The Rational Destruction of YugoslaviaMichael Parenti
In 1999, the U.S. national security state — which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads — launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men.
All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo.
Or so we were asked to believe.
In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the U.S. was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places.
And U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with some 300 major overseas support bases — all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism. Demonizing the SerbsThe propaganda campaign to demonize the Serbs fits the larger policy of the Western powers.
The Serbs were targeted for demonization because they were the largest nationality and the one most opposed to the breakup of Yugoslavia.
None other than Charles Boyd, former deputy commander of the U.S. European command, commented on it in 1994: “The popular image of this war in Bosnia is one of unrelenting Serb expansionism.
Much of what the Croatians call ‘the occupied territories’ is land that has been held by Serbs for more that three centuries.
The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia. . . .
In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs.”
While U.S. leaders claim they want peace, Boyd concludes, they have encouraged a deepening of the war.11
But what of the atrocities they committed?
All sides committed atrocities, but the reporting was consistently one-sided.
Grisly incidents of Croat and Muslim atrocities against the Serbs rarely made it into the U.S. press, and when they did they were accorded only passing mention.12
Meanwhile Serb atrocities were played up and sometimes even fabricated, as we shall see.
Recently, three Croatian generals were indicted by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal for the bombardment and deaths of Serbs in Krajina and elsewhere.
Where were U.S. leaders and U.S. television crews when these war crimes were being committed?
John Ranz, chair of Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, USA, asks:
Where were the TV cameras when hundreds of Serbs were slaughtered by Muslims near Srebrenica?
The official line, faithfully parroted in the U.S. media, is that the Serbs committed all the atrocities at Srebrenica.
Before uncritically ingesting the atrocity stories dished out by U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned news media, we might recall the five hundred premature babies whom Iraqi soldiers laughingly ripped from incubators in Kuwait, a story repeated and believed until exposed as a total fabrication years later.
During the Bosnian war in 1993, the Serbs were accused of having an official policy of rape. “Go forth and rape” a Bosnian Serb commander supposedly publicly instructed his troops.
The source of that story never could be traced.
The commander's name was never produced. As far as we know, no such utterance was ever made.
Even the New York Times belatedly ran a tiny retraction, coyly allowing that “the existence of ‘a systematic rape policy’ by the Serbs remains to be proved.”14
Bosnian Serb forces supposedly raped anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 Muslim women.
The Bosnian Serb army numbered not more than 30,000 or so, many of whom were engaged in desperate military engagements.
A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that stories of massive Serbian rapes originated with the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian governments and had no credible supporting evidence.
Common sense would dictate that these stories be treated with the utmost skepticism — and not be used as an excuse for an aggressive and punitive policy against Yugoslavia.
The mass rape propaganda theme was resuscitated in 1999 to justify NATO’s renewed attacks on Yugoslavia.
A headline in the San Francisco Examiner tells us: “SERB TACTIC IS ORGANIZED RAPE, KOSOVO REFUGEES SAY.”
Only at the bottom of the story, in the nineteenth paragraph, do we read that reports gathered by the Kosovo mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe found no such organized rape policy.
The actual number of rapes were in the dozens “and not many dozens,” according to the OSCE spokesperson.
This same story did note that the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal sentenced a Bosnian Croat military commander to ten years in prison for failing to stop his troops from raping Muslim women in 1993 — an atrocity we heard little about when it was happening.15
The Serbs were blamed for the infamous Sarajevo market massacre of 1992. But according to the report leaked out on French TV, Western intelligence knew that it was Muslim operatives who had bombed Bosnian civilians in the marketplace in order to induce NATO involvement. Even international negotiator David Owen, who worked with Cyrus Vance, admitted in his memoir that the NATO powers knew all along that it was a Muslim bomb.16 However, the well-timed fabrication served its purpose of inducing the United Nations to go along with the U.S.-sponsored sanctions.
On one occasion, notes Barry Lituchy, the New York Times ran a photo purporting to be of Croats grieving over Serbian atrocities when in fact the murders had been committed by Bosnian Muslims. The Times printed an obscure retraction the following week.17
We repeatedly have seen how “rogue nations” are designated and demonized.
The process is predictably transparent.
First, the leaders are targeted.
Qaddafi of Libya was a “Hitlerite megalomaniac” and a “madman.”
Noriega of Panama was a “a swamp rat,” one of the world’s worst “drug thieves and scums,” and “a Hitler admirer.”
Saddam Hussein of Iraq was “the Butcher of Baghdad,” a “madman,” and “worse than Hitler.”
Each of these leaders then had their countries attacked by U.S. forces and U.S.-led sanctions.
What they really had in common was that each was charting a somewhat independent course of self-development or somehow was not complying with the dictates of the global free market and the U.S. national security state.18
Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has been described by Bill Clinton as “a new Hitler.”
Yet he was not always considered so.
At first, the Western press, viewing the ex-banker as a bourgeois Serbian nationalist who might hasten the break-up of the federation, hailed him as a “charismatic personality.”
Only later, when they saw him as an obstacle rather than a tool, did they begin to depict him as the demon who “started all four wars.”
This was too much even for the managing editor of the U.S. establishment journal Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria.
He noted in the New York Times that Milosevic who rules “an impoverished country that has not attacked its neighbors — is no Adolf Hitler.
He is not even Saddam Hussein.”19
Some opposition radio stations and newspapers were reportedly shut down during the NATO bombing.
But, during my trip to Belgrade in August 1999, I observed nongovernmental media and opposition party newspapers going strong.
There are more opposition parties in the Yugoslav parliament than in any other European parliament.
Yet the government is repeatedly labeled a dictatorship.
Milosevic was elected as president of Yugoslavia in a contest that foreign observers said had relatively few violations.
As of the end of 1999, he presided over a coalition government that included four parties.
Opposition groups openly criticized and demonstrated against his government.
Yet he was called a dictator.
The propaganda campaign against Belgrade has been so relentless that prominent personages on the Left — who oppose the NATO policy against Yugoslavia — have felt compelled to genuflect before this demonization orthodoxy.20
Thus do they reveal themselves as having been influenced by the very media propaganda machine they criticize on so many other issues.
To reject the demonized image of Milosevic and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim they are faultless or free of crimes.
It is merely to challenge the one-sided propaganda that laid the grounds for NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia.
More information at:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html
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