[Fresh Ink] Breaking Yugoslavia: an interview with Diana Johnstone

[Richard Menec]

http://www.spectrezine.org/breaking-yugoslavia-interview-diana-johnstone

Breaking Yugoslavia: an interview with Diana Johnstone

March 16, 2010 14:11 | New Left Project in Europe

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and 
Western Delusions. She spoke to the New Left Project (NLP) on the wars in 
the former Yugoslavia, western involvement and the trial of Slobodan 
Milosevic.

What was your view of Yugoslavia before its dissolution. What was admirable 
about that society? What was not so admirable?

Every society has its good and bad points, and I am not qualified to make an 
overall judgement of such a complex society as former Yugoslavia.

>From my personal experience, what was not admirable was that in Tito's 
lifetime it was a personal dictatorship. Tito didn't run everything, but he 
had the right of final decision in case of conflict. The harshest repression 
was reserved for communists loyal to the Soviet Union after Tito's break 
with Stalin in 1948. But repression is not all that is wrong with a 
dictatorship, a system which encourages hypocrisy and lack of recourse for 
unfair or unwise measures. Nevertheless, despite the undemocratic regime, it 
was always easy to find critical intellectuals in Yugoslavia who thought for 
themselves and said what they thought.

Yugoslavia's "self-managed socialism" was certainly an improvement over the 
Soviet model. It provided full employment, which is what people most acutely 
miss today. It is noteworthy that many former critics of the socialist 
system today declare that the so-called free market democracy they have now 
is much worse.

As the only European member of the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslavia enjoyed 
privileged relations with Third World countries, notably in the Arab world. 
The Yugoslav passport was welcome everywhere, and Yugoslavs enjoyed their 
freedom to travel throughout the world as citizens of a country whose 
international prestige was great for its size.

Tito's policy toward the great ethnic diversity of Yugoslavia had been to 
give considerable cultural and linguistic rights to each group, a policy 
which is pursued today by Serbia - although not by Croatia and Slovenia. 
(For example, Serbia provides bilingual schools using the mother tongue of 
Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian and Slovak minorities.)

If, in 1990, there had been a national referendum on the subject, I have 
little doubt that an overwhelming majority of Yugoslavs would have voted to 
maintain the federation. But elections were held only within the various 
republics, enabling the bureaucracies of Croatia and Slovenia to promote 
their secessionist projects.

You argue that Western governments bear significant responsibility for the 
wars in the former Yugoslavia by encouraging the secession of the 
constituent republics. Was the West not merely supporting those states in 
their struggle for self-determination?

There is nothing in international law or diplomatic practice that justifies 
secession from an existing state on grounds of "self-determination". There 
is great confusion and hypocrisy on this point. First one can point to 
comparisons: Why did the United States not support the struggle of the 
Basques against Spain, which has been going on much longer? Why did they not 
support Corsicans against France, Scottish nationalists against Britain, the 
Kurds against Turkey - a violent struggle with deep historic roots, 
including Western promises to Kurds after World War I? Why did they not 
support the separatist "Padania" movement that was growing about the same 
time in northern Italy, seeking separation from the poorer south of Italy - 
a movement that had a great deal in common with the Slovenian separatist 
movement? The answer is obvious: the United States does not support 
separatist movements in countries they consider their allies. The targets 
are either countries they consider rivals, like Russia or China, or 
countries that are too weak to resist, and where they can obtain totally 
dependent client states from the breakup - which is what happened with 
Yugoslavia.

Second there are the simple facts of the matter. History, to start with. 
Former Yugoslavia was not formed by conquest, but by a voluntary association 
after World War I as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Croats 
and Serbs speak essentially the same south Slavic language, and Slovenian is 
quite similar. This association was sought by Croatian leaders who wished to 
leave Austro-Hungarian rule and who actually coined the word "Yugoslavia", 
meaning land of southern Slavs. Since Serbia already existed as an 
independent country, Serb leaders were wary of this union, but accepted it 
under urging from the Western powers, France and Britain.

After Tito's death in 1980, Yugoslavia entered an extremely clumsy phase of 
political transition, which was distorted by severe economic regression 
caused by the debt crisis. Since Tito's method of rule had been to respond 
to unrest by decentralization rather than by democratization, the local 
Communist parties in each republic of the federal state, as well as the 
autonomous provinces within Serbia, enjoyed considerable autonomy. Rivalry 
between the party bureaucracies undermined national unity. The dynamic thus 
tended toward dissolution rather than democratization. This trend was 
encouraged by outside forces (German and Austrian organizations represented 
by the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Otto von Habsburg, who was very 
active in this phase) which supported secession of the parts of Yugoslavia 
which had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I, 
Croatia and Slovenia.

Now, assuming that "self-determination" would lead to dissolution of the 
federation, there was the crucial issue of how this would be done. The Serbs 
interpreted the constitution to argue that Yugoslavia was a political union 
of three peoples - Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, who would have to negotiate 
the terms of secession. The Slovenes and especially the Croats maintained 
that the constituent units were the "republics" in the boundaries set for 
them by Tito during World War II, which left sizeable Serb populations in 
both Croatia (about 12%) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (a relative majority up 
until the 1971 census). Germany persuaded the United States and the European 
Union to accept the Croatian claim without ever seriously considering the 
Serbian argument. This was unacceptable to the Serb minority in Croatia who 
had been persecuted by Nazi-sponsored independent Croatia during World War 
II, and whose "self-determination" was thereby denied. This was the cause of 
the civil war in Croatia.

Both Slovenia and Croatia enjoyed full equality and autonomy within 
Yugoslavia. In no way could they be considered oppressed minorities. Tito 
was a Croat as was the last functioning prime minister of Yugoslavia, Ante 
Markovic, not to mention a disproportionate number of senior officers in the 
Yugoslav armed forces. As the richest part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia's desire 
to secede was based almost solely on the desire to "jump the queue" and join 
the rich EU ahead of the rest of the country, which it succeeded in doing. 
The Croatian secessionist movement was nationalistic, with strong racist 
overtones, and was strongly supported by a Croatian diaspora with crucial 
political influence in Germany and in Washington (in the office of Senator 
Bob Dole). In the absence of any legal justification for unnegotiated 
secession, nationalist leaders in both Slovenia and Croatia provoked units 
of the Yugoslav army stationed in their territory and used the inevitable 
response as their justification for seceding. This succeeded only because it 
was supported by Western governments and media - otherwise the Yugoslav army 
would have held the country together. Instead, the collapsing Yugoslav army 
effort to preserve the federation, as it was supposed to do, was denounced 
as a "Serbian invasion". Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic handled this 
crisis badly, but he did not, as accused, instigate the dissolution of 
Yugoslavia.

You have suggested that there are certain continuities between the policies 
of the German government and the objectives of the Third Reich in the 
Balkans. Can you describe those continuities for us?

Even before the Third Reich, the government of Kaiser Wilhelm and even more 
the democratic Weimar Republic supported self-determination of ethnic 
minorities, and the Federal Republic of Germany continues to do so today, 
for reasons of national interest and ideology. The "revenge" against Serbia, 
and detachment of former Austro-Hungarian territories within Yugoslavia, 
harks back to World War I. Of course, the Third Reich cut Yugoslavia into 
pieces, and on that point the 1991 German policy was more than disturbingly 
reminiscent, it was essentially the same. Germany has reasons for wanting to 
bring Slovenia and Croatia into its own sphere of influence. In a sense I am 
more critical of Western governments which followed the German policy 
without bothering or daring to evaluate the situation clearly for 
themselves. As this turned out to be disastrous, they had to blame the devil 
Milosevic for everything, in order to cover their own mistakes.

Why did the United States so strongly support Bosnian secession?

I think this support was the product of a number of factors. One, pointed 
out by former State Department official George Kenney, was the influence of 
media reports, in turn heavily influenced by a propaganda campaign run by 
Ruder Finn public relations agency on behalf of the government of Croatia, 
and later the Bosnian Muslims, which succeeded in presenting the Serbs as 
"new Nazis". This public relations campaign was hugely successful with the 
public and politicians alike. American foreign policy-making can be 
vulnerable to the propaganda of lobbies, and the Croatian lobby was active 
and influential. The Bosnian lobby was smaller but very well connected, 
notably through Mohammed Sacirbey, the American son of a colleague of 
Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic who chose him to be Bosnia's 
ambassador to the United States. There was a natural class affinity between 
American officials like Richard Holbrooke and the Bosnian Muslims, who had 
been the upper class under the Ottoman Empire and presented themselves as 
more anti-communist than the Serbs.

A second element was that since Germany was emerging as the sponsor of 
Croatia, the United States could have its own client state by supporting the 
Bosnian Muslims. Some US leaders thought that siding with the Muslim party 
in Bosnia would make a good impression in the Muslim world, counterbalancing 
US support to Israel. The late influential Congressman Tom Lantos, who was 
chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, called US support for the 
Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo independence "just a reminder to the 
predominantly Muslim-led governments in this world" that "the United States 
leads the way for creation of a predominantly Muslim country in the very 
heart of Europe." Support to Bosnian Muslims was strongly advocated by the 
pro-Israel neo-conservatives. It is hard to believe that neo-con guru 
Richard Perle served as advisor to Muslim leader Izetbegovic at the Dayton 
peace talks with no private agenda of his own. The Clinton administration 
found it natural to do a favour to the Afghan mujahidin (which then included 
Osama bin Laden), whom they had supported and used against the Soviet Union, 
by helping them fight the Orthodox Christian Serbs in the Bosnian civil war.

But perhaps the main cause should be seen in the main effect: to reassert 
United States supremacy in Europe. The August 1995 NATO bombing "marked a 
historic development in post-Cold War relations between Europe and the 
United States", wrote Richard Holbrooke in his memoirs, citing columnist 
William Pfaff who alone seemed to get the point: "The United States today is 
again Europe's leader: there is no other." (Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, 
Random House, 1998, p.101.) By the policy of an "even playing field", the 
United States created a stalemate between the Bosnian parties which allowed 
Holbrooke to take charge of what he called "the Bosnian end game" at Dayton. 
The United States was able to pose as "the indispensable nation".

Some have accused you of downplaying or even denying the Srebrenica 
massacre. How do you respond to such accusations?

First of all, I think these accusations are designed primarily to distract 
public attention from the main focus of my writing on Yugoslavia, and in 
particular my book, Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. 
That focus is political. As the title indicates, my book is not about 
Srebrenica. It is about the historical and political background, and the 
deception and self-deception involved in media coverage and Western 
policy-making that led to the illegal NATO war of aggression in 1999. The 
only reason I wrote about Srebrenica at all is that I could not very well 
avoid the subject, but I stated from the start I was not writing about what 
happened at Srebrenica (on which I claim no special knowledge) but about the 
political uses of it. I am not a war correspondent but a political analyst. 
The trouble is that some people do not welcome political analysis of the 
Balkan conflicts, and use Srebrenica to ban it. If mothers are weeping, how 
can anyone engage in such a heartless exercise as political analysis? 
Judging complex events solely on the basis of images and emotions, which are 
often deceptive, is infantile. But we are living in a period of infantile 
regression.

For instance, the wives and mothers of the men who were killed deserve 
sympathy, but is their individual grief any greater if their son was one of 
several hundred or one of several thousand? Why this insistence on a 
particular number, which has not been clearly proved? Isn't it possible, and 
even likely, that the genuine grief of mourning women is exploited for 
political ends? How many people are in a position to know exactly what 
happened at Srebrenica? Where are the documents, where are the photographs? 
Yet people who know nothing are ready to consider it scandalous if someone 
says openly, "I don't know exactly what happened."

I do know that from the very start of the Yugoslav tragedy, there were 
significant massacres of Serb civilians (for instance, in the town of Gospic 
in Croatia) that were studiously ignored in the West. But I do not care to 
engage in competitive victimhood.

As for Srebrenica, certainly any execution of prisoners is a war crime and 
deserves punishment, even if the figure of 8,000 is certainly exaggerated, 
since it includes men who died in ambush while trying to escape, or even men 
who actually did escape. But whatever the number of victims, a single 
massacre of military-age men while sparing women and children cannot in my 
opinion be correctly described as "genocide" - unless the term "genocide" is 
redefined to fit the single case of Srebrenica. And this is precisely what 
was done by the International Criminal Tribunal on former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 
in The Hague. In order to convict General Radislav Krstic (who was not even 
present at the scene) of complicity in "genocide", the ICTY judges ruled in 
August 2001 that killing a large number of Muslim men from Srebrenica was 
"genocide" because of the "patriarchal" nature of their society. Women and 
children survivors were too insignificant in such a patriarchal society to 
matter! This preposterous verdict simply confirmed the obvious fact that 
ICTY is working for those who set it up, choose its judges and pay its 
expenses: that is, essentially, NATO. It is there to justify the NATO 
interpretation of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, by putting the entire 
burden of blame on the Serbs. Unless an Orwellian future bans free 
historical inquiry, I am confident that my critical appraisal of ICTY will 
be justified by history.

Why do you believe NATO carried out its bombing war against Serbia?

The essential reason was to save NATO from obsolescence after the collapse 
of the Soviet bloc, whose supposed threat had been its ostensible raison d'être. 
The United States came up with a new "humanitarian mission", and the 
large-scale NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 served to prove that NATO 
could get away with it, without United Nations authorization. This was "the 
war to start wars". It is regularly cited by apologists as "the good war" 
which proves that "human rights" constitute the most efficient excuse for 
aggression. It was indeed a perfect little war, waged safely from the air 
with all the casualties on the ground, whether Serb or Albanian.

How do you view the UK's role in the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia?

As absolutely shameful. The British foreign office certainly had experts 
able to understand the complexities of the Yugoslav situation, and indeed 
the conservative government hesitated. Lord Carrington and then Lord Owen, 
if supported, might have brokered an early peace in Bosnia. But Tony Blair 
preferred to strut the stage of "humanitarian intervention", and most of the 
left swallowed the wild tale according to which the world's most powerful 
military alliance was henceforth motivated by sentimental concern for the 
underdog.

What did you make of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic?

That trial actually aroused my first admiration for Slobodan Milosevic. He 
defended himself, and his country, with great courage and intelligence, and 
successfully disproved most of the charges against him, even though he died 
before the defence could make its case. The ICTY was set up largely to 
convict Milosevic, and would surely have found a way to do so regardless of 
the evidence. His death spared them that trouble. Of course, Western media 
failed totally to report fairly on the proceedings.

You speak of your admiration for Milosevic "defending his country" in the 
Hague. But is there not a wider and more fundamental sense in which 
Milosevic's rule was by no means beneficial for Serbia? V. P. Gagnon Jr. has 
written about how Milosevic used war as a tool against movements for 
democratic reform, by effectively changing the subject to whether people 
were pro or anti-Serb at any point where these movements became too strong. 
Karel Turza and Eric Gordy have written about the deleterious effect that 
Milosevic's rule had on Serbian society and culture. Little of this speaks 
of a man worthy of admiration, even from a Serbian perspective. Was 
Milosovic defending Serbia, or just defending his regime?

When I said that Milosevic on trial in The Hague aroused my first admiration 
for the man, I was obviously making the distinction between Milosevic as 
President and Milosevic as prisoner of a biased tribunal that had been set 
up to convict him. However unfortunate his policies as president, he became 
a victim when he was illegally shipped off to The Hague, in a rather sordid 
deal between prime minister Zoran Djindjic, who violated Serbian law in the 
hope of economic rewards, and the NATO powers, who needed the trial in order 
to justify their 1999 bombing campaign.

What is meant by "democratic reforms"? Milosevic did introduce a multi-party 
system, which is the basic democratic reform. Whatever his faults, it is by 
no means clear that his political adversaries in the early 1990s would have 
been better for the Serbian people than he was. Now that Serbia has 
Western-approved "democratic" governments, major industries have been sold 
to Western corporations, the media are more uniform than ever, and the 
economic situation of the majority of the population has worsened 
considerably.

Many people in Serbia who hated Milosevic when he was in office admired his 
defence at The Hague.  His self-defence was automatically a defence of his 
country, since the totally arbitrary (and unproven) charge of a "joint 
criminal enterprise" in effect implicated collective guilt, since the 
alleged enterprise had no defined limits.

Little blame for the Balkan wars appears to attach to the Serb side in your 
account. Yet Bosnian Serb figures such as Vojislav Seselj, Radovan Karadzic 
and Ratko Mladic have stated publicly that there was a drive for a Greater 
Serbia. Doubtless there have been many attempts to reduce the conflict to 
nothing more than a case of Serbian aggression, but while correcting for 
that is it not also important to still leave room for attaching the 
appropriate level of blame to the Serbian side?

Testifying at the Milosevic trial, Vojislav Seselj stated clearly that 
Milosevic was not in favour of Greater Serbia, and that he had slandered him 
politically for that very reason, because Seselj himself did favour Greater 
Serbia. The meaning of "Greater Serbia" is complicated, and I have dealt 
with it in my book, "Fools' Crusade". But Serbs were divided on the matter, 
and Milosevic for one did not advocate a "Greater Serbia".  Milosevic was 
competing with politicians such as Vuk Draskovic and Zoran Djindjic, whom 
the West considers "democratic", but who were far more nationalistic than he 
was.  No Serbian politician could be totally indifferent to Serb populations 
cut off from Serbia by the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, 
starting in 1992, Milosevic signed onto a series of potential peace accords 
that left Serbs outside of shrinking Yugoslavia, and were clearly 
incompatible with a greater Serbia.

I do not presume to attach "appropriate levels of blame" to the various 
Yugoslav parties.  I simply point out certain facts, and the only blame that 
really interests me is that of the Western powers and especially of the 
United States.  That is my responsibility as an American citizen.  It is the 
United States that exploited the tragedy to strengthen NATO, and the people 
of Yugoslavia who suffered and are still suffering.

Many of our readers will find it hard to accept your expressing admiration 
for Milosovic. Its well understood that the West portrays its enemies 
dishonestly (take Saddam's mythical WMD, for example). But to praise the 
"courage" of a man widely seen (including by those who are no fans of 
Western power) as having a lot of blood on his hands goes a good deal 
further than this. Is your choice of words here really appropriate?

I am not going to change what I say because many of your readers, as you 
allege, have a limited capacity to understand the complexities of human 
character.  Of course, all leaders of countries involved in wars can be said 
to "have blood on their hands". The stereotype of an inhuman Milosevic is a 
fictional propaganda creation, like the long line of "Hitlers" the West 
keeps discovering. But supposing the man was utterly ruthless, does that 
preclude courage?  I fear our "humanitarian" age is adopting an 
unprecedentedly simplistic notion of what people are - either innocent lambs 
or savage beasts.  Look at many of the heroes of ancient tragedy, who were 
complicated enough to be ruthless and courageous, and often displayed a 
mixture of good and bad qualities.  If we are incapable of recognizing the 
humanity of our chosen enemies (and Milosevic was a chosen enemy, who 
actually liked the United States where he had lived as a banker, and never 
even slightly threatened the West), then there can be no peace in the world.

What have been the consequences for the constituent republics of becoming 
independent states?

In general, secession is beneficial to the bureaucrats. Someone who was only 
a minor official in a large country gets to be Cabinet Minister, or 
ambassador. So secession was a good thing for members of the bureaucracy in 
each statelet. It has also been good for a minority who live off crime and 
corruption. For the rest of the population, it was beneficial primarily to 
Slovenia, whose leaders succeeded in getting into the European Union ahead 
of the others. Of course it was not beneficial to the small population of 
Yugoslavs who were not ethnic Slovenians and found themselves living in 
Slovenia without any civil status.

Croatia has the advantage of strong German support, but so far this has not 
yielded all the economic benefits hoped for. Most of the Serb population has 
been driven out, which is of course satisfying to the racist Croat 
nationalists, and does not seem to disturb the Western leftist 
multiculturalists.

Otherwise, people who once were citizens of an independent, medium-sized 
European country find themselves confined in small mutually hostile 
statelets, dependent on outside powers and poorer than before. Outside 
intervention has served to exacerbate ethnic hatreds, and continues to do 
so, notably in Bosnia and Kosovo.

The political situation of most of the successor states is precarious and 
further tragedy is almost certain.

This interview was conducted and first published by the New Left Project

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