{"id":1899,"date":"2021-01-05T14:56:20","date_gmt":"2021-01-05T13:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.balkan-conflicts-research.com\/archive\/?page_id=1899"},"modified":"2021-01-05T14:59:59","modified_gmt":"2021-01-05T13:59:59","slug":"the-dismantling-of-yugoslavia-ed-herman-david-peterson","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.balkan-conflicts-research.com\/archive\/the-dismantling-of-yugoslavia-ed-herman-david-peterson\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dismantling of Yugoslavia – Ed Herman & David Peterson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Dismantling of Yugoslavia (Part I)<\/h1>\n

A Study in In<\/em>humanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse)<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
\n
by<\/em> Edward S. Herman<\/a> and David Peterson<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

(Oct 01, 2007)<\/abbr><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Topics: <\/span>Imperialism<\/a> , Political Economy<\/a><\/p>\n

Places: <\/span>Yugoslavia<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Edward S. Herman<\/span> is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the media. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power<\/em>(Cambridge University Press, 1981), The Real Terror Network<\/em> (South End Press, 1982), and, with Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights<\/em> (South End Press, 1979), and Manufacturing Consent<\/em>(Pantheon, 2002). David Peterson<\/span> is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago.<\/p>\n

Jump to Part: II<\/a>, III<\/a>, IV<\/a> | Glossary<\/a> | Timeline<\/a><\/p>\n

The breakup of Yugoslavia provided the fodder for what may have been the most misrepresented series of major events over the past twenty years. The journalistic and historical narratives that were imposed upon these wars have systematically distorted their nature, and were deeply prejudicial, downplaying the external factors that drove Yugoslavia\u2019s breakup while selectively exaggerating and misrepresenting the internal factors. Perhaps no civil wars\u2014and Yugoslavia suffered multiple civil wars across several theaters, at least two of which remain unresolved\u2014have ever been harvested as cynically by foreign powers to establish legal precedents and new categories of international duties and norms. Nor have any other civil wars been turned into such a proving ground for the related notions of \u201chumanitarian intervention\u201d and the \u201cright [or responsibility] to protect.\u201d Yugoslavia\u2019s conflicts were not so much mediated by foreign powers as they were inflamed and exploited by them to advance policy goals. The result was a tsunami of lies and misrepresentations in whose wake the world is still reeling.
\n\"Key
\nFrom 1991 on, Yugoslavia and its successor states were exploited for ends as crass and as classically realpolitik<\/em> as: (1) preserving the NATO military alliance despite the disintegration of the Soviet bloc\u2014NATO\u2019s putative reason for existence; (2) overthrowing the UN Charter\u2019s historic commitments to non-interference and respect for the sovereign equality, territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in favor of the right of those more enlightened to interfere in the affairs of \u201cfailing\u201d states, and even to wage wars against \u201crogue\u201d states; (3) humiliating the European Union (EU) (formerly the European Community [EC]) over its inability to act decisively as a threat-making and militarily punitive force in its own backyard; (4) and of course dismantling the last economic and social holdout on the European continent yet to be integrated into the \u201cWashington consensus.\u201d The pursuit of these goals required that certain agents within Yugoslavia be cast in the role of the victims, and others as villains\u2014the latter not just belligerents engaged in a civil war, but evil and murderous perpetrators of mass crimes which, in turn, would legitimate military intervention. At its extreme, in the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Yugoslavia has been cast as one gigantic crime scene, with the wars in their totality to be explained as a \u201cJoint Criminal Enterprise,\u201d the alleged purpose of which was the expulsion of non-Serbs from territories the Serbs wanted all to themselves\u2014an utterly risible caricature, as we show below, but taken seriously in Western commentary, much as Iraq\u2019s \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d were to be taken early in the next decade.<\/p>\n

While the destruction of Yugoslavia had both internal and external causes, it is easy to overlook the external causes, despite their great importance, because Western political interests and ideology have masked them by focusing entirely on the alleged resurgence of Serb nationalism and drive for a \u201cGreater Serbia\u201d as the root of the collapse. In a widely read book that accompanied their BBC documentary, Laura Silber and Allan Little wrote that \u201cunder Milosevic\u2019s stewardship\u201d the Serbs were \u201cthe key secessionists,\u201d as Milosevic sought the \u201ccreation of a new enlarged Serbian state, encompassing as much territory of Yugoslavia as possible,\u201d his \u201cpolitics of ethnic intolerance provok[ing] the other nations of Yugoslavia, convincing them that it was impossible to stay in the Yugoslav federation and propelling them down the road to independence.\u201d In another widely read book, Misha Glenny wrote that \u201cwithout question, it was Milosevic who had willfully allowed the genie [of violent, intolerant nationalism] out of the bottle, knowing that the consequences might be dramatic and even bloody.\u201d Noel Malcolm found that by the late 1980s, \u201cTwo processes seemed fused into one: the gathering of power into Milosevic\u2019s hands, and the gathering of the Serbs into a single political unit which could either dominate Yugoslavia or break it apart.\u201d For Roy Gutman, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina \u201cwas the third in a series of wars launched by Serbia\u2026.Serbia had harnessed the powerful military machine of the Yugoslav state to achieve the dream of its extreme nationalists: Greater Serbia.\u201d For David Rieff, \u201ceven if [Croatia\u2019s President Franjo] Tudjman had been an angel, Slobodan Milosevic would still have launched his war for Greater Serbia.\u201d1<\/a><\/p>\n

In a commentary in 2000, Tim Judah wrote that Milosevic was responsible for wars in \u201cSlovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo: four wars since 1991 and [that] the result of these terrible conflicts, which began with the slogan \u2018All Serbs in One State,\u2019 is the cruelest irony.\u201d Sometime journalist, sometime spokesperson for the ICTY at The Hague, Florence Hartmann, wrote that \u201cLong before the war began, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and, following his example, Franjo Tudjman in Croatia, had turned their backs on the Yugoslav ideal of an ethnically mixed federal State and set about carving out their own ethnically homogeneous States. With Milosevic\u2019s failure, in 1991, to take control of all of Yugoslavia, the die was cast for war.\u201d After Milosevic\u2019s death in 2006, the New York Times<\/em>\u2019s Marlise Simons wrote about the \u201cincendiary nationalism\u201d of the man who \u201crose and then clung to power by resurrecting old nationalist grudges and inciting dreams of a Greater Serbia\u2026the prime engineer of wars that pitted his fellow Serbs against the Slovenes, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Albanians of Kosovo and ultimately the combined forces of the entire NATO alliance.\u201d And at the more frenzied end of the media spectrum, Mark Danner traced the Balkan war dynamic to the Serbs\u2019 \u201cunquenchable blood lust,\u201d while Ed Vulliamy asserted that \u201cOnce Milosevic had back-stabbed his way to power and had switched from communism to fascism, he and Mirjana set out to establish their dream of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia cleansed of Croats and \u2018mongrel races\u2019 such as Bosnia\u2019s Muslims and Kosovo\u2019s Albanians.\u201d2<\/a><\/p>\n

This version of history\u2014or ideology under the guise of history\u2014fails at multiple levels. For one, it ignores the economic and financial turbulence within which Yugoslavia\u2019s highly indebted, unevenly developed republics and autonomous regions found themselves in the years following Tito\u2019s death in 1980, the aptly named \u201cgreat reversal\u201d during which the \u201cstandard of living whose previous growth had muted most regional grievances and legitimized Communist rule declined by fully one-quarter.\u201d3<\/a> It also ignores the geopolitical context marked by the decline and eventual dissolution of the Soviet bloc, just as it ignores the German, Austrian, Vatican, EU, and eventual U.S. interest in the dismantlement of the socialist as well as federal dimensions of a unitary Yugoslav state, and the actions that brought about that result. Furthermore, it underrates the importance of Albanian (Kosovo), Slovene, Croat, Macedonian, Bosnian Muslim, Montenegrin, and even Hungarian (Vojvodina) nationalisms, and the competing interests of each of these groups as they sought sovereignty within, and later independence from, Yugoslavia. Perhaps most critical of all, it overrates the Serbs\u2019 and Milosevic\u2019s nationalism, gives these an unwarranted causal force, and transforms their expressed interest in preserving the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and\/or allowing Serbs to remain within a single unified successor state into wars of aggression whose goal was \u201cGreater Serbia.\u201d<\/p>\n

The standard narrative also fails egregiously in claiming the Western interventions humanitarian in purpose and result. In that narrative those interventions came late but did their work well. We will show on the contrary that they came early, encouraged divisions and ethnic wars, and in the end had extremely damaging effects on the freedom, independence, and welfare of the inhabitants, although they served well the ends of Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, and Kosovo Albanian nationalists, as well as those of the United States and NATO. Furthermore, NATO\u2019s 1999 bombing war against Yugoslavia, in violation of the UN Charter, built upon precedents set by NATO\u2019s late summer 1995 bombing attacks on the Bosnian Serbs. More important, it provided additional precedents which advanced the same law-of-the-jungle lineage under the cover of \u201chuman rights.\u201d It thus served as a precursor and a model for the subsequent U.S. regime\u2019s attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and the lies that enabled them.<\/p>\n

Another notable feature of the dismantling of Yugoslavia was the very widespread support for the Western interventions expressed by liberals and leftists. These intellectuals and journalists swallowed and helped propagate the standard narrative with remarkable gullibility, and their work made a major contribution to engineering consent to the ethnic cleansing wars, the NATO bombing attacks, the neocolonial occupations of Bosnia and Kosovo, and the wars that followed against Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n

1. Geopolitics and Nationalism<\/h3>\n

The Yugoslav (or \u201cSouth Slav\u201d) solution to this region of Southeastern Europe\u2019s \u201cnational question\u201d had always been tenuous. \u201cFailure\u2026to maintain the [united, federal] state throughout the\u2026country\u2019s existence [was] an ever present possibility,\u201d Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick write. Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo\u2014the three most bloodily contested areas in the 1990s\u2014had all been \u201careas of high ethnic fragmentation\u201d and \u201cpersistent hotbeds of political criminality.\u201d Throughout Yugoslavia\u2019s brief history, ethnic unity \u201cwas more an artifact of party pronouncements, induced personnel rotation, and institutional reorganization, than an outcome of genuine political incorporation or enhanced cohesion among the different segments of the population\u201d4<\/a><\/p>\n

This fragile state of affairs had been held together by the rule of Tito, along with Western support for the independent Yugoslavia in an otherwise Soviet-dominated area. Tito\u2019s death in 1980 loosened the authoritarian cement. The collapse of the Soviet bloc a decade later deprived Yugoslavia of Western support for the unified state. As the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia purportedly instructed Belgrade upon his arrival in April 1989: \u201cYugoslavia no longer enjoyed the geopolitical importance that the United States had given it during the Cold War.\u201d5<\/a><\/p>\n

Yugoslavia\u2019s economy was deeply troubled by the 1980s. Unemployment was dangerously high and persistent. Regional inequalities remained the rule. On a per-capita basis, Slovenia\u2019s income by the late 1980s was at least twice the average for Yugoslavia as a whole, Croatia\u2019s more than one-fourth greater, and Serbia proper\u2019s roughly equal to the average. But Montenegro\u2019s was only 74 percent of Yugoslavia\u2019s average, Bosnia-Herzegovina\u2019s 68 percent, Macedonia\u2019s 63 percent, and Kosovo\u2019s 27 percent.6<\/a> What is more, Yugoslavia borrowed abroad heavily in the 1970s, and it accumulated a large external debt that stood at $19.7 billion in 1989.7<\/a> With hyperinflation spiking upward to more than 1,000 percent this same year,8<\/a>Yugoslavia was pressured by the IMF to undertake a classic \u201cshock therapy\u201d program that threatened the solidarity of its population.<\/p>\n

Economic decline was accompanied by a diminished confidence in the federal system and the rise of republican challenges to it. But as Susan Woodward notes, taking the lead \u201cwere not the unemployed but the employed who feared unemployment\u201d and property owners who feared \u201cthat they would lose value and status.\u201d It was in the two wealthiest republics of the northwest, Slovenia and Croatia, but Slovenia in particular, that the drive toward autonomy took the most pronounced anti-federal form.9<\/a> Although less than 30 percent of Yugoslavia\u2019s population lived in Slovenia and Croatia, they accounted for half of federal tax revenues\u2014before they stopped paying it. They openly resented these obligations. Longing for closer ties with Western Europe, they revolted.10<\/a><\/p>\n

In what Robert Hayden calls the \u201cnew doctrine of republican supremacy,\u201d by midsummer 1989 Slovenia had rejected the federation. Amendments were proposed for Slovenia\u2019s constitution that clashed with its federal counterpart. Among these was a notorious amendment that defined \u201cSlovenia\u201d as the \u201cstate of the sovereign Slovenian nation\u201d\u2014a change that the Borba<\/em>newspaper (Belgrade) editorialized would \u201cdivide Yugoslavia.\u201d In February 1990, the Constitutional Court (a federal body) ruled against Slovenia\u2019s assertion that its laws took precedence over federal ones. This included the \u201cquestion of secession,\u201d which the court ruled \u201ccould only be decided jointly with the agreement of all the republics.\u201d The court also ruled \u201cthat the Presidency of Yugoslavia would have both the right and the obligation to declare a state of emergency in Slovenia if some general danger threatened the existence or constitutional order of that republic, on the grounds that such a condition would also threaten the whole of the country.\u201d Slovenia \u201crejected the court\u2019s jurisdiction,\u201d Hayden adds.<\/p>\n

In April 1990, both Slovenia and Croatia held the first multiparty elections in Yugoslavia since the late 1930s. A coalition of six parties called DEMOS that campaigned on an independence platform received 55 percent of the Slovene vote. In Croatia, Franjo Tudjman\u2019s blatantly nationalistic and separatist Croatian Democratic Union received 70 percent. News accounts conveyed the resurgence of nationalist politics in Slovenia and Croatia, along with a distinct flavor of ethnic chauvinism pitting these Westernized republics against the other, less advanced counterparts. Hayden notes that on July 2, 1990, the Slovene parliament declared Slovenia\u2019s \u201ccomplete sovereignty,\u201d and that the \u201crepublic\u2019s laws superseded those of the federation.\u201d Then on July 25, Croatia\u2019s parliament did likewise, making Croatia \u201ca politically and economically sovereign state\u201d (Tudjman). Finally in September\u2014still three months before its own republican elections, in which Milosevic\u2019s Socialist Party received 65 percent on a platform of preserving Yugoslavia, in explicit opposition to the separatist parties that had come to power in Slovenia and Croatia, and were to be soundly defeated in Serbia\u2014Serbia adopted a new constitution granting its laws the same supremacy over federal institutions. \u201cIf the Slovenes can do it, so can we,\u201d a member of the Serbian Presidency said. With these challenges to federal authority by each of the three most powerful republics, the \u201ccollapse of the Yugoslav state was inevitable,\u201d Hayden concludes.11<\/a><\/p>\n

In contrast to the standard narrative, it is clear that nationalist forces at this time were stronger in Slovenia and Croatia than in Serbia. The decisive, history-making difference, however, was that in Slovenia and Croatia, the nationalist parties that won the April 1990 elections also adopted separatist<\/em> platforms. Not only did they challenge the federal institutions as a whole, they also sought to sever ties with them\u2014the last real bonds left from the Tito era.<\/p>\n

Had Western powers supported the federal state, Yugoslavia might have held together\u2014but they did not. Instead they not only encouraged Slovenia, Croatia, and later Bosnia-Herzegovina to secede, they also insisted that the federal state not use force to prevent it. Diana Johnstone recounts a January 1991 meeting in Belgrade between the U.S. ambassador and Borisav Jovic, a Serb then serving on Yugoslavia\u2019s collective State Presidency. \u201c[T]he United States would not accept any use of force to disarm the paramilitaries,\u201d Jovic was told. \u201cOnly \u2018peaceful\u2019 means were acceptable to Washington. The Yugoslav army was prohibited by the United States from using force to preserve the Federation, which meant that it could not prevent the Federation from being dismembered by force\u201d12<\/a>\u2014a remarkable injunction against a sovereign state. Similar warnings were communicated by the EC as well. We might try to imagine what the United States would look like today, were the questions it faced in 1860 about its federal structure and the rights of states handled in as prejudicial a manner by much stronger foreign powers.<\/p>\n

At the heart of the multiple civil wars had always been a simple question: In which state do the people of Yugoslavia want to live\u2014the SFRY or a successor state?13<\/a> But for a great many Yugoslavs, an answer contrary to their desires and contrary to the Yugoslav constitution was imposed from the outside. One way this was accomplished was by the EC\u2019s September 1991 appointment of an Arbitration Commission\u2014the Badinter Commission\u2014to assess legal aspects of the contests over Yugoslavia. This body\u2019s work provided a \u201cpseudo-legal gloss to the [EC\u2019s] opportunistic consent to the destruction of Yugoslavia demanded by Germany,\u201d Diana Johnstone writes.14<\/a> On each of the major issues contested by the Serbian republic, the commission ruled against Serbia. Yugoslavia was \u201cin the process of dissolution,\u201d the commission\u2019s notorious Opinion No. 1 stated when published on December 7, 1991. Similarly, Opinion No. 2 held that \u201cthe Serbian population in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina\u2026[does not] have the right to self-determination,\u201d though it \u201cis entitled to all the rights concerned to minorities and ethnic groups under international law\u2026.\u201d And Opinion No. 3 declared that \u201cthe [former] internal boundaries between Croatia and Serbia and between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia\u2026[have] become frontiers protected by international law.\u201d15<\/a> Remarkably, the commission recognized the right of republics<\/em> to secede from the former Yugoslavia, and thus affixed the right of self-determination to Yugoslavia\u2019s former administrative units; but the commission detached the right of self-determination from Yugoslavia\u2019s peoples<\/em>, and thus denied comparable rights to the new minorities now stranded within the breakaway republics. The breakaway republics themselves might be blessed with foreign recognition; or, like Serbia and Montenegro for the remainder of the decade, recognition would be withheld, and its peoples rendered effectively stateless.<\/p>\n

From the standpoint of conflict resolution, this was a disastrous set of rulings, as the republics had been administrative units within Yugoslavia, and three of them (Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia) included large ethnic minorities who strongly opposed the terms of Yugoslavia\u2019s breakup, and who had been able to live with each other in relative peace on condition that their rights were safeguarded by a powerful federal state. Once the guarantees of the federal state were removed, it was inflammatory to deny peoples the right to choose the successor state in which they<\/em> wanted to live; and the more ethnically mixed a republic or even commune, the more provocative the foreign demand that the old internal republican boundaries were sacrosanct.16<\/a> But the Badinter Commission\u2019s rulings made perfect sense from a much different standpoint: That of prescribing an outline for Yugoslavia\u2019s dismantlement that was in accord with the demands of the secessionist forces in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina and their Western supporters, while ignoring the rights (and wishes) of the constituent \u201cnations\u201d as specified in the Yugoslav constitution, and justifying foreign interference in the civil wars as a defense of the newly independent states.<\/p>\n

Germany in particular encouraged Slovenia and Croatia to secede, which they did on June 25, 1991; formal recognition was granted on December 23, one year to the day after 94.5 percent of Slovenes had voted in a referendum in favor of independence. EC recognition followed on January 15, 1992, as did U.S. recognition in early April, when Washington recognized Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina all at once. More provocative yet, whereas the UN admitted all three breakaway republics as member states on May 22, it withheld the admission of a successor state to the dismantled Yugoslavia for another eight-and-a-half years; the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, composed of Serbia and Montenegro, often denigrated as the \u201crump\u201d Yugoslavia, was not admitted until November 1, 2000, almost four weeks after Milosevic\u2019s ouster. In other words, the two republics within the SFRY\u2014itself a founding member of the UN\u2014that rejected the dismantling of the federal state had been denied the right to succeed the SFRY as well as membership within the UN for close to a decade. At this highest level of the \u201cinternational community,\u201d it would be difficult to find a more extreme case of realpolitik<\/em> at work, but it was a realpolitik<\/em> that assured a violent outcome\u2014and to the victor, the spoils.<\/p>\n

A far more aggressive U.S. policy toward Yugoslavia began in 1993, with Washington anxious to redefine NATO\u2019s mission and to expand NATO eastward; and searching for a client among the contestants, Washington settled on the Bosnian Muslims and Alija Izetbegovic. To serve these ends the Clinton administration sabotaged a series of peace efforts between 1993 and the Dayton accords of 1995;17<\/a> encouraged the Bosnian Muslims to reject any settlement until their military position had improved; helped arm and train the Muslims and Croats to shift the balance of forces on the ground;18<\/a> and finally settled at Dayton with an agreement that imposed upon the warring factions terms that could have been had as early as 1992, but for one missing link: In 1992, a Western-managed neocolonial regime, complete with NATO serving as its military enforcer, still was not achievable.19<\/a> Now into the twelfth year after Dayton, Bosnia remains a foreign occupied, severely divided, undemocratic, and in every sense of the term\u2014failed<\/em> state.<\/em>20<\/a><\/p>\n

A similar process took place in Kosovo, where an indigenous, ethnic Albanian independence movement was captured by an ultra-nationalist faction, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose leaders soon recognized that, like the Bosnian Muslims, they could enlist U.S. and NATO sponsorship and military intervention by provoking Yugoslav authorities to violence and getting the incidents reported the right way. Thus in the year before NATO\u2019s seventy-eight-day bombing war in the spring of 1999, the \u201cKLA were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been,\u201d British Defense Secretary George Robertson told his Parliament.21<\/a> As was true of the Bosnian Muslim and Croat forces before their major spring and summer offensives in 1995, the KLA received covert training and supplies from the Clinton administration,22<\/a> a well-guarded secret to the Western publics then being fed lines about \u201cMilosevic\u2019s willing executioners\u201d marching off to perpetrate genocide in Kosovo.<\/p>\n

On matters of principle, neither the EU nor the United States have been consistent on secession rights. In 1991\u201392, they encouraged the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina to break away from Yugoslavia; the federal state was denied any right to use force to prevent them from doing so; and no one living within these republics was permitted to break away from them. And yet as recently as June 2006, the EU, United States, and UN accepted Montenegro\u2019s right to break away from its Serbian partner; and more recently, the UN\u2019s special envoy for Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari has supported the right of the Serbian province of Kosovo to break away from Serbia once and for all\u2014\u201cto be supervised for an initial period by the international community.\u201d Calling NATO-occupied Kosovo \u201ca unique case that demands a unique solution,\u201d Ahtisaari reassured that Kosovo would not \u201ccreate a precedent for other unresolved conflicts.\u201d With resolution 1244, Ahtisaari reports, the \u201cSecurity Council responded to Milosevic\u2019s actions in Kosovo by denying Serbia a role in its governance, placing Kosovo under temporary UN administration and envisaging a political process designed to determine Kosovo\u2019s future. The combination of these factors makes Kosovo\u2019s circumstances extraordinary.\u201d23<\/a><\/p>\n

The UN special envoy is badly deluded. Kosovo is a NATO-occupied province in southern Serbia, following NATO\u2019s illegal war in the spring of 1999. Kosovo\u2019s status ought to be no different than was Kuwait\u2019s on August 3, 1990: It is a territory taken by military force in contravention of the UN Charter, and its independence should mean above all the restoration of its sovereignty to Serbia. But as with the subsequent U.S. wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Security Council neither condemned NATO\u2019s 1999 aggression nor demanded that measures be taken to remedy it, for the simple reason that three of the Council\u2019s Permanent Five members had launched it. And in 2007, the UN\u2019s special envoy shows not the slightest interest that Serbia entered into its war-ending treaties under the duress of a conquered state. Instead of demanding that NATO return the province to the country from which it was seized, the UN not only accepts the aggression as a fait accompli<\/em>, but also affirms its legitimacy on \u201chumanitarian\u201d grounds. The Ahtisaari solution is a case of \u201ccommissioned power politics.\u201d24<\/a> The only \u201cextraordinary\u201d circumstance is to be found in which group of states launched the war. (On the fraudulence of the \u201chumanitarian\u201d rationale for NATO\u2019s war, and the inhumanitarian effects of both the war and occupation, see sections 9 and 10.)<\/p>\n

In sum, the United States and NATO entered the Yugoslav struggles quite early and were key external factors in the initiation of ethnic cleansing, in keeping it going, and in working toward a violent resolution of the conflicts that would keep the United States and NATO relevant in Europe, and secure NATO\u2019s dominant position in the Balkans.<\/p>\n

2. The Role of the Serbs, Milosevic, and \u2018Greater Serbia\u2019<\/h3>\n

A key element in the myth structure holds that Milosevic incited the Serbs to violence, setting loose the genie of Serb nationalism from the bottle that had contained it under Tito. During the prosecution\u2019s opening statement at his trial, a videotape was played of Milosevic uttering the words \u201cNo one should dare beat you\u201d at the Hall of Culture in Pristina in April 1987. \u201cIt was that phrase\u2026and the response of others to it that gave this accused the taste or a better taste of power, maybe the first realisation of a dream,\u201d prosecutor Geoffrey Nice told the court. With these words Milosevic \u201chad broken the taboo of [Tito] against invoking nationalism,\u201d Dusko Doder and Louise Branson write, \u201ca taboo credited with submerging ethnic hatreds and holding Yugoslavia together for more than forty years\u2026.The initial impact was catastrophic: rabid ethnic nationalism swept all regions of Yugoslavia like a disease.\u201d25<\/a><\/p>\n

But neither these remarks by Milosevic nor his June 28, 1989, speech on the six-hundreth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo had anything like the characteristics imputed to them. Instead Milosevic used both speeches to appeal to multi-ethnic tolerance, accompanied by a warning against the threat posed to Yugoslavia by nationalism\u2014\u201changing like a sword over their heads all the time\u201d (1989).26<\/a><\/p>\n

In his 1987 speech\u2014the words \u201cno one should dare beat you\u201d having been uttered in response to the news that the police had roughed up some local Serbs\u2014Milosevic said \u201cwe do not want to divide people into Serbs and Albanians, but we must draw the line that divides the honest and progressive who are struggling for brotherhood and unity and national equality from the counterrevolution and nationalists on the other side.\u201d Similarly in his 1989 speech, he said that \u201cYugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it,\u201d and nothing in either of these speeches conflicted with this sentiment\u2014nor can quotes like these be found in the speeches and writings of Tudjman or Izetbegovic. But the standard narrative steers clear of Milosevic\u2019s actual words, understandably, as the misrepresentation that surrounds the simple phrase \u201cno one should dare beat you\u201d is deeply ingrained, and repeated by the ICTY\u2019s prosecutor, Silber and Little, Glenny, Malcolm, Judah, Doder and Branson, and a cast of thousands; also by The Guardian<\/em>and the New York Times<\/em>, to name but two, all of whom allude to these speeches in the inciting-Serb-nationalism mode, but almost surely never bothered to read and report their actual content.<\/p>\n

The massive trial of Milosevic, with 295 prosecution witnesses and 49,191 pages of courtroom transcripts, failed to produce a single credible piece of evidence that Milosevic had spoken disparagingly of non-Serb \u201cnations\u201d or ordered any killings that might fall under the category of war crimes. But the so-called Brioni Transcript of talks that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman held with his military and political leadership on July 31, 1995, reveal Tudjman instructing his generals to \u201cinflict such a blow on the Serbs that they should virtually disappear.\u201d27<\/a> What followed within days was Operation Storm, a massive, well-planned military blow that made the Krajina Serbs literally disappear. Imagine the windfall that a statement such as Tudjman\u2019s would have provided Carla Del Ponte, Geoffrey Nice, Marlise Simons, and Ed Vulliamy, had it been Milosevic who uttered a statement directly linking him to criminal activity of this magnitude. But by the summer of 1995 Tudjman was a U.S. ally, and Operation Storm was approved and aided by the United States and some of its corporate mercenaries.28<\/p>\n

Similarly, in Alija Izetbegovic\u2019s Islamic Declaration<\/em>, first circulated in 1970 but republished in 1990 for his presidential campaign, his major theme is what he called the \u201cincompatibility of Islam with non-Islamic systems.\u201d \u201cThere is neither peace nor coexistence between the \u2018Islamic religion\u2019 and non-Islamic social and political institutions,\u201d Izetbegovic argued. \u201cHaving the right to govern its own world, Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of putting a foreign ideology into practice on its territory. There is thus no principle of secular government and the State must express and support the moral principles of religion.\u201d29<\/a> Again, nothing ever uttered by Milosevic matches this for a program of ethno-religious intolerance. But as it was the prescription of a man who became a key U.S. client, Izetbegovic\u2019s beliefs were ignored by the same journalists and historians for whom \u201cno one should dare beat you\u201d was alleged to herald the breakup of an entire country. Instead, David Rieff adopted the Bosnian Muslims as his \u201cjust cause\u201d because, in his account, theirs was \u201ca society committed to multiculturalism\u2026and tolerance, and of an understanding of national identity as deriving from shared citizenship rather than ethnic identity\u201d\u2014and this witness-bearer claims to be referring to the \u201cvalues\u201d and \u201cideals\u201d that Izetbegovic\u2019s Bosnia would uphold!30<\/p>\n

In the series of ICTY indictments of Milosevic et al<\/em>., the charge that he was striving to produce a \u201cGreater Serbia\u201d ranks high among the causes of the wars. This is also the standard formula that entered into the intellectual and media narrative of cause, as expressed by Judah\u2019s statement \u201cthat it all began with the slogan \u2018All Serbs in One State\u2019\u201d and in an obituary in the Washington Post<\/em> in March 2006, where we read again that Milosevic\u2019s \u201cpledge to unify all Serbs in one state turned into an ironic promise.\u201d And in a comprehensive offering of clich\u00e9 lies, we find Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books<\/em> stating: \u201cAs had the Yugoslav wars, the Dayton peace sprang from the forehead of Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of Greater Serbia, the man who had built his power base by inciting and exploiting Serb nationalism.\u201d31<\/a><\/p>\n

One serious problem with the prosecution\u2019s theory and the premise of the establishment narrative\u2014that Yugoslavia\u2019s wars were the result of the \u201cincendiary nationalism\u201d (Marlise Simons), \u201cblood lust\u201d (Mark Danner), and ruthless contempt for the \u201cmongrel races\u201d (Ed Vulliamy) by the Serbs and Milosevic\u2014is that Serbia proper, the alleged heartland of this \u201cjoint criminal enterprise,\u201d was itself subject to no \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d whatsoever throughout the wars, but witnessed a net inflow of refugees from other former republics. (For data on refugee flows in the former Yugoslavia, see section 9.) This dramatic fact was brought out by Milosevic in his trial, during his examination of defense witness Mihailo Markovic, a noted professor of philosophy and one of the founders of Praxis<\/em>. Acknowledging the \u201cparadox in view of all these charges\u201d concerning \u201cGreater Serbia\u201d and \u201cethnic cleansing,\u201d Markovic said that \u201cSerbia still has today the same national structure that it had in the 1970s,\u201d and that although \u201cSerbs were expulsed from practically all the other republics, Serbia did not change.\u201d \u201cWhy would Serbs be expelling Croatians from Croatia if they\u2019re not expelling them from Serbia?\u201d Markovic asked the court. \u201cWhy would Serbs be expelling Albanians from Kosovo if they\u2019re not expelling them from Belgrade and other parts of Serbia?\u201d Shortly thereafter, Milosevic directed much the same question back toward Markovic:<\/p>\n

Milosevic: [I]f you have in mind that the greatest part of that Greater Serbia would be precisely the Republic of Serbia, which did not see any expulsions at all throughout the crisis, do you find it logical that Serbia should initiate expulsions from territories outside of Serbia?<\/p>\n

Markovic: Well, I already told you it seems illogical to me.32<\/p>\n

Obviously, these are important questions, whose answers cast doubts on a fundamental tenet of the standard narrative. If the Belgrade Serbs, as the alleged originators of the \u201cjoint criminal enterprise\u201d to create a \u201cGreater Serbia,\u201d did not implement their conspiracy where they held unquestioned power, inside Serbia proper, then what is the likelihood that the prosecution\u2019s theory for the wars has any merit? Lead prosecutor Geoffrey Nice had no solution for this \u201cparadox.\u201d And Marlise Simons, Mark Danner, Ed Vulliamy, David Rieff, and others have not dealt with it by any method other than yet more misleading rhetoric and strategic silence. This exchange was unreported in any Western media institution.<\/p>\n

But in an even more devastating development in the Milosevic trial, which occurred during its defense phase, prosecutor Geoffrey Nice admitted that Milosevic\u2019s objective of allowing Serbs to live in one state \u201cwas different from the concept of the Greater Serbia\u2026.\u201d33<\/a> Nice was responding to questions that had been raised by amicus curiae<\/em> attorney David Kay and presiding judge Patrick Robinson about the prosecution\u2019s claim that Milosevic et al<\/em>. had a plan to create a \u201cGreater Serbia,\u201d and what such a plan really meant\u2014a charge that exists in each of the three indictments for Croatia, in both indictments for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that is either asserted or implied by countless news and historical treatments of the wars. \u201cI had the clear impression that this was an essential foundation of the Prosecution\u2019s case,\u201d Judge Robinson noted.34 A short while later, Judge O-Gon Kwon asked Nice to explain to the court the \u201cdifference of the Greater Serbia idea and the idea of one\u2014all Serbs living in one state.\u201d Nice replied:<\/p>\n

[I]t may be that the accused\u2019s aim was for that which could qualify as a de facto Greater Serbia\u2026.Did he find the source of his position at least overtly in [the] historical concept of Greater Serbia; no, he didn\u2019t. His was\u2026the pragmatic one of ensuring that all the Serbs who had lived in the former Yugoslavia should be allowed for either constitutional or other reasons to live in the same unit<\/em>. That meant as we know historically from his perspective first of all that the former Yugoslavia shouldn\u2019t be broken up<\/em>\u2026.35<\/p>\n

In this passage, Nice betrays the fact that the prosecution itself doesn\u2019t believe its most notorious accusation against Milosevic et al<\/em>., as to why Yugoslavia broke apart: That leading Serbs in Belgrade and elsewhere conspired to create a living space exclusively for Serbs, cleansed of the other ethnic groups (\u201cGreater Serbia\u201d); that they entered into this conspiracy by no later than August 1, 1991; and that they were willing to perpetrate any atrocity, genocide included, to execute their conspiracy. Instead, what the prosecution really believes is that the breakup of Yugoslavia was accompanied by civil wars, plain and simple; that the principal crime for which Milosevic et al<\/em>. have always been held responsible among the Western powers was the crime of trying to hold Yugoslavia together, against the West\u2019s efforts to dismantle it; and that once events beyond their control closed-off this option, they attempted to hang onto a smaller successor state established on the same principles as the larger one they had lost. That they were not striving for an \u201cethnically pure\u201d Serb state was made clear by the absence of any ethnic cleansing in Serbia proper.<\/p>\n

Of course, the prosecution would reply that once Yugoslavia had undergone the process of dismantlement\u2014and on July 4, 1992, Opinion No. 8 of the Badinter Commission declared that as a \u201cmatter of fact,\u201d the \u201cprocess of dissolution of the SFRY referred to in Opinion No. 1\u2026is now complete and that the SFRY no longer exists\u201d36<\/a>\u2014any attempt by the minority Serb populations of Croatia or Bosnia to secede from the new, internationally recognized states and to join the \u201crump\u201d Yugoslavia was an act of rebellion, and any aid provided by Milosevic to these rebels was interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, aggressive, and criminal. But Badinter ran roughshod over both Yugoslavia\u2019s constitution and fundamental principles of self-determination: The former reserved the right of secession to Yugoslavia\u2019s constituent nations<\/em>, not to its administrative units;37<\/a> and Badinter\u2019s endorsement of the independence claims of Yugoslavia\u2019s Slovenes, Croats, Muslims, and Macedonians, while rejecting the claims of its Serbs, ranks among the greatest and most costly exercises of the double-standard in modern times.38<\/a><\/p>\n

Despite the allegations to the contrary, it remained the prosecution\u2019s belief throughout the trial that the Milosevic regime\u2019s political objective at the time of the secessions of Slovenia, Croatia, and later Bosnia-Herzegovina was to preserve the SFRY; and that if this could not be done, then as much of the old SFRY as possible should be kept within a single, unitary successor state. Indeed, this was the reason for which Milosevic\u2019s Socialist Party had received 65 percent of the Serbian vote in December 1990, in the republic\u2019s first multiparty elections: Not to create a \u201cGreater Serbia,\u201d but to preserve Yugoslavia. Until historians recognize that the ultimate crime for which the serial indictments have been brought against Milosevic et al<\/em>. was the crime of trying to hold the SFRY together or a successor state on a similarly unified, federal model, they will never understand the enormity of what Nice conceded in court on August 25, 2005. As best we can tell, this startling concession to the Milosevic defense and the historical record, which amounted to the prosecution\u2019s de facto<\/em> abandonment of the main component of the ICTY\u2019s case, has never been reported in the major English-language print media.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, it is not even true that Milosevic fought to keep all Serbs in one state. He either supported or agreed to a series of settlements, like Brioni (July 1991), Lisbon (February 1992), Vance-Owen (January 1993), Owen-Stoltenberg (August 1993), the European Action Plan (January 1994), the Contact Group Plan (July 1994), and ultimately the Dayton Accords (November 1995)\u2014none of which would have kept all Serbs in one state.39<\/a> He declined to defend the Croatian Serbs when they were ethnically cleansed in two related operations in May and August 1995. He agreed to an official contraction in the earlier SFRY to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (i.e., to Serbia and Montenegro\u2014itself further shrunk with the exit of Montenegro), which in effect abandoned the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to their fate outside any \u201cGreater Serbia.\u201d His aid to Serbs in both Croatia and Bosnia was sporadic, and their leaders felt him to have been an opportunistic and unreliable ally, more concerned with getting the UN sanctions against Yugoslavia removed than making serious sacrifices for the stranded Serbs elsewhere.<\/p>\n

In short, Milosevic struggled fitfully to defend Serbs who felt abandoned and threatened in the hostile, secessionist states of a progressively dismantled Yugoslavia; and he wanted, but did not fight very hard, to preserve a shrinking Yugoslav Federation that would have kept all the Serbs in a successor common state. For historians, journalists, and the ICTY to call this a drive for a \u201cGreater Serbia\u201d is Orwellian political rhetoric that transforms a weak and unsuccessful defense of a shrinking Yugoslavia into a bold and aggressive offensive to seize other peoples\u2019 territory. It is also of interest that the clear drives of Croatian and Kosovo Albanian nationalists toward a \u201cGreater Croatia\u201d and \u201cGreater Albania,\u201d and Bosnian Muslim leader Izetbegovic\u2019s refusal to agree to a settlement (with U.S. encouragement) in hopes that with NATO aid he could rule over all three \u201cnations\u201d in Bosnia, have been ignored in the standard narrative as serious causal factors in the ethnic wars of the 1990s.<\/p>\n

It should also be clear that the assured claims of Silber and Little, Glenny, Malcolm, Judah, and Simons (and they are only a small sample from a vast universe) about who was responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia is ideology and myth parading under the guise of history\u2014easily confuted, but part of the standard narrative that is unchallengeable in a closed system.<\/p>\n

[return to top]<\/a><\/p>\n

Notes<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. \u21a9<\/a> Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 26; Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 33; Noel Malcolm, Bosnia, rev. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 212; Roy Gutman, introduction, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), xviii; David Rieff, \u201cThe Balkans,\u201d Toronto Globe and Mail, July 19, 1997.<\/li>\n
  2. \u21a9<\/a> Tim Judah, \u201cIs Milosevic Planning Another Balkan War?\u201d Scotland on Sunday, March 19, 2000; Florence Hartmann, \u201cBosnia,\u201d in Roy Gutman & David Rieff, eds., Crimes of War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), 50\u201351; Marlise Simons, \u201cSlobodan Milosevic, 64, Former Yugoslav Leader Accused of War Crimes, Dies,\u201d New York Times, March 12, 2006; Mark Danner, \u201cAmerica and the Bosnia Genocide,\u201d New York Review of Books, December 4, 1997; Ed Vulliamy, \u201cProfile: Mira Milosevic,\u201d The Observer, July 8, 2001.<\/li>\n
  3. \u21a9<\/a> Harold Lydall, Yugoslavia in Crisis (New York: Clarendon Press, 1989), esp. 40\u201371; and John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 322. In Lydall\u2019s words, \u201cthe year 1979 was climacteric: from that year onwards, the trend of economic change [was] in almost all respects downwards\u201d (40).<\/li>\n
  4. \u21a9<\/a> Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983), esp. chap. 7; here 1; 152; 157.<\/li>\n
  5. \u21a9<\/a> Warren Zimmermann, \u201cThe Last Ambassador,\u201d Foreign Affairs, March\/April, 1995.<\/li>\n
  6. \u21a9<\/a> Dijana Plestina, Regional Development in Communist Yugoslavia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), table 6.1, 180. For what these numbers represent, see n. 9, xxvii.<\/li>\n
  7. \u21a9<\/a> World Development Report 1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), table 21, \u201cTotal external debt,\u201d 245.<\/li>\n
  8. \u21a9<\/a> Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), esp. figure 3.3, 54.<\/li>\n
  9. \u21a9<\/a> Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. 345\u201370, here 361. Also see \u201cUnemployment Rate by Republic or Province,\u201d 384.<\/li>\n
  10. \u21a9<\/a> As Dijana Plestina sums up her study: \u201c[E]conomic regionalism, that is, the pursuit of one\u2019s own region\u2019s economic interests, explains better than any other factor the Yugoslav socialist regime\u2019s overall failure in narrowing regional economic inequalities.\u201d Regional Development in Communist Yugoslavia, 173. She adds that by 1990, the disparity in per capita income between Slovenia and Kosovo had reached as high as 8:1.<\/li>\n
  11. \u21a9<\/a> Robert M. Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 27\u201352.<\/li>\n
  12. \u21a9<\/a> Diana Johnstone, Fools\u2019 Crusade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 24.<\/li>\n
  13. \u21a9<\/a> The logic of the constitutional crisis that led to Yugoslavia\u2019s violent breakup is best exemplified by the oft-quoted, oft-misrepresented, and perhaps apocryphal quip attributed to a Macedonian political figure: \u201cWhy should I be a minority in your State, when you can be a minority in mine?\u201d<\/li>\n
  14. \u21a9<\/a> Johnstone, Fools\u2019 Crusade, 36\u201340.<\/li>\n
  15. \u21a9<\/a> Perhaps the most accessible copy of the Arbitration (or Badinter) Commission\u2019s Opinions is to be found within the electronic archives of the European Journal of International Law 3, no. 1 (1992), and 4, no. 1 (1993), http:\/\/ www.ejil.org.<\/li>\n
  16. \u21a9<\/a> According to Yugoslavia\u2019s 1981 census, out of a total population of 22.4 million, Slovenia was 90.5 percent Slovene; \u201cSerbia proper\u201d 85.4 percent Serb; Croatia 75.1 percent Croat and 11.5 percent Serbs; Montenegro 68.5 percent Montenegrin; Macedonia 67 percent Macedonian; and Bosnia- Herzegovina 39.5 percent Muslim, 32 percent Serb, and 18.4 percent Croat. The autonomous region of Kosovo was 77.4 percent Albanian; and Vojvodina 54.4 percent Serb and 19 percent Hungarian. See Cohen and Warwick, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic, appendix A, \u201cThe Ethnic Composition of Yugoslavia,\u201d table A.1, 164.<\/li>\n
  17. \u21a9<\/a> See the invaluable memoir of David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995).<\/li>\n
  18. \u21a9<\/a> On covert aid to the Croatian and Muslim forces, see the report by the House Committee on International Relations (a.k.a. the \u201cIranian Green Light Subcommittee\u201d), Final Report of the Select Subcommittee to Investigate the United States Role in Iranian Arms Transfers to Croatia and Bosnia, U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997); and Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992\u20131995 (London: Lit Verlag, 2003), esp. 157\u2013218.<\/li>\n
  19. \u21a9<\/a> NATO remained the sole military enforcer of Dayton from January 1996 through December 2005, when it was joined by a European Union force (EUFOR).<\/li>\n
  20. \u21a9<\/a> See David Chandler, Bosnia (Sterling, VI: Pluto Press, 1999); David Chandler, Empire in Denial (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006).<\/li>\n
  21. \u21a9<\/a> George Robertson, Testimony before the Select Committee on Defense, U.K. House of Commons, March 24, 1999, par. 391.<\/li>\n
  22. \u21a9<\/a> On covert aid to the KLA, see, e.g., Ian Bruce, \u201cSerbs used CIA phone to call in convoy raid,\u201d The Herald (Glasgow), April 19, 1999; Tom Walker & Aidan Laverty, \u201cCIA aided Kosovo guerrilla army,\u201d Sunday Times, March 12, 2000; \u201cNATO Faces Combat With KLA Forces Which the US Trained and Armed,\u201d Defense and Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, February, 2001; Peter Beaumont et al., \u201c\u2018CIA\u2019s bastard army ran riot in Balkans,\u2019\u201d The Observer, March 11, 2001; James Bissett, \u201cWe created a monster,\u201d Toronto Globe and Mail, July 31, 2001.<\/li>\n
  23. \u21a9<\/a> Martti Ahtisaari, Report of the Special Envoy of the Secretary- General on Kosovo\u2019s future status (S\/2007\/168), March 26, 2007, par. 5; par. 15.<\/li>\n
  24. \u21a9<\/a> See Johan Galtung et al., \u201cAhtisaari\u2019s Kosovo proposal,\u201d Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, May 11, 2007.<\/li>\n
  25. \u21a9<\/a> Milosevic Trial Transcript, February 12, 2002, 19; Dusko Doder & Louise Branson, Milosevic (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 3\u20134; also 43ff.<\/li>\n
  26. \u21a9<\/a> See \u201cSpeech by Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo Polje,\u201d BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, April 28, 1987; and \u201cSlobodan Milosevic addresses rally at Gazimestan,\u201d BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, June 30, 1989.<\/li>\n
  27. \u21a9<\/a> For our reference to the Brioni Transcripts of July 31, 1995, see Milosevic Trial Transcript, June 26, 2003, 23200 (lines 1\u201310).<\/li>\n
  28. \u21a9<\/a> Ken Silverstein quotes a writer for Soldier of Fortune magazine, who noted that as of early 1995, the Croatian military \u201cconsisted of criminal rabble, a bunch of fucking losers. MPRI [i.e., the Virginiabased Military Professional Resources Incorporated] turned them into something resembling an army.\u201d Private Warriors (New York: Verso, 2000), 173.<\/li>\n
  29. \u21a9<\/a> Alija Izetbegovic, Islamic De-claration, 1970, 1990, 30, as posted to the Web site of the Balkan Repository Project, http:\/\/www .balkanarchive.org.yu.<\/li>\n
  30. \u21a9<\/a> David Rieff, Slaughterhouse, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 10.<\/li>\n
  31. \u21a9<\/a> Daniel Williams & R. Jeffrey Smith, \u201cCrusader for Serb Honor Was Defiant Until the End,\u201d Washington Post, March 12, 2006; Mark Danner, \u201cEndgame in Kosovo,\u201d New York Review of Books, April 7, 1999.<\/li>\n
  32. \u21a9<\/a> Milosevic Trial Transcript, November 16, 2004, 33460\u201363.<\/li>\n
  33. \u21a9<\/a> See Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43223ff; here 43225, lines 9\u201310.<\/li>\n
  34. \u21a9<\/a> Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43224, lines 11\u201312.<\/li>\n
  35. \u21a9<\/a> Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43227, line 6 through 43228, line 3, emphases added.<\/li>\n
  36. \u21a9<\/a> For the Badinter sources, see note 15, above.<\/li>\n
  37. \u21a9<\/a> According to the opening words of the Preamble to the 1974 Constitution of the SFRY, \u201cThe nations of Yugoslavia, preceding from the right of every nation to self-determination, including the right to secession, on the basis of their will freely expressed in the common struggle of all nations and nationalities in the National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution\u2026\u201d (emphases added). See Snezana Trifunovska, ed., Yugoslavia Through Documents (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1994), 224\u201333, here 224. No fragment among this Constitution\u2019s 10 principles or 406 articles contradicted what its preamble unambiguously proclaimed, and earlier constitutions (e.g., 1963 and 1971) had as well: That the \u201csubjects\u201d to whom the rights of self-determination and secession belonged were explicitly defined as nations\u2014real flesh and bone people, not republican units in the federation\u2014of which Yugoslavia recognized six equally: Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, and Slovenes.<\/li>\n
  38. \u21a9<\/a> See Peter Radan, The Break-up of Yugoslavia and International Law (New York: Routledge, 2002), 216\u201322. Here we add that the Slovene and Croat declarations of independence of June 25, 1991, each separately affirmed the \u201cright of the Slovene nation to self-determination\u201d and the \u201cright of the Croatian nation to self-determination.\u201d Thus, as the two triggers for Yugoslavia\u2019s breakup, this fact underscored the belief then prevalent in Yugoslavia that the legal subject to whom the rights of self-determination and secession belonged was the nations, and not, as the Badinter Commission would later rule, the republics (i.e., mere administrative units within the SFRY). See Trifunovska, Yugoslavia Through Documents, (a) Republic of Slovenia Assembly Declaration of Independence, Ljubljana, June 25, 1991, 286; and (b) Constitutional Decision on the Sovereignty and Independence of the Republic of Croatia, Zagreb, June 25, 1991, 299.<\/li>\n
  39. \u21a9<\/a> See, e.g., Owen, Balkan Odyssey; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy; Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds, 2nd. ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); and Steven L. Burg & Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \n
    \n
    <\/div>\n

    Jump to Part: II<\/a>, III<\/a>, IV<\/a> | Glossary<\/a> | Timeline<\/a><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Dismantling of Yugoslavia (Part I) A Study in Inhumanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse) by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson (Oct 01, 2007) Topics: Imperialism , Political Economy Places: Yugoslavia Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively … <\/p>\n

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Herman and David Peterson (Oct 01, 2007) Topics: Imperialism , Political Economy Places: Yugoslavia Edward S. 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Herman and David Peterson (Oct 01, 2007) Topics: Imperialism , Political Economy Places: Yugoslavia Edward S. 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