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THOUGHTS ON NIOD REPORT, CHOMSKY, UN, DUTCH GOVERNMENT and DEAF HORSES
RELATIVISM OF JUSTICE: THOUGHTS ON NOAM CHOMSKY, NIOD REPORT, DUTCH GOVERNMENT, U.N. & more…
Blog’s Editorial
Date Published: July 8th, 2006.
Updated again on: July 29th, 2006.
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Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Fugitives on the Run
3. On Noam Chomsky & The Leftist Apologists
4. On (Flawed) NIOD Report & the Dutch Government
5. More on Dutch & the UN
6. Deaf Horses Gone Blind – ‘Balancing Act’
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1. Introduction
There are a few days left until the 11th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre – the first legally established case of genocide in Europe after the Holocaust – in which men, elderly and children (boys) were slaughtered, while many women were raped and tens of thousands of them trucked and forcibly deported from Srebrenica.
In the coming days I will be publishing a revised Srebrenica Massacre Report and will report about the 11th Anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.
This week I’ve been active in reviewing some of the published findings with respect to Srebrenica massacre. I focused on reviewing ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal), U.N. and the Government of Netherland’s findings about Srebrenica. I was also in contact with Noam Chomsky, trying to understand his association with left wing revisionists and Srebrenica genocide deniers.
2. FUGITIVES ON THE RUN
As you might already know, both the United Nations and the Netherlands have complicity in Srebrenica massacre and their findings are not as objective as one might have expected.
Although primary responsibility for the massacre lies with the Bosnian Serb leadership, they are not the only party to blame for the massacre, as both the U.N and Dutchbat clearly failed to prevent and/or at least try to prevent the Srebrenica massacre.
With respect to Naser Oric, most of his initial charges were dropped or he was acquitted of them – and with respect to those, he is innocent. However, he failed to prevent the murders of about 5 Serb captives, and he is guilty of that, as concluded by the ICTY. Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic are both on the run. Both Karadzic and Mladic are indicted on genocide charges with respect to the killings of over 8,000 Bosniaks in the Srebrenica massacre, as well as other human rights violations.
Most likely, they will never be brought to justice (and I would like to be proved wrong here).
To bring Karadzic and Mladic to justice, the United States Government is offering a reward for information.
Individuals who furnish information leading to the arrest or conviction, in any country, of these two fugitives are eligible for a reward of up to $5 million.
In addition to the reward of up to $5 million, informants may be eligible for protection of their identities and relocation for their families. For more information about the reward, see Ratko Mladic & Radovan Karadzic.
3. ON NOAM CHOMSKY & THE LEFTIST APOLOGISTS
I dedicated some time to speak to Noam Chomsky, who answered all my emails. Although I am not going to reveal the contents of emails exchanged with Chomsky, I will take the liberty of posting my general opinion about Chomsky.
As you might already know, Chomsky is considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of the United States politics. And the “leftist apologist wing” is what usually fits the definition of Srebrenica genocide denial and/or revisionism (e.g. Ed Herman and Diana Johnstone). The “leftist apologists” pride themselves on being always on the opposite side of the mainstream media. So, while the media is taking a pro-Israel stance, the leftist apologists will speak on behalf of Palestinian side and bash the Israeli side. Accordingly, while the media is taking a pro-Srebrenica genocide stance, the leftist apologists will speak on behalf of the Serbian side and deny the Srebrenica genocide. More extreme cases of “left wing Srebrenica genocide deniers and revisionists,” as well as Milosevic’s apologists and conspiracy theorists, would include cases like Jared Israel (link) & Francisco Gil-White (who was fired from the University of Pennsylvania for his Srebrenica genocide denial).
While this leftist apologist arrangement of the political spectrum may seem to serve as a counter-balance to the mainstream media, it is actually very selective and most often fraudulent with respect to established facts (e.g. the fact that at least 8,106 Bosniaks perished in the Srebrenica massacre).
The “left wing anti-imperialists” also pride themselves in their – what could be described as – anti-American sentiment and/or never-ending disagreements with American foreign policies, such as the policy of liberating Iraq and Afghanistan from merciless dictatorships, or bombing Serbia to stop Milosevic forces from committing another genocide in Kosovo. For them, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were defenders of their people from ‘bad’ NATO attackers.
To get back to the issue of Chomsky, he was voted ‘the leading living public intellectual’ in ‘The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll’ conducted by the British magazine Prospect. There were 100 nominees in this poll and around 20,000 votes were cast. Whether Chomsky got 1,000 votes, or 2,000 votes, or more or less votes to win the title, is insignificant. What is significant is that nobody used common sense to ask the following question: Can he truly be a leading “global” intellectual with so few votes cast, which were confined only to Britain and the – at that time obscure – British Prospect magazine? If someone is going to be the leading “global” intellectual, then more votes need to be cast and they cannot be confined to obscure British magazines. However you look at it, the term “global” means international, not British; certainly, the term “global” does not mean few thousand votes.
Chomsky is also popular for downplaying the violence and suffering involved in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and shifting the blame to the Western alliance. [read here]
Chomsky’s natural “left apologist wing leanings” dictate his political opinions, but he is careful enough to disassociate himself from Milosevic’s sympathizers. For him, Milosevic is a “terrible” person. However, Chomsky believes that the charges against Milosevic were a “farce”. Here is what he said in an interview for Serbian television: “This trial was never going to hold up, if it was even semi-honest. It was a farce; in fact they were lucky that he died”. (On the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, April 25, 2006)
Here we could see Chomsky – with no legal training in international law – making statements that make absolutely no sense. Milosevic was charged with 66 charges of genocide and other crimes against humanity, one might wonder what were the chances that he would be acquitted of all of them? None.
To my knowledge, Chomsky never directly stated that he denies Srebrenica genocide, but he did support publications which do deny Srebrenica genocide. Examples include his support for Diana Johnstone’s “Fools’ Crusade” book in which she denies Srebrenica genocide and his association with leftist apologist publication ZMag and Edward Herman – both of whom deny Srebrenica genocide. A rebuttal of Edward Herman’s claims was published by Balkan Witness, Edward Herman on the List of Missing at Srebrenica.
Chomsky has been a target of controversy with respect to Srebrenica genocide denial. There is a wonderful article by Marko Attila Hoare titled Chomsky’s Genocide Denial. While, according to my knowledge, Chomsky never directly stated that he denies Srebrenica genocide, he did seem to justify the Srebrenica massacre by suggesting that the massacre was provoked – here is what he said:
Srebrenica was an enclave, lightly protected by UN forces, which was being used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages. It was known that there’s going to be retaliation. When there was a retaliation, it was vicious. (Civilization versus Barbarism? December 17, 2004).
Furthermore, in his article titled Imperial Presidency, Chomsky provocatively uses quotes when refering to Srebrenica genocide:
…Or Srebrenica, almost universally described as “genocide” in the West. In that case, as we know in detail from the Dutch government report [editor’s note: NIOD Report bias, read bellow] and other sources, the Muslim enclave in Serb territory, inadequately protected, was used as a base for attacks against Serb villages, and when the anticipated reaction took place, it was horrendous. The Serbs drove out all but military age men, and then moved in to kill them. There are differences with Falluja. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, but trucked out, and there will be no extensive efforts to exhume the last corpse of the packrats in their warrens in Falluja. There are other differences, arguably unfair to the Serbs. [Canadian Dimension, January/February 2005 (Volume 39, Number 1)]
What Chomsky does not know is that before Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) put any armed resistance against this Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing, several thousand Bosniaks, mainly men and children (boys), were summarily executed. Only then did Bosniaks start attacking the Serb front lines (aka: surrounding Serb villages) to defend the enclave, gather food and possibly break the siege.
However, the judgment in Naser Oric case clearly shows that surrounding Serb villages were used as bases to attack Srebrenica on a daily basis from day one:
Between April 1992 and March 1993, Srebrenica town and the villages in the area held by Bosnian Muslims were constantly subjected to Serb military assaults, including artillery attacks, sniper fire, as well as occasional bombing from aircrafts. Each onslaught followed a similar pattern. Serb soldiers and paramilitaries surrounded a Bosnian Muslim village or hamlet, called upon the population to surrender their weapons, and then began with indiscriminate shelling and shooting. In most cases, they then entered the village or hamlet, expelled or killed the population, who offered no significant resistance, and destroyed their homes. During this period, Srebrenica was subjected to indiscriminate shelling from all directions on a daily basis. Potočari in particular was a daily target for Serb artillery and infantry because it was a sensitive point in the defence line around Srebrenica. Other Bosnian Muslim settlements were routinely attacked as well. All this resulted in a great number of refugees and casualties. (Naser Oric Judgement, pdf format, see pages 43-53)
Human Rights Watch agrees:
Take the events in the village of Kravica, on the Serb Orthodox Christmas on January 7, 1993, for example. The alleged killing of scores of Serbs and destruction of their houses in the village is frequently cited in Serbia as the key example of the heinous crimes committed by the Muslim forces around Srebrenica. In fact, the Oric judgment confirms that there were Bosnian Serb military forces present in the village at the time of attack. In 1998, the wartime New York Times correspondent Chuck Sudetic wrote in his book on Srebrenica that, of forty-five Serbs who died in the Kravica attack, thirty-five were soldiers. Original Bosnian Serb army documents, according to the ICTY prosecutor and the Sarajevo-based Center for Research and Documentation of War Crimes, also indicate that thirty-five soldiers died. [source]
Serb forces continued to attack Srebrenica even after Srebrenica became a “Safe Heaven”:
Later, a Dutch battalion replaced the Canadian troops. The weapons of Bosnian
Muslims were, at least to some extent, turned in or confiscated. Larger military operations by both Bosnian Muslims and Serbs were effectively brought to a halt. However, incidents of Serb military action continued to occur, causing casualties among the Srebrenica population. (Naser Oric Judgement, pdf format, see pages 43-53)
The genocide justifiers have consistently ignored the strong VRS military presence in some Bosnian Serb villages. For example, the village of Fakovici was used as a military outpost through which Bosnian Serb forces launched massive attacks on Bosniak civilians. [source].
Secondly, the Oric judgment found the presence of Serb military in several villages that the Bosniak forces launched an offensive on. Including the presence of sophisticated weapons such as tanks, anti aircraft, rocket launchers etc. Therefore, putting the offensive actions against those specific villages where there was a VRS presence in much different light than the one purported by the genocide deniers. [source].
Now if Chomsky’s justification for genocide equals genocide denial, then one might make the following argument: Although Chomsky defiantly denies being a Srebrenica genocide denier, he does not merely deny the Genoicide he denies his own denial.
For those interested in Chomsky’s make-believe stories, you may read Top 100 Chomsky Lies (in .pdf format).
Highly recommended articles by Dr. Marko Attila Hoare are The Left Revisionists and The Fallacy of Anti-Imperialism.
4. ON (FLAWED) NIOD REPORT & DUTCH GOVERNMENT
Another report that I studied, and that Chomsky used to ‘prove’ his pro-Serb arguments, is the NIOD Report published by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. This is the document, commissioned by the Dutch government following criticism of the way its peacekeeping force in the Srebrenica behaved at the time of the massacre. [See: Srebrenica Massacre Lawsuit Against U.N. and Dutch Government]
Although the Dutch government refused to apologize for the failure of Dutchbat to prevent the Srebrenica massacre, the NIOD Report was the Netherlands’s attempt to wash their hands of direct involvement in the Srebrenica massacre. The report is extremely biased in some parts, depending on the sources or references used.
For example, Part II – Chapter 2 talks about “The history preceding the conflict in Eastern Bosnia up until the establishment of the Safe Area“. By reading this part of the report, one can easily get the impression that Bosniaks constantly attacked Serb villages while Serbs were constantly defending themselves from Bosniaks. But since this report was Netherland’s attempt to shift blame by virtues of ‘moral equivalency’, no wonder they came up with such grotesque claims. Earlier U.N. Report 53/35 concluded:
Even though this accusation is often repeated by international sources, there is no credible evidence to support it. Dutchbat personnel on the ground at the time assessed that the few “raids” the Bosniaks mounted out of Srebrenica were of little or no military significance. These raids were often organized in order to gather food, as the Serbs had refused access for humanitarian convoys into the enclave. Even Serb sources approached in the context of this report acknowledged that the Bosniak forces in Srebrenica posed no significant military threat to them.
The NIOD report cites too many biased Serb sources and even suggests that over 1,000 Serbs died around Srebrenica, which was proven to be false by the internationally sponsored Research and Documentation Center (RDC), which concluded that less than 400 Serbs died there, three quarters of them soldiers (source). Manipulating the number of victims is a form of propaganda that in practice is very difficult to deal with. The Bosnian Government did the same in the 1990s, stating that over 200,000 people died. RDC has concluded that not more than 150,000 people died in Bosnia (and RDC’s incomplete data as of today lists around 100,000 people).
Critics of the NIOD Report allege that the massive tome is full of inaccuracies and amounts to a whitewash designed to clear the Dutch of any wrongdoing. IWPR’s piece, titled Controversial Srebrenica Report Back on Table (source), exposes flaws of NIOD Report:
They [the critics] claim that the government-financed report now provides a “one-stop shop” of information for all sides if the conflict, because it was watered down too much for it to take a real position on anything. According to Jan Willem Honig, senior lecturer in war studies at London’s Kings College and co-author of the highly-praised “Srebrenica, Record of a War Crime”, the truth lies somewhere in between. Although he says the report “has an aura of independent academic research,” Honig is critical of its length, saying the sheer abundance of information makes it possible for anyone to pluck from it whatever they need to make their point. This, he says, is a liability because the report is not always consistent. “It’s possible to draw different conclusions from the different parts in the book. Therefore one can imagine it is useful to both defence and prosecution,” he said. Honig said he found numerous errors in the report as well. For example, he said an explanatory map inserted as a graphic aid to explaining the Bosnian Serb battle plan does not correspond with the plan as described in the text. And neither the written description nor the map accurately describe the actual plan. Worse than the inaccuracies, according to Honig, is the fact that the report has no clear objective. “They [the researchers] should have considered better what they wanted to establish with the report. That might have saved thousands of pages. With its leisurely narrative approach they shot themselves in the foot. The project escaped their control; it became too big,” he said. Honig is not alone in criticising the report. Many readers have complained that the index is poorly organised and full of errors, particularly regarding peoples’ names. Even those who worked on the NIOD report have been critical of it. One of the nine NIOD-researchers, anthropologist Ger Duijzings recently told the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, “Information from sources that I found unreliable, I found back in Part 1 [of the report] – used by [fellow-researcher] Bob de Graaf, if he thought it fitted in his argumentation.”
According to Hasan Nuhanovic, who survived Srebrenica massacre, the NIOD Report has not determined the level of responsibility and guilt of the Dutch troops and officials for genocide in Srebrenica [full text].
For more on U.N.’s moral equivalency, read: Bosnia prepares to mark the 11th anniversary of Genocide and Srebrenica Massacre answers (revised edition).
5. MORE ON DUTCH & THE UN
The direct Dutch involvement in the Srebrenica massacre and subsequent shameful collaboration with Ratko Mladic’s genocidal forces is one of the issues in the upcoming lawsuit against the Dutch government and the United Nations. Dutch forces have direct responsibility for the fall of Srebrenica and the subsequent massacre of over 8,000 Bosniaks.
Venezuela’s former ambassador to the United Nations Diego Enrique Arria, recently said: “The Srebrenica massacre “is the greatest cover up in the history of the United Nations.” [source]
Ambassador Arria testified at the International Tribunal that the international community “did not move its little finger” to protect the Muslims in the enclave and “did not make it possible for them to defend themselves”. There was a tendency in the Security Council, he said, to “morally equate the victims and the aggressor”, thus avoiding the need to take action to prevent the humanitarian disaster.
It’s time for the Netherlands and the U.N. to stand up, take responsibility, apologize, and pay reparation for their direct involvement in the massacre, bearing in mind also that class-action lawsuits are rarely unsuccessful.
If the Report was intended to be objective, then it should have included unbiased sources – not just what Serbian apologists for atrocities wrote and published during the war.
6. DEAF HORSES GONE BLIND – ‘BALANCING ACT’
My impression is that both documents, United Nation’s General Assembly Report 53/35 and the NIOD Report were prepared to provide a “balanced” account of what happened at Srebrenica. In fact, the report is far from being balanced, because in critical parts of the report NIOD researches solely relied on local Serb sources (as I elaborated earlier); thus far, they attempted to “balance” the report at the expense of over 8,000 Srebrenica massacre victims.
One might even get the impression that this Report was made to justify the massacre and point fingers away from Dutch failure in Srebrenica. In some parts of the report, for example, for every critique of Serbs there was one critique of Bosniaks, etc.
This may seem fair, but it’s not.
Imagine if someone raped you and brought you to the court and the judge ruled that both you and your rapists were equally guilty; him because he raped you – and you – because you did not lock your door at night. You may do similar comparison with 9/11 and never-ending justifications of the attack and grotesque conspiracy theories.
Do you think this is fair? In my opinion, there is no room for critique of victims, but again – you may disagree with me. And you are perfectly welcome to do so.
Related:
Moral Equivalism is Flawed
THE GUARDIAN, NOAM CHOMSKY and THE MILOSEVIC LOBBY
By Marko Attila Hoare, 04th February 2006
Sometimes facts are stranger than fiction. On 31 October 2005, The Guardian published an interview with Noam Chomsky, prophet of coffee-table anti-imperialism and verbal conjuror extraordinaire, carried out by the journalist Emma Brockes, which was highly embarrassing to him. The interview exposed him as having revisionist views in relation to the Srebrenica massacre, which he described as ‘probably overstated’ and which he has minimised at various times and in various ways. The interview also cited him as saying that reports of Serb concentration-camps were ‘probably not true’, and that claims that these camps had been deliberately invented by the Western media to demonise the Serbs were ‘probably correct’. Despite being a self-proclaimed champion of freedom of speech, Chomsky decided that in this instance, the right to free speech was not applicable. Brockes made one small error of detail, in her claim that ‘Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.’ For while Chomsky has indeed been highly ambiguous in his references to the Srebrenica massacre, he has never actually put the term in quotation marks; Brockes’s sentence accurately reflected Chomsky’s ambiguous view of Srebrenica, but erred as to the form in which this ambiguity was manifested. By homing in on this error of detail, while not disputing the accuracy of the rest of the interview, Chomsky claimed that Brockes had falsely represented his views on Srebrenica. He therefore successfully pressurised The Guardian to repudiate the interview and remove it from its website. Having been stabbed in the back by her editors, Brockes was now subject to an unparalleled campaign of vilification by Chomsky’s supporters. Yet though both Chomsky and The Guardian thereby hoped to put the lid on this unfortunate incident, they have failed to do so, and the debate over The Guardian’s so-called ’correction’ of the Brockes interview continues to reverberate. Those Bosnian genocide-survivors who have spoken out on the matter, have universally condemned both Chomsky and The Guardian. Yet the latter have received support from an expected, but perhaps not entirely welcome source, in the form of members of two interconnected lobbies – the ‘International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic’ and the ‘Srebrenica Research Group’, which exists to deny the Srebrenica massacre. Furthermore, we have evidence to suggest that Chomsky is in close contact with members of both groups, who keep him informed about their efforts to defend him – from the charge that he is one of them! You couldn’t make it up!
To understand how Britain’s leading liberal paper should have found itself in such a position – of being denounced by Bosnian genocide-survivors but defended by lobbyists for Slobodan Milosevic – some additional background is needed. Having once decided to capitulate to Chomsky, presumably out of terror at the prospect of libel action, The Guardian now bent over backward to apologise, not only to Chomsky, but to another, much more overt Srebrenica revisionist, Diana Johnstone, who is on record as a denier of the massacre, and whom – as Brockes described in her interview – Chomsky had supported. The Guardian, in an orgy of self-abasement, accepted Johnstone’s false claim that she had not denied the Srebrenica massacre, and Chomsky’s equally false claim that his support for Johnstone ‘related entirely to her right to freedom of speech’, not because he agreed with her views on Srebrenica (Why precisely Chomsky should have been so concerned to disassociate himself from Johnstone’s views on Srebrenica, when she supposedly has not denied the massacre after all, is just one of the many paradoxes of this case). The Guardian repudiated not only Brockes’s interview, but a letter it had published by Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the Serb concentration-camp Omarska, condemning Chomsky for his views on Srebrenica and on the Serb concentration-camps. Chomsky falsely claimed – and The Guardian upheld his falsehood – that Pervanic’s letter concerned only the revisionist views on Srebrenica that Brockes had falsely attributed to him, and that Pervanic’s accusations were therefore unfounded and should not have been published. In reality, Pervanic condemned Chomsky above all for his views on the Serb camps, the accuracy of whose portrayal by Brockes Chomsky has made no attempt to dispute.
In the face of this travesty of correct journalistic practice, a group of several Bosnian genocide-survivors, academics, journalists and others with a specialisation on the subject of the Bosnian war – the present author included – resolved to write a letter to The Guardian to protest at its legitimisation of genocide revisionism. We pointed out that a) Johnstone had indeed denied the Srebrenica massacre; b) Chomsky had not merely defended her right to free speech, but endorsed her views; c) Chomsky’s own statements on Srebrenica have been highly ambiguous, so that Brockes’s presentation of them was therefore essentially fair; d) The Guardian, in its apology to Chomsky, had misrepresented Pervanic and insulted his intelligence; and e) both Chomsky and Johnstone have denied genocide took place in Bosnia, despite the conviction of a Bosnian Serb general, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a UN court, for aiding and abetting genocide. We called upon The Guardian to retract its ‘correction’ to the Brockes interview and to apologise unreservedly to both Brockes and Pervanic. The letter, which was emailed to The Guardian on 8 December, can be read at the following link, along with its stellar cast of signatories.
Our letter coincided with a much longer and more detailed refutation of The Guardian’s ‘correction’, written by Oliver Kamm, Francis Wheen and David Aaronovitch, which was sent to The Guardian at about the same time and which remains unpublished. These two letters were what The Guardian readers’ editor Ian Mayes, author of the original ‘correction’, meant when he referred to ‘an extraordinary storm of opposing passions’ that his ‘correction’ had provoked. This created a certain pressure on The Guardian to acknowledge the extent to which its ‘correction’ was being called into question by expert opinion. Our letter had been sent from the present author’s email, and I received on the same day a telephone call from The Guardian’s Deputy Editor, Georgina Henry, who informed me that The Guardian would be willing to publish our letter, but that at nearly 950 words, it was too long in its present form. Would we be willing to shorten it to no more than 450 words? I responded that we would. We duly produced a shortened version of the letter, which we sent to The Guardian on 9 December. Ms Henry thanked me for this, and informed me that The Guardian’s lawyers would be examining our letter before publication. At the request of Siobhain Butterworth, head of The Guardian’s legal department, I submitted on the same day supporting evidence for the claims we had made in our letter.
At this point, however, there appears to have been a change of heart at The Guardian. Butterworth did not merely examine the letter and suggest changes, but rewrote it in her own words, divesting it of most of its original meaning and weakening it to the point of tepidity. The following is the text of our abridged letter:
Sir,
We wish to protest at The Guardian’s ‘correction’ of 17 November, relating to Emma Brockes’s interview with Noam Chomsky (31 October), Chomsky’s support for Diana Johnstone, and the Bosnian concentration-camp survivor Kemal Pervanic’s letter to The Guardian (2 November). This ‘correction’ unjustly besmirches Brockes, misrepresents and insults Pervanic, and legitimises attempts to deny the Bosnian genocide and minimise the Srebrenica massacre:
1) It is untrue that Johnstone has never denied the Srebrenica massacre. In her book Fools’ Crusade (2002), Johnstone puts the term ‘Srebrenica massacre’ in quote marks; denies 8,000 Muslims were killed, claiming that most of these merely ‘fled Srebrenica’ and ‘made it to safety in Muslim territory’; and admits only the Serb ‘execution’ of 199 Muslims.
2) It is untrue that Chomsky’s support for Johnstone was limited to her ‘right to free speech’. An open letter signed by Chomsky states: ‘We regard Johnstone’s ‘Fools’ Crusade’ as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason’. Elsewhere, Chomsky describes the book as ‘quite serious and important… Johnstone argues – and, in fact, clearly demonstrates – that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.’
3) It is untrue that Chomsky has been unambiguous in recognising the Srebrenica massacre. Chomsky has described Serb forces as having ‘apparently slaughtered’ Muslims in Srebrenica; the thousands of dead as mere ‘estimates’; the killings as Serb ‘retaliation’ for alleged Muslim crimes against Serbs; Serb behaviour at Srebrenica as better than US behaviour in Iraq; and the crime of Srebrenica as ‘much lesser’ than the Indonesian massacre of 5-6,000 civilians in East Timor in 1999.
4) It is untrue that Pervanic’s letter to The Guardian of 2 November ‘addressed a part of the interview which was false’. In the interview, Chomsky described Ed Vulliamy’s reports on Serb concentration camps as ‘probably not true’ and Living Marxism’s claim that the character of these camps was deliberately misrepresented by Western reporters as ‘probably correct’ – even though this claim was proven false in a British court. Chomsky has never claimed that, on this issue, Brockes misrepresented his position. Pervanic’s letter condemned Chomsky primarily on this point.
5) Both Johnstone and Chomsky reject the term ‘genocide’ in reference to Serb actions at Srebrenica or in Bosnia as a whole, despite the conviction, by a UN war-crimes tribunal, of a Bosnian Serb general for aiding and abetting genocide at Srebrenica.
We call upon The Guardian to withdraw its ‘correction’ of 17 November; to apologise unreservedly to Brockes for unjustly impugning her professional reputation; and to apologise unreservedly to Pervanic for misrepresenting his argument and insulting his intelligence.
Yours faithfully,
The following is Butterworth’s version of our letter:
Sir,
We wish to protest at The Guardian’s ‘correction’ of 17 November, relating to Emma Brockes’s interview with Noam Chomsky (31 October). This ‘correction’ legitimises attempts to deny the Bosnian genocide and minimise the Srebrenica massacre:
1) We disagree with the statement that Johnstone has never denied the Srebrenica massacre. In her book ‘Fools’ crusade’ (2002), Johnstone puts the term ‘Srebrenica massacre’ in quote marks; denies 8,000 Muslims were killed, claiming that most of these merely ‘fled Srebrenica’ and ‘made it to safety in Muslim territory’; and while she acknowledges that 2,631 bodies were exhumed in the region she admits only the Serb execution of 199 Muslims.
2) In our view Chomsky has been ambiguous in his recognition of the Srebrenica massacre. While Chomsky says that the Serbs ‘trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside and apparently slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people slaughtered’, he also characterises the killings as Serb ‘retaliation’ for alleged Muslim crimes against Serbs; and the crime of Srebrenica as ‘terrible but much lesser’ than the Indonesian massacre of 5-6,000 civilians in East Timor in 1999.
3) Despite the conviction, by a UN war-crimes tribunal, of a Bosnian Serb general for aiding and abetting genocide at Srebrenica Chomsky maintains that the term ‘genocide’ is ‘generally overused’, not just in relation to Srebrenica and Bosnia but also in relation to East Timor and elsewhere. His view is that the terms should be reserved for the Holocaust and Rwanda and ‘maybe a few other cases’. Johnstone rejects the term ‘genocide’ in reference to Serb actions at Srebrenica’.
Yours faithfully,
The reader will note that our letter, already reduced to just under 450 words at Henry’s request, was now further reduced to 265 words. Butterworth removed the demand for an apology to Brockes on the grounds that Brockes accepted the correction – whether or not Brockes was free to do otherwise, given that her bosses had already decided to repudiate her, and whether or not the head of The Guardian’s legal department is the most objective judge of this matter, are moot points. Butterworth similarly removed the demand for an apology to Pervanic, repeating the claims made in The Guardian’s ‘correction’ and by Chomsky, that it addressed a part of the article about which Chomsky had complained and to which the correction referred – even though, as our letter specifically pointed out, the best part of Pervanic’s letter was not concerned with Chomsky’s views about Srebrenica (and even the part that was did not repeat Brockes’s error about quote marks). Whereas Butterworth might, perhaps, have felt that our presentation of the views of Chomsky and Johnstone needed to be reworded to avoid possible libel action by either of the latter, this would not explain why she felt it necessarily to delete parts of our letter that were solely concerned with The Guardian’s incorrect treatment of Brockes and Pervanic.
Whatever her reasons, this slaughtering of our letter amounted, in our view, to a rejection, and I informed Butterworth that we should be publishing it elsewhere. She warned me that this would be at our own risk. Our letter was published online by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), which, to date, has not been the object of legal action by either Chomsky or Johnstone.
Among the signatories of our letter are three survivors of the Srebrenica massacre: Emir Suljagic, Hasan Nuhanovic and Nihad Salkic. A fourth signatory, Nerma Jelacic, is a refugee who was driven from her home in Visegrad by the Serb ethnic-cleansers. Pervanic himself likewise informed me that he felt The Guardian owed him an apology. Another refugee from Srebrenica, the blogger Alan Kocevic, has similarly expressed his anger and disgust at Chomsky’s genocide-denial over Srebrenica and at his support for Johnstone – an opinion derived not from Brockes’s disputed interview, but from Chomsky’s more recent statements on Bosnian television. These, then, are the people who are not convinced by Chomsky’s or Johnstone’s protestations of the respectability of their views on Bosnia and Srebrenica. But what of the people who take the side of Chomsky and Johnstone?
Last month (January), BIRN received an open letter, in response to our open letter, which it likewise posted on its website and which sought to defend Chomsky and Johnstone. It referred to Brockes’s interview as a ‘deliberate effort to smear both Prof Chomsky and Ms Diana Johnstone over issues related to the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.’ However, the signatories declared themselves satisfied with The Guardian’s correction, and dismayed at our attempts to challenge it, so that they ‘felt compelled to urge those responsible to use their common sense and not let this sad affair go any further’. The signatories wrote of Johnstone: ‘Ms. Johnstone’s work, epitomised in her book Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, is a model of humanity, insight and impeccable scholarship. We cannot understand how anybody who has read this book could find it anything but admirable’. Furthermore: ‘The scholarly contributions of Diana Johnstone and Noam Chomsky need no defence from us. They are capable of standing on their own. We write only to oppose the attempts to carry out a kind of Inquisition in matters of the Balkan Wars that aims to root out as heresy and apostasy any challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy, no matter how well-reasoned the arguments or how solid their evidential foundation.’ The letter then went on, precisely, to question whether 8,000 Muslims really had been killed at Srebrenica; to question whether genocide really had taken place; and to question the legitimacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). So who are these people who leap to the defence of Chomsky and Johnstone, who support The Guardian’s ‘correction’ to the Brockes interview, and who repeat The Guardian readers’ editor’s plea – indeed actually quoting him – that ‘a line should be drawn under the matter’? The authors of this open letter were unable to find a single established scholar of former-Yugoslav or Balkan history to endorse their views on Srebrenica; their signatories were of a different type.
Second on the list of signatories in support of Chomsky and Johnstone is Christopher Black, whom the letter describes only as a ‘Canadian lawyer dealing with human rights issues’. This is a somewhat euphemistic way of describing a man who is Vice-President of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic. Further down the list we find David Jacobs, described as a ‘lawyer practising on human rights, defence council before ICTR’. Again, a somewhat selective description of a man who is a member of the legal committee of the ICDSM. Several other signatories (Vera Vratusa, George Szamuely, Nebojsa Malic) are also signatories of the ICDSM’s petition, which appeared after Milosevic had been arrested by the Serbian authorities, but before he had been deported to the Hague. The petition reads as follows:
‘We the undersigned demand that the Serbian authorities immediately release Slobodan Milosevic and all other Serbian patriots from jail… We demand an end to the arbitrary kidnapping, arrest, harassment and persecution of Yugoslav leaders and soldiers and ordinary people whose crime was to set an example to the world by resisting NATO aggression. Free Slobodan Milosevic at once! End persecution [sic] of Mr. Milosevic and all Yugoslav patriots and soldiers at once! Jail the real war criminals: the NATO leaders who committed crimes against humanity and against Yugoslav sovereignty and who continue to commit those crimes today.’
Several of the other signatories of the letter in support of Chomsky and Johsntone are members or supporters of the Srebrenica Research Group: Ed Herman, Philip Corwin, Milan Bulajic, Jonathan Rooper, Tim Fenton, Philip Hammond, Michael Mandel, George Bogdanich and George Szamuely (note that Szamuely is both a member of the SRG and a signatory of the ICDSM’s petition). The SRG is a campaign group set up to deny the Srebrenica massacre. At its press conference on 12 July 2005, the SRG claimed that
‘The premise that Serbian forces executed 7,000 to 8,000 people “was never a possibility”… at least 38,000 Srebrenica residents survived out of a population of 40,000 before the capture of the enclave. Around 2,000 Muslims who fled with the 28th division were killed, most by fighting, but also hundreds executed by paramilitary units and a mercenary group.’ (emphasis in original).
Thus, those leaping to defend Chomsky and Johnstone from accusations of Srebrenica revisionism include people who openly and unambiguously claim that only ‘hundreds’ were ‘executed’ at Srebrenica, that only about 2,000 were killed, and that most of these were killed in combat. One of these people, George Bogdanich, is the director of a film entitled ‘Yugoslavia: The avoidable war’, which was used by Milosevic himself as evidence in his defence at the ICTY.
Other signatories of the letter in support of Chomsky and Johnstone include George Kenney, who is on record as claiming that only 25-60,000 were killed in Bosnia; and Louis Dalmas, editor of the ‘Balkans Infos’ website, which follows the same political line as the ICDSM and SRG and that advertises literature written by Milosevic himself. Dalmas’s website carries articles by Michael Parenti, head of the US section of the ICDSM and author of a book for which Milosevic wrote the foreword, and by Kosta Cavoski, head of the ‘International Committee for the Truth about Radovan Karadzic’, a lobby set up to defend the fugitive former Bosnian Serb leader and indicted war-criminal.
Such are the eminent individuals who have spoken out in defence of Noam Chomsky and Diana Johnstone – essentially the same people who have spoken out in defence of Slobodan Milosevic and/or who have unambiguously denied the Srebrenica massacre. Of course, this does not mean that Chomsky and Johnstone really are associated with these people. Or does it? In his article ‘The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre’, SRG leader Ed Herman thanks a number of individuals for their help and advice, including Diana Johnstone, ICDSM signatory Vera Vratusa and a certain George Pumphrey. Of the last of these, Herman writes ‘George Pumphrey’s Srebrenica: Three Years Later, And Still Searching’, ‘is a classic critique of the establishment Srebrenica massacre narrative’. George Pumphrey has actually described Srebrenica as a ‘hoax’ and holds views that are borderline anti-Semitic; his denial of the reality of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi violence against Jews resembles his denial of the Srebrenica massacre.
Pumphrey wrote his own letter in support of Chomsky and Johnstone, which he sent to the BIRN, The Guardian, the American left-wing journal ‘Counterpunch’, Diana Johnstone and Noam Chomsky, and which has consequently been circulating around the internet, although it does not appear to have been published anywhere. When Pumphrey’s text found its way to me, and I saw to whom it had been addressed, I immediately wrote to BIRN, urging that they publish it, though my advice was not followed (I would, however, be happy to forward it to anyone who is interested). It is a straightforward claim that the Srebrenica massacre never happened, not essentially different from his published article making this claim. More interesting is the fact that Pumphrey appended to his article sections of an email correspondence that had occurred between his circle of fellow travellers, discussing their possible response to our own open letter, and which I reproduce below. The reader should note in particular the list of recipients of the third email reproduced below, sent by SRG member David Peterson to Diana Johnstone, Noam Chomsky, George Pumphrey and others. Chomsky’s email address appears directly before that of Tiphaine Dickson, attorney of the ICDSM.
—–[First Email]—–
From: Diana Johnstone [mailto:DianaJohnstone@compuserve.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December28, 2005 6:16 PM
To: Blind.Copy.Receiver@compuserve.com
Subject: Guardian bis
Could someone please forward this to Michael Mandel? I don’t have his email! address where I am now. I had hoped to move onto other matters, but I am going to have to defend myself from this new assault. Diana.
—–[Second Email]—–
From: “Ed Herman”
Dear Friends: I wonder whether it wouldn’t be advisable to do what the “anti-revisionists” do here, namely, put up a letter signed by an equal number of us “revisionists” contesting their attack, rather than leaving Diana Johnstone to defend herself alone? An impressive feature of this attack, that I think should be featured, is the use of “revisionism” (and “denial”) to put down any contesting views to an institutionalised truth that they espouse. This is in line with their performance from the early 1990s in viciously attacking all dissenters, including Peter Brock and George Kenney, who challenged the party line already fixed. The party liners’ behavior then and now is hostile to debate and has a strong element of ad hominem as well as appeal to unchallengeable truth, along with a minimal appeal to fact. They also continually misrepresent the positions of the “revisionist” targets. I like the statement in Freebairn’s summary below that the genocide in Bosnia has been “legally established.” As Michael Mandel has suggested, this ICTY claim is itself a nice case of “revisionism,” but meeting the party line demand it ceases to be revisionism and becomes truth. What do you think about this? Ed Herman.
—–[Third Email]—–
From:davidepet@comcast.net [mailto:davidepet@comcast.net]
Sent:Thursday, December 29, 2005 11:01 AM
To: Ed Herman; chomsky2@mit.edu; Tiphaine Dickson; IntPressIntl@aol.com; ‘PhillipCorwin’; Vera Vratusa-Zunjic; AvoidableWar@aol.com; dianajohnstone@compuserve.com; hammonpb@sbu.ac.uk; Jonathan Rooper; milan bulajic; Petokraka78@aol.com; Sanjoy Mahajan; tim@tjfenton.plus.com; ‘george pumphrey’; ‘george Szamuely’; ‘michael mandel’
Cc: davidepet@comcast.net
Subject:RE: Guardian bis
Dear Ed: Very good idea. Whenever I encounter use of the terms ‘revisionism’ and’ revisionist’, immediately I know that the Truth in this instance is too important for it not to be true. The collective who signed onto this particular letter employ “Bosnian genocide” and “Srebrenica massacre” both as touchstones of Truth, and as whips for disciplining deviant views. Only a totalitarian mentality works like this. If they were concerned about the historical accuracy of a person’s work, they would challenge it on grounds that it is wrong. But the use of the accusations revisionism and denial work on a wholly different plane: Namely, political discipline. Thus to resort to these accusations is to resort to a species of the charge of heresy. In what sense can one’s work revise the historical record, and its producer be guilty of some egregious crime for doing so? In the sense that it deviates from the doctrine of the faithful. Only a totalitarian mentality employs a charge like revisionism. Furthermore, what should we call a collective that refuses to emend its body of accepted knowledge in the face of evidence to the contrary? SincerelyYours,DavidPetersondavidepet@comcast.net
Further comment on the character of this circle would be superfluous. But how closely do the views of Johnstone and Chomsky mirror those of their correspondents? Johnstone has challenged the accepted view of the Srebrenica massacre in her book Fools’ Crusade: ‘Six years after the summer of 1995, ICTY forensic teams had exhumed 2,631 bodies in the region, and identified fewer than 50. In an area where fighting had raged for years, some of the bodies were certainly of Serbs as well as of Muslims. Of these bodies, 199 were found to have been bound or blindfolded, and must reasonably be presumed on the basis of the material evidence to have been executed.’ I have interpreted this to mean that Johnstone admits the Serb ‘execution’ (what the rest of us call ‘massacre’) of 199 Muslim victims, and that as this reduces the massacre to less than 2.5% of its accepted death-toll, Johnstone has effectively denied the massacre. Some of her defenders, such as Brian Leiter, have suggested that Johnstone’s mention of the 2,631 exhumed bodies shows that she has not necessarily reduced the Srebrenica massacre toll to only 199; presumably, they feel, she leaves open the possibility that the death toll may have been over two and a half thousand, or less than a third of the accepted figure of 8,000 (though she does imply that some or most of those 2,631 may have been killed in fighting, and some may have been Serbs). Since Johnstone does not actually explicitly draw any conclusion about the scale of the Srebrenica massacre from the evidence she puts forward, readers are left to draw their own. Yet the Srebrenica Research Group, which explicitly thanks Johnstone for her contribution to their work and whose members praise her book, has explicitly stated its belief that only 2,000 Muslims were killed at Srebrenica, that most of these were killed in combat, and that only several hundred were ‘executed’. So there are two possible interpretations: that Johnstone and the SRG are in agreement, and that Johnstone has indeed reduced the Srebrenica massacre death-toll to a figure in the hundreds, as I believe; or that Johnstone perhaps believes that the SRG is wrong and that the death-toll may be as high as two and a half thousand or so, but for some reason neglects to spell this out, as Leiter appears to believe. Readers are free to decide whose interpretation is more plausible.
So far as Chomsky is concerned, he cannot of course be held responsible if a group of Milosevic supporters and unambiguous Srebrenica deniers should happen to include his name on a mailing list of people coordinating their action to defend him from the charge that he is one of them, even if he does also regularly write for the same website as they do; even if he did tell Brockes that he believed the Srebrenica massacre was ‘probably overstated’; even if he has described Johnstone’s book as ‘an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition’; even if he has described the Srebrenica massacre as ‘much lesser’ than the Indonesian massacre of 5-6,000 people in East Timor in 1999; and even if he has in the past joined with SRG leader Ed Herman to minimise the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime. It is possible that he entirely disapproves of their wicked activities, but has simply neglected ever to say this openly – readers are again free to draw their own conclusions.
In his open letter to The Guardian, Chomsky claimed that ‘with five minutes research on the internet, any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre, never with quotes.’ In my last article on the subject, I mentioned that I had failed to find a single web-page where Chomsky does indeed describe the Srebrenica massacre as a massacre. Since then, various people have pointed me to a sum total of ONE web-page where Chomsky does indeed refer in passing to the ‘Srebrenica massacre’, without putting it in quotes. This dates back to 2002, the year of the appearance of Johnstone’s book, which appears to have influenced Chomsky’s perception of Srebrenica. Thus, his subsequent references to the latter have been more ambiguous, up until the controversy with Brockes, since when he appears to have come back down off the fence so far as Srebrenica is concerned – though not about Bosnia in general, as his statements about Omarska and the Serb concentration-camps show.
Indeed, where Bosnia atrocity-denial is concerned, Chomsky has – to borrow a quip from David Lloyd George – sat on the fence for so long that the iron has entered into his soul. Bosnian Muslim victims remain for him and his circle ‘unworthy victims’ – to borrow a well-known Chomskyite concept – as are Croats, Albanians, Israelis, Iraqi Kurds and Iraqi victims of suicide bombings, whereas Palestinians, Turkish Kurds, Serbs, East Timorese and Iraqi victims of American air-strikes are ‘worthy victims’, whose death-toll figures are never subject to the same demands for forensic evidence as are the Srebrenica victims. When was the last time an anti-American radical complained that the figure of one million victims of US air-strikes in Cambodia, or 250,000 East Timorese victims of Indonesia, is two neat and round and has not been backed up with the evidence of an equivalent number of corpses, appropriately examined to determine the cause of death of every single one?
The questions of whether the Srebrenica massacre really did happen, and what its death toll was, have already been extensively addressed by others. Readers should look here for the evidence for a death-toll of 8,000; here for a breakdown of the forensic and other evidence collected by the year 2000; here for the Bosnian Serb government’s own recognition of the massacre; and here for the most extensive survey yet of the massacre, carried out by a Dutch team of experts, which refers to the ‘mass murder’ of Muslims at Srebrenica – a term which you will not find Johnstone, Chomsky or their friends using in this context.
There remains the question of freedom of speech. Chomsky has gone on record to denounce ‘Britain’s outrageous libel laws, denounced as scandalous worldwide by everyone concerned with the right of freedom of expression’, yet it was probably thanks to the existence of these laws that Chomsky was able to win his unethical victory over The Guardian. The facts are that a journalist’s interview with Chomsky was driven off The Guardian’s website for the crime of portraying the great prophet in a negative light, and that the journalist in question was then subject to an unprecedented campaign of vilification. She has been accused of everything, from being a tool of The Guardian’s conspiracy to defame Chomsky (by Chomsky himself), to being an apologist for Ariel Sharon. An entry for Wikipedia was created for her that refers exclusively to her interview with Chomsky and her repudiation by The Guardian. Apparently, The Guardian has been the subject of a campaign aimed at her dismissal for the crime of her interview. Leiter virtually salivates at the thought of Brockes’s fall: ‘Perhaps Ms. Brockes, having now been publically [sic] humiliated with the total [sic!] repudiation of her work in this case, will do better in the future; or perhaps she will find a different profession, where she can conduct herself more honorably.’ Two supporters of the Henry Jackson Society – myself and Oliver Kamm – have been vocal critics of Chomsky’s behaviour in this affair. Consequently, Richard Symonds of the ‘Cyril Joad Society’ held a ‘Christmas lecturette’ to ‘mark Noam Chomsky’s 77th birthday (and to counter the Henry Jackson Society)’, the flyer for which Symonds forwarded unsolicited to me – a week after the ‘Christmas lecturette’ had already occurred. The flyer claimed: ‘There is now an orchestrated attempt to silence the voice of Noam Chomsky – especially by THE HENRY JACKSON SOCIETY.’ Symonds is apparently unable to distinguish between criticising Chomsky and attempting to silence him. The signatories of the open letter in defence of Chomsky and Johnstone, described above, have accused myself and the other defenders of Emma Brockes and Kemal Pervanic of being ‘inquisitors’ – for daring to expose the dishonesty of their gurus; the same people for whom Milosevic is a ‘Serbian patriot’ describe Srebrenica survivors and Bosnian refugees as ‘inquisitors’, naturally. Chomsky himself accused The Guardian editors of ‘lies and deceit’ over the Brockes interview, alleging a conspiracy to defame him, and humbly comparing his own treatment by The Guardian to the murder of El Salvadorean dissidents by US-backed death-squads in the 1980s. Such is the Chomskyite tolerance of criticism.
It should be crystal clear which side in this debate is the enemy of freedom of speech. Let us be absolutely clear on this point: anyone has the right publicly to deny the Srebrenica massacre, or the Holocaust, or Pol Pot’s genocide, because we believe in democracy, where everyone has the right to say what they think. But equally, the rest of us have the right to expose and condemn those who do this. It is one thing for Holocaust-deniers and other conspiracy-theorists and crackpots to have the freedom to disseminate their views, and another for a respectable newspaper like The Guardian to endorse them. Of course, The Guardian is free to endorse whatever views it likes, but let us be clear about the consequences: this is the thin end of the wedge; first the Srebrenica massacre is dismissed as a ‘hoax’ of ‘Anglo-Saxon imperialism’, and before you know it, the Holocaust-deniers’ ‘challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy’ will be taught to our children in schools as a respectable ‘alternative’ to the ‘mainstream’ viewpoint. Far fetched? Already the fashionable ‘anti-war’ current embraces – along with the usual Chomskyites and Guardianistas – Islamists who routinely denigrate Jews and deny the Holocaust. The Chomsky-Brockes controversy is, so far as we are concerned, about our right to expose genocide-denial in all its forms; to counter the spread of this poison – not through censorship, but through our pens. This is why we shall not do what both The Guardian and the Milosevic lobby want, and draw a line under this affair.
SREBRENICA – DEFENDING THE TRUTH
Author: Twenty-four signatories
Uploaded: Tuesday, 03 January, 2006
This letter addressed to The Guardian (London) was originally accepted for publication, provided that it was cut to a maximum of 450 words in length. When a 450-word abridgement was duly submitted, however, The Guardian refused to publish it without drastic further shortening and unacceptable editorial rewriting. The authors therefore decided that they had no alternative but to publish it elsewhere. It accordingly appeared on the website of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) at http://www.birn.eu.com with an accompanying article on the affair by Alison Freebairn.
Sir,
We are writing to protest at the ‘correction’ published by The Guardian on 17 November, in relation to Emma Brockes’s interview with Noam Chomsky of 31 October and the Bosnian concentration-camp survivor Kemal Pervanić’s letter to The Guardian of 2 November. We believe that by issuing this ‘correction’, The Guardian has unjustly besmirched Brockes’s reputation, misrepresented and insulted Pervanić and bestowed a stamp of legitimacy on revisionist attempts to deny the Bosnian genocide and minimise the Srebrenica massacre.
The ‘correction’ was published in response to complaints from Chomsky over Brockes’s alleged misrepresentation of his views. The Guardian upheld Chomsky’s complaints: a) that Brockes falsely attributed to him the view that the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 never occurred, or was not genuinely a ‘massacre’; and b) that Brockes’s ‘misrepresentation’ of Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica stemmed from her ‘misunderstanding’ of his support for the writer Diana Johnstone, which ‘related entirely to her freedom of speech’, rather than to her actual views. Furthermore, The Guardian claimed: ‘Neither Prof. Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre.’ Finally, The Guardian upheld Chomsky’s complaint that it had published on 2 November a letter from Kemal Pervanić, a Bosnian concentration-camp survivor, on the grounds that Pervanić’s letter ‘addressed a part of the interview which was false’.
For the following reasons, we believe that neither of Chomsky’s complaints against Brockes is valid; that Brockes’s presentation of his views was essentially fair; that Chomsky’s complaint about the publication of Pervanić’s letter was similarly invalid; and that The Guardian’s ‘correction’ was therefore unjustified:
1. It is untrue that Johnstone has never denied the Srebrenica massacre. In her book Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western delusions’ (Pluto, London 2002), Johnstone puts quote marks around the words ‘Srebrenica massacre’, implying that it was not a real massacre (pp. 106, 115). She rejects the claim that 8,000 Muslims [Bosniaks] were killed at Srebrenica, claiming that most of these had not been killed, but had merely ‘fled Srebrenica’ and ‘made it to safety in Muslim territory’ (p. 114). And she admits only to the Serb killing in cold blood of 199 Muslims, or less than 2.5% of the accepted total (p. 115). This is denial. Furthermore, the book as a whole constitutes a defence of the Serb nationalists’ record during the 1990s, and a minimisation or whitewashing of their crimes.
2. It is untrue that Chomsky’s support for Johnstone was limited to her ‘right to free speech’. An open letter signed by Chomsky describes Johnstone’s book in the following terms: ‘We regard Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.’ In his own open letter on Johnstone’s book, to which he refers in his letter to The Guardian of 2 November, Chomsky states: ‘I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important… Johnstone argues – and, in fact, clearly demonstrates – that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.’ Conversely, nowhere does Chomsky express the slightest disagreement with anything that Johnstone’s book says (except perhaps in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated). This goes beyond support for Johnstone’s right to free speech, and amounts to an endorsement of her arguments.
3. It is untrue that Chomsky has been as unambiguous in his recognition of the Srebrenica massacre as he now claims. Since the appearance of Johnstone’s book in 2002, Chomsky has spoken of Serb forces as having ‘apparently slaughtered’ Muslims in Srebrenica and of the thousands of dead as mere ‘estimates’; has described the killings as Serb ‘retaliation’ for alleged Muslim crimes against Serbs; and has compared Serb behaviour at Srebrenica favourably with US behaviour in Iraq. In the very same open letter to which he refers in his letter to The Guardian, he described the crime of Srebrenica as ‘much lesser’ than Indonesian crimes in East Timor in 1999, even though he estimates the latter as involving only 5-6,000 civilian casualties. If Brockes’s depiction of Chomsky’s position on Srebrenica was inaccurate, then it was an inaccuracy for which his own ambiguity on the subject was entirely responsible.
4. It is untrue that Pervanić’s letter to The Guardian of 2 November ‘addressed a part of the interview which was false’. In his interview with Brockes, Chomsky expressed a revisionist view on the matter of Serb concentration camps in Bosnia: he described Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy’s reports on these camps as ‘probably not true’, and Living Marxism’s claim that the character of these camps was deliberately misrepresented by the Western media as ‘probably correct’ – even though Living Marxism’s claim was proven to be false in a British court of law. Chomsky has at no time claimed that Brockes misrepresented his view on this matter. Pervanić’s letter in The Guardian condemned Chomsky above all for his defence of Living Marxism’s discredited claims. The Guardian has therefore misrepresented Pervanić and insulted his intelligence.
5. Finally, both Johnstone and Chomsky reject the use of the term ‘genocide’ in reference to the actions of Serb forces at Srebrenica or in Bosnia as a whole, despite the conviction of a Bosnian Serb general for aiding and abetting genocide at Srebrenica by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – an international court established by the UN.
We call upon The Guardian to withdraw its ‘correction’ of 17 November; to apologise unreservedly to Emma Brockes for its unjust impugning of her professional reputation; and to apologise unreservedly to Kemal Pervanić for misrepresenting his argument and insulting his intelligence.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Marko Attila Hoare, author of How Bosnia Armed (2004)
Nerma Jelačić, Bosnia Country Director, Balkans Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN)
Hasan Nuhanović, Srebrenica survivor
Nihad Salkić, Srebrenica survivor
Emir Suljagić, Srebrenica survivor, author of Postcards from the Grave (2005)
Diego Enrique Arria, director of the UN mission in Srebrenica, March 1993
Professor Ivo Banac, author of The Price of Bosnia (1996)
Martin Bell, author of In Harm’s Way (1996)
Sonja Biserko, editor of Srebrenica: from denial to acknowledgement (2005)
Dr Cathie Carmichael, author of Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans (2002)
Professor Norman Cigar, author of Genocide in Bosnia (1995)
Nick Cohen, columnist, The Observer
Professor Robert J. Donia, author of Bosnia-Hercegovina: a tradition betrayed (1994)
Quintin Hoare, director of The Bosnian Institute
Oliver Kamm, columnist, The Times
Melanie McDonagh, journalist, The Evening Standard
Branka Magaš, editor of The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (2001)
Dr Noel Malcolm, author of Bosnia: A Short History (1994)
Sylvie Matton, author of Srebrenica: un génocide annoncé (2005)
David Rieff, author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (1995)
David Rohde, author of Endgame: the betrayal and fall of Srebrenica (1997)
Dr Brendan Simms, author of Unfinest Hour: Britain and the destruction of Bosnia (2001)
Francis Wheen, journalist, Private Eye
Said Zulficar, former chairman, UNESCO staff group ‘Solidarity with Bosnia’
Related Story:
Chomsky’s Genocidal DenialTHE LEFT REVISIONISTS
By Marko Attila Hoare
[Daniel’s note: An extensive review of a broad array of those on the Left who downplay the violence and suffering involved in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and shift the blame to the Western alliance. Among those discussed are Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Michael Parenti, Michel Chossudovsky, Diana Johnstone, Mick Hume, John Pilger, Harold Pinter, and Jared Israel. By Marko Hoare, November 2003]
These events at the ICTY inflamed the bitter controversies that have raged over this conflict since it broke out in 1991. Internationally, political opinion has been divided into two camps characterized by their conflicting analyses of the crisis and views of the correct international response. On the one side were those who viewed the war as a result of Serbian aggression and expansionism and who generally advocated military intervention by the West in response. On the other side were those who viewed the conflict as a civil war between competing nationalisms (Serb, Croat, Muslim [Bosniak], and Albanian) in which the Serb side was if anything less to blame than the others. They tended to blame Western interference for catalysing the conflict and to reject military intervention against Serbian forces.
For the sake of convenience, we may refer to the first camp as the ‘orthodox’ and the second as the ‘revisionist’.
The debate between these two camps has continued to dominate discourse on the former Yugoslavia in the West up till the present day. Although the events at The Hague in 2001 marked a defeat for the revisionist camp, its more determined members have responded by denying both the validity of the charges of genocide and the legitimacy of the ICTY. The revisionist analysis of the wars in the former Yugoslavia therefore constitutes one aspect of the Western response to the phenomenon of genocide in the contemporary world, one that is in some ways related to similar ‘revisionist’ analyses of the prior genocide in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the contemporaneous genocide in Rwanda.
The use of the word ‘revisionist’ to describe this current of opinion serves a dual purpose, for the revisionists seek on the one hand to oppose what they see as the mainstream, orthodox view of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and on the other to challenge the very notion that genocide took place. Thus they are in some ways the counterpart to the Holocaust revisionists. While the revisionists under consideration correctly point out that the massacres in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992-95 and in Kosovo in 1998-99 are not on a scale with those of Auschwitz their arguments resemble in some ways those of the Holocaust revisionists while their own frequent exploitation of the Holocaust legacy contains some startling ambiguities.
Although the revisionist camp stretches right across the political spectrum to encompass liberals, conservatives, socialists, and members of the far right, the ideological motivation of each of these groups is very different. The current I wish to analyse here consists of people who are to the left of mainstream Social Democracy and who oppose what they see as the anti-Serbian or anti-Yugoslav policies of the Western alliance. It includes members of many different far-left traditions: left Labourites and Social Democrats; Christian Socialists; Orthodox Communists; Trotskyists; Maoists; anarchists; and others. For the sake of convenience I shall refer to them as ‘left revisionists’, meaning those who, on the basis of a radical left-wing philosophy, seek 1) to revise the negative evaluation of the Milosevic regime made by politically mainstream commentators; 2) to deny that genocide took place and downplay the violence and suffering involved in the wars in the former Yugoslavia; and 3) to shift the blame for this violence and suffering, as well as for the break-up of Yugoslavia, on to the Western alliance. Other adherents of a radical left-wing philosophy who oppose Western military intervention in the Balkans but who also opposed the Milosevic regime do not belong to this category and are not the subjects of this essay. My purpose here is neither to discuss the merits and demerits of a left-wing philosophy, nor to analyse the events in the former Yugoslavia themselves, nor to address the advantages and disadvantages of Western military intervention. This is a study of the ideology of left revisionism itself. The present author makes no pretence at neutrality in this debate – he belongs firmly in the ‘orthodox’ camp – and this is above all a study of the extremes to which one current of Western opinion is prepared to go and the intellectual and moral somersaults it is prepared to perform, in order to avoid confronting the reality of genocide. In order to understand the erroneous analysis on which left revisionism is based, it is necessary to examine the real causes of the break-up of Yugoslavia, which lie in the policies of the Milosevic regime.
Ideology of the left revisionists
“What about the Kurds?” is viewed by the left revisionists as their clinching argument in the case against the NATO intervention in Kosovo: if Western leaders were motivated to intervene in Kosovo out of concern at the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians, why have they not intervened to protect the Kurds from Turkish oppression? Or the Palestinians from the Israelis? I wish to turn the question around and to ask “What about the Albanians?” If the left-wing revisionists are concerned with the suffering of oppressed nationalities, as they claim to be regarding the Kurds, Palestinians, and others, it needs to be explained why did they not speak out against Milosevic’s persecution of the Kosovo Albanians, or of the Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks], or of the Croats. It needs to be explained why Serbian or Yugoslav military intervention was less objectionable to them than American military intervention, even when it was incomparably more bloody. It needs to be asked why the six hundred or so Yugoslav civilian deaths during the Kosovo War were ‘worthy’ victims in a way that the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Bosnians killed by Serbian forces were not.
This double standard may in part be attributed to anti-Americanism or ‘anti-imperialism’, whereby members of the far left subordinate their morality to the ‘higher cause’ of opposing the United States. There is a long tradition on the far left of supporting the weaker country against the stronger on an anti-imperialist basis. V.I. Lenin wrote in 1915 that “if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia and so on, these would be ‘just’ or ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who was the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependant, and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding, and predatory ‘Great Powers’.”[1] Such a line of reasoning might conceivably have led members of the far left to support Milosevic’s Serbia as a victim of ‘American imperialism’, even to the point of ignoring or denying its crimes against the non-Serb peoples of the former Yugoslavia.
Simple ‘anti-imperialism’ is however insufficient to explain the motives of the left revisionists, who do not themselves couch their arguments in ‘anti-imperialist’ terms. Rather they prefer to make pedantic, legalistic quibbles over such issues as the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the authority of the UN Security Council, and the exact numbers of Albanian dead; appropriate arguments for international lawyers, perhaps, but scarcely the kind usually favoured in the polemics of the revolutionary left. The focus of the left revisionists is in fact less on denouncing the US as an evil in and of itself – though this is clearly an element – than on defending politically the Milosevic regime. Other regimes that have clashed with the Western alliance during the past decade – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere – have not received similar support from the Western left. To the best of my knowledge nobody has tried to claim that Saddam Hussein is a man of peace who respects the territorial integrity of Iraq’s neighbours or that the Taliban are champions of women’s rights and cultural diversity. Nobody, except Osama bin-Laden and eccentric chess-grandmaster Bobby Fischer, has treated the victims of the World Trade Centre bombing with the callousness and contempt with which left revisionists speak of the dead of Vukovar, Srebrenica, and Racak. The Serbia of Milosevic enjoyed the unique position in the pantheon of the ‘rogue states’ of the 1990s as the only one that was supported politically, not just defended from attack, by much of the Western left.
The left revisionists are holding on to the anti-humanist, anti-moralist, anti-democratic bathwater long after the revolutionary baby has died and its corpse decayed. Instead of being moved by the events in Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1989-91 to reevaluate their political philosophy, many of them reacted by clinging even more stubbornly to every last straw from the wreckage of the Communist Atlantis.
Milosevic and the WestOne such straw was the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. Its credentials as a ‘left-wing’ regime were pretty poor: Milosevic’s ruling party was called the ‘Socialist Party of Serbia’ (SPS) and had formerly been the League of Communists of Serbia, but SPS leaders Slobodan Milosevic and Borisav Jovic emphasised from the start their commitment to free-market reforms. Under their tenure the gap between rich and poor massively increased, social services were greatly reduced, free healthcare effectively ended, public transport collapsed, and a large new class of black marketeers and organised criminals created. To look to Milosevic’s Serbia as an ‘alternative’ to the capitalist West was pretty much scraping the bottom of the socialist barrel. Radovan Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb nationalist regime in Pale was even less credibly ‘progressive’: ideologically anti-Communist, Karadzic’s Serb Democratic Party identifies with the monarchist and Nazi-collaborationist Chetnik movement far more openly than the Tudjman regime in Zagreb ever identified with the Ustashas. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the left revisionists, to accept that Belgrade and its proxies were committing aggression and genocide was akin to admitting that the liberals really had been right all along about the negative character of Communism. In their minds the Cold War is still being fought on the battlefields of Kosovo. Twenty-five years ago Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman complained of the poor image conveyed by the Western media of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. They wrote that “What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasising alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered.”[2] Today both authors use similar arguments to downplay the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians and to shift the blame for it away from the Milosevic regime and onto the US. In Chomsky’s words, Turkey is guilty of “massive atrocities” against the Kurds; Indonesia of “aggression and massacre” of “near-genocidal levels” in East Timor; Israel of “murderous and destructive” operations in Lebanon; but there is no mention of Kurdish, East Timorese, or Palestinian atrocities.[3] By contrast, Chomsky uses no such emotive language when discussing The Serbian killings of Albanians; they are a “response” and “reaction” to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) attacks. Meanwhile the KLA was guilty of “targeting Serb police and civilians”; “killing six Serbian teenagers”; the “killing of a Serb judge, police, and civilians”; and so on. The picture Chomsky consequently sketches is of atrocities by both sides and, since KLA actions were “designed to elicit a violent and disproportionate Serbian response”, the implication is that the Milosevic regime was less to blame than the KLA.[4] When a US client massacres innocent civilians it is wholly to blame; when a ‘socialist’ regime does so it is the victims who are primarily to blame.
There is a term for this attitude: moral relativism. In its far-left variety there are two sides to its coin. On the one hand there is a holier-than-thou condemnation of every Western failing (“What about the Kurds/Palestinians/East Timorese?”), allowing the left revisionists always to damn Western policy for its moral imperfections no matter what it is. The West is therefore damned simultaneously for intervening in Kosovo and for colluding in the Turkish oppression of the Kurds and for maintaining sanctions against Iraq, though it is clear that ultimately the West cannot easily reject military intervention, sanctions, and appeasement all at the same time. Combined with this all-trumping moralism in the left-revisionist mind-set, like the opposite pole of a magnet, is a cold-blooded immoralism, according to which the left-winger is absolutely unmoved by the crimes of the Revolution performed for the greater good. More striking even than the defence or denial of crimes against humanity carried out by the left revisionists is their sheer lack of any positive vision for the future or political raison d’etre whatsoever. They should not be seen as ‘pro-Serb’, for the Serb people are unlikely to benefit from their actions. They are offering precisely nothing to the long-suffering people of Serbia in return for suffering sanctions and isolation and defending war criminals from the ICTY. Rather, they appear to view ‘resistance to Western imperialism’ as something worthwhile for its own sake, no matter how much self-destruction it results in for Serbia and how much misery it inflicts on the Serbs. The Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic accused the British during World War II of “fighting to the last Serb in Yugoslavia”.[5] The same could be said of the contemporary left revisionists, but with one crucial difference: Churchill offered the Serbs something concrete in return for their sacrifices, namely liberation from Nazism, which he duly helped to bring about. By contrast, the left revisionists really are offering the Serbs nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Equally conspicuous by their absence are constructive proposals of the left revisionists regarding Kosovo’s future. For all his lofty denunciations of the West’s policy, the only alternative Chomsky can suggest for a resolution of the Kosovo question that would have avoided NATO bombing is the partition of Kosovo between Serbs and Albanians as suggested by Dobrica Cosic, the father of contemporary Serb nationalism and one of the architects of Yugoslavia’s wars.[6] As the Albanians make up at least 80% of the population of Kosovo and as the Serb villages are scattered in enclaves throughout the province, what this implies is the expulsion of the Albanian majority from half of Kosovo so that it can be settled by Serbs from elsewhere and therefore satisfy the Serb-nationalist demand for a face-saving formula short of Kosovo’s complete independence.
The left revisionists founded their analysis of Yugoslavia’s collapse on the false premise that because Serbia was in some bizarre sense a ‘socialist’ state in their eyes, the West ‘ought to be’ hostile to it, regardless of all evidence to the contrary. They therefore invented a Western conspiracy to explain the Yugoslav collapse and the subsequent defeats of Milosevic’s Serbia. In Michael Parenti’s view all opposition to Milosevic, be it from the Croats, Muslims [Bosniaks], Albanians, or even the Serbian opposition, was simply the expression of such a conspiracy. According to Parenti, Western hostility to Yugoslavia was due to the fact that “after the overthrow of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) [sic – Parenti means the SFRY] remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free market system”. Consequently “the US goal has been to transform the FRY [sic] into a Third World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities”.[7] Following the break-up the FRY resisted privatisation of its socialised industry, continues Parenti, and “as far as the Western free-marketeers were concerned, these enterprises had to be either privatised or demolished. A massive aerial destruction like the one delivered upon Iraq might be just the thing needed to put Belgrade more in step with the New World Order.”[8] In other words, the US engineered Yugoslavia’s destruction and then bombed Serbia in order to bring about the privatisation of its socialised economy. Parenti provides not a single source to back up these assertions; he omits to mention that Milosevic privatised Serbia’s telecommunications system with Britain’s Douglas Hurd acting as intermediary.
Of course, Washington in 1991 did seek the end of Communist rule in Yugoslavia, just as it had previously in Poland and Hungary. But Washington did not seek to break up Poland or Hungary. The myth that the Western powers destroyed Yugoslavia and persecuted Serbia because they were ‘socialist’ is made above all to satisfy the emotional need of the left revisionists to believe that the dictatorships they spent years defending were in some sense ‘progressive’ and hence unacceptable to the powers that be.
It is true that Serbia was subjected to a NATO assault in 1999 and that Western leaders rejoiced in Milosevic’s overthrow the following year. But to deduce from this that the West was already ‘anti-Serb’ during the Croatian war in 1991 – eight years earlier – is a bit like saying that the West viewed Saddam Hussein as an enemy during the Iran-Iraq war or Osama bin-Laden as an enemy during the Soviet-Afghan war. During the Gulf crisis of 1990-91 the Milosevic regime supported the US-led drive to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait. Thus, following a meeting with US President George Bush on 1 October 1990 Borisav Jovic, at the time President of Yugoslavia, recorded that “President Bush expressed special satisfaction and gratitude to Yugoslavia for adopting the same position of condemning Iraqi aggression and the annexation of Kuwait. He is pleased and encouraged by the unity of the international community regarding the crisis in the Gulf and Iraq.” Jovic on this occasion boasted to Bush that “we [Yugoslavs] are the only Eastern European country that has almost developed and established a market economy system. Now we are at a critical point, but we will overcome it too over the next few years, which is why we need the understanding and aid of the United States with international financial institutions and in the business world.” Finally, responding to Bush’s query regarding the presence of Iraqi jets in Yugoslavia, Jovic informed him that “We have a contract from earlier, before the crisis, to repair 16 MiGs for the Iraqi air-force. They will not be delivered to Iraq now. Two of them were dismantled in the workshop, after which they were gathered up and tested or transferred to another location in order not to hinder the normal work in the workshop.” Jovic records that “President Bush thanked me for that.”[9] So much for the argument that the US victimised Serbia as a ‘socialist’ and ‘defiant’ state. The left revisionists are fond of pointing out that both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden were originally allies of the US, but they are reluctant to acknowledge Western collaboration with Milosevic because such an admission would ruin their claim of Western victimisation of ‘socialist’ Serbia.
In 1991 the American UN mediator Cyrus Vance negotiated the so-called ‘Vance Plan’ to end the conflict in Croatia involving the use of UN peacekeepers to protect Serb-held territory in Croatia; even Jovic described it as “exceptionally favourable to the Serb side”.[10] Every single Western peace plan for Bosnia was based on the premise of Bosnia’s partition; every one gave Karadzic’s Bosnian Serbs a much larger share of Bosnia than their proportion of the population would warrant. UN troops in Bosnia collaborated systematically with Ratko Mladic’s forces, helping them murder the Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister in 1993; British troops in Central Bosnia killed dozens of Croat troops[11] and in his memoir of the conflict British Major Vaughan Kent-Payne describes beating up a Croat soldier.[12] UN forces drove the Bosnian Army from Mt. Igman in the autumn of 1994, using rocket launchers to destroy its trenches. Most notoriously, the West maintained an arms embargo against Bosnia which the British and French, though not the Americans, enforced rigorously to the bitter end. Meanwhile not a single NATO missile struck Serbia throughout the Croatian and Bosnian wars while Milosevic was the respected interlocutor of Douglas Hurd, David Owen, and Richard Holbrooke. The Dayton Accord of 1995 compromised the sovereignty of the Bosnian state far more than the Rambouillet treaty of 1999 threatened the sovereignty of the Yugoslav state: it abolished the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and recognised Radovan Karadzic’s ‘Republika Srpska’, with rights far greater than those ever offered to the Kosovo Albanians. The left revisionists’ ‘anti-interventionism’ does not seem to extend to these particular instances of Western intervention.
Who destroyed Yugoslavia?
The ‘anti-Serbian imperialist conspiracy’ in fact existed in only two places. One was the minds of the Serbian leadership and the commanders of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). I have read the memoirs of several top Serbian and Yugoslav political and military leaders, including Borisav Jovic, Branko Mamula, Veljko Kadijevic, Ratko Mladic, and Aleksandar Vasiljevic, who were respectively Serbia’s representative on the Yugoslav Presidency, Yugoslav Defence Minister, Yugoslav Defence Minister, commander of the Bosnian Serb army, and Yugoslav chief of military intelligence.[13] Not one provides a single fact to back up the claim that the West was working to break up Yugoslavia, but they interpret the failure of the West actively to support them with support for their enemies. The other place in which the ‘anti-Serbian conspiracy’ existed was in the minds of the left revisionists. The idea that ‘Western imperialism’ was not responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia is for the left revisionists simply unthinkable, rather as the Stalinists of the 1930s could not conceive of the failure of the USSR to fulfill a five-year plan as anything other than the result of a Trotskyist-Fascist plot. The destruction of Yugoslavia thus could only have been caused by German and/or American imperialists wishing to control this economic and strategic El Dorado. Thus Michael Barratt Brown claimed that Germany’s recognition of Croatia was part of a Drang nach Osten aimed at “control over the oil supplies of the Middle East”.[14]
In fact, two such imperialist conspiracies are posited: a conspiracy to break up Yugoslavia and a conspiracy to attack Serbia. Neither has any basis in fact. So far as the historical evidence goes, there is no doubt about ‘who killed Yugoslavia’. On 27 June 1990 Borisav Jovic, Serbia’s member of the Yugoslav Presidency (thus the number two politician in Serbia after Milosevic) and Veljko Kadijevic, Yugoslav Defence Minister and the top man in the JNA, met and agreed that they should, regarding Croatia and Slovenia, “expel them forcibly from Yugoslavia, by simply drawing borders and declaring that they have brought this upon themselves through their decisions”.[15] The next day Jovic met with Milosevic and obtained his agreement. As Jovic records on 28 June:
Conversation with Slobodan Milosevic on the situation in the country and in Serbia. He agrees with the idea of “expelling” Slovenia and Croatia, but he asks me whether the military will carry out such an order? I tell him that it must carry out the order and that I have no doubts about that; instead, the problem is what to do about the Serbs in Croatia and how to ensure a majority on the SFRY Presidency for such a decision. Sloba had two ideas: first, that the “amputation” of Croatia be effected in such a way that the Lika-Banija and Kordun municipalities, which have created their own community, remain with us, whereby the people there later declare in a referendum whether they want to stay or go; and second, that the members of the SFRY Presidency from Slovenia and Croatia be excluded from the voting on the decision, because they do not represent the part of Yugoslavia that is adopting this decision. If the Bosnian is in favour, then we have a two-thirds majority. Sloba urges that we adopt this decision no later than one week hence if we want to save the state. Without Croatia and Slovenia, Yugoslavia will have around 17 million inhabitants and that is enough for European circumstances.[16]
In September 1990 Serbia promulgated a new constitution that recognised the “sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia”.[18] In March 1991 Milosevic declared that Serbia no longer recognised the authority of the Yugoslav Presidency, that it was forming its own independent armed forces and that “We have to ensure that we have unity in Serbia if we want as the Republic that is biggest, which is most numerous, to dictate the further course of events. Those questions of borders are, therefore, state questions. And borders, as you know, are always dictated by the strong, never by the weak. Consequently, what is essential is that we have to be strong.”[19] In June 1991 Croatia declared independence while Germany publicly reaffirmed its support for a unified Yugoslavia. In October 1991 Mihajlo Markovic, deputy president of the SPS, stated that “there will be at least three units in the new Yugoslav state: Serbia, Montenegro, and a united Bosnian and Knin Krajina”.[20] Later that month Borivoje Petrovic, Vice-President of the Serbian Parliament, claimed that all Serbs must live in a single state and that it was all the same “whether the new state is called Yugoslavia or the ‘United States of Serbia’.” [21] In November 1991 the JNA conquered the Croatian city of Vukovar. In December 1991 Germany recognised the independence of Croatia and Slovenia.
It would require a pretty strange sense of historical chronology to argue that Germany’s decision in December 1991 to recognise Croatia could have influenced the Serbian leadership’s decision in June 1990 “forcibly to expel” Croatia from Yugoslavia; it would be a bit like saying that World War I caused the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There exists not a single shred of evidence anywhere that Germany ‘orchestrated’ the break up of Yugoslavia. Michel Chossudovsky alleges German support for Croatian secessionism was part of what he calls “long Western efforts to undo Yugoslavia’s experiment in market socialism and workers’ self-management and to impose the dictate of the free market.” Chossudovsky claims that the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher “gave his go-ahead for Croatian secession”. [22] Chossudovsky’s source is an article by his ideological fellow traveler, the late Sean Gervasi. Gervasi’s source was an article in the New Yorker citing an allegation by a US diplomat. [23] In this way the left revisionists substitute third-hand hearsay for documentation. But even if it were true that Germany covertly encouraged Croatian secession contrary to official German policy, it is certainly true that the US, Britain, and France very publicly discouraged Croatia from seceding. Even Parenti admits that the US disagreed with Germany over Croatia; in fact he complains that “the United States did little to deter Germany’s efforts” in support of Croatia and that it was not until “January 1992” that “the United States had become an active player in the break-up of Yugoslavia”.[24] So at this point the Americans were not really the bad guys after all. Alleged German diplomatic intervention nevertheless serves to excuse the decision by Milosevic and the JNA to attack Croatia in 1991, just as Western recognition of Bosnian independence excused their decision to attack Bosnia in 1992 and the NATO strikes of 1999 excuse Milosevic’s decision to expel eight-hundred thousand of his own citizens from their homes. In fact, it appears the Serbian and Yugoslav leaders really are not responsible for anything they have done. Edward S. Herman and Philip Hammond speak of “the elitist and anti-democratic character of Western policy, whereby the people of the region are assumed to be incapable of self-government.”[25] Or of starting their own wars and conducting their own massacres, one might add.
The role of the mediaThe fact that during the Croatian and Bosnian wars the Western alliance manifestly did not want to attack or bomb Serbia forced the left revisionists to search elsewhere for evidence of the anti-Serbian conspiracy. The fact that the Western media reported Serbian atrocities was not, of course, evidence that such atrocities were taking place but rather of the existence of an anti-Serb media conspiracy and, as Diana Johnstone points out, “it often seemed that the media were dictating policy to Western governments, rather than the other way around”.[26] Consequently, the revelation by Western journalists and reporters of atrocities against Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovar citizens created a climate of public opinion in which the reluctant Western leaders were forced gradually to take action against the Serbian forces responsible. It was the democratic media, therefore, rather than the Western political and military leaders, which was the real carrier of the anti-Serbian conspiracy. In the left revisionists’ world of twisted logic and conspiracy theories, the Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks] repeatedly shelled their own civilians in Sarajevo so that they could blame the massacres on the Serbs and then used the Western media to broadcast the images to the Western public in order to create an ‘anti-Serb’ climate of opinion and pressurise the Western leaders to intervene against the Serbs. The Muslims [Bosniaks] are thus transformed from victims of Milosevic’s genocide and Western indifference into diabolical puppeteers, using the Western media to manipulate the Western public and Western leaders who consequently become the victims along with Milosevic, Karadzic, and ‘the Serbs’.
The irony of this grotesque line of reasoning is that the numerous Western statesmen and military commanders who were opposed to military intervention against the Serbian forces then become witnesses to prove the existence of the anti-Serbian conspiracy in their own media. Parenti cites claims by US General Charles Boyd, British General Michael Rose, French General Philippe Morillon, EC peace mediator Lord David Owen, and other Western military and political leaders to prove that it was really the Muslims [Bosniaks], not the Serbs, who were bombing and besieging Sarajevo for three and a half years; that the Muslims [Bosniaks] were pretending to be besieged; and that massacres of Muslim [Bosniak] civilians in Sarajevo were carried out by the Muslims [Bosniaks] against themselves.[27] Thus it transpires that whereas Christiane Amanpour, Roy Gutman, Maggie O’Kane, Ed Vulliamy, and other professional journalists and television reporters were part of the Western-media conspiracy to “demonise the Serbs”, virtually the entire military and diplomatic leadership of the Western intervention in Bosnia was opposed to the conspiracy and was motivated solely by the desire to present honestly and accurately the facts as they really were. A second group of witnesses whom the left revisionists draw upon are those Western journalists whom they happen to agree with, whose articles are somehow published in the mainstream media despite its supposed anti-Serb bias. Thus whereas O’Kane, Vulliamy, Amanpour, and Gutman are viewed as part of the anti-Serb conspiracy, David Binder, Misha Glenny, Robert Fisk, Edward Pearce, and Simon Jenkins are seen as wholly objective observers free from any political bias. Not to mention Mick Hume, former editor of the magazine Living Marxism, which during the 1990s repeatedly denied that genocide had taken place either in Bosnia or in Rwanda.[28] Living Marxism was eventually forced to close after it accused the media company ITN of inventing concentration camps in Bosnia and was promptly sued by ITN and bankrupted, but Hume now has a regular column in The Times (London). If Ed Vulliamy reports on a contemporary Serbian concentration camp then this is ‘demonising the Serbs’ and proof that the Western media is biased against ‘the Serbs’, but if Robert Fisk writes about a Croatian concentration camp that existed half a century earlier during World War II, as he did in The Independent at the height of the Bosnian war,[29] then this is proof positive that ‘the Croats’ are really the bad guys and consequently that the rest of the media is biased against ‘the Serbs’ for not pointing this out. It is a win-win argument.
The mindset of the left revisionists allows them to disregard all evidence of the genocidal activities of the Milosevic regime, no matter how damning. When, following Milosevic’s extradition to The Hague, the Serbian police began to unearth mass graves of his Albanian victims in Serbia, Seumas Milne responded by implying that even the government and police of democratic Serbia were part of the Western propaganda conspiracy against the Milosevic regime, that they were betraying their country to the capitalist Mammon and that the only real crime was the extradition itself: “Shamelessly bought with $1.3bn of aid for a country ravaged by sanctions and NATO bombing, Milosevic’s extradition had to be forced through by decree, in defiance of Yugoslavia’s constitutional court, by a government which knew it stood no chance of getting the decision through parliament.” By contrast the corpses of murdered Albanians were simply part of the Western conspiracy: “That is presumably why – as the new Belgrade administration dug up corpses to order – the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, described the cash as a ‘dividend of democracy’.”[30] “Where are all the bodies buried?” asks Parenti, arguing that because only slightly more than two thousand bodies had been discovered in Kosovo, it followed that that was the total Albanian death toll: “how did the Serbs accomplish these mass-grave-disappearing acts?”, he asks ironically, quoting a newspaper as saying that a forensic team “‘found no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies.’”[31] The ominous parallels of such arguments hardly need to be spelled out. In the words of the white-supremacist web-site Stormfront: “Auschwitz had no mass graves. The cremation of four million bodies would have left 15,000 tons of ash which was never found.”[32] While Milosevic’s crimes against the Albanians are not equivalent to Hitler’s crimes against the Jews; what are equivalent are the arguments used by the apologists for both dictators. Indeed, the left revisionists’ atrocity denial recalls the fascist propaganda surrounding the most infamous Nazi atrocity in Europe before World War II. On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis’ Condor Legion bombed the Basque town of Guernica. The following day the Spanish fascists issued a statement to the foreign press accusing the Basques of blowing up their own town. They claimed in the days that followed that, “while a few bomb fragments” had been found in Guernica, the damage was mainly caused by Basque incendiaries in order to inspire outrage among the foreign public, and later that Spanish Republican planes had bombed Guernica using Basque-manufactured bombs and that the explosions were caused by dynamite placed by the Basques in the town’s sewers. Despite this fascist attempt at denial, the atrocity swung part of the US media (the magazines Time, Life, and Newsweek) round to supporting the Spanish Republicans.[33]
The left revisionists claim to object to comparisons between the Bosnian genocide and the Holocaust on the grounds that they are emotional and hyperbolic. Johnstone complains of the fact that because of media exaggeration “Suddenly, Milosevic was the new Hitler”. She goes on: “Analogies should be employed with care, especially with such emotion-laden subjects as Hitler and the Holocaust. When applied to unfamiliar situations, they can create a powerful semi-fictional version that actually masks reality.”[34] Mick Hume, usually proud to be politically incorrect, in this case also professes deep concern about talk of genocide or a Holocaust in the Balkans. He complains that the tendency for journalists to compare Serb forces in Bosnia and Kosovo with the Nazis “with talk of ‘echoes of the Holocaust’ and ‘genocide’ carried out in ‘true Nazi Final Solution fashion’ has seriously distorted the popular image of the Balkans today. It has helped to brand the Serbs as the evil new Nazis.” He goes on “This diminishing of the Final Solution is what ultimately concerns me most about the Nazification of the Serbs.”[35] Nevertheless, the left revisionists are quite ready to exploit the legacy of the Holocaust in their own propaganda. A mere week after writing the statement quoted above, Johnstone wrote that “[I]f the Croatian fascists actually led, rather than followed, the German Nazis down the path of genocide, that doesn’t mean they have forgotten their World War II benefactors. After all, it was thanks to Hitler’s invasion of Yugoslavia that the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ was set up in April 1941, with Bosnia-Herzegovina (whose population was mostly Serb at the time [sic!]) as part of its territory.” Johnstone thus draws a parallel with Nazi aggression in the Balkans during World War II and democratic Germany’s diplomatic support for Croatia in 1991: “And the hit song of 1991, when Croatia once again declared its independence from Yugoslavia and began driving out Serbs, was ‘Danke Deutschland’ in gratitude to Germany’s strong diplomatic support for Zagreb’s unnegotiated secession.”[36] So Johnstone, who urges caution in employing “emotion-laden subjects as Hitler and the Holocaust” when it is a question of Serbian atrocities, is quite happy to throw out this caution when it is a question of the Croats; her claim that “the Croatian fascists actually led, rather than followed, the German Nazis down the path of genocide” seems to imply that the Final Solution was Croatian in origin – a view that no serious student of the Holocaust would bother even discussing. As for Hume, Living Marxism magazine, of which he was the editor, hosted an exhibition in 1993 entitled ‘Genocide against the Serbs’, organised by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and funded by the Republic of Serbia, showing pictures of the corpses of Serbs killed by Croatian and Bosnian forces in the 1990s alongside pictures of the corpses of Serbs killed by Ustashas during World War II. Pictures from the exhibition were published in Living Marxism, which did not see fit to add any comment of its own.[37] Throughout the war in Croatia and Bosnia Hume and Living Marxism constantly equated the Croats with the Nazis in order to shift the odium away from Milosevic and his forces. Finally John Pilger, in a piece devoted to minimising Albanian casualties during the Kosovo War, comments that “Today, the Serbs are the unpeople. They have no civilisation, no society, no poetry, no history. The savagery they suffered at the hands of the Nazis in the Second World War, exceeded only by the mass extermination of the Polish Jews, has been forgotten.”[38]
Falsifying Yugoslav history
It is of course true that the Serb people suffered grievously at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators in Yugoslavia (Ustashas, Chetniks and others), but this suffering was on a scale little or no greater than that of the Croats, Muslims [Bosniaks], and other Yugoslavs or of the Poles, Greeks, Ukrainians, and East Europeans generally. It certainly was not on a par with the fate that befell the Jews in Europe under the Nazis. Pilger however seems to be suggesting that the Serbs, whose total World War II losses were between 487,000 and 523,000 or approximately 7% of the total Serb population of Yugoslavia,[39] suffered more than the three million non-Polish Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, more than the Jews massacred at Kishinev, Babi Yar, and Odessa. So while the left revisionists strenuously object to reference to the Holocaust in relation to the fate of the Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks] and Albanians in the 1990s, they readily draw on the legacy of the Holocaust to highlight Serb suffering both in World War II and in the recent wars, even at the price of historical accuracy. In order to paint the Serbs as eternal victims equivalent to the Jews the left revisionists frequently mention the crimes of the Croat fascists (Ustashas) during World War II while ignoring similar crimes committed by Serb fascists and collaborators in the same period. It is true that there was an Ustasha regime in power in power in Zagreb during World War II; there was also a Serbian quisling regime in power in Belgrade, and on 18 September 1943 the Serbian quisling leader Milan Nedic met with Hitler and requested the establishment of a Great Serbia within the framework of the Nazi European order.[40] It is true that the Ustasha regime pursued a genocidal policy toward the Serb population of the Croatian quisling state; there was also a parallel genocide carried out by the Serb Chetniks against the Muslims [Bosniaks] and Croats of Bosnia and Croatia. [41] The Ustasha regime assisted the Nazis in exterminating the Jewish population of Croatia and Bosnia; Nedic’s Serbian police assisted the Nazis in rounding up Serbia’s Jews. [42] Just as the Ustashas employed anti-Semitic propaganda, so too did the Chetniks. A Chetnik proclamation of 1941 claimed that the Communists were “people who are not of our blood, Serb name and our Serb Orthodox religion” but were “Jews, Turks and Croats”. [43] In 1943 a group of Chetnik commanders issued a joint proclamation to the people of Croatia and Bosnia claiming that “since we have cleansed Serbia, Montenegro and Hercegovina, we have come to help you to crush the pitiful remnants of the Communist international, criminal band of Tito, Mose Pijade, Levi Vajnert and other paid Jews” and that the Serbs had been “swindled by the Communist Jews”. [44] According to Israel Gutman’s Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, “There were many instances of Chetniks murdering Jews or handing them over to the Germans”. [45] None of this prevents Johnstone from describing the Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic as an “anti-Nazi resistance leader”. [46] The Serbs, like the Croats, were a nation deeply polarised during World War II; like the Croats, they produced both murderous Nazi-collaborators and brave resistance fighters. Many Serbs and Croats were victims; others were perpetrators of genocide. The left-revisionist version of World War II in Yugoslavia as a conflict between fascist Croats and anti-fascist Serbs who suffered “like the Jews” is pure fiction.
Pilger’s comment shows how the left revisionists viewed ‘socialist’ Serbia as a kind of left-wing holy land, its people martyred by the imperialist Antichrist. For the left revisionists the identification of socialism, anti-imperialism, and Serb nationalism, three forces that in reality have nothing particularly in common, has become absolute. They are not deterred by the fact that Milosevic’s nationalist campaign arose in opposition, not to Western imperialism, but to the Titoist constitutional order that governed Yugoslavia until the late 1980s and above all to its provisions regarding Kosovo. Milosevic is in their eyes a better Communist than Tito: Parenti complains that “Tito did little to discourage the Albanian campaign to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of non-Albanians.”[47] Both Parenti and Johnstone consequently endorse Milosevic’s policy toward the Kosovo Albanians and his revision of Tito’s system. In Johnstone’s words, Milosevic’s suppression of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1988-89 was “necessary to enable the economic liberalisation reforms; they were enacted legally; and they left intact the political rights of ethnic Albanians as well as a considerable degree of regional autonomy”.[48] Like Milosevic and his acolytes, the left revisionists combine an alleged support for ‘Yugoslavia’ with a pathological hatred for most Yugoslavs: Croats, Albanians, Muslims [Bosniaks], Slovenes, and sometimes even anti-Milosevic Serbs. I noted earlier that the left revisionists do not hold Milosevic, Karadzic, and their forces responsible for any of the atrocities carried out in the former Yugoslavia, since all these atrocities were provoked or engineered by the West anyway. But by a curious sleight of hand the left revisionists portray all Croat, Muslim [Bosniak], or Albanian atrocities against Serbs as in no way related to previous aggressive policies by the Milosevic regime. Thus the Croatian persecution of Serbs in the former Krajina following Operation Storm in 1995, or the Albanian persecution of Serbs in Kosovo following the NATO victory in 1999, are not seen as responses to Milosevic’s aggression against Croatia in 1990-91 and the subsequent four-year occupation of Croatian territory or to his ten-year reign of terror in Kosovo in 1989-99. Rather, the left revisionists portray Croat, Muslim [Bosniaks], and Albanian nationalism as inherently evil in a way that Serb nationalism is not.
Parenti and Johnstone project the righteousness of the Serbian struggle with the Albanians and other Yugoslav nations back into the past, painting a picture of pro-Nazi Albanians, Croats, and Muslims [Bosniaks] persecuting anti-Nazi Serbs. Parenti writes at length about what he calls “Croatia’s Nazi past” and about the Nazi collaboration of Muslims [Bosniaks] and Albanians.[49] In a manner strikingly reminiscent of the way the Stalinists erased the role of Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other Old Bolsheviks from their historical account of the Russian Revolution, the left revisionists have erased the history of the tens of thousands of Croats, Muslims [Bosniaks], and Albanians who fought alongside their Serb comrades against Nazism and Fascism during the 1930s and ‘40s under the leadership of Tito, Europe’s greatest anti-Nazi resistance leader and himself a Croat. There is no place in their propaganda for Vladimir Copic, the Croat who commanded the 15th International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War; for Fadil Jahic-Spanac, the Muslim [Bosniak] Partisan who led the Serbs of north-east Bosnia in the struggle against the Ustashas; for Marko Oreskovic-Krntija, the Croat Partisan who led the Serb struggle against the Ustashas in Lika; for the vanguard role played by the predominantly-Croat Partisan Dalmatian Brigades at the legendary battles of Neretva and Sutjeska against the Germans and Italians in 1943; for the 16th Muslim Brigade that fought SS forces in East Bosnia and spearheaded the liberation of Sarajevo in 1945; for the Albanian Partisans who fought across the length of Yugoslavia to liberate the country from the Nazis; for the Albanian Partisan Fadilj Hodza who was one of Milosevic’s first victims. Nor is there a place for the numerous Serb Partisan veterans who had the courage to oppose Milosevic’s policies: Bogdan Bogdanovic, Draza Markovic, Koca Popovic, Milos Minic, Ljubo Babic, and many others.
‘Counter-revolutionary nations’?
Not content to erase the history of the multinational anti-Nazi Yugoslav Partisan struggle, Johnstone goes back further into the past in her effort to demonise the Albanians. She portrays Albanian nationalism as originating in the desires of Albanian Islamic feudal lords to retain their privileges, contrasting it with a Serb nationalism she sees as originating in the desire of Serb Christian serfs for liberty: “The ethnic Albanians who had converted to Islam by the 19th century gained privileges (to bear arms, serve in the administration, and collect taxes) denied the Christian population. Such privileges stood in the way of the development of an Albanian nationalism parallel to the 19th century Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian national liberation movements.” In Johnstone’s eyes Albanian national revolts were traditionally reactionary, so that “When Albanian feudal lords did revolt, it was rather to try to retain these privileges than to achieve an independent State of equal citizens.” By contrast, “Because they were deprived of equal rights under Ottoman rule, the Serb leaders adopted an egalitarian political philosophy borrowed from France as appropriate to their national liberation struggle in the 19th century. This meant advocacy of a state of equal citizens enjoying equal rights. The practice certainly did not always live up to the principles. But there is a significant and practical difference between a nation that proclaims principles of equal citizenship and one that does not.”[50] The message is clear: the Serbs are a ‘revolutionary’ nation and the Albanians are a ‘counter-revolutionary’ nation. Johnstone appears wholly ignorant of Albanian history; of the existence of Catholic and Orthodox as well as Muslim Albanians, including some who were pioneers of Albanian nationalism; or of the Albanian national rebellions against the Ottomans from 1878 culminating in the successful rebellion of 1912.[51] Indeed, the Albanians are the only Balkan nation whose national movement has succeeded in uniting Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox down to the present day. But there is no reason to believe that Johnstone or her comrades are interested in learning anything positive about the Albanians. It is as if, like the rulers of Orwell’s Oceania, the left revisionists are rewriting the past in order to make it conform to present policies.
Belief in the existence of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’ fit only to be exterminated was strongly upheld by Marx and Engels. Their hatred was particularly directed against the Czechs and the Croats. In 1849 Engels called for a “war of annihilation of the Germans against the Czechs” as the “only possible solution”; he described the Croats as a “naturally counter-revolutionary nation” and looked forward to the day when the Germans and Hungarians would “annihilate all these small pig-headed nations even to their very names.”[52] Marx and Engels also hated the Serbs. In a letter to Marx in 1876 Engels cheered an Ottoman military victory over the Serbs: “The collapse of the Serbs is stupendous. The campaign was intended to set the whole of Turkey in flames, and everywhere the tinder is damp – Montenegro has betrayed the campaign for her own private ends, Bosnia has absolutely no intention of rebelling now that Serbia proposes to liberate her, and the worthy Bulgarians aren’t lifting a finger.” For Engels the Serbs were little more than brigands: “The Serbian army of liberation is having to live at its own expense and, after a swashbuckling offensive, withdrew into its robber’s lair without having been seriously defeated anywhere.”[53] Marx and Engels sympathised with the Ottoman side and complained of Western media bias, as they saw it, in favour of the Serbs and against the Turks: “Not a word is said, of course, about the infamies perpetrated by the Montenegrins and Herzegovinians. Luckily the Serbs are getting knocked for six”.[54]
Later generations of Marxists rejected the early Marxist tendency to demonise “counter-revolutionary nations”. As a journalist reporting on the Balkan wars of 1912-13 Leon Trotsky wrote passionately about the atrocities committed by the Balkan Christian states against the Albanians and other Balkan Muslims. In January 1913 Trotsky wrote that “the Bulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia, in their national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in the systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts.” (‘Old Serbia’ being a Serbian term for Kosovo.) He accused Russian liberal supporters of the Serbian and Bulgarian war-effort of bearing their share of responsibility for “the ripped-open bellies of Turkish children and the necks cut through to the bone of aged Muslims”.[55] The following month Trotsky, arguing that “protest against the outrages in the Balkans cleanses the social atmosphere in our own country, heightens the level of moral awareness among our own people”, denounced the Russian liberal faction of Pavel Miliukov for supporting a Serbian Army that was massacring Albanian civilians: “But since the ‘leading’ newspapers of Russia kept on singing their praises and either hushed up or denied the exposures published in the democratic press, a certain number of murdered Albanian babies must be put down, Mr. Deputy, to your Slavophile account. Get your senior doorman to look for them in your editorial office, Mr. Miliukov!” Trotsky then insisted on the imperative of protesting against the atrocities in the Balkans: “Indignant protest against unbridled behaviour by men armed with machine guns, rifles, and bayonets was required for our own moral self-defence. An individual, a group, a party or a class that is capable of ‘objectively’ picking its nose while it watches men drunk with blood, and incited from above, massacring defenceless people is condemned by history to rot and become worm-eaten while it is still alive.”[56] It is tempting to suggest that the fate Trotsky predicted for apologists of atrocities ironically ended up applying to a large section of the far left in the late twentieth century. Throughout his campaign to publicise Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek atrocities against the Islamic peoples of the Balkans, Trotsky never attributed these atrocities to any alleged inherently evil character of the Christian Balkan nations in question but blamed them on militarism and imperialism, of which other European countries were also guilty.
The Bolsheviks under Lenin likewise rejected the division of nations into “good” and “bad”, declaring in favour of an ideological commitment to national equality and the right of all nations to self-determination. This right of course did not apply in practice to the nationalities of the Soviet Union, but it applied to the nationalities enslaved by the Yugoslav state. Thus a proclamation of the Executive Council of the Communist International of June 1920 to the proletariat of the Balkan and Danubian nations declared that the “Macedonian Bulgars, Albanians, Croats, Montenegrins and Bosnians are rebelling against the rule of the bureaucratic and landowning oligarchy” of Yugoslavia.[57] This support for national pluralism and rejection of the concept of “revolutionary” and “counter-revolutionary” nations is reflected in a famous passage by Tito, a Communist of the subsequent generation, written in 1942 during the Partisan struggle against the Nazis: “The term ‘People’s Liberation Struggle’ would be simply a phrase, even a lie, if it did not have, apart from its general Yugoslav character, a national character for every nation individually; that is, if it did not mean, in addition to the liberation of Yugoslavia, at the same time the liberation of the Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians, Muslims [Bosniaks], etc.”[58] Such an expression of equal appreciation of each individual Yugoslav nationality is unthinkable for the left revisionists of today. While they display the moral relativism typical of the post-1917 far left, in their treatment of the national question they are considerably more reactionary and have returned to the chauvinism of nineteenth-century Marxism. Thus, if the Albanians are a “counter-revolutionary” nation then their annihilation represents a sort of class justice equivalent to the extermination of the bourgeoisie. The playwright Harold Pinter is consequently more moved by the plight of Slobodan Milosevic, imprisoned in a comfortable cell in The Hague and visited regularly by his wife and family, than he is by the extermination of over a hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks] or the expulsion of eight hundred thousand Albanians from their homes. For unlike these unpeople, Milosevic is seen by the left revisionists as being on their side of the barricades. The emotional identification of Pinter and other socialists with Milosevic and other Yugoslav war-criminals in their struggle against the ICTY is the other side of the walnut to their heartlessness toward Milosevic’s victims and contempt for their suffering.
Milosevic as martyr
Pinter has joined the ‘International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic’, organised by Milosevic’s passionate admirer Jared Israel, aimed at rescuing Milosevic from trial by the ICTY. Israel, who is reduced to translating Milosevic’s speeches in an effort to prove his idol is not a racist, represents the left revisionist in its purest form, without any of the dissembling. According to a petition for Milosevic’s release from prison issued by Israel, “Milosevic the so-called ‘ethnic cleanser’ preached multinational unity, not nationalist intolerance”; “Milosevic conducted no persecution of Albanian civilians”; “The most notorious ‘atrocities’ for which Milosevic is accused never happened”; “Crimes were committed in Yugoslavia – but not by Milosevic”. Not only was Milosevic not guilty of genocide, but he was in fact a freedom fighter against US imperialism: “Slobodan Milosevic’s real offence was that he tried to keep the 26 nationalities that comprise Yugoslavia free from US and NATO colonization and occupation; his nation’s resources, industries, and media from being stolen by multinational corporations; his nation’s institutions from being controlled by US consultants and advisers.” The Serbian opposition, by contrast, were merely part of the conspiracy: “His real offence was to defend his nation’s freedom and sovereignty from a political ‘opposition’ bought and paid for by the United States and installed into power by US specialists in psychological operations. He and all those now under attack resisted Western colonization to the very end, even as American naval ships waited off the coast of Yugoslavia to ensure the ‘correct’ results in Yugoslavia’s contested elections.”[59] Thus Milosevic becomes a Christ-like figure; a martyr on the cross, while the Serbian opposition to him becomes the collective Judas. Similarly, Neil Clark in the New Statesman says of Milosevic that “When faced with the incessant violence of western-trained separatist groups, he had little option but to use military means to try to prevent the break-up of his country and to defend the Serbian and Roma people from being driven out of the lands they had inhabited for centuries.” Far from being a war criminal, Milosevic is a “prisoner of conscience” at the ICTY whose “worst crime was to carry on being a socialist”.[60]
This sense of Milosevic as a socialist martyr and the ICTY as a form of Inquisition permeates the thought of the left revisionists, who view him as their man ‘fighting back’ against the Western enemy. Milosevic, currently threatened with life imprisonment in one of the world’s most comfortable prisons, signed the 1995 Dayton Accord that recognised the ICTY and pledged the arrest of Bosnian Serb war criminals. That was after his political enemy Radovan Karadzic had been indicted by the Tribunal while Milosevic was still on friendly terms with Washington. Now that he is in the dock himself he has decided that the ICTY is illegitimate after all. It is not however just Milosevic’s hypocrisy regarding the ICTY that is overlooked by the left revisionists, nor the fact that he is receiving a fair trial, unlike the men of Srebrenica who were massacred without a trial and whose rights were not championed by the left revisionists. The latter ignore the fact that in both Serbia and Croatia the ICTY is supported by the democrats and anti-nationalists and opposed by the fascists and criminals. In Serbia the student movement ‘Otpor’ that spearheaded Milosevic’s overthrow, and Velimir Ilic, Mayor of Cacak and one of the organisers of the overthrow of the regime, support the ICTY while the supporters of Milosevic and Vojislav Seselj oppose it. This may not seem a convincing argument to the left revisionists who no doubt view the overthrow of Milosevic as a counterrevolution, but what of the genuine Serbian anti-fascist left that Milosevic overthrew in 1987? It is often forgotten today that Milosevic’s first victims, before even the Albanians, were Serb Communists: the supporters of Dragisa Pavlovic and Ivan Stambolic, the latter murdered by Milosevic shortly before his overthrow. To those Serbian Communists brave enough to oppose Milosevic’s war-mongering policies and anti-Albanian chauvinism we may add Latinka Perovic, the liberal Communist leader purged by Tito in 1972; Bogdan Bogdanovic, former mayor of Belgrade; Draza Markovic, uncle of Milosevic’s wife Mira Markovic; Milos Minic, prosecutor at the trial of Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic; and many others. Then there are the Serbian human rights activists Natasa Kandic and Sonja Biserko who stood up for the rights of the Albanians when it was most difficult. All those living support the ICTY; none of their voices are heard by the left revisionists.
Similarly in Croatia the current, moderate regime of Stipe Mesic and Ivica Racan has put on trial Croats guilty of killing Serbs in 1991, rejected Croatian irredentism in Bosnia, and reaffirmed the Partisan legacy. It supports the ICTY. So do those anti-nationalist Croats who defended the rights of the Serb minority when it was most unpopular, such as Ivo Banac and Ivan Zvonimir Cicak of the Croatian Helsinki Committee and the famous satirical newspaper Feral Tribune. By contrast the Tudjmanites and Ustashas are opposed to it and have mobilised mass demonstrations in defence of their war criminals. Thus ironically the left revisionists who have spent the last ten years demonising the Croats as fascists now align themselves with the Croatian fascists and against the Croatian liberals. But it would be wrong to suppose that the left revisionists know or care about this; they oppose the ICTY for the sake of their own political agenda, not for the sake of the Serbs and Croats. David Chandler, in his negative assessment of the ICTY published in New Left Review, does not even bother to discuss which political currents in Serbia and Croatia support the Tribunal and which oppose it, as if the Tribunal has no relevance to anything outside the left revisionists’ anti-American crusade.[61] So sure are they that the ICTY is part of the international conspiracy against Europe’s last socialist state that they predicted repeatedly that no Croat could possibly be indicted for crimes against Serbs during Operation Storm in 1995, because the US supported this Croatian military operation and surely would not let “its own” Tribunal indict “its own Croats”. Chomsky claimed in 2000 that “there is little likelihood that the Tribunal will pay attention to its 150-page ‘Indictment Operation Storm: A Prima Facie Case’, reviewing the war crimes committed by Croatian forces that drove some 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in August 1995 with crucial US involvement”.[62] In May 2001 the ICTY did indeed indict Croatian General Ante Gotovina, a former favourite of Franjo Tudjman, for crimes against Serb civilians during Operation Storm. Two and a half months later Seumas Milne wrote of the “logistical US backing for the massacres and ethnic cleansing in the Krajina region of Croatia in 1995” and stated confidently that “War crimes indictments in the latter case are, needless to say, not expected”, therefore managing to predict incorrectly something that had already happened.[63]
The bitterness of the left-revisionist campaign to deny the genocide in the former Yugoslavia carried out by Milosevic and the Serb nationalists reflects a neo-Stalinist determination to champion Europe’s last ‘socialist’ dictatorship against all the overwhelming evidence of its murderous and corrupt nature. This involves deliberately disregarding the responsibility of this regime for the destruction of Yugoslavia and upholding its chauvinistic discourse on Croats, Muslims [Bosniaks], and Albanians. The left revisionists are neither progressives nor genuine anti-imperialists. Their a-historical, anti-democratic worldview and their refusal to condemn fascism or to stand up for the rights of its victims, make them morally complicit in the crimes that have taken place in the former Yugoslavia.
Marko Attila Hoare is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. He is the author of a short history of the Bosnian Army (How Bosnia Armed, Saqi Books, London, 2004). He is currently completing a major work on the Partisan movement of resistance in Yugoslavia during World War II.
An extended version of this article appears in the December 2003 edition of the Journal of Genocide Research.
[1]. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964), pp. 300-301.
[2]. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “Distortions at Fourth Hand”, The Nation, June 25, 1977.
[3]. Noam Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor, and the Standards of the West (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 11, 21, 23, 110.
[4]. Ibid, pp. 104-114.
[5]. Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 292.
[6]. Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line, p. 123.
[7]. Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (London: Verso, 2000), p. 18.
[8]. Ibid, p. 22.
[9]. Borisav Jovic, Poslednji dani SFRJ (Belgrade: Politika, 1995), pp. 198-199.
[10]. Ibid, p. 431.
[11]. Ed Vulliamy, “Shootbat squaddies’ hidden battles”, The Guardian, 2 April 1996.
[12]. Vaughan Kent-Payne, Bosnia warriors: living on the front line (London: Robert Hale, 1998), pp. 124-126.
[13]. Jovic, op. cit.; Veljko Kadijevic, Moje vidjenje raspada (Belgrade: Politika, 1993); Branko Mamula, Slucaj Jugoslavia (Podgorica: CID, 2000); Ratko Mladic, serialised memoirs in NIN (Belgrade), January-February 1994; Aleksandar Vasiljevic, serialised memoirs in NIN, June-July 1992.
14]. Michael Barratt Brown, The Yugoslav Tragedy – Lessons for Socialists (Nottingham: Socialist Renewal, 1996), p. 38.
[15]. Jovic, p. 160.
[16]. Jovic, p. 161.
[17]. Kadijevic, pp. 92-93.
[18]. Sluzbeni glasnik Republike Srbije, yr 46, no. 1, 28 September 1990.
[19]. NIN, Belgrade, 12 April 1991, pp. 40-41.
[20]. Tanjug, 1746 gmt 9 October 1991.
[21]. Tanjug, 1828 gmt 31 October 1991.
[22]. Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Yugoslavia; Colonising Bosnia”, Covert Action, no. 56, spring 1996.
[23]. John Newhouse, “The diplomatic round”, The New Yorker, 24 August 1992.
[24]. Parenti, p. 25.
[25]. Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman (eds), Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 2.
[26]. Diana Johnstone, “Nato and the New World Order: Ideals and Self-Interest”, in Hammond and Herman, p. 7.
[27]. Parenti, pp. 73-80.
[28]. See for example Joan Phillips, “Bosnia: The invention of a Holocaust”, Living Marxism, September 1992; Fiona Foster, “Massacring the truth in Rwanda”, Living Marxism, December 1995.
[29]. Robert Fisk, “Cleansing Bosnia at a camp called Jasenovac”, The Independent, 15 August 1992.
[30]. Seumas Milne, “Hague is not the place to try Milosevic”, The Guardian, 2 August 2001.
[31]. Parenti, pp. 144-154.
[32]. Stormfront website (www.stormfront.org/truth_at_last/holocaust.htm).
[33]. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd ed., (London: Penguin,1977), pp. 625-627.
[34]. Diana Johnstone, “Hitler Analogies betray both past and present”, ZNet Daily Commentaries website, 28 August 1999 (www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/1999‑08/28johnstone.htm).
[35]. Mick Hume, “Nazifying the Serbs, from Bosnia to Kosovo”, in Hammond and Herman, p. 74.
[36]. Diana Johnstone, “Nazi nostalgia in Croatia”, The Emperor’s New Clothes website, 6 September 1999 (www.emperors‑clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/nostalgi.html).
[37]. Living Marxism, March 1993.
[38]. John Pilger, “Censorship by Omission”, in Hammond and Herman, p. 133.
[39]. According to the two serious demographic studies by a Serb and a Croat respectively: Bogoljub Kocovic, Zrtve drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji (London: Veritas Foundation Press, 1985), pp. 65-70; Vladimir Zerjavic, Gubici stanovnistva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskom ratu (Zagreb: Jugoslavensko viktimolosko drustvo, 1989), pp. 61-63.
[40]. Milan Borkovic, Milan Nedic (Zagreb: Centar za informacije i publicitet, 1985) pp. 227-228; 275-278.
[41]. See Vladimir Dedijer and Antun Miletic (eds), Genocid nad Muslimanima 1941-1945: Zbornik dokumenata i svjedocenja (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1990).
[42]. Roy Gutman (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: MacMillan, 1990) pp. 1340-1342.
[43]. Veljko Dj. Djuric, Novi prilozi za biografiju Vojvode Jezdimira Dangica (Belgrade: Nova Srbija, 1997) pp. 22-23.
[44]. Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o Narodnooslobodilackom ratu naroda Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Vojnoistorijski institut, 1983) pt 14, vol. 2, doc. 31, p. 175.
[45]. Gutman, p. 289.
[46]. Diana Johnstone, “Before and after Yugoslav elections”, ZNet Daily Commentaries website, 27 September 2000 (www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2000-09/27johnstone.htm).
[47]. Parenti, p. 96.
[48]. Diana Johnstone, “Notes on the Kosovo Problem and the International Community”, Dialogue, no. 25, spring 1998.
[49]. Parenti, pp. 44, 51, 95.
[50]. Johnstone, “Notes on the Kosovo Problem and the International Community”.
[51]. See Stavro Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening 1878-1912 (Princeton: 1967).
[52]. David Fernbach (ed.), Karl Marx – The Revolutions of 1848 – Political Writings Volume I (London: Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 225, 232, 236.
[53]. Karl Marx Friedrich Engels – Collected Works, vol. 45 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991), pp.130-131.
[54]. Ibid., p. 140.
[55]. Leon Trotsky, The Balkan Wars 1912-1913 (Sydney: Pathfinder Press, 1980), p. 286.
[56]. Ibid., pp. 292-293.
[57]. Gordana Vlajcic, Jugoslavenska revolucija i nacionalno pitanje 1919-1927 (Zagreb: Globus, 1984), p. 318.
[58]. Bihacka Republika – Zbornik clanaka (Bihac: Izdanje Muzeja AVNOJ-a i Pounja u Bihacu, 1965), vol. 2, doc. 225, pp. 514-515.
[59]. International Action Centre website (www.iacenter.org/witchhunt.htm).
[60]. Neil Clark, “Milosevic, prisoner of conscience”, New Statesman, 11 February 2002.
[61]. David Chandler, “‘International justice?’”, in New Left Review, no. 6, November-December 2000.
[62]. Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line, p. 132.
[63]. Seumas Milne, op. cit.
CHOMSKY’S SREBRENICA GENOCIDE DENIAL
Chomsky’s Genocidal Denial
By Marko Attila Hoare
November 23, 2005
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2
In the realm of politics, there are those of us who wear our hearts on our sleeves: proud of what we stand for, we are not afraid to state our positions as clearly as possible, so there is no danger of misunderstanding; we call a spade a spade, and are ready to face the music. On the other hand, there are those who are embarrassed by their own position: they dissemble; muddying the waters so that what they really think is vague and hidden; when confronted by those who recognise them for what they are, they lash out in fear and shame, denying what everyone knows to be the truth.
Two very interesting parallel cases were highlighted in the Guardian newspaper on 17 November. It was reported that David Irving was arrested in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial. Irving is well known as a Holocaust denier and Hitler apologist, yet when accused of this by the historian Deborah Lipstadt, he attempted to sue her for libel, resulting in his crushing courtroom defeat. Yet he apparently remains ashamed to accept the label that he has inevitably earned. According to the Guardian: ‘Mr Irving has said he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths. He has questioned the use of large-scale gas chambers to exterminate the Jews, and has claimed that the numbers of those who perished are far lower than those generally accepted. He also contends that most Jews who died at Auschwitz did so from diseases such as typhus, not gas poisoning.’ In other words, lacking the moral courage to say proudly ‘Yes, I deny the Holocaust !’, Irving seeks refuge in the claim that he is merely concerned with the accuracy of details and interpretation. Thus, the Holocaust denier does not merely deny the Holocaust; he denies his own denial. Of course, no rational person would accept such a plea at face value.
On the same day (17 November), a new twist emerged in another saga of genocide-denial: the Guardian printed a grovelling apology to Noam Chomsky for a none-too-flattering interview with him carried out by the award-winning journalist Emma Brockes, published by the Guardian on 31 October, in which Brockes cites Chomsky as having said that the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 was ‘probably overstated’ and was not even an actual massacre. Chomsky prides himself on being a resolute champion of freedom of speech; on this ground, he has defended the right of Holocaust-deniers to publish what they want; and condemned Britain’s libel laws. Yet faced with Brockes’s exposure of his position, he and his circle of fans retreated from their pro-free-speech position, and organised a campaign of denunciation of Brockes, bombarding the Guardian with letters of complaint, and eventually bullying this spineless newspaper into issuing an unequivocal apology and retraction.
In his letter of complaint to the Guardian, published on 2 November, Chomsky writes: ‘As for her [Brockes’s] personal opinions, interpretations and distortions, she is of course free to publish them, and I would, of course, support her right to do so, on grounds that she makes clear she does not understand.’ Yet as a result of the Chomskyite campaign against Brockes, the Guardian readers’ editor reported on 17 November: ‘The Guardian has now withdrawn the interview from the website.’ Just fancy that ! More shamefully still, the Guardian also apologised for having published a letter by Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the Serb concentration-camp Omarska, alongside Chomsky’s on 2 November. Pervanic said he was ‘shocked by some of the views of Noam Chomsky in the article by Emma Brockes’s.’ Yet in the words of the Guardian readers’ editor’s grovelling piece of self-criticism: ‘While he has every sympathy with the writer [Pervanic], Prof Chomsky believes that its publication was designed to undermine his position, and addressed a part of the interview which was false… With hindsight it is acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof Chomsky’s complaint, and that is regretted.’ So much for respecting the right of a concentration-camp survivor to state his opinion.
The irony is all the greater, as the Brockes interview revolved around Chomsky’s defence of the writer Diana Johnstone, allegedly on the grounds of supporting freedom of speech. In 2003, the left-wing Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone, which repeated her revisionist, genocide-denying views of the Bosnian war. This provoked massive outrage on the part of members of Ordfront’s editorial board and readers, leading to resignation of the editor and a public apology by the magazine for the pain it had caused to Bosnian genocide survivors. Johnstone’s Swedish publisher apparently withdrew its agreement to publish her book. This, in the eyes of Chomsky, consisted of a violation of Johnstone’s ‘freedom of speech’, though nobody had prevented her from disseminating her views through other magazines or publishers; indeed, her book has been published in the UK by Pluto Press, and her articles are available all over the internet, should anyone wish to read them. Nor, it should be said, was Johnstone murdered, tortured or driven out of her home, like hundreds of thousands of Bosnian citizens in the 1990s, whose rights Chomsky has never got round to championing. But assuming the right of a Western author not to have her writings rejected by publishers on political grounds is a more worthy cause than the right of Balkan untermenschen to life and limb, it remains to be seen whether Chomsky’s fellow left-wing libertarians will engage themselves in defence of Brockes as forthrightly as they did in defence of Johnstone.
What was it about Brockes’s interview that so rattled Chomsky ? Chomskyite ire focussed on the question-and-answer headline that introduced the interview:
Q. [Brockes]: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated ?
A. [Chomsky]: My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough.
This was a paraphrase, rather than a literal quotation, and one that was written by the newspaper rather than by Brockes herself, and for which she therefore cannot be held responsible. Nevertheless, it accurately summed up the essence of the matter: Chomsky had supported Johnstone, who claimed that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated. In his open letter to the Guardian of 13 November, Chomsky claimed it was simply a matter of defending freedom of speech: ‘The truthful part is that I said, and explained at length, that I regret not having strongly enough opposed the Swedish publisher’s decision to withdraw a book by Diana (not ‘Diane,’ as the Guardian would have it) Johnstone after it was bitterly attacked in the Swedish press… In the interview, whatever Johnstone may have said about Srebrenica never came up, and is entirely irrelevant in any event, at least to anyone with a minimal appreciation of freedom of speech.’
Chomsky therefore claimed his defence of Johnstone’s freedom of speech had been misrepresented as denial of the Srebrenica massacre. Indeed, Brockes’s portrayal of Chomsky’s alleged denial of Srebrenica was at the heart of Chomsky’s complaint. According to Brockes, Chomsky claimed ‘that during the Bosnian war the ‘massacre’ at Srebrenica was probably overstated.’ Brockes elaborated thus on Chomsky’s style: ‘Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things that he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.’ Chomsky’s outraged response was that ‘with five minutes research on the internet, any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre, never with quotes. That alone ends the story.’ The Guardian readers’ editor accepted the validity of Chomsky’s complaint, and threw in an apology to Johnstone for good measure: ‘Ms Brockes’s misrepresentation of Prof Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica stemmed from her misunderstanding of his support for Ms Johnstone. Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre.’
The big question is, of course, does Chomsky really deny the Srebrenica massacre ? Or, if he does not deny it outright, does he put such a spin on it that he denies it to all intents and purposes ?
Johnstone, for her part, denies it to all intents and purposes. Her book, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (London: Pluto Press, 2002) puts the words ‘Srebrenica massacre’ in quotes (p. 106). She then goes on to argue: ‘In trying to understand what happened at Srebrenica, a number of factors should be taken into account.’ These are, she argues, that Srebrenica and other ‘safe areas’ had ‘served as Muslim military bases under UN protection’; that the ‘Muslim military force stationed in Srebrenica – some 5,000 men under the command of Naser Oric, had carried out murderous raids against nearby Serb villages’; that ‘[Bosnian President] Izetbegovic pulled Naser Oric out of Srebrenica prior to the anticipated Serb offensive, deliberately leaving the enclave undefended’; and that ‘Insofar as Muslims were actually executed following the fall of Srebrenica, such crimes bear all the signs of spontaneous acts of revenge rather than a project of ‘genocide’’. Furthermore: ‘Six years after the summer of 1995, ICTY forensic teams had exhumed 2,631 bodies in the region, and identified fewer than 50. In an area where fighting had raged for years, some of the bodies were certainly of Serbs as well as of Muslims. Of these bodies, 199 were found to have been bound or blindfolded, and must reasonably be presumed on the basis of the material evidence to have been executed.’ She concludes: ‘War crimes ? The Serbs themselves do not deny that crimes were committed. Part of a plan of genocide ? For this there is no evidence whatsoever.’ (pp. 109-118).
To sum up Johnstone’s position on Srebrenica: she blames everything that happened there on the Muslims; claims they provoked the Serb offensive in the first place; then deliberately engineered their own killing; and then exaggerated their own death-toll. She denies that thousands of Muslims were massacred; suggesting there is no evidence for a number higher than 199 – less than 2.5% of the accepted figure of eight thousand. And she eschews the word ‘massacre’ in favour of ‘execution’ – as if it were a question of criminals on Death Row, not of innocent civilians. It is as if she were to claim that less than 150,000 Jews, rather than six million, had died in the Holocaust; that the Jews had provoked and engineered the Nazi killings; that these killings had been ‘executions’; and that the Jews had then exaggerated their death toll. She is ready to excuse the Srebrenica killings as retaliation for Oric’s earlier killings of Serb civilians – but does not mention that Oric’s crimes took place long after the war had already begun and Serb forces had begun slaughtering Muslims all over Bosnia. She does not mention how Srebrenica became an ‘enclave’ in the first place: through Serb aggression against, and conquest of, East Bosnia in 1992, and the killing and expulsion of the Muslim population that this involved – against which the Srebrenica Muslims were temporarily able to hold out as an ‘enclave’. All in all, this can reasonably be called denial; insofar as it is not complete denial – she recognises less than 2.5% of the massacre – it is an apologia for the Serb forces. The Guardian readers’ editor’s claim that ‘Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre’ is, therefore, at least half untrue.
But what about the other half, i.e. Chomsky ? An open letter to Ordfront, signed by Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, stated: ‘We regard Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.’ In his personal letter to Ordfront in defence of Johnstone, Chomsky wrote: ‘I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important.’ Chomsky makes no criticism here of Johnstone’s massacre denial, or indeed anywhere else – except in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated. Indeed, he endorses her revisionism: in response to Mikael van Reis’s claim that ‘She [Johnstone] insists that Serb atrocities – ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions – are western propaganda’, Chomsky replies that ‘Johnstone argues – and, in fact, clearly demonstrates – that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.’
In the same letter, Chomsky makes much of an allegedly positive review of Johnstone’s book in a British foreign-affairs journal: ‘I also know that it has been very favourably reviewed, e.g., by the British scholarly journal International Affairs, journal of the Royal Academy.’ He then continues, with his own idiosyncratic logic: ‘I don’t read Swedish journals of course, but it would be interesting to learn how the Swedish press explains the fact that their interpretation of Johnstone’s book differs so radically from that of Britain’s leading scholarly foreign affairs journal, International Affairs. I mentioned the very respectful review by Robert Caplan, of the University of Reading and Oxford [sic]. It is obligatory, surely, for those who condemn Johnstone’s book in the terms just reviewed to issue still harsher condemnation of International Affairs, as well as of the universities of Reading and Oxford, for allowing such a review to appear, and for allowing the author to escape censure.’ The essence of what Chomsky is saying, is that Johnstone received a positive review in a respectable scholarly journal, therefore her book must be good.
There are, first of all, a number of distortions in Chomsky’s claim: International Affairs is the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, not of the ‘Royal Academy’; the RIIA is a para-governmental think tank, not a scholarly institution, therefore it makes no sense to describe International Affairs as ‘Britain’s leading scholarly foreign affairs journal’; the reviewer was Richard, not Robert Caplan; and his review of Johnstone’s book was far from being as positive as Chomsky suggests. Caplan wrote: ‘Diana Johnstone has written a revisionist and highly contentious account of Western policy and the dissolution of Yugoslavia… Yet for all of the book’s constructive correctives, it is often difficult to recognize the world that Johnstone describes…The book also contains numerous errors of fact, on which Johnstone however relies to strengthen her case… Johnstone herself is very selective.’
Indeed, Caplan was overly polite in his criticisms of what is, in reality, an extremely poor book, one that is little more than a polemic in defence of the Serb-nationalist record during the wars of the 1990s – and an ill-informed one at that. Johnstone is not an investigative journalist who spent time in the former Yugoslavia doing fieldwork on the front-lines, like Ed Vulliamy, David Rohde or Roy Gutman. Nor is she a qualified academic who has done extensive research with Serbo-Croat primary sources, like Noel Malcolm or Norman Cigar. Indeed, she appears not to read Serbo-Croat, and her sources are mostly English-language, with a smattering of French and German. In short, she is an armchair Balkan amateur-enthusiast, and her book is of the sort that could be written from any office in Western Europe with access to the internet.
The quality of Johnstone’s ‘scholarship’ may be gauged from some of the Serb-nationalist falsehoods she repeats uncritically, such as the claim that the Serb Nazi-collaborationist leader Draza Mihailovic formed ‘the first armed guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in all of Europe’ (p. 291) – a myth long since exploded by serious historians (see for example Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1975, pp. 124, 137). Or Johnstone’s claim that Croatia in 1990 ‘rapidly restored the symbols of the dread 1941 [Nazi-puppet] state – notably the red and white checkerboard flag, which to Serbs was the equivalent of the Nazi swastika’ (p. 23) – a falsehood that can be refuted by a glance at any complete version of the Yugoslav constitution, which clearly shows that the Croatian chequerboard – far from being a fascist symbol equivalent to the swastika – was an official symbol of state in Titoist Yugoslavia (see, for example the 1950 edition of the Yugoslav constitution, published by Sluzbeni list, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard as a Yugoslav symbol of state on p. 115; or the 1974 edition published by Prosveta, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard – in full colour – at the start of the text). It would require an entire article to list and refute all the numerous errors and falsehoods in Johnstone’s book; Chomsky praises it because he sympathises with her political views, not because it has any scholarly merit.
Perhaps it would be unfair to label Chomsky a Srebrenica massacre-denier simply because he praises uncritically Johnstone’s massacre-denying book and endorses its conclusions. A fuller picture of Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica, however, can be gleaned from his interview with M. Junaid Alam of Left Hook on 17 December 2004, where he states that ‘Srebrenica was an enclave, lightly protected by UN forces, which was being used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages. It was known that there’s going to be retaliation. When there was a retaliation, it was vicious. They trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside, and apparently slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people slaughtered.’ The key words here are ‘retaliation’, ‘apparently’ and ‘estimates’; the slaughter ‘apparently’ took place; the thousands killed were mere ‘estimates’; they were, in any case, simply ‘retaliation’ for earlier Serb crimes. Note that while Chomsky raises doubts about the fact and scale of the killings, he is absolutely categorical that they were retribution for earlier Muslim crimes – the slaughter apparently took place, but if it did, then it was definitely retaliation. Read carefully, nothing that Chomsky says actually contradicts Johnstone’s massacre-denying claims cited above.
Chomsky then goes on to compare the Serb behaviour favourably with that of the Americans in Fallujah: ‘Well, with Fallujah, the US didn’t truck out the women and children, it bombed them out.’ Chomsky does not mention the thousands of Bosnian women and children raped and murdered by Serb forces in other parts of Bosnia; nor those blown to bits by the Serb shelling of Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns, choosing instead to focus on the sparing of the women and children of Srebrenica. Johnstone, too, makes much of this: ‘one thing should be obvious: one does not commit ‘genocide’ by sparing women and children’. In fact, the Nazis began the systematic extermination of Jewish adult males in the USSR in 1941 before they began the systematic extermination of Jewish women and children, and the Nazis, unlike the Serb forces a half century later, were not being restrained by the democratic Western media.
Chomsky again compared Serb behaviour at Srebrenica favourably with American behaviour at Fallujah in his article ‘Imperial Presidency’ (Canadian Dimension, January/February 2005, vol. 39, no. 1), where he wrote of ‘Srebrenica, almost universally described as ‘genocide’ in the West. In that case, as we know in detail from the Dutch government report and other sources, the Muslim enclave in Serb territory, inadequately protected, was used as a base for attacks against Serb villages, and when the anticipated reaction took place, it was horrendous. The Serbs drove out all but military age men, and then moved in to kill them. There are differences with Falluja. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, but trucked out, and there will be no extensive efforts to exhume the last corpse of the packrats in their warrens in Falluja. There are other differences, arguably unfair to the Serbs.’ Not quite massacre denial, it is true; more of a massacre minimisation – since Chomsky nowhere recognises the figure of eight-thousand Muslim dead, it is entirely possible that he reduces the massacre to the fraction suggested by Johnstone, and therefore denies it to all intents and purposes. And he is certainly at pains to contrast ‘the Serbs’ favourably with the Americans.
One might criticise Brockes for not giving a more nuanced portrayal of Chomsky’s vague yet complex view of the Srebrenica massacre – were it not for the fact that Chomsky is notorious for the deliberate use of obscure and confusing language, designed to muddy the waters as to his real views, and the use of verbal trickery aimed at confusing his opponents. Take his 2001 exchange with Christopher Hitchens over the question of whether the US bombing of Sudan’s pharmaceutical factory in 1998 was a crime equivalent to 11 September:
Chomsky stated: ‘That Hitchens cannot mean what he writes is clear, in the first place, from his reference to the bombing of Sudan. He must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime, and cannot intend what his words imply.’
Hitchens replied: ‘Since his [Chomsky’s] remarks are directed at me, I’ll instance a less-than-half-truth as he applies it to myself. I ‘must be unaware’, he writes, that I ‘express such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime.’ With his pitying tone of condescension, and his insertion of a deniable but particularly objectionable innuendo, I regret to say that Chomsky displays what have lately become his hallmarks.’
Chomsky then pulled his sleight-of-hand: ‘Hitchens claims that I accused him of a ‘propensity for racist contempt.’ I explicitly and unambiguously said the opposite.’
Given such word games and obfuscation, Chomsky should hardly complain when an earnest interviewer fails to interpret his well-camouflaged position as he would have it. Had he so wished, he could have avoided the entire imbroglio with Brockes by telling her unambiguously: ‘I recognise that several thousand Muslim civilians were massacred by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995′. Yet one rather suspects he wanted to have his cake and eat it: to put forward a ‘position’ that was compatible with those of the outright deniers, like Johnstone, but that nevertheless allows him formally to deny being a denier himself.
Instead of taking responsibility for his own insincerity and double-talk, he chose to punish the messenger – Brockes. He has then failed on two occasions – his letter published in the Guardian on 2 November and his open letter to the Guardian of 13 November – to state categorically that the massacre occurred in the way that it is understood to have done: as a massacre of several thousand innocent Muslim civilians by Serb forces. Nor is it true what Chomsky claims, that ‘with five minutes research on the internet, any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre, never with quotes.’ I have not yet discovered a single text on the internet in which Chomsky describes Srebrenica as a ‘massacre’; if such a text exists, it is not as easy to find as Chomsky claims. Chomsky’s actual position on Srebrenica must remain an open question until he can actually bring himself to speak and write in plain English – for which nobody should hold their breath. Under these circumstances, the Guardian readers’ editor had no need to issue its apology, and had no right to impugn the journalistic professionalism of Brockes. It is to Brockes, not to Chomsky, that the Guardian should be apologising.
The outrage of Chomsky and his fellow-travellers over his portrayal as a Srebrenica massacre-denier is particularly ironic, given that several of these fellow-travellers are themselves overt Srebrenica deniers. Chomsky is notorious for having gone on record in 1977, in an article co-written with a certain Ed Herman, as claiming that Khmer Rouge atrocities were being exaggerated by the Western media (‘Distortions at Fourth Hand’, The Nation, 25 June 1977). Recently, the same Ed Herman founded a ‘Srebrenica Research Group’ to propagate the view that the Srebrenica massacre never happened. In his essay ‘The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre’, Herman writes that ‘the evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys were executed, has always been problematic, to say the least’. Herman concludes: ‘The ‘Srebrenica massacre’ [note the quote marks] is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars… But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent. The disconnection with truth is epitomised by the fact that the original estimate of 8,000, including 5,000 ‘missing’ – who had left Srebrenica for Bosnian Muslim lines – was maintained even after it had been quickly established that several thousand had reached those lines and that several thousand more had perished in battle. This nice round number lives on today in the face of a failure to find the executed bodies and despite the absence of a single satellite photo showing executions, bodies, digging, or trucks transporting bodies for reburial.’
In this way, Chomsky’s close collaborator Herman unashamedly holds a view that Chomsky is outraged to have attributed to himself. Both Chomsky and Herman are regular contributors to the website ‘ZNet’ – a haven for neo-Stalinist die-hards, several of whom are outright Srebrenica deniers. The publication of Herman’s above-cited article was greeted with uncritical approval by ZNet blogger David Petersen, who praised its ‘powerful analysis’. The same Petersen then reacted with outrage when Brockes attributed the same Srebrenica-denying view that he himself endorses to his comrade Chomsky, describing her interview as ‘lies, smears and more lies’. Just fancy that ! If to deny the Srebrenica massacre is shameful – which it is – why do Johnstone, Petersen and Herman do so ? But if they really think that the Srebrenica massacre did not happen, or was vastly smaller and more justifiable than is usually claimed, why should they be so outraged at Chomsky being described as a denier ? The answer brings us back to where we began: the Chomskyites and ZNet people are, at heart, embarrassed by their own position. In this, too, they resemble the controversial British historian recently arrested in Austria.
In this debate over whether or not Chomsky denied a massacre, it is important not to lose sight of something more damning and much less controversial: that Chomsky quite openly denies that genocide took place, either in Srebrenica or in Bosnia as a whole, and makes no bones about putting the word ‘genocide’ in quotes – this despite the fact that an international tribunal, established by the UN, has convicted a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica. Indeed, the genocide-denial of Johnstone, Chomsky and their circle goes far beyond questioning the Srebrenica massacre. Chomsky was among those who supported the campaign in defence of Living Marxism (LM), the lunatic-fringe magazine that accused the news agency ITN of fabricating the existence of Serb concentration camps in Bosnia, on the basis of the writings of Thomas Deichmann, an amateur journalist and supporter of the Serb-nationalist cause. Deichmann claimed the camps in question were merely ‘detention centres’, and – although he had never visited them himself – presumed to know them well enough to claim that the pictures ITN had taken of them were deliberately intended to ‘mislead’ the Western public as to their true nature. ITN sued LM for libel, and the magazine was unable to produce a single witness who had actually seen the camps at first hand, whereas eye-witnesses such as Vulliamy testified as to their true, horrific character. LM‘s resounding defeat in the libel trial has not stopped Johnstone, in a recent commentary on the Chomsky-Brockes affair in the left-wing American magazine Counterpunch, from repeating LM‘s already discredited lies: “The issue raised by LM had to do with the way photographs taken at Trnopolje camp, by focusing on a thin man on the other side of a wire fence which in reality did not surround the Muslim inmates, but rather the ITN crew itself, was used to create the impression that what was happening in Bosnia was a repetition of a Nazi-style Holocaust.” The campaign against Brockes has therefore simultaneously become a campaign to rewrite the history of the Bosnian war to deny that genocide took place.
Chomsky’s denial that genocide took place in Bosnia, even after it has been established in international law that it did, and even after LM‘s lies about Serb camps were exposed as such in a British court, marks him down as a revisionist in the mould of Irving; the general thrust of Brockes’s exposure of him was therefore bang on target. In pandering to him, the Guardian has besmirched its own reputation and insulted the survivors of the genocide. Ironically, it was Guardian journalists such as Vulliamy and Maggie O’Kane who were in the forefront of bringing the genocide to light in 1992. That the Guardian – with this proud record – should have chosen to betray Brockes, its own journalist, by apologising on her behalf to an unabashed genocide-denier, means that this newspaper is now collaborating in the revisionist re-writing of the history of the Bosnian war.
Srebrenica Massacre 