A Serbophobe Outburst in the Nation Magazine
 
Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2007 09:40:16 -0600 (CST)

The Unrepentent Marxist
December 21, 2007

A Serbophobe Outburst in the Nation Magazine

by Louis Proyect

The current issue of the Nation Magazine has an extraordinarily long article
titled Western Promises that accuses the Western imperialists being soft
on the late Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbs. It was written by Marc
Perelman, the diplomatic correspondent of the Forward, a Jewish-American
weekly in NY with historic ties to the social democratic leadership of the
ILGWU.

Perelman uses nearly 6000 words to make the case that the U.S. and Britain
sabotaged the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) and allowed Serb criminals to go scot-free. It relies
heavily on the word of one Florence Hartmann, a Serbophobe reporter for Le
Monde in the early 1990s who became an assistant to Carla Le Ponte, the
chief prosecutor of the ICTY. Hartmann is the author of one of those
typically one-sided biographies of Slobodan Milosevic that makes him out to
be Satans Spawn. Perelmans article, however, relies heavily on her latest
book titled Paix et chbtiment: Les guerres secrhtes de la politique et de
la justice internationales (Peace and Punishment: The Secret Wars of
Politics and International Justice) that is not yet available in English.

Hartmann is even too much for Marcus Tanner, who covered Yugoslavia for the
Independent and hewed to their Serbophobe editorial position. In a review of
a collection of articles on Yugoslavia co-edited by fellow Serbophobes Roy
Gutman and David Rieff, Tanner dismissed Hartmann as an untrustworthy crank:

Some of the articles are sermons and rants. Florence Hartmanns piece on
Bosnia is just a series of accusations that have been bundled together. That
Milosevic made it his mission to set Yugoslavias ethnic and national
groups against one another is one of a great many facts that are baldly
asserted without any supporting evidence.

The Independent (London), August 3, 1999

Why the Nation Magazine would waste 9 pages circulating ideas that stemmed
from Ms. Hartmann is somewhat beyond me, but then again they had the
 wisdom to publish the awful Joaquin Villaloboss attack on Hugo Chavez.

The gist of Hartmanns complaint is that a deal struck between the West and
the Serb Republic to divide up Bosnia resulted in the slaughter at
Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde since they fell within territory that was to be
ceded to the Serbs. Hartmanns argument is not new as Perelman reports:

The story of how the city was overrun and several thousand inhabitants were
executed as UN peacekeepers watched helplessly has been recounted many
times, most grippingly by David Rohde, an American reporter who first
uncovered evidence of the massacre and whose Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall
of Srebrenica (1997) describes the event through the eyes of seven
witnesses. Rohde concluded that the litany of mistakes that led to the
massacre was a passive conspiracy rather than a cynical backroom deal.

Missing entirely from these accounts of the Srebrenica killings that most
assuredly did take place (although to describe them as genocide is
positively Orwellian) is the ratcheting up of tensions at the hands of
Muslim militias. You never find the name Naser Oric in the reporting of a
David Rohde or a Roy Gutman, but Bill Schiller (by no means pro-Serb) wrote
in the July 16, 1995 Toronto Star:

On a cold and snowy night, I sat in his living room watching a shocking
video version of what might have been called Nasir Orics Greatest Hits.
There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed heads, and people fleeing.
Oric grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork.

We ambushed them, he said when a number of dead Serbs appeared on the
screen.

The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by explosives: We
launched those guys to the moon, he boasted.

When footage of a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any visible
bodies, Oric hastened to announce: We killed 114 Serbs there.

Later there were celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices chanting his
praises. These video reminiscences, apparently, were from what Muslims
regard as Orics glory days. That was before most of eastern Bosnia fell and
Srebrenica became a safe zone with U.N. peacekeepers inside - and Serbs on
the outside.

Despite Orics taste for Serb blood, his forces were inexplicably withdrawn
from Srebrenica just before the Serb counter-attack. A small UN force proved
incapable of withstanding the Serb militias and the net result was a
bloodbath.

Where Hartmann sees UN and Western inaction as proof that they were willing
to cast the Muslims to the wolves as part of a process of carving up Bosnia
ethnically along the lines of the India-Pakistan division, Diana Johnstone
views it as a necessary first step in drawing NATO into the fray. If the UN
was incapable of stopping the Serb Stalinist-Fascist-Satanist onslaught,
then more powerful forces had to be mobilized. Waving the bloody shirt in
this fashion has become more and more instrumental to the war aims of
imperialism. Only a few years after Srebrenica became a rallying cry of the
cruise missile left, Racak would play the same role in precipitating NATO
intervention in Kosovo. And then more recently the attack on the WTC served
similar purposes. One imagines that if there is ever an all-out nuclear war,
it will be some other incident of genocide that will necessitate B-52s
being sent on their way to teach the miscreants a radioactive lesson.

If the goal of Perelmans article is to convince readers of Serb guilt that
the ICTY overlooked, it does not do a very good job. For example, there is
much ado about the Kula Tapes that link Milosevic with the Red Berets, a
highly trained detachment of the Serb army that operated in Croatia and
Bosnia. Supposedly the U.S. sent a copy of the tape to ICTY that concealed
key information about Milosevics culpability.

Perhaps people like Florence Hartmann and Marc Perelman are still stung by
the ICTYs decision that Milosevic was not directly involved with what they
called genocide in Bosnia, so somebody has to be blamed for that failure.
You have to stop and ask yourself why the U.S. would withhold such evidence
when there is nothing in the tapes that has anything to do with Western
failure to come to the aid of the Bosnian Muslims.

Contrary to Perelman and Florence Hartmann, there is substantial evidence
that Milosevic was absolutely innocent of the charges against him as this
report by Chris Stephen in the habitually anti-Milosevic London Observer
(October 10, 2004) would indicate:

FRESH controversy has hit the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic with a
claim from a senior intelligence analyst that the Yugoslav leader is
innocent of genocide.

Dr Cees Wiebes, a professor at Amsterdam University, now says there is no
evidence linking Milosevic to the worst atrocity of the Bosnian war, the
massacre of 7,000 Muslims at the town of Srebrenica.

Srebrenica, which was overrun by Serb forces in July 1995, forms the basis
of the genocide charge against Milosevic, but Wiebes, a member of a Dutch
government inquiry into the atrocity, said there is nothing to link
Milosevic to the crime.

In our report, which is about 7,000 pages long, we come to the conclusion
that Milosevic had no foreknowledge of the subsequent massacres, he says in
a radio programme, The Real Slobodan Milosevic, to be broadcast by BBC Five
Live tonight. What we did find, however, was evidence to the contrary.
Milosevic was very upset when he learnt about the massacres.

The prospect of the former Balkan strongman being cleared of the most
serious charge he faces is a fresh blow to an already troubled case, which
begins hearing defence evidence this week after several months of delays.

Any failure to prove genocide will cast a shadow not only over this case but
over the whole practicality of holding tyrants to account in war crimes
trials, most obviously in the case against Saddam Hussein.

Wiebes headed a team of intelligence specialists commissioned by the Dutch
government to look into the massacre because its own forces were present in
the town under the UN flag.

He had access to secret files, key diplomats and hundreds of witnesses to a
massacre in which Muslim men and boys as young as 12 were butchered by
Bosnian Serb forces. But while clearly implicating senior Serb field
commanders, including General Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian army chief
still on the run, Wiebes says Milosevic played no part.

He said it was understandable that Milosevic was upset because in this
phase of the war he was looking for a political settlement and this was not
very good for him.

Furthermore, if Western complicity with an alleged war criminal like
Slobodan Milosevic would get in the way of a successful prosecution, then
why in the world did the U.S. agree to allow Saddam Hussein to stand trial?
Surely, he would have been able to expose American collaboration in his
war with the Kurds as some leftist commentators predicted. Unfortunately,
kangaroo courts like the ones that took place in the Hague and Baghdad are
not set up for an evenhanded examination of all the facts. Neither Milosevic
nor Saddam Hussein received adequate legal representation. And even if they
had been able to bring to light American complicity, nothing of consequence
would have come out of it since the propaganda machine of the West had
already condemned such men to become unpersons in the Orwellian sense.

In keeping with the overall credulousness of the article, Perelman calls on
a witness even more doubtful than Florence Hartmann:

In Srebrenica: Un ginocide annonci (Srebrenica: A Genocide Foretold), a book
published in France on the tenth anniversary of the massacre, French writer
Sylvie Matton offers some fresh acknowledgments by senior European political
and military officialsmostly Frenchthat the tragic fate of the enclave was
no mystery. The most vivid acknowledgment is provided by Alain Juppi, who
was prime minister of France at the time of the Srebrenica massacre. It was
widely known that the Serbs wanted to take the enclaves and annihilate the
men, Juppi told Matton, who then asked Juppi what he meant by annihilate.
Lets say we knew they would take no prisoners, he answered.

After reading this, I paused for a moment with my mouth agape. Who in their
right mind would take Juppis word about anything? Alain Juppi was probably
the most hated politician in recent French history, although Sarkozy seems
poised to surpass him before long. The two of them came into office with a
mandate from the French ruling class to break the powerful trade union
movement and both ended up with bloody noses in the process. In 2004, he was
found guilty of stealing money from his party, the Rally for the Republic,
for which he got an 18-month suspended jail sentence and was banned from
holding office for 10 years.

Fortunately, the Nation Magazine does occasionally allow the truth to filter
through on the Balkans wars. In George Kenneys review of Noam Chomskys
The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo that appeared nearly 8
years ago to the day, the notion of a Serb master plan to subjugate its
neighbors gets thoroughly debunked. Kenney writes:

On March 18, the day the Rambouillet talks broke down, David Scheffer, the
State Departments ambassador at large for war crimes issues, proclaimed
that we have upwards to about 100,000 men that we cannot account for in
Kosovo. Depending upon the sophistication of the press organ involved, this
statement was variously construed as a warning or, as the New York Daily
News put it in a headline the next day, 100,000 Kosovar Men Feared Dead. The
specter of mass murder critically supported public acceptance of NATO
airstrikes, which began less than a week later, on March 24. After two
months of bombing, the Yugoslav regime was still, to the Administrations
deepening chagrin, in the fight. By this time there were increasing murmurs
of discontent in the press regarding the effect of NATO airstrikes on
unmistakably civilian targets. Ambassador Scheffer stepped to the plate
again in mid-May, calling for speedy investigations of war crimes (by
Serbs) while now noting that as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged
between 14 and 59 remain unaccounted for. Several wire services quoted him
on different days as saying that with the exception of Rwanda in 1994 and
Cambodia in 1975, you would be hard-pressed to find a crime scene anywhere
in the world since World War II where a defenseless civilian population has
been assaulted with such ferocity and criminal intent, and suffered so many
multiple violations of humanitarian law in such a short period of time as in
Kosovo since mid-March 1999. It was a profoundly ignorant remark, of
course, but whats important is that the Administrations laserlike focus on
allegations and innuendoes of genocidal acts securely established the
legitimacy of continued bombing for an at-that-time unknown, perhaps lengthy
period.

Helpfully sensing that WashingtonScheffer and a battalion of like-minded
flackshad gone too far out on a limb, in June and July the British started
publicizing their reduced estimate that 10,000 Albanian Kosovars had been
killed. For whatever reason that number stuck in establishment circles. In
fact, however, it appears to be still too many. The actual number is
probably somewhere in the low thousands.

In mid-July sources from the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, known as
KFOR, were telling the press that of 2,150 bodies found by peacekeepers only
850 were victims of massacres. Nevertheless, still eager to bolster the
Serb=devil argument, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, in an address
to the Council on Foreign Relations on July 26, poignantly mentioned the
village of Ljubenic, the largest mass-grave site discovered so far from this
conflict, with as many as 350 bodies. Berger may not have been aware that
the Italian in charge of the site, Brig. Gen. Mauro Del Vecchio, had told
the press several days earlier that the exhumation had been completed at the
site and that seven bodies had been found. All press mention of Ljubenic
ceases after that point.

Thats the kind of writing that the Nation needs, not the drivel offered up
by Marc Perelman.
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/a-serbophobe-outburst-in-the-nation-magazine/