"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Five [8]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEW IMPERIAL MODEL

PREPARING FOR WAR

I'm not a fan of the KLA. The methods and tactics utilized were too thuggish and indiscriminate for my tastes; more to the point, the ideology was too nationalistic and tribal. It should be no surprise that Johnstone keeps the focus on the KLA as much as possible. Even though, by this point, she has so thoroughly demonized the Albanians and their culture it hardly seems necessary to throw any more dirt their way.

Her description of KLA tactics, however, fail to distinguish that organization from myriad other resistance movements; the brutal logic of guerrilla/revolutionary warfare is not pretty stuff, but Johnstone does not explain why the tactics of the KLA were any different from, say, Tito's Partisans. Rather than acknowledging that the KLA adopted time-tested tactics which were common to far-left revolutionary movements, Johnstone plays dumb and portrays their activities as novel, audacious acts of terror.

It is no secret that the KLA paid for a significant portion of their war with drug smuggling and worse. Nor is it a secret that the CIA has a long and inglorious history of colluding with criminals of all stripes in order to undermine governments the US Government doesn't like and support those which it does.

None of which addresses the issue of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, human rights for ethnic Albanians in Serbia, or the poisoning of relations between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo by nationalist rhetoric and worse coming from Belgrade. But never you mind--the Albanian cause has been smeared a little more, and we've been reminded for the umpteenth time that the USA is, and always has been, an imperialist force of evil at all places and all times.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Five [7]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEW IMPERIAL MODEL

THE EAR OF THE EMPIRE: THE ALBANIAN LOBBY IN THE UNITED STATES

In which we learn that: Albanians had a powerful lobby with an inside track to the Clinton Administration through the "Ethnic Outreach" program, while Serbs did not. Johnstone assures us that:

"Americans of Serbian descent, even if they opposed Tito and revered the memory of executed wartime Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic, never dreamed of reshaping the Balkans with help from the U.S. superpower."

It's an amazing talent of Johnstone, this ability to know the dreams of Serb-Americans as a collective group. With such amazing powers of deduction, how did she fail to note that this program was set up in 1996, when the US was somewhat preoccupied with Serbia and ethnic Serbs in the West Balkans?

It's a tired tactic, yet she never gives it up--segregate events from their context in time and place so that facts which were contingent on circumstance and surrounding events can be recontextualized as glaring contradictions or sinister realities. Johnstone's pretensions to sophistication are once again exposed, as she reacts to stories of--GASP--ethnic lobbying as if she's discovered the Freemason's pulling the strings of the Federal government in league with the Trilateral Commission. The real world is a complicated place, and those in power often respond to conflicting pressures from a variety of pressure groups. The decisions made by those in power are often driven by a mixture of cynical calculation, response to public pressure, kowtowing to organized interest groups, and sometimes even genuine idealism. That idealism is rarely untainted or pure should be obvious to anyone with even a cursory grasp of how government works. But such a nuanced, balanced understanding ill-serves those who wish to paint every action of the imperialist West in the darkest possible hues.

So when Johnstone points out that the US had plans for a natural gas pipeline across the Balkans through Kosovo, one may rest assured that she truly believes this is a damning and shocking revelation, as is the information that Halliburton is potentially involved. The list of people in and out of government who would participate in, and profit from, such a venture is only surprising if you are truly clueless about such things.

To recap, according to Johnstone, the breakup of Yugoslavia was driven by: nationalist groups (Croats, Muslims, Albanians) who had not achieved the high level of national consciousness, inclusive nation-building institutions, and functioning statehood as the Serbs and therefore resented and hated that misunderstood national group which alone stood firm in defense of the multiethnic/multinational ideal of Yugolavia; in collusion with imperialist Western hyper-capitalists intent on dismantling the sovereignty of small nations in order to achieve the global supremacy of global NGOs in service to the neoliberal, globalist New World Order.

Is that sophisticated and nuanced enough for you?

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Five [6]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEW IMPERIAL MODEL

THE KOSOVO NGO

This section is eight pages long, yet contains very little substance. Perhaps that it is due to the subject matter, which is a difficult one for Johnstone--the nonviolent resistance movement among Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s, under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova. To her credit, Johnstone acknowledges the Albanian tactic of nonviolent resistance at the beginning of this section, even though she feels obligated to mention the large number of blood feuds thus canceled or at least suspended as a result (we mustn't allow ourselves to forget the essentially primitive and violent nature of Albanian society, after all). She even describes this accomplishment as "impressive." And then she spend the following seven pages doing her best to undermine any positive implications of this accomplishment.

The gist of her criticism is that the Albanian resistance movement was fundamentally different from other, more celebrated resistance movements in that the Albanians weren't fighting for their rights within the system, but were secessionist in nature. This is true, as far as that goes--they did set up alternate institutions, and there is little doubt that independence (or union with Albania proper) was the goal of many, probably the majority. Johnstone could have compared the Kosovar Albanians to the Kurds of northern Iraq in that case; I do not believe the parallel could have escaped her. As it is, she does not mention that possible parallel.

We're then treated to a litany of examples of how insufficient and inferior the health and educational institutions that the Albanians set up were, especially compared to the existing Serbian institutions already in place. I believe I've already noted this, but it bears repeating--Johnstone is echoing the rationale of colonialism in this chapter with her repeated condemnations of allegedly insufficient and faulty Albanian institutions. The patronizing tone of these sections, which both implicitly and explicitly suggest that Albanians are culturally and even tempermentally ill-suited for self-government, suggest that the Kosovo was, by all rights, a "colony" of Serbia and that Albanians would have been well-advised to accpe the civilizing influence of their masters. In a book which purports to assail neo-imperialism, this is an odd approach, to say the least.

At this point, she blithely suggest that Serbs were looking for a way out of Kosovo, and that partition was suggested as a way to let the Albanians go! The brazen disregard for context is glaring here--to prove her claim, she quotes Serbian novelist and arch-nationalist Dobrica Cosic. This is his ONLY appearance in the book; nothing has been mentioned of his role in the rise of Serb nationalism in the 1980s or of his intellectual contributions to the ethnic cleansing project of the 1990s. He is presented as a concerned intellectual, observing the problem from afar and from despair, hoping only to bring peace to a troubled region and and end to endemic ethnic conflict between two peoples. The hypocrisy of this approach is staggering--considering how she completely ignored Cosic up to this point, the reader might suppose she simply chose to sweep him and his role in events under the rug.

Yet, this is not all that surprising at all--Johnstone treats reality as a carefully scripted play or movie, so the characters in the Yugoslav drama serve as nothing but props to be brought on when their presence is useful, and carted offstage when they no longer serve the desired narrative.

She concludes by noting the growing importance of NGOs and Western observers and organizers in Kosovo. It is not clear whether Johnstone believes that crafty, scheming Albanians played these naive dupes like fools, or that these organizations served as advance troops in the Western imperialist invasion. At the beginning of this chapter, Johnstone claimed that the peculiar circumstances of Albanian nationalism made their culture a convenient and useful beachhead for imperialist powers seeking a beachhead into the Western Balkans. So I suppose we are to assume a master conspiracy, with the Kosovar Albanian leadership playing to the sympathies of their Western benefactors in order to jockey for more power and autonomy.

Johnstone wraps all this in a cloying concern for the Serb minority in Kosovo, which might be believable if she weren't so determined to avoid placing any iota of blame for the troubles in Kosovo on the leadership in Belgrade. I would suspect that Kosovar Serbs know, deep down, that they were betrayed and let down by Serbia's government. And while I can understand why a scared Serb in Pristina or Pec or elsewhere in Kosovo might reflexively blame all ethnic Albanians for his or her plight then and now, there's no excuse for Johnstone--safe in the civilized, secular West she criticizes so glibly--to give in to similarly knee-jerk, bigoted generalizations.

Her concern, at any rate, is not with the fate of Kosovo per se. The spread and growth of Western NGO's gave the "Great Powers" the toehold they needed, as well as the proxies on the ground to give the purportedly one-sided reports of the situation that NATO countries would need to justify military action against Serbia.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Five [5]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEW IMPERIAL MODEL

POLITICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Four more pages of black-is-white recent history. Not worth my time to summarize or yours to read. In brief:

The problems in Kosovo were all about constitutional changes, and shifting Western attitudes towards them before and after the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. Kosovar Albanians were hard-line Marxist-Leninists and nationalists, while Serb forces (Johnstone conveniently blurs the distinction between Serb and Yugoslav authorities throughout this section) represented modernizing Socialism and reform.

Milosevic's repression of the Albanians wasn't any harsher than earlier Titoist measures, but the world had changed and the West no longer needed to tolerate socialism in Yugoslavia (this isn't an entirely meritless point, but Johnstone, Parenti, and others make far too much of it).

To conclude, Johnstone claims that the West objected to Serb measures in Kosovo because they didn't understand the constitutional issues driving events there; she claims that concern about "human right" (the parenthesis are hers) was merely a clumsy effort to fit events into a paradigm that Westerners could understand and care about.

That's about it. As you can see, my patience with this book has nearly run out--but also, there's precious little to discuss here. She skips from 1990 to 1997 in the space of a single sentence, as if the wars in Bosnia (and Belgrade's involvement in it) never happened. She tries to draw a picture of a reasonable, moderate Serbia trying to deal with difficult internal affairs when, out of the blue, the imperialist West and its NGO proxies falsely portrayed events as a way to turn the Western publics against "the Serbs" and in favor of intervention.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Five [4]

THE NEW IMPERIAL MODEL

2. VICTIMS AND VENGEANCE

Johnstone treats us to a little sociology by way of an introduction; here we are informed that Albanian society--being traditional in nature--is prone to ideals of vengeance. She quotes sources calling Albanians as having a "culture of hatred" and a "culture of spite." The focus on blood feuds and tribal concepts of honor underlines this introductory paragraph.

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THE MYTH OF THE SERBIAN MEMORANDUM

Four pages in which Johnstone argues that the infamous memorandum of the Serbian Academy has been completely misconstrued by anti-Serb Croats and Albanians. It wasn't, she assures us, any sort of manifesto, certainly not one advocating ethnic cleansing. An argument that she bolsters by:

1) claiming that the authors were sincerely, and without guile, merely addressing the underlying weaknesses of post-Tito Yugoslavia; and
2) ignoring the context in which the memorandum was written.

The entire section consists of little else; one is either willing to suspend disbelief and believe her, or one is not. I don't feel compelled to give her interpretation the benefit of the doubt. At any rate, we already know who she finds blameless. What is of interest in this chapter is the venom she directs at ethnic Albanians; we will get there soon enough.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Five [3]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEW IMPERIAL MODEL

PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION, LANGUAGE, AND TRUTH

A maddening section, in that there is the germ of a reasonable analysis here. If only Johnstone weren't so stubbornly one-sided--searching for evidence to support her predetermined point of view rather than examining the facts and developing her interpretation with an open mind--this section might have contained interesting and useful insights.

Essentially, Johnstone focuses on the low level of education and literacy among Albanians, and the related failure of Albanians to develop a national literature (or even an accepted written form of the language) until the early 20th Century.

There is much to ponder here; in spite of herself, Johnstone has brought up an interesting subject. Albanian nationalism is--even by Balkan standards--a recent, immature phenomena, and the separation of the Albanians of Kosovo from their ethnic brethren in Albania proper from the very dawn of this process was all but certain to affect this process. The cultural and social identity of ethnic Albanians in Yugoslavia was struggling to define itself in modern, nationalistic terms even as they were a minority in a nation-building project dominated by two national groups with more established and pronounced national identities.

The decision by Tito to allow Albanian-language instruction by teachers and books from Hoxha's country was, in retrospect, a minefield. And Johnstone's point about the decline of bilingualism (or even trilingualism, as Turkish died out) among Kosovar Serbs and Albanians is a serious one. If only it were being raised by a serious individual.

The picture she draws is of a society rapidly becoming segregated by language, the majority being educated as de facto citizens of another nation. Albanians, according to her, were fed a steady diet of crude nationalist self-pity and martyrdom, deficient in science, math, and other useful skills. The Kosovar Albanians became increasingly resentful of the stagnant economic and social conditions in their province, and they placed the blame on the Slavic majority of Yugoslavia.

This isn't an entirely unconvincing argument. But Johnstone consistently peppers her presentation with implicitly derogatory and condescending asides. The strong suggestion that Albanians would have been better off had they been educated in Serbian--a more established written language with a more extensive literature--smacks of patronizing colonialism. This impression is all but inescapable given that, in the previous section, she defended the Serbian conquest of Kosovo on the grounds that Albanian nationalism was too young and undeveloped, and Kosovar Albanian society lacked the social, cultural, and political infrastructure to successfully manage independence.

Her "analysis," as usual, is facetious. Such a shame, too--she comes close, or at least within sight of, a reasonable, even-handed interpretation of events. She seems to have grasped a larger tragedy at work in Kosovo, where the two main ethnic groups were slowly segregated psychologically as well as physically from each other as a byproduct of the larger forces wrenching the Balkans throughout the 20th Century.

But that won't do, for our Miss Johnstone. As we shall see in the next section.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Five [2]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEW IMPERIAL MODEL

THE CROWDED "CRADLE OF CIVLIZATION"

A Balkan history lesson that picks and chooses its facts carefully, this section traces the history of Albanian-Serb relations in Kosovo with an almost believable facade of even-handedness. Out of context, these six pages very nearly approximate a serious and objective summary of early Albanian nationalism in Kosovo.

Johnstone acknowledges that the incorporation of Kosovo into the modern Serb nation-state was a 20th-Century phenomena, and her assertion that the Albanian state that emerged after World War I was too institutionally immature to incorporate all Albanian-speaking territories is at least plausible. Were that she so even-handed and historically grounded in the rest of this book.

She even acknowledges the bloody consequences of the Serb takeover of Kosovo--although (and this is telling of her point of view) without the graphic anecdotes and damning hard data that she deploys when the victims in question were Serbs--to the point where even I was half-willing to believe that the woman may only be misguided rather than dishonest and sinister. And then, without a change in tone, she shifts emphasis ever so slightly, and her true nature comes through.

She wants to discount the importance of the writings of Vaso Cubrilovic, who wrote dispassionately and bluntly about the rationale for, the logistics of, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. To this end, she deploys some very valid points--there is nothing he suggests which had not recently been put into practice in the Balkans, and his ideas hardly shocked European sensibilities at the time. And, furthermore, some elites in Albania and Turkey were receptive to his ideas.

So far, so good, or at least not so bad. It is only fair to put his comments and the actions of the government of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes into the context of time and place. But then she goes further; and this is where the illusion of objectivity and fairness slips away:

"Cubrilovic was thinking primarily in strategic terms and saw future Albanian irredentism (whose rise he foresaw) as a threat to the viability of the Yugoslav state. This was cold realipolitik rather than emotional racism."

[As always, underlined text was italicized in the original.]

So ethnic cleansing is an acceptable strategy if it is deployed as part of realipolitik on behalf of the state, rather than as "emotional racism". This is on behalf of the same Belgrade regime that Johnstone previously claimed subverted the interests of the Serbian people, mind you.

In case the reader feels I am exaggerating, Johnstone goes on to document his suggested strategies--ethnic cleansing by various means (including terror) was his stated goal. More to the point, since Johnstone validates the logic behind his strategy, one expects her to condemn his methods all the more. She does not. She notes that his plan was inspired by what he saw as a far too Western-influenced strategy carried out by the government in Belgrade. She smugly notes that this shows that the Serbs were, contrary to the label given them in the 1990s, not historically wedded to an ethnic cleansing project. As I noted just above--suddenly, The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was Serb-controlled. When it's convenient for her argument, that is.

The section ends by noting that thousands of Serbs and Montenegrins were driven from Kosovo during World War II, and that Tito refused to allow them back in order to appease the Albanian majority. This was tragic and unfair; typically of Johnstone, instead of stepping back and viewing this as part of the larger tragedy of the Balkans--a region where local coexistence has been all too often thwarted by outside interference stirring up inflated national differences--she frames the matter in crude terms of Serbs victimized by brutal Albanians.