Sunday Telegraph 15/3/98
Simpson on Sunday: Serbs do not deserve to be branded modern-day Nazis
by John Simpson
It was all depressingly familiar: the lines of bodies with bullet-holes, neat or otherwise, to the head and the bland assurances from the Serb authorities that these were the legitimate casualties of war. The wonderful folks who brought you the siege of Sarajevo had scored again. [The ‘siege’ of Sarajevo – in reality, nothing of the sort – was a cheap shot to make plain at the start that the Serbs were the bad guys].
Kosovo has so far been a big success for President Slobodan Milosevic of the Yugoslav federation, which is dominated by Serbia. It was he, you may remember, who fired the starting gun for the various wars in the former Yugoslavia with his fierce brand of nationalism. [Totally untrue: although his support for the Kosovo Serbs gained him popularity with some Serbian nationalists, Milosevic was always a convinced multiculturalist and supporter of Tito’s brotherhood and unity policy.]
Now he has come close to beginning another war in Kosovo, the southern, Albanian-speaking province of Serbia. He’s a clever tactician and so far he’s winning hands down. There’s been an embarrassed silence from President Milosevic’s political enemies in Serbia and its allied republic, Montenegro. The land of Kosovo arouses such intensely patriotic feeling among the more nationalistic Serbs that it would be political suicide for anyone in Belgrade to question Serbia’s control over it. The “police” action in Kosovo seems to have been popular in Serbia proper. [Unreported at the time, we now know that Kosovo was invaded from Albania in early 1998 by a KLA army which had been trained and armed by the USA and its allies. Within six weeks, this army had gained control of some 60% of the Serbian province and was aiming to complete the military seizure of Kosovo as soon as possible. However, Serbian forces regrouped and turned the tables, recapturing almost all the territory they had lost before the international community intervened yet again to prevent the complete defeat of the KLA army.]
But, you might say, what about the international outcry: the barking from Madeleine Albright, the head-shaking from her envoy Robert Gelbard, the bleating from Europe? So far it’s meant nothing of any significance: just a kneejerk weapons embargo which shouldn’t worry the Serbs, and a couple of probably ineffectual economic sanctions. Big deal. The fact is, the sanctions that were already in force represented just about everything that could easily be done against the Belgrade government. Slobodan Milosevic is the Balkan Saddam Hussein; and like Saddam, he outmanoeuvres the West continually.
Neither Saddam nor Slobodan may actually achieve much by their successes. But the only way the two of them can ensure their political survival is by continuing to stir up trouble. The ordinary people that they rule will have to endure the unpleasant consequences: empty shops, lunatic inflation, the sense of belonging to a country which has voluntarily put itself beyond the pale. [It was not Milosevic but the international community that was determined to stir up trouble. The aim was always to force the Serbs to give up Kosovo.]
And yet, although we can blame Milosevic himself, we should be careful about demonising Serbia as a country. Large numbers of Serbs who want nothing to do with the man have been outmanoeuvred by him just as the rest of us have.
Serbia is a country with a positive talent for putting itself in the wrong. Plenty of American and European politicians and journalists have identified the Serbs as the Nazis de nos jours, so that even to hint that they might not all be Himmlers can be regarded as tantamount to supporting the Final Solution. [Serbia had done nothing wrong. The wars in Croatia and Bosnia were caused by the international community’s illegal support for Tudjman, an extreme Croatian nationalist, and Izetbegovic, an extreme religious nationalist.]
This isn’t necessarily an exaggeration: at an international conference five years ago the head of a leading Los Angeles radio station accused me, first of being a follower of Chamberlain, then of fascism, and finally of outright anti-semitism, because I wouldn’t agree that the Serbs were to blame for the suffering in Bosnia. A powerful coalition of European and American conservatives and liberals (Lady Thatcher prominent among them) gave their support to the predominantly Muslim Bosnian government cause, and eventually succeeded in getting the United States to come into the war on the government’s side. [Western politicians and media were allied in denouncing any challenge to the official narrative of the Balkan conflicts as beyond-the-pale atrocity denial.]
We need to be clear about this. Ethnic cleansing, the siege of Sarajevo, the massacre at Srbrenica were disgusting crimes initiated by the Serbs. (Croat crimes were largely forgotten about, and any wrong-doing by the Bosnian government, though on a smaller scale, was ignored). [Contrary to public impression in the west, no hard evidence of any of these allegations has ever been produced – not even by The Hague Tribunal which had supposedly gathered conclusive forensic and DNA evidence, but has never allowed anyone to see it to this day]
But the identification with the Nazis came most strongly as a result of a single set of television pictures from the camps run by the Bosnian Serbs at Omarska and Trnopolje in August 1992. They were quite unforgettable. Skeletal figures behind barbed wire. It could have been Dachau. The pictures went round the world; and the reservations of the ITN journalists who filmed them over the way that they were interpreted were completely ignored. [In 2007 Bernard Kouchner, a former French Cabinet Minister and one of the early UN High Representatives in Bosnia, published a book which included a transcript of a conversation he and US diplomatic fixer Richard Holbroooke had had with Alija Izetbegovic, who was on his deathbed. Izetbegovic explicitly admitted that there had been no death camps in Bosnia and that he had only claimed that there had been because he thought this would persuade the international community to enter the war on the Bosnian Muslim side].
It was later maintained that the barbed wire ran round a small compound beside the camp, and that the prisoners were actually outside it while the camera was inside. As for Fikrit Alik, the most skeletal of all the prisoners, he was just as thin weeks after his release. But by then Serbs equalled Nazis. [This claim about the wire was actually fully endorsed by the judge in his film summing up.]
It isn’t quite like that. The Bosnian Serb forces were the aggressors in Bosnia and the Serbian police are the aggressors now in Kosovo. In both cases the hand of President Milosevic is clear. But we don’t need to drag in past nightmares to explain the present. The reality is bad enough. [Bosnian Serb forces were not the ‘aggressors’ in Bosnia. The Hague Tribunal failed to find any evidence that President Milosevic had any involvement in the decisions taken by the Bosnian Serb leadership.]
