BOSFAM Homepage
I'm sure most of the regular readers of this blog are already aware of the existence of the BOSFAM weaving collective. If you are not aware of this group and its fine work, by all means check it out. It is a collective of war widows who have banded together to try and find a way to utitlize their weaving skills as a way to make a living. When you consider that the educational and literacy levels of many of these women is low, and that they mostly were homemakers who have no experience in the workplace, you can appreciate the long-term economic hardships they face, along with the emotional toll taken.
I have been in touch with the DC Office of AdvocacyNet in regards to their new 'Sponsor a Weaver" program. The program is simple--you donate $1,000.00 and you sponsor one of these women, who will use your money to support herself and purchase the supplies she needs (wool, etc.) in order to set herself up in business.
I think it's a great idea, but unfortunately a thousand dollars is more than I can afford. However, there is no reason why several people can't pool their resources and colletively sponsor one of these women.
I'm going to contact friends of mine to see if anyone would be interested in donating towards this cause. If anyone reading this would be interested in joining in, please email me. I haven't set anything up yet, like a PayPal, but if I get some interest I'll definately try to get the ball rolling.
I'll keep you all updated on any progress I do or don't make. Also, the weaver you sponsor makes a rug as a thank-you gift for the donor. I'm willing to entertain ideas for who would receive the rug, but my suggestion would be for the Embassy of Bosnian and Hercegovina. I have been there several times (it's only an hour from my house, give or take Northern Virginia traffic). To put it kindly, they haven't wasted too much of their nations resources on decorating the place. The rug would not only be a nice display of one of their nations indigenous crafts, it would also be a tangable show of support from a handful of concerned Westerners.
Think about it, and let me know.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Friday, September 08, 2006
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter One [18]
Up to this point, there has been much in Johnstone's narrative to be appalled and outraged by. But nothing up to this point--her anti-cosmopolitan embrace of primitive tribal collectivism, her disregard for truth, her contempt for the victims of a vicious war--can compare to the moment, in the subsection entitled "Ideals versus Facts," on page 53, when Diana Johnstone makes the off-hand claim that there was no genocide in Bosnia. And then she goes on to drain the term "genocide" of any real meaning. It is a staggering moment, all the more so for being blandly included in a throwaway line, part of yet another dig at David Rieff. (Her contempt for Rieff's book--Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West--is one more good reason to buy a copy and read it).
This subsection, as mentioned yesterday, begins by snidely dismissing the tolerant, multicultural tradition of Sarajevo; it then brings up the activities of seperatist Croats in Hercegovina by of proving...something, I'm sure; then points out that even Rieff admitted that the SDA's commmittment to multiculturalism was fading in 1994 (without, you can be sure, examining the reasons WHY the Muslims of Bosnia might have began identifying themselves as 'Muslims' instead of as 'Bosnians' after years of ethnic cleansing and war); mentions the mujahideen who came to fight in Bosnia as proof that Izetbegovic and the SDA were closet fundamentalists; which brings us back to David Rieff, the archetypical Western Bosniaphile. It's a long paragraph leading up to her denial, but let's look at the whole thing:
"David Rieff's mother, Susan Sontag, actually attempted to turn Sarajevo into the Bosnia cult's vision of it by going there and staging Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," in an apparant snipe at the "International Community" which was slow to rush to the awaited rescue."
Johnstone's snideness and contempt for Sontag's brave and decent attempt to stand in solidarity with the citizens of a cultured city under seige is sickening. It is beyond me why Sontag's action could in any way offend anyone's sensibilities.
"Meanwhile, her son seemed little concerned to separate fact from fiction in his zeal to prove his tragic thesis that Bosnia was the best of all multicultural societies, being subjected to "genocide," and that "the Serbs were the villains of the war." The press corps in the Holiday Inn knew that "to be fair and to be impartial are not the same thing," what mattered was to work up enough public indignation to force the West to intervene militarily on behalf of the Muslims."
Note the quotes around 'genocide.' And note the hyperbole being attributed to Reiff--that Bosnia was "the best of all multicultural societites,' something he did not claim.
"After his first trip to Bosnia in September 1992, to write for an American magazine on "ethnic cleansing," Rieff returned repeatedly, "resolved to write as frankly incendiary a narrative as I could," with the idea that what he wrote could end the slaughter. Rieff had no doubt: "ethnic cleansing was not just a war crime, it was genocide, pure and simple." But two pages later: "Ethnic cleansing was in part about making these routes secure from guerilla attack." That sounds more like war than genocide."
I cannot for the life of me fathom what the hell this twisted, sneering shell of a human being is getting at here. Is it not possible for an act of genocide to be committed as a military aim? Or does that make it 'merely' a war crime? Is Johnstone suggesting that only a universal plan of elimination, carried out under peacetime through industrial means counts as genocide? Or, as it seems, is she suggesting that ethnic cleansing is an acceptable military policy? Or that a large-scale war crime with a logical military objective is not, by definition, genocide?
I don't know. She doesn't know, either, I suspect, not that it matters. Her goal is not to illuminate but rather to obscure and occlude. I did not manage to finish my analysis of this chapter before I had to return it this afternoon; the next few pages go into more detail on body counts and so forth. Along with one last swipe at Izetbegovic and his 'Muslimness,' which was apparantly the legitimate threat the Bosnian Serbs were fighting against.
I'll get back to this book in the next couple of weeks, and pick up where I left off. But it is rather welcome that I'm forced to take this break right after this section. I need a break. I'm taking a vacation from Diana Johnstone. I promise to finish the job I've started--her lies and her corrupt reasoning should be confronted relentlessly.
Right now, I'm tired of trying to live in the cramped and convuluted moral universe Johnstone inhabits. I need fresh air, honesty, and decency. I'm tired of sterile, disingenuous legalisms and smug pseudo-sophisticated contrarianism. I'm tired of viewing the plight of the Bosnians--or anyone--as nothing but an intellectual construct, or a symptom of Western imperialism. I'm tired of this woman. And if I'm doing a decent job of conveying her views and her writing, you are, too.
This subsection, as mentioned yesterday, begins by snidely dismissing the tolerant, multicultural tradition of Sarajevo; it then brings up the activities of seperatist Croats in Hercegovina by of proving...something, I'm sure; then points out that even Rieff admitted that the SDA's commmittment to multiculturalism was fading in 1994 (without, you can be sure, examining the reasons WHY the Muslims of Bosnia might have began identifying themselves as 'Muslims' instead of as 'Bosnians' after years of ethnic cleansing and war); mentions the mujahideen who came to fight in Bosnia as proof that Izetbegovic and the SDA were closet fundamentalists; which brings us back to David Rieff, the archetypical Western Bosniaphile. It's a long paragraph leading up to her denial, but let's look at the whole thing:
"David Rieff's mother, Susan Sontag, actually attempted to turn Sarajevo into the Bosnia cult's vision of it by going there and staging Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," in an apparant snipe at the "International Community" which was slow to rush to the awaited rescue."
Johnstone's snideness and contempt for Sontag's brave and decent attempt to stand in solidarity with the citizens of a cultured city under seige is sickening. It is beyond me why Sontag's action could in any way offend anyone's sensibilities.
"Meanwhile, her son seemed little concerned to separate fact from fiction in his zeal to prove his tragic thesis that Bosnia was the best of all multicultural societies, being subjected to "genocide," and that "the Serbs were the villains of the war." The press corps in the Holiday Inn knew that "to be fair and to be impartial are not the same thing," what mattered was to work up enough public indignation to force the West to intervene militarily on behalf of the Muslims."
Note the quotes around 'genocide.' And note the hyperbole being attributed to Reiff--that Bosnia was "the best of all multicultural societites,' something he did not claim.
"After his first trip to Bosnia in September 1992, to write for an American magazine on "ethnic cleansing," Rieff returned repeatedly, "resolved to write as frankly incendiary a narrative as I could," with the idea that what he wrote could end the slaughter. Rieff had no doubt: "ethnic cleansing was not just a war crime, it was genocide, pure and simple." But two pages later: "Ethnic cleansing was in part about making these routes secure from guerilla attack." That sounds more like war than genocide."
I cannot for the life of me fathom what the hell this twisted, sneering shell of a human being is getting at here. Is it not possible for an act of genocide to be committed as a military aim? Or does that make it 'merely' a war crime? Is Johnstone suggesting that only a universal plan of elimination, carried out under peacetime through industrial means counts as genocide? Or, as it seems, is she suggesting that ethnic cleansing is an acceptable military policy? Or that a large-scale war crime with a logical military objective is not, by definition, genocide?
I don't know. She doesn't know, either, I suspect, not that it matters. Her goal is not to illuminate but rather to obscure and occlude. I did not manage to finish my analysis of this chapter before I had to return it this afternoon; the next few pages go into more detail on body counts and so forth. Along with one last swipe at Izetbegovic and his 'Muslimness,' which was apparantly the legitimate threat the Bosnian Serbs were fighting against.
I'll get back to this book in the next couple of weeks, and pick up where I left off. But it is rather welcome that I'm forced to take this break right after this section. I need a break. I'm taking a vacation from Diana Johnstone. I promise to finish the job I've started--her lies and her corrupt reasoning should be confronted relentlessly.
Right now, I'm tired of trying to live in the cramped and convuluted moral universe Johnstone inhabits. I need fresh air, honesty, and decency. I'm tired of sterile, disingenuous legalisms and smug pseudo-sophisticated contrarianism. I'm tired of viewing the plight of the Bosnians--or anyone--as nothing but an intellectual construct, or a symptom of Western imperialism. I'm tired of this woman. And if I'm doing a decent job of conveying her views and her writing, you are, too.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter One [17]
IDEALS VERSUS FACTS
The idealization of Bosnia that bothers Johnstone so much was primarily guilty, in her mind, of creating a false Bosnia, a mulitcultural Eden (she actually uses that exact phrase somewhere in the book) led by the saintly Izetbegovic (ditto THAT phrase) and his immaculately secular SDA, residing in the tolerant paradise of Sarajevo.
Did I mention Johnstone likes to joust with strawmen?
Having already denied that Sarajevo had been under seige during the war (in that case, I should have simply rented a car at the time, and driven in to see the place for myself!), she also makes the rather remarkable claim that the Serb neighborhoods in the hills (which had, by and large, 'become' Serb after the outbreak of the war) suffered the same deprivations as the Muslim neighborhoods in the central part of the city (the old Turkish sector had been mainly Muslim, but other than that the central part had been just as mixed as the suburbs prior to hostilities).
She also claims that the fact that the three nationalist parties (SDA, SDS, and HDZ) received 90% of the vote in 1990 somehow indicates that Sarajevo was actually a very divided city. That those election results were a reflection of the unstable and fearful political situation in 1990, and not a reflection of, say, complext historical and social factors, seems to be beyond her capacity to understand.
She even insinuates that Bosnian soldiers deliberately made it unsafe for journalists to stay in the Serb-controlled suburb of Ilidza and then forced them to stay, for the rest of the war, in the Holiday Inn in the government-controlled part of town. Bosnian soldiers didn't even control access to the airport, yet they were somehow able to control Western access to the Serb side of the front lines. It only sounds ridiculous if you believe that Sarajevo was, as every available fact demonstrates, under seige and surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces. The Johnstone who writes this:
"The "Sarajevo" on the world's television screens was the Muslim center of the city. The Serbian suburbs, whose inhabitants were undergoing the same fears and deprivations, became invisible."
clearly is not burdened by such knowledge.
She goes on to point at the Croat extremist breakaway republic of Herceg-Bosna, the regrettable existance of which somehow is supposed to undercut the legitimacy of Western criticism of Republika Srpska and its campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern and eastern Bosnia. Like any good conspiracy theorist, Johnstone ignores the forest in order to look at the weeds.
And then she returns to Rieff, who she fancies has been made a fairly ridiculous figure by now. All the better--if you have discredited the messenger, the message becomes easier to denounce. And the message to be denounced is this: that there was genocide occuring in Bosnia in the 1990s. Johnstone will deny that genocide occured in two ways; she will lie about the body count, and she will attempt to change the very definition of the term.
The idealization of Bosnia that bothers Johnstone so much was primarily guilty, in her mind, of creating a false Bosnia, a mulitcultural Eden (she actually uses that exact phrase somewhere in the book) led by the saintly Izetbegovic (ditto THAT phrase) and his immaculately secular SDA, residing in the tolerant paradise of Sarajevo.
Did I mention Johnstone likes to joust with strawmen?
Having already denied that Sarajevo had been under seige during the war (in that case, I should have simply rented a car at the time, and driven in to see the place for myself!), she also makes the rather remarkable claim that the Serb neighborhoods in the hills (which had, by and large, 'become' Serb after the outbreak of the war) suffered the same deprivations as the Muslim neighborhoods in the central part of the city (the old Turkish sector had been mainly Muslim, but other than that the central part had been just as mixed as the suburbs prior to hostilities).
She also claims that the fact that the three nationalist parties (SDA, SDS, and HDZ) received 90% of the vote in 1990 somehow indicates that Sarajevo was actually a very divided city. That those election results were a reflection of the unstable and fearful political situation in 1990, and not a reflection of, say, complext historical and social factors, seems to be beyond her capacity to understand.
She even insinuates that Bosnian soldiers deliberately made it unsafe for journalists to stay in the Serb-controlled suburb of Ilidza and then forced them to stay, for the rest of the war, in the Holiday Inn in the government-controlled part of town. Bosnian soldiers didn't even control access to the airport, yet they were somehow able to control Western access to the Serb side of the front lines. It only sounds ridiculous if you believe that Sarajevo was, as every available fact demonstrates, under seige and surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces. The Johnstone who writes this:
"The "Sarajevo" on the world's television screens was the Muslim center of the city. The Serbian suburbs, whose inhabitants were undergoing the same fears and deprivations, became invisible."
clearly is not burdened by such knowledge.
She goes on to point at the Croat extremist breakaway republic of Herceg-Bosna, the regrettable existance of which somehow is supposed to undercut the legitimacy of Western criticism of Republika Srpska and its campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern and eastern Bosnia. Like any good conspiracy theorist, Johnstone ignores the forest in order to look at the weeds.
And then she returns to Rieff, who she fancies has been made a fairly ridiculous figure by now. All the better--if you have discredited the messenger, the message becomes easier to denounce. And the message to be denounced is this: that there was genocide occuring in Bosnia in the 1990s. Johnstone will deny that genocide occured in two ways; she will lie about the body count, and she will attempt to change the very definition of the term.
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter One [16]
THE BOSNIA CULT
Having demonized the SDA leadership of the Bosnian government as tools of Western imperialism--and sneaky Muslims to boot--Johnstone now turns her wrath on the Western journalists, writers, pundits, and intellectuals who supported the cause of Bosnian sovereignty.
The first paragraph overstates the degree which the Western media simplified the war (and ignores the fact that Western media outlets often bent over backwards to give Bosnian Serb politiicans a listen in the interests of 'objectivity'):
"The reality was complex, and steeped in lies, myth, and history. The reporters sent to report on the "seige of Sarajevo" were mostly too new to the region to be able to distinguish truth from lies."
She goes on, disparaging the thrust of Western reporting on the war as nothing but human interest reporting in search of a convenient narrative and easily identifiable victims and villains. Take note of the quotes around 'seige of Sarajevo'--this is no typo. As she mentions later, she does not believe that Sarajevo was under seige. Forget that the city was surrounded by a hostile military, subjected to years of artillery bombardment and sniper fire, deprived of communication and commerce with the outside world, and claimed for partition by a rebel government--apparantly, this is all too crude and obvious. Presumably, there were subtleties and nuances us mere mortals are not able to detect. Lord knows the citizens of Sarajevo weren't privvy to them.
The biggest 'myth' at play in Bosnia was the ridiculous idea that outsiders lacked the experience and intimate knowledge alleged to be necessary to understand the situation. Johnstone frequently does this, presenting herself as a lone voice of reason against a shreiking hoard of misguided, ignorant Westerners who foolishly imagine themselves to be capable of understand the Byzantine complexities at play. Her deluded sense of intellectual and moral superiority would be laughable if not in service of such a heinous cause.
She also takes a few potshots at David Rieff, author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. His passionate defense of Bosnia and the multicultural ideal its sovereignty represented earns him two full pages of venom, including this rather bizarre misinterpretation:
She quotes Rieff here:
"Rieff was openly and fervently convinced that Europe must become another United States, a melting pot. He had gone to Europe "in search of this 'Americanization' of the European future" with the "didactic conviction that in the twenty-first century we would all be polyglot or we would kill one another off." "
And then she responds thusly:
"This is a rather extraordinary conviction, and comes down to saying, "within a century, everybody must be like me, or else we will all kill each other." "
Which, of course, is NOT the meaning of what eeiff says here. And while Johnstone might have her reasons for believing that Rieff is wrong to believe a cosmopolitan, polyglot future is necessary in order to avoid mutual destruction, it seems an odd choice to choose the cause of the Bosnian Serbs--who refused to live in a state where they would have to share political power with others--as a good example of why Reiff is allegedly wrong.
But that would be using logic, and logic is something that Johnstone and the other Balkan genocide deniers can't indulge in excessively.
Having demonized the SDA leadership of the Bosnian government as tools of Western imperialism--and sneaky Muslims to boot--Johnstone now turns her wrath on the Western journalists, writers, pundits, and intellectuals who supported the cause of Bosnian sovereignty.
The first paragraph overstates the degree which the Western media simplified the war (and ignores the fact that Western media outlets often bent over backwards to give Bosnian Serb politiicans a listen in the interests of 'objectivity'):
"The reality was complex, and steeped in lies, myth, and history. The reporters sent to report on the "seige of Sarajevo" were mostly too new to the region to be able to distinguish truth from lies."
She goes on, disparaging the thrust of Western reporting on the war as nothing but human interest reporting in search of a convenient narrative and easily identifiable victims and villains. Take note of the quotes around 'seige of Sarajevo'--this is no typo. As she mentions later, she does not believe that Sarajevo was under seige. Forget that the city was surrounded by a hostile military, subjected to years of artillery bombardment and sniper fire, deprived of communication and commerce with the outside world, and claimed for partition by a rebel government--apparantly, this is all too crude and obvious. Presumably, there were subtleties and nuances us mere mortals are not able to detect. Lord knows the citizens of Sarajevo weren't privvy to them.
The biggest 'myth' at play in Bosnia was the ridiculous idea that outsiders lacked the experience and intimate knowledge alleged to be necessary to understand the situation. Johnstone frequently does this, presenting herself as a lone voice of reason against a shreiking hoard of misguided, ignorant Westerners who foolishly imagine themselves to be capable of understand the Byzantine complexities at play. Her deluded sense of intellectual and moral superiority would be laughable if not in service of such a heinous cause.
She also takes a few potshots at David Rieff, author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. His passionate defense of Bosnia and the multicultural ideal its sovereignty represented earns him two full pages of venom, including this rather bizarre misinterpretation:
She quotes Rieff here:
"Rieff was openly and fervently convinced that Europe must become another United States, a melting pot. He had gone to Europe "in search of this 'Americanization' of the European future" with the "didactic conviction that in the twenty-first century we would all be polyglot or we would kill one another off." "
And then she responds thusly:
"This is a rather extraordinary conviction, and comes down to saying, "within a century, everybody must be like me, or else we will all kill each other." "
Which, of course, is NOT the meaning of what eeiff says here. And while Johnstone might have her reasons for believing that Rieff is wrong to believe a cosmopolitan, polyglot future is necessary in order to avoid mutual destruction, it seems an odd choice to choose the cause of the Bosnian Serbs--who refused to live in a state where they would have to share political power with others--as a good example of why Reiff is allegedly wrong.
But that would be using logic, and logic is something that Johnstone and the other Balkan genocide deniers can't indulge in excessively.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter One [15]
The next four and a half pages continue the trend of seeing everything that happened in Bosnia through the prism of Western/EU/NATO/US actions and interference; the magnitude and influence of foreign actors in the former Yugoslavia is consistantly exaggerated, while the entire shared body of knowledge concerning actions taken in Belgrage and among the SDS leadership is completely ignored.
At the same time, the threat of Islam looms ever greater. We read about "Izetbegovic's Muslim forces," not the Army of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Bosnia's extremely secular Muslims were somehow ripe for Islamic theocracy, at their neighbor's expense. The Bosnian leadership were rich, capitalist tools, heirs to the privilage (and, implicitly, the duplicity and cruelty) of their Ottoman-era ancestors. As it turns out, the Bosnian government was led by a pro-American, fundamentalist, neo-Ottoman elite. She has plenty to say about the leadership of the SDA; not so much about he Muslim population as a whole; being that they are nothing but traitorous Serbs and Croats led astray by religion and foreign privilage, perhaps they are not worthy of our consideration.
Like most conspiracy theorists, Johnstone tends to get bogged down in minutiae and decontextualized facts. She goes on to claim that US support for this imagined Islamic government in Bosnia (no explanation as to what form this "support" took during the period from the breakout of the war until the fall of 1995) was a crucial element in developing a strong US presence in the Central Asian republics AND in strengthening "the crucial strategic US-Israeli-Turkish alliance in the Middle East."
That last one really comes out of left field, since Israeli rhetoric and state actions--such as selling arms to Serbia--don't reflect such a reality; neither does the fact that the Israeli punditry was remarkably pro-Serb during much of the war. Not that Israel was a major player during the conflict--'support' for Serbia mostly took the form of favorable statements by a number of pundits and a handful of politicians, and a tendancy to look the other way when small, covert arms deals were made. Then again, that pretty much summarizes US 'support' for Bosnia for the first three-plus years of the conflict, and that doesn't stop Johnstone from conneting the dots and portraying the SDA in Sarajevo as crafty tools of the American empire.
At the same time, the threat of Islam looms ever greater. We read about "Izetbegovic's Muslim forces," not the Army of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Bosnia's extremely secular Muslims were somehow ripe for Islamic theocracy, at their neighbor's expense. The Bosnian leadership were rich, capitalist tools, heirs to the privilage (and, implicitly, the duplicity and cruelty) of their Ottoman-era ancestors. As it turns out, the Bosnian government was led by a pro-American, fundamentalist, neo-Ottoman elite. She has plenty to say about the leadership of the SDA; not so much about he Muslim population as a whole; being that they are nothing but traitorous Serbs and Croats led astray by religion and foreign privilage, perhaps they are not worthy of our consideration.
Like most conspiracy theorists, Johnstone tends to get bogged down in minutiae and decontextualized facts. She goes on to claim that US support for this imagined Islamic government in Bosnia (no explanation as to what form this "support" took during the period from the breakout of the war until the fall of 1995) was a crucial element in developing a strong US presence in the Central Asian republics AND in strengthening "the crucial strategic US-Israeli-Turkish alliance in the Middle East."
That last one really comes out of left field, since Israeli rhetoric and state actions--such as selling arms to Serbia--don't reflect such a reality; neither does the fact that the Israeli punditry was remarkably pro-Serb during much of the war. Not that Israel was a major player during the conflict--'support' for Serbia mostly took the form of favorable statements by a number of pundits and a handful of politicians, and a tendancy to look the other way when small, covert arms deals were made. Then again, that pretty much summarizes US 'support' for Bosnia for the first three-plus years of the conflict, and that doesn't stop Johnstone from conneting the dots and portraying the SDA in Sarajevo as crafty tools of the American empire.
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter One [14]
Having blamed the victim in the previous paragraph, Johnstone then glibly deals with the infamous--and still shadowy--meeting between Milosevic and Tudjman at Karadjordjevo, where the partition of Bosnia was most likely discussed. Her focus here isn't on the substance of the talks, or even the implications of the leaders of the two neighboring republics discussing Bosnia's fate in secret, but rather in defending the honor of Slobodan Milosevic by pointing out that it was Tudjman, not the Serbian leader, who claimed to have brought up the matter of partitioning Bosnia between Croatian and Serbia. (Not for the first time, Johnstone ignores Milosevic's penchant for engaging in deceit and playing his cards extremely close to his chest while keeping the dirty work at a distance; as always, she takes this sociopath at his word).
Having damned Tudjman for having proposed the partition of Bosnia, Johnstone promptly opines, in the very next paragraph, that doing so was a great idea:
"But if Yugoslavia was indeed "in a state of disintegration," what would have been so terrible about a negotiated territorial division between Croatia and Serbia to spare the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina the horrors of civil war? There had never in history been an independent Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina."
You can get whiplash trying to follow Johnstone's train of thought sometimes, but let us try and keep up here. One wants to ask: How, exactly, was this territorial division of Bosnia to be achieved without some kind of civil war? Given the mixed demographics of the country, it would have been hard to draw a boundry acceptable to both Croat and Serb nationalists. And wasn't a division of Bosnia between Serbs and others the underlying theme of the bloody war that did occur in Bosnia?
While pondering the staggering number of problems such a proposal would entail, one runs the risk of skimming over that second sentence--but that would be a mistake, because it attempts to gloss over the ugly reality of this division she is advocating--there was no place for the Muslims of Bosnia.
I don't think Johnstone is ignorant of this point--she has pointed out before, and does so again in this very paragraph, that 'Muslim' was a recent national designation; she also repeats the lie that Bosnian Muslims are really just lapsed Serbs and/or Croats.
To be fair, she does go on to address the fate of Bosnia's Muslims if such a division were enacted, but her solution is a little strange:
"It would have required guaranteeing that the full religious freedom already enjoyed by Bosnian Muslims would be safeguarded--by no means a difficult matter."
Not a difficult matter, but certainly an almost irrelevant one--the Kosovar Albanians weren't being persecuted because they were predominantly Muslim, but because they were Albanian. The shift from ethnicity to religion is most likely no accident--Johnstone will use Islam as a stick with which to beat Bosnia's Muslim leadership.
I'll wrap up this post by discussing the sentence which follows the above quote:
"Serbs and Croats had no objection to living with Muslims as neighbors; their objections were to living as potentially second-class citizens of a Muslim state--another matter altogether."
{underlined text in the above quote italicized in original text}
The second half of this sentence somehow tries to spin the straw of bigoted invictive into the gold of respectable opinion; the specter of a fundamentalist theocracy being imposed by a nearly defenseless, deeply secularized population comprising less than half of the population somehow is transformed from hysterical hate-mongering to sensible public opinion. The insertion of the qualifying "potentially" is the closest shave with reality this clause contains.
The first half of this sentence? I mentioned that Karadzic has not made an appearance yet, and Plavsic never will; you could not discuss either one of them and still bring yourself to write such a whopper.
Having damned Tudjman for having proposed the partition of Bosnia, Johnstone promptly opines, in the very next paragraph, that doing so was a great idea:
"But if Yugoslavia was indeed "in a state of disintegration," what would have been so terrible about a negotiated territorial division between Croatia and Serbia to spare the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina the horrors of civil war? There had never in history been an independent Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina."
You can get whiplash trying to follow Johnstone's train of thought sometimes, but let us try and keep up here. One wants to ask: How, exactly, was this territorial division of Bosnia to be achieved without some kind of civil war? Given the mixed demographics of the country, it would have been hard to draw a boundry acceptable to both Croat and Serb nationalists. And wasn't a division of Bosnia between Serbs and others the underlying theme of the bloody war that did occur in Bosnia?
While pondering the staggering number of problems such a proposal would entail, one runs the risk of skimming over that second sentence--but that would be a mistake, because it attempts to gloss over the ugly reality of this division she is advocating--there was no place for the Muslims of Bosnia.
I don't think Johnstone is ignorant of this point--she has pointed out before, and does so again in this very paragraph, that 'Muslim' was a recent national designation; she also repeats the lie that Bosnian Muslims are really just lapsed Serbs and/or Croats.
To be fair, she does go on to address the fate of Bosnia's Muslims if such a division were enacted, but her solution is a little strange:
"It would have required guaranteeing that the full religious freedom already enjoyed by Bosnian Muslims would be safeguarded--by no means a difficult matter."
Not a difficult matter, but certainly an almost irrelevant one--the Kosovar Albanians weren't being persecuted because they were predominantly Muslim, but because they were Albanian. The shift from ethnicity to religion is most likely no accident--Johnstone will use Islam as a stick with which to beat Bosnia's Muslim leadership.
I'll wrap up this post by discussing the sentence which follows the above quote:
"Serbs and Croats had no objection to living with Muslims as neighbors; their objections were to living as potentially second-class citizens of a Muslim state--another matter altogether."
{underlined text in the above quote italicized in original text}
The second half of this sentence somehow tries to spin the straw of bigoted invictive into the gold of respectable opinion; the specter of a fundamentalist theocracy being imposed by a nearly defenseless, deeply secularized population comprising less than half of the population somehow is transformed from hysterical hate-mongering to sensible public opinion. The insertion of the qualifying "potentially" is the closest shave with reality this clause contains.
The first half of this sentence? I mentioned that Karadzic has not made an appearance yet, and Plavsic never will; you could not discuss either one of them and still bring yourself to write such a whopper.
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter One [13]
6. MULTICULTURAL BOSNIA VERSUS MULTICULTURAL YUGOSLAVIA
This final section, an assault on the very idea of Bosnia, is where Johnstone really lets it all hang out.
"Having decisively contributed to the violent distintigration of multicultural Yugoslavia, the West proceeded to idolize one of the fragments as a multicultural Eden: the central Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina."
In this opening sentence, Johnstone prepares to marshall her selectively chosen facts and chronologically convoluted narrative to do battle with yet another strawman of her own creation; in this case, a 'West' that has "decisively contributed" to the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. And yet again, she deliberately conflates media coverage and political rhetoric with actual policies and actions taken by governments. Like Parenti and others, Johnstone's bizarre assertion that the West was trying from the beginning to break Yugoslavia apart is based mostly on media rhetoric and generally toothless political pronouncements. And even then, one must ignore something as fundamental as the sequence of events before and after the outbreak of war.
"For complex historical reasons, deeply rooted in the consciousness of the people, the balance in Bosnia depended on its insertion in a balanced Yugoslavia."
Ignoring the pompous tone of this sentence (terms like "the consciousness of the people" reveal why Johnstone is so easily swayed by nationalist bombast), one has to ask three questions:
1) Is this true? What are these complex reasons? She doesn't tell. Perhaps its something along the line of the facetiously 'traditional' "narod/narodnost" distinction?
2) If this is true, why is it true? Bosnia and Hercegovina existed for centuries prior to the founding of Yugoslavia; the ethnic and relgious demographics of the country had always been in flux, and neither the founding of the Kingdom after World War I or the founding of the Socialist Republic after World War II changed that fact. Why had the "balance" within Bosnia become untenable outside of the Yugoslav framework?
[NOTE: This is not necessarily an invalid point. As mentioned earlier, the nationalist 'pull' of neighboring Serbia and Croatia (still within Austo-Hungary, but home of a rising sense of national identity) in the 19th Century had contributed to the growing sense of 'Serbness' and 'Croatness' among Orthodox and Catholic Bosnians, who began to 'become' Serbs and Croats; in more recent time, the designation of 'Muslim' as a nationality--and migration to and from the Sandzak--had a related effect on Muslim Bosnian, although they natually remained more attached to their Bosnia identity.
However, in order to address this point, Johnstone would have to acknowledge and confront the rather fluid and imprecise nature of national identity among the South Slavs; this would undermine much of the collectivist/tribalist logic of her arguement. So even if she is aware of this possible avenue of inquiry, she rightly smells danger and avoids it).
3) What of this "balanced Yugoslavia"? Without Slovenia and Croatia, and with Vojvodina and Kosovo under Belgrade's thumb, wouldn't her own logic compel her to reexamine the situation?
She does address the third question, sort of:
"The secession of Slovenia and Croatia unbalanced the Yugoslav Federation, increasing the relative weight of Serbia. This was not to the liking of Muslim or Croat leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina, nor to the government of Macedonia."
It is interesting to note that, while Johnstone always refers to 'the Serbs' or 'the Bosnian Serbs,' here she is careful to talk about Muslim and Croat leaders. The better to suggest treachery and conspiracy later, we can assume. We already know what she thinks of Croatia's leadership (note also that, at this point in the book, Radovan Karadzic has yet to be mentioned, nor has Momcilo Krajisnik--Biljana Plavsic is not cited in the index at all).
Having acknowledged that a "balanced" Yugoslavia no longer existed--in fact, having essentially conceeded that the Yugoslavia that Bosnia was being asked to stay in was Serb-dominated, she promptly drops the matter.
The really important point, she goes on to point out, is this:
"The Bosnian Serbs were vehemently opposed to secession from Yugoslavia. They considered that without their consent as a "consituent people," secession and the referendum were illegal>"
So while Muslim and Croat leaders played dangerous games with a volatile situation--ultimately plunging the country into the abyss at the prodding of their Western masters--the Bosnian Serb people stood on principle as a group. The contrast is the way she portrays these different groups is starkly revealed here.
But, at any rate, Bosnia's Muslim-led government--along with the Bosnian Croat community--were foolish enough to listen to this presumed chorus of Western pressure. The EU's admittedly foolish handling of the situation is not, in her telling, a mitigating factor to the tragedy that befell the country; rather, the EU, and the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo bear the primary blame for starting the war. A more startling refutation of well-documented facts and any reasonable interpretation of events is hard to fathom.
This final section, an assault on the very idea of Bosnia, is where Johnstone really lets it all hang out.
"Having decisively contributed to the violent distintigration of multicultural Yugoslavia, the West proceeded to idolize one of the fragments as a multicultural Eden: the central Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina."
In this opening sentence, Johnstone prepares to marshall her selectively chosen facts and chronologically convoluted narrative to do battle with yet another strawman of her own creation; in this case, a 'West' that has "decisively contributed" to the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. And yet again, she deliberately conflates media coverage and political rhetoric with actual policies and actions taken by governments. Like Parenti and others, Johnstone's bizarre assertion that the West was trying from the beginning to break Yugoslavia apart is based mostly on media rhetoric and generally toothless political pronouncements. And even then, one must ignore something as fundamental as the sequence of events before and after the outbreak of war.
"For complex historical reasons, deeply rooted in the consciousness of the people, the balance in Bosnia depended on its insertion in a balanced Yugoslavia."
Ignoring the pompous tone of this sentence (terms like "the consciousness of the people" reveal why Johnstone is so easily swayed by nationalist bombast), one has to ask three questions:
1) Is this true? What are these complex reasons? She doesn't tell. Perhaps its something along the line of the facetiously 'traditional' "narod/narodnost" distinction?
2) If this is true, why is it true? Bosnia and Hercegovina existed for centuries prior to the founding of Yugoslavia; the ethnic and relgious demographics of the country had always been in flux, and neither the founding of the Kingdom after World War I or the founding of the Socialist Republic after World War II changed that fact. Why had the "balance" within Bosnia become untenable outside of the Yugoslav framework?
[NOTE: This is not necessarily an invalid point. As mentioned earlier, the nationalist 'pull' of neighboring Serbia and Croatia (still within Austo-Hungary, but home of a rising sense of national identity) in the 19th Century had contributed to the growing sense of 'Serbness' and 'Croatness' among Orthodox and Catholic Bosnians, who began to 'become' Serbs and Croats; in more recent time, the designation of 'Muslim' as a nationality--and migration to and from the Sandzak--had a related effect on Muslim Bosnian, although they natually remained more attached to their Bosnia identity.
However, in order to address this point, Johnstone would have to acknowledge and confront the rather fluid and imprecise nature of national identity among the South Slavs; this would undermine much of the collectivist/tribalist logic of her arguement. So even if she is aware of this possible avenue of inquiry, she rightly smells danger and avoids it).
3) What of this "balanced Yugoslavia"? Without Slovenia and Croatia, and with Vojvodina and Kosovo under Belgrade's thumb, wouldn't her own logic compel her to reexamine the situation?
She does address the third question, sort of:
"The secession of Slovenia and Croatia unbalanced the Yugoslav Federation, increasing the relative weight of Serbia. This was not to the liking of Muslim or Croat leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina, nor to the government of Macedonia."
It is interesting to note that, while Johnstone always refers to 'the Serbs' or 'the Bosnian Serbs,' here she is careful to talk about Muslim and Croat leaders. The better to suggest treachery and conspiracy later, we can assume. We already know what she thinks of Croatia's leadership (note also that, at this point in the book, Radovan Karadzic has yet to be mentioned, nor has Momcilo Krajisnik--Biljana Plavsic is not cited in the index at all).
Having acknowledged that a "balanced" Yugoslavia no longer existed--in fact, having essentially conceeded that the Yugoslavia that Bosnia was being asked to stay in was Serb-dominated, she promptly drops the matter.
The really important point, she goes on to point out, is this:
"The Bosnian Serbs were vehemently opposed to secession from Yugoslavia. They considered that without their consent as a "consituent people," secession and the referendum were illegal>"
So while Muslim and Croat leaders played dangerous games with a volatile situation--ultimately plunging the country into the abyss at the prodding of their Western masters--the Bosnian Serb people stood on principle as a group. The contrast is the way she portrays these different groups is starkly revealed here.
But, at any rate, Bosnia's Muslim-led government--along with the Bosnian Croat community--were foolish enough to listen to this presumed chorus of Western pressure. The EU's admittedly foolish handling of the situation is not, in her telling, a mitigating factor to the tragedy that befell the country; rather, the EU, and the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo bear the primary blame for starting the war. A more startling refutation of well-documented facts and any reasonable interpretation of events is hard to fathom.
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