KILLERS

The Christ-Prince Lazar

Sells discusses the centrality of the Good Friday story to Christianity, and then describes the long-standing tradition of Passion Plays, which bring the suffering of Jesus alive to his believers and which serve to break down the temporal barriers between the audience and the events being enacted. The strong emotions evoked were often directed at the actors portraying Jesus' betrayers, and these passions have often been harnessed for both good and evil throughout history. All too often, those passions have been directed at Jews, who were blamed by the masses and the Church in Medieval times for killing Christ.

Serb nationalism, as Sells then notes, is built on a mythology which portrays Slavic Muslims as Christ killers. Considering that Islam was founded a good six centuries after the Crucifixion, how is this possible? The answer is in the myth of Prince Lazar, the Christ-King of medieval Serbia.

I will assume that any reader of this blog knows the story of the Battle of Kosovo and the attendant mythology. At this point, it becomes even clearer that Sells is well-attuned to the real issue--rather than spend time on the actual historical record (such as it exists) or attempting to create a believable, fact-based account, Sells realizes that the crux of the matter lies in more recent history. Specifically, in 19th Century Serbian nationalism and the mythology created to support it. As he writes:

"During the nineteenth century, Serbian nationalist writers transformed Lazar into an explicit Christ figure, surrounded by a group of disciples, partaking of a Last Supper, and betrayed by a Judas. Lazar's death represents the death of the Serb nation, which will not be resurrected until Lazar is raised from the dead and the descendants of Lazar's killers are purged from the Serbian people. In this story, the Ottoman Turks play the role of the Christ killers. Vuk Brankovic, the Serb who betrays the battle plans to the Ottoman army, becomes the Christ killer within. In the nationalist myth, Vuk Brankovic represents the Slavs who converted to Islam under the Ottomans and any Serb who would live with them or tolerate them."

-------

I will leave off here and pick up my review of this chapter in the next post. As an aside, I will note--and I very much doubt that this insight is original to me--that one problem of the former Yugoslavia is that the different national groups suffer from very bad history. All too often, observers glibly note the historical baggage and grievances in the Balkans, without going on to acknowledge that more often than not the "history" under which the people of that region labor is heavy on myth and light on objective, rational, fact-based analysis. As a personal anecdote, I have spent quite a bit of time in Bulgaria, where people--including academics, historians, and politicians--routinely talk about the Ottoman or Turkish "yoke," meaning the centuries of Ottoman rule. It is clear to an outsider that this characterization represents 19th century nationalism more than actual historical experience; yet this is the "history" which young Bulgarians are still raised on. The nearly-forgotten Bulgarian campaign against its ethnic Turkish minority in the early 1980s was a precursor of the much bloodier breakup of Yugoslavia less than a decade later, and was a product of the same type of mystic, paranoid, racist "history" which fuels contemporary Serb nationalist determination to avenge imagined medieval atrocities.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [2]

CHAPTER ONE: FIRE IN THE PAGES

Rain of Ash

Sells begins his account of the Bosnian War not with Srebrenica, or Omarska, or with scenes of water-pail toting Sarajevans dodging sniper bullets; rather, he begins with the shelling of the National Library; the deliberate and systematic destruction of that repository of Bosnian history and culture. This is quite right, and very appropriate.

For anyone not familiar with this book, it needs to be kept in mind that it was published in 1996 and presumably was being written just as the war was drawing to a close. Coming after the end of hostilities, the book is not a piece of advocacy or reportage; neither is it work of history or retrospective analysis, since Dayton was still a relatively recent occurrence and there hadn't been time to collect information, documents, and interviews in the country. Rather, Sells was determined to illustrate the importance of religion and religious beliefs in the destruction of a mutliethnic/multi-confessional society; and also to debunk the conventional wisdom about "ancient hatreds" as well as other myths.

Keeping this in mind, I hope the reader will understand if I skim quickly through some passages in this book; not only did Sells write this book 12 years ago, he also wrote it as part of a series "Comparative Studies in Religion and Society". Therefore, his target audience cannot be expected to have had more than a cursory knowledge of events in Bosnia and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s outside of nightly news broadcasts and mainstream press coverage. Sells reiterates a lot of territory which will be old hat to anyone reading this blog. I shall not spend much time summarizing his account of events.

Back to the destruction of the national library...

To repeat--I think this is an excellent choice by Sells. While I certainly believe that human lives are more important than old books and that any innocent life is worth more than even the rarest manuscript, no aspect of the Bosnian war more starkly illustrates the genocidal nature of the assault against the sovereign nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina than the war against the physical manifestations of its history and culture.

It is telling that while revisionists like Diana Johnstone and Michael Parenti are often willing to consider civilian deaths in Bosnia (even though their analysis is rarely honest or complete), neither "Fools' Crusade" nor "To Kill A Nation" dealt at all with the systematic destruction of mosques in Serb-held areas, or with the deliberate destruction of first the Oriental Institute and then the National Library in Sarajevo. I think they know that bringing such incidents into their warped narratives would be a losing proposition for their revisionist project. While it is unfortunately possible to sell some people on the notion that widespread civilian deaths, while "unfortunate", were merely the inevitable product of ruthless "ethnic conflict" and inflamed hatreds rather than of a systematic campaign of destruction. It is much harder to explain away the dynamiting of every mosque in Serb-held areas after active combat had ceased, or to invent even a far-fetched rationalization for the intentional destruction of a library with no military value, but incalculable cultural worth.

The inferno and debris that resulted from that nihilistic act of barbarism is the "Rain of Ash" of this section's title. From page one, Sells is on the right track.

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

I will continue my review of Chapter One in the next post.

"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 [21]

CHAPTER TEN: ON TO KOSOVO

Parenti is simply begging for a beat-down in this chapter His ignorance has been on display throughout this book, but while most of his chapters have begun with overheated rhetoric or laughable assertions (the Serbs were targeted because a larger percentage of them were Communists, for example), he begins this chapter (after a short initial paragraph recapping that "all that remained" of Yugoslavia was Montenegro and Serbia with its two autonomous provinces) with the following declaration:

"Let us begin with some history.".

Well, historical context is good--let's see where Parenti starts, and what historical facts he chooses to emphasize:

"During World War II, the Albanian fascist militia in western Kosovo expelled seventy thousand Serbs and brought in about an equal number of Albanians from Albania."

On the one hand, I'm oddly thankful that Parenti didn't go back much, much further into the historical record in order to muddy the issue with even more half-baked nationalist myths and questionable demographic facts. One of the main impediments to any US involvement in Bosnia was the ridiculous claim that the war was a tragic by-product of "ancient hatreds". Serious observers of the crisis realize that it was more recent history--the vicious, multi-faceted civil war that raged during WW II and the clampdown on discussion imposed by Tito--rather than unfinished business from the Ottoman invasion which truly fueled whatever genuine nationalist passions were inflamed by cynical and irresponsible politicians in the years after Tito's death.

So I do not object to the decision to begin his brief historical sketch during WW II in principle, but while it should be possible to present a balanced view of the conflict there without examining previous events such as the 1908 conquest, such a balanced presentation is clearly not Parenti's intention. His account is incredibly one-sided, and riddled with misinformation clearly derived from Serb nationalist sources.

The claim that thousands of ethnic Albanians entered Kosovo during World War II has long been a staple of Serb nationalist propaganda, so there is little mystery as to where Parenti is getting his information (there is no citation for this claim in the text). He goes further still in deferring to the views of his Serb nationalist allies when he regurgitates claims that there was an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Serbs and other non-Albanians throughout the post-WW II period.

The portrayal of Kosovar Serbs as being victims of ethnic cleansing in the years before Milosevic is not without a grain of truth--relations between the two communities were not good--although Parenti, typically, does not bother detailing any of the history of the region prior to WW II, when the province was conquered and a policy of harassment against the Albanian population as well as a colonization project to settle ethnic Serbs in the region in order to turn the demographic balance in Belgrade's favor.

The chapter continues to list all the failings and shortcomings of Kosovo and its Albanian majority in language very similar to the logic used by 19th Century imperialists to justify the subjugation and exploitation of colonial peoples.

And then we get to the Milosevic era and beyond. The rest of this chapter will be discussed in the next post.

"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.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [14]

CHAPTER FIVE: CROATIA: NEW REPUBLIC, OLD REACTIONARIES

[continued]

After three pages of "context," Parenti is finally ready to discuss contemporary events. Sort of.

"Between 1991 and 1995, the army of the newly proclaimed Croatian republic conducted its own ethnic cleansing operation, replete with rapes, summary executions, and indiscriminate shelling, driving over half a million Serbs from their ancestral homes in Croatia, including an estimated 225,000 Serbs from Krajina in August 1995 during what was called "Operation Storm." The resistance of the Krajina Serbs was broken with assistance from NATO war planes and missiles. "We have resolved the Serbian question," crowed Tudjman in a speech to his generals."

This paragraph is all the space that Parenti devotes, out of nine pages, to the four years of actual military conflict on Croatian soil during those four years. That's it. No mention of Vukovar, Dubrovnik, or of the actions and policies of the breakaway Knin regime. This paragraph is all we get.

He devotes roughly the same amount of space to the revival of the kuna as the unit of currency (after claiming that the new government was "set up with the help of NATO's guns") and the checkerboard emblem, which he falsely describes as a Ustashe symbol, even though he then acknowledges that the design was a traditional Croat design. The Ustashe, it should be noted, added a large "U" to that design. He is correct that the revival of such symbols, combined with the sinister and vulgar rhetoric coming out of Zagreb, was certain to send ominous signals to non-Croats (primarily Serbs) in Croatia; were his account not so one-sided and myopic he might have created the opportunity for substantive debate rather than hysterical incitement.

And so it goes; a dreary accounting of some of the gruesome and despicable acts of Tudjman's regime and it's heinous appeals to implicitly or even explicitly fascist sentiment. All of which deserve serious attention, but in a measured, balanced fashion. Parenti mixes various ugly details without discrimination or context. He makes claims such as "Serb-hating was abundantly evident during Tudjman's reign," a typical example of Parenti's tendency to wallow in rhetorically heated phraseology.

In the end, Parenti implies that Tudjman was a tool of Western financial powers, who gutted his own economy and poisoned his society with resurgent fascism, leaving his nation an economic and social wreck with nothing to show but the blood on its hands. People who have visited the Croatia of today might have a very hard time recognizing the country they see with the grotesque nation of Parenti's imagination. And concerned observers who would like to focus more attention on the sins of the HDZ during the war most likely will wish Parenti had turned down the intensity of his outrage a few notches, so that the rest of us can hear ourselves think.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [12]

CHAPTER FOUR: CROATIA: NEW REPUBLIC, OLD REACTIONARIES

Anyone who takes up the cause of Bosnian mulit-ethnic nationalism and who defended efforts to maintain the territorial integrity of the Bosnian state during the war of aggression maintained by Belgrade's proxies must, at some point, come to grip with the problem of Croatian nationalism as practiced and exploited by Franjo Tudjman and the HDZ in both Croatia and Bosnia.

I am not for one second suggesting that any sort of equivalence can be drawn--as loathsome as the rhetoric used by the HDZ leadership, including Croatia's wartime leader, there was clearly never any systematic, prewar planning for large-scale ethnic cleansing. Comparisons between the numbers of Krajina Serbs who fled in the wake of "Operation Storm" (over 200,000 people, at least a third of the entire prewar population of Croatian Serbs) and the Muslims of the Drina valley in eastern Bosnia are not as damning as Parenti, Johnstone and others would like us to believe since they substitute quantitative data for qualitative information.

However, the following points are not in doubt, and should not be downplayed by anyone who wants to lift the cloud of disinformation from the Bosnian war:

1) Franjo Tudjman was a genuine nationalist.
2) The HDZ was a hardline nationalist party that utilized extreme propaganda and worse, aimed at non-Croats--primarily ethnic Serbs.
3) The HDZ in Hercegovina often acted in bad faith, and the attempt to set up the statelet of "Herceg-Bosna" was little different, in rhetoric or in substance, from the efforts to create Republika Srpska by force.
4) "Operation Storm" was an often brutal operation that favored vengeance against the Serb civilians of the breakaway Krajina republic at the expense of justice and fundamental respect for human rights.

I could list more, but hopefully any informed reader will already know what I am trying to convey. Downplaying the sins of nationalist Croats simply because the HDZ has much less blood on its hands, and because the Croat republic was at a distinct disadvantage at the onset of war in terms of military and infrastructural resources only leads to further obfuscation. And, it should be noted, it provides ammunition for those like Parenti, who wish to create a bogus case for equivalence.

The case of Croatian nationalism and the darker motives of the Tudjman regime merit serious attention. Such concerns will inform my review of Chapter Five, in the next post.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [10]

CHAPTER THREE: DIVIDE AND CONQUER

[continued]

In the last post, I considered the easily refutable assertion that the Bosnian Serb army was merely "holding" 70% of Bosnian territory, rather than taking it by force--and clearing non-Serbs out by terror and force. In the next paragraph, Parenti manages to top that statement with an audacious callousness that should infuriate any informed reader:

"A ceasefire, the "Dayton accords," was brokered by the Western powers in Nobember 1995, with terms that insured Western suzerainty over a thoroughly partitioned Bosnia-Herzegovina. The larger portion became the Bosnian Federation (Muslim-Croat) and a smaller territory became Republika Srpska, into which the Bosnian Serbs were corralled, those who had not fled to Serbia."

In light of events at Srebrenica, Zepa, and a thousand other smaller, less infamous places, it is an act of spiteful dishonesty and revisionism which can lead a writer to describe the ratification of separatist Serb territorial gains as Serbs being "corralled". "Blaming the victim" simply doesn't capture the level of callousness in that statement.

At this point, the chapter veers into a tangle of tired, abstract legalisms familiar to anyone who read my review of "Fool's Crusade." I won't even bother--if Parenti sees no difference between the right of Bosnia to secede from an increasingly Serb-nationalist dominated rump Yugoslavia versus the status of Scotland within the UK, then there is no point continuing the discussion--the man will not even acknowledge the raw facts on the ground, let alone the subtle distinctions between the various examples he provides. It is not that some of his examples aren't relevant, but he brushes facts and complexities aside with such contempt that any measured debate would be impossible. For example--he compares the status of Puerto Rico in the USA to the status of Krajina Serbs as if the parallel were absolute and self-evident; yet I would assume that even the most passionate of Puerto Rican nationalists hoping for independence (and I acknowledge--they have a strong case) would argue that the government in Washington has engaged in a policy of ethnic cleansing against islanders. And, if they had--is Parenti arguing that two wrongs make a right? Like Johnstone, Parenti is not interested in practical, just solutions--he just wants to smear the US and the West in general.

Not only does he argue that the secession of the republics was illegal under the Yugoslav constitution (ignoring the actions of the Belgrade regime at the time), he also frets that the recognition of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia were both illegal and interventions in Yugoslavia's internal affairs. That's what we in the reality-based community call "disproportionate outrage."

How far is willing to take this insistence on abstract legalism over the reality on the ground? This far:

"The United States does not acknowledge the right of any state or other constituent political unit or ethnic community within its boundaries to secede from the Union or, for that matter, to override the supremacy of federal power in any way. This was made perfectly clear in 1861-65, when the Southern Confederacy's secession was forcibly repressed in one of the bloodiest wars of the nineteenth century."

He does go on to quote Jefferson, using the same logic that Confederate leaders used to justify their actions. He does seem to be arguing that the United States was both the aggressor and in the wrong during the American Civil War. I will let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.

He concludes the chapter by comparing the effect of the sanctions against Serbia to those imposed against Iraq. This is, in itself, not a bad point--I find the use of sanctions distasteful since they mainly target the civilians of a country, not its leadership or military. It took 34 pages, but Parenti has finally said something that I can agree with.

But he uses this insight to draw very different conclusions--but first, he puts the cart in front of the horse and claims that the sanctions contributed to the rise of "ethnic violence" when a simple look at any almanac would demonstrate that sanctions were not imposed until after the outbreak of war and the onset of ethnic cleansing.

But never mind that--we know how cavalier Parenti is when it comes to chronology. He goes on--by quoting Susan Woodward (both he and Johnstone rely heavily on Balkan Tragedy, which I have skimmed but not yet read--it may be next, to give fair warning), who claims that:

"Tensions along ethnic, racial or historical fault lines can lead to civil violence but to explain the Yugoslav crisis as a result of ethnic hatred is to turn the story upside down and begin at its end."

We are now going to "learn" how the West manipulated the situation they had deviously created in order to create a convenient bloodbath in the middle of Europe. In the next post, we will begin to see how Parenti manipulates reality in order to bring this paranoid fantasy to life.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [9]

CHAPTER THREE: DIVIDE AND CONQUER

[continued]

For the record, the closing paragraph of my previous post was not strictly accurate--Parenti does acknowledge the distinction between ethnic nationalism and, if not exactly civic nationalism, at least the notion of sovereignty as being predicated on geopolitical entities:

"The separatist movements in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia revived Serbian nationalists' dream of a nation-state, as promoted by those who believed that self-determination belongs to ethnic nationalities not to republics or federations."

That sentence, for all its faults, at least gives the illusion that Parenti is not taking sides or serving as a mouthpiece for the aims of hardline Serb nationalists. Such flawed but at least ostensibly even-handed objectivity proves to be an illusion, however.

Slovene independence, we are told, was the wedge that broke up the rest of Yugoslavia. Parenti is all-too casual with the facts here:

"Secession for Croatia proved more difficult. Fighting between Croats and the large Serbian population that had lived in Croatia for centuries reached intensive levels and lasted several years."

First, there is no mention of war crimes committed by the Knin regime. Second, Parenti, like Johnstone and other revisionists, loves to point to German and American recognition for Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, but neglect to mention that the United Nations itself also recognized all of the newly independent republics of Yugoslavia.

More importantly, note how the language of collectivism creeps into the text--the fighting is not between the armed forces of the breakaway Krajina republic and the Croatian army, but between "Croats" and the "Serbian population." The masses act as a single unit, indistinguishable from the actions of their leadership.

In the same paragraph (this chapter is the shortest history of the Yugoslav wars you will ever read), Parenti goes on to decry the actions of Operation Storm. I will not defend the atrocities carried out against the Krajina Serbs in 1995; since Parenti, like Johnstone, has not another word to say about their fate after their flight, and since he exaggerates the death tolls by implication (his book is remarkably bereft of hard data and footnotes compared to "Fools' Crusade"), it is safe to assume that his concern has little to do with outrage and simple compassion; this is simply a propaganda weapon to use against the US.

He gives Macedonia all of two sentences, yet still manages to misrepresent reality.

"Spurred by US support, its independence may be something less than complete, given the US troop occupation that Macedonia has had to accept."

What is significant about this statement is not the fact that the presence of 300 US peacekeepers along the Macedonian-Serbian border is characterized as an "occupation." Such dishonesty and hyperbole is to be expected from a book like this. Rather, we see that Parenti's tendency to see the people of the Balkans and their political leadership as being helpless pawns in the hands of the West, no matter what. The fact that Macedonian president Gligorov was actually a pretty astute leader who played a weak hand as well as he could, and managed to take his ethnically divided, landlocked republic (surrounded by unfriendly, or at least unsupportive, states) out of Yugoslavia without descending into war and chaos should evoke at least a small degree of separation. But Parenti cannot conceive that the people of Yugoslavia were in any way responsible for, or capable of, controlling their own destiny.

His "history" of Bosnia's war is equally brief and selective with the facts. Bosnian revisionists often twist the chronology of events in order to uncover post de facto "proof."

"It is a matter of public record that the CIA fueled the Bosnian conflict. Consider these headlines: the Manchester Guardian, November 17 1994: "CIA Agents Training Bosnian Army", the London Observer, November 20 1994: "America's Secret Bosnian Agenda", the European, November 25 1994: "How The CIA Helps Bosnia Fight Back."

[As always, underline text in quoted sections was italicized in the orginal.]

Thus, events from 1994 and 1995 somehow "prove" the true instigator of a war that was already several years along.

Parenti then quotes Charles Boyd--approvingly and in agreement--who makes a statement as shocking in its dishonesty as it is callous and indifferent to the reality he is covering up:

"Charles Boyd, former deputy commander of the US European command, commented: "The popular image of this war [in Croatia] is one of unrelenting Serb expansion. Much of what the Croatians call 'the occupied territories' is land that has been held by Serbs for more than three centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia--what the Western media frequently refer to as the 70 per cent of Bosnia seized by rebel Serbs. In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs." As a result of the war, Serbian land holdings in Bosnia were reduced from 65 to 43 per cent."

Where does one begin? Boyd seems to be living in the Dark Ages, where land is "held" by tribal groups as a collective. This idea that land was being "held" in a modern nation-state by homogeneous social collective united by blood and religion is almost as troubling as his complete disregard for fundamental facts--how does he square his assertion that 'the Serbs' "held" 70 percent of Bosnia prior to the war? How does one define "held." It is true that the Muslims were more urbanized and therefore were the predominant group in a proportionately smaller part of Bosnia, but 70% is simply an outrageous figure even if Jones is only arguing for a simple majority in a municipality. These are basic, easily verifiable demographic facts that Jones and Parenti simply ignore. The crudeness of the lie is stunning.

Even darker is this--once you have asserted that an ethnic group in a modern nation-state "held" 70% of the land, the next question is how did they "hold" it? What demographic realities verified that a given geopolitical subunit of Bosnia was "held" by the Serbs?

Important questions--which Parenti ignores completely.

We will conclude this chapter in the next post.