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Liberals and much of the left have been badly bamboozled on
recent Yugoslav history and the role of the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, with former Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic having been hyper-demonized and the
history of the Balkans rewritten to fit what Lenard Cohen calls
the “paradise lost/loathsome leaders” paradigm. But numerous
serious scholars have rejected this history and regard the U.S.
and other NATO powers as heavily responsible for the disasters
since 1990. Lord David Owen’s Balkan
Odyssey, and his testimony before the Tribunal, make it very
clear that Milosevic was eager for a settlement of the Bosnian
wars well before the Dayton agreement in 1995, and that he
regularly had major conflicts of interest with the Bosnian Serbs.
It is clear from Owens, as well as from other experts that the
U.S. government played a key role in the failure of the 1991
Vance plan, the 1992 Cutileiro plan, and the 1993-94 Vance-Owen
and Owen Stoltenberg plans, as the Clinton administration armed
the Bosnian Muslims, and later the KLA in Kosovo, while
encouraging them both to hope (and work) for U.S.-NATO military
intervention on their behalf.
Milosevic was not indicted along with Mladic and Karadzic in
1995 for the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in prior years, so the
belated attempt in The Hague in 2002 to make him responsible for
those killings suggests that UN war crimes tribunal chief
prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte did this because she saw that the
killings in Kosovo fell far short of anything she could pass off
as “genocide.” Even establishment spokespersons like retired
U.S. Air Force General Charles Boyd and UN official Cedric
Thornberry have stressed that the Bosnian killings in the years
1991-1995 were by no means confined to those by Bosnian Serbs:
the Croatians and Bosnian Muslims, the latter supplemented by
thousands of imported mujahideen, slaughtered many thousands of
their ethnic enemies in the area. But the Tribunal,
organized, funded, and essentially controlled by the U.S. and
Britain, was only interested in pursuing NATO targets, and these
were almost exclusively Serbs.
There is now substantial literature that makes a strong case
that the Tribunal is not only a crudely political arm of NATO,
but that it is a “rogue court.” As a political arm, it
regularly cleared the ground for NATO military actions and since
that victory the Tribunal has worked hard to prove that the NATO
war was just.
The Milosevic trial is the main vehicle for proving NATO’s
virtue, though it has been a major flop in proving its case and
maintaining an image of fairness and justice. The latter problem
was nicely illustrated in the Tribunal’s recent privileged
treatment of the U.S. government and Wesley Clark. Thus, the
U.S. government was given the right to demand a closed session
of the court and to redact testimony; Clark was allowed to
communicate with outsiders and obtain and insert into the record
a truth testimonial from Bill Clinton, in straightforward
violation of Judge May’s trial rules. Readers of the New
York Times (or In These Times and The Nation)
will also never know that with William Walker on the stand,
Judge May’s deference to the “Ambassador” was laughable: during
direct examination by the prosecutors there was not one
interruption, while during Milosevic’s cross-examination he
interrupted 70 times, and wouldn’t allow him
to ask Walker, the man who grieved so over deaths at Racak,
about his earlier crude apologetics for the killing of the six
Jesuit leaders and others in El Salvador.
A recent example of the kind of analysis that repeats the
canards common to the liberal “conventional wisdom” is
FPIF’s commentary by Stacy Sullivan, of the Institute for War
and Peace Reporting (IWPR), on “Milosevic and Genocide: Has
the Prosecution Made Its Case?” (http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402milosevic.html).
IWPR is funded by the State Department, USAID, the National
Endowment for Democracy, the Open Society Institute, and half a
dozen other Western governments, and it has long served as a de
facto propaganda arm of NATO. Sullivan is most noted for her
New Republic classic of hardline pro-war and vengeance
propaganda, “Milosevic’s Willing Executioners” (May
9, 1999). Sullivan’s FPIF article is in the same mode, taking
it as a given that the Tribunal is an apolitical instrument of
justice and that we have an honest and not a show trial.
An Annotated Response to Sullivan
Her first sentence says that the prosecutors announced right
off that they would “prove” Milosevic guilty of genocide.
She fails to mention that the Bosnia charges were added
belatedly, that Milosevic had not been charged with them at the
time of the actual killings, and that while Del Ponte said she
would “prove” this guilt she admittedly didn’t yet have
the evidence. Indict, publicly and flamboyantly charge, and then
look for the evidence, has long been the Tribunal’s modus
operandi.
Sullivan’s second sentence mentions that there were “300
witnesses,” “some high level insiders who have turned on
their former master,” ”thousands of pages of documents,”
etc. We are supposed to be impressed with this sheer volume of
smoke that must show a genocidal fire. She
doesn’t mention that Canadian law professor Michael Mandel
gave Del Ponte “thousands of pages” of documents in April
1999 showing NATO war crimes, which of course Del Ponte ignored,
and that thousands of pages have been published and innumerable
witnesses could have been supplied as witnesses for the many
thousands of Serb victims in Bosnia. It is extremely easy to
find victimized people in civil wars who will testify to
maltreatment if given the opportunity and even paid for their
trouble, and some and perhaps most will even be telling the
painful truth. But only a propagandist will mention the 300
witnesses as if this alone is a serious consideration in proving
“genocide.”
As regards the “high level insiders,” in fact the
prosecution came up with few that were high level and fewer
still who were cooperative. One of their prime witnesses,
Ratomir Tanic, appears to have been a conman, who was so
“inside” that he couldn’t even describe the location of
the president’s office. Genuine insiders
like former Yugoslav president Zoran Lilic and member of the
Yugoslav presidency Borislav Jovic confirmed Milosevic on almost
all key points. Rade Markovic, the former head of Yugoslav
security, who had everything to gain from denouncing his old
boss, also defended Milosevic on all key points while renouncing
a statement he claimed had been extracted from him by threats
and torture during a 17 month stint in prison. Sullivan
predictably doesn’t mention that many “insiders” and
others were bribed and threatened with heavy sentences unless
they acquiesced to plea-bargains.
Sullivan claims that many legal experts are doubtful about a
successful genocide charge because the Tribunal “has set the
bar for doing so extremely high.” They might have to prove
that Milosevic “orchestrated the breakup of Yugoslavia with
the specific intent to destroy Bosnian Muslims as a
people…[with] unequivocal evidence of genocidal
intent…calling for the liquidation of all of the Bosnian
Muslims…” The idea that Milosevic wanted the breakup of
Yugoslavia is ideology run wild and contradicts the usual
formula that he attacked Slovenia and Croatia in an attempt to
prevent their exit from Yugoslavia (for a summary of an
alternative view of the Balkan wars, see Edward S. Herman, “Diana
Johnstone on the Balkan Wars,” http://www.monthlyreview.org/0203herman.htm,
as well as a recent piece by George Szamuely for FPIF, “The
Yugoslavian Fairytale,” http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405fairytale.html).
As there was a lot of back-and-forth ethnic cleansing and
killing in Bosnia, and the celebrated Srebrenica killings were
comprised entirely of military-aged men, many killed in
fighting, and after the Bosnian Serbs had admittedly separated
out the women and children and moved them to safe refuge, intent
and plan (as well as the still elusive Milosevic control of the
Bosnian Serb forces) would seem rather essential to proving that
Milosevic was guilty of genocide in any sense. Besides, Del
Ponte said she was definitely going to “prove” genocide.
What concept did she have in mind?
What constitutes genocide?
Sullivan doesn’t have a clue on the level of Tribunal
“bars” for charges of genocide. These have proved to be
wonderfully flexible, and her claim of a too-high bar has no
basis in any Tribunal actions but is rather a form of pressure
to get the bar low enough to assure the show trial’s proper
result. In Bosnian Serb General Krstic’s case, the Tribunal
found Krstic guilty of genocide by making it virtually the same
thing as ethnic cleansing, and extending the concept to
killing only armed men in a single small town!
Assuming that this was a valid case of genocide, Sullivan
alleges that an “acquittal would have serious consequences for
attempts to prosecute genocide in the future.” If it isn’t a
valid case of genocide it wouldn’t interfere with future
efforts at all. However, if it is a corrupt case brought by an
alliance that actually carried out the “supreme crime” of
aggression in violation of the UN Charter in attacking
Yugoslavia, using the Tribunal first as a war-facilitating
instrument and then as a means of justifying the aggression,
losing the case would be a plus for the international rule of
law. This is not likely to happen, given
the fact that the Tribunal is an arm of the NATO powers,
although the case made by the prosecution has been so weak that
it is not inconceivable that Milosevic might only be found
guilty of “crimes against humanity.”
Great Powers and Genocide
What might really interfere with efforts to pursue genocide
would be if the United States or another major power engaged in
genocide or gave it support, as there are no mechanisms to
prevent or punish acts such as these in the New World Order, and
major powers are essentially exempt. Thus, the “sanctions of
mass destruction” imposed by the U.S.
and Britain on Iraq from 1991-2002 killed four or five times as
many civilians as died from all causes in the Balkans wars of
the 1990s, and as Thomas Nagy and Joy Gordon have shown,
these deaths were brought about deliberately; and Suharto’s
and his successors’ operations in Indonesia and East Timor
were big-time genocidal, but under Western, and notably U.S. and
British, protection. The problem of this exemption does not
occur to Sullivan.
Sullivan argues that “by far the most serious consequences
of an acquittal on genocide charges…would be for Bosnia’s
victims,” ignoring the Croat and Serbian victims, of which
there were many thousands. (The largest single ethnic cleansing
during the Balkan wars was of Serbs driven out of the Krajina in
August 1995, by the Croats, with U.S. assistance; the largest
proportionate ethnic cleansing in those wars was of Serbs and
other minorities, including Roma, driven out of Kosovo by the
KLA under NATO auspices after June 1999.) But even in her own
narrow terms of reference, how concerned are Bosnian victims
over this issue? How does Sullivan know about the victims’
feelings? A poll taken in Bosnia several years ago indicated
that no more than six percent of Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, or
Croats considered the bringing of war criminals to justice as
important (Charles Boyd, “Making Bosnia Work,” Foreign
Affairs, January 1998).
Furthermore, why would Bosnian victims need a successful
“genocide” charge and not be satisfied with guilt for
“crimes against humanity?” However, if the function of the
trial is to prove the NATO war just, we must have
“genocide.” Best, however, to pretend that it is concern
over the victims rather than NATO-establishment priorities that
make the charge of genocide so important.
(Ed Herman is an economist and media analyst. He has a
regular “Fog Watch” column in Z magazine. With Philip
Hammond, he co-edited Degraded Capability: the Media and the
Kosovo Crisis (Pluto: 2000).)
Additional References
Thomas Nagy, “The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S.
Intentionally Destroyed Iraq’s Water Supply,” The
Progressive, (September 2001)
http://www.progressive.org/0901/nagy0901.html
Joy Gordon, “Economic Sanctions as Weapons of Mass
Destruction,” Harpers, (November 2002)
http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html
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Published
by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of
the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
and
the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). ©2004. All
rights reserved.
Reposted
for fair use.
Recommended
citation:
Edward S. Herman, “Stacy Sullivan on Milosevic and
Genocide,” (Silver City, NM & Washington, DC:
Foreign Policy In Focus, May 28, 2004).
Web
location:
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405ssgenocide.html
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