YUGOSLAVIA: A HOLOCAUST DENIED

by Geoff Berne

A review of four articles:

Mark Schapiro, "Serbia's Lost Generation," Mother Jones, Sept-Oct. 1999 Todd
Gitlin, "The End of the Absolute No," Mother Jones, Sept-Oct. 1999 William
Finnegan, "Letter from the Balkans: The Next War," The New Yorker, Sept. 20,
1999 Christopher Hitchens, "Thunder in the Black Mountains," Vanity Fair,
Nov. 1999



By Geoff Berne 1/27/00

If NATO decides to finish the job it started in the Balkans by aiding a
breakaway by Montenegro from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia this spring,
it will have to do so without the public support it enjoyed the first time
around. Awareness has spread through the world that NATO's demonization of
Yugoslavia and its President, Slobodan Milosevic, were products of
fabrication and disinformation. Unfortunately, however, few as yet have
found it in their hearts to take the next step of ridding themselves of
anti-Serb prejudices and embracing the Serbs as a kindred and unjustly
victimized people. It's my hope in what follows to argue for such an
attitude adjustment and "return to sender" of the flawed writings and
exaggerated rhetoric of journalists such as those surveyed here, that have
contributed to the branding of the Serbs of Yugoslavia with the demon label
in no small way.

"A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture,
to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole
group of people like- an electric current, . . . and yet the rage that one
felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one
object to another like the flame of a blowlamp George Orwell, 1984

In today's age of Orwellian doublethink, in which peace is just a mask for
unending wars and hate campaigns against now this, now that lesser nation,
reality has surely been turned on its head.

American planes bomb Christian cathedrals in defense of bloodthirsty
gun-slinging Muslims once typecast as terrorists. Belligerent Buchanan who
once penned war whoops for Reagan in Nicaragua and Nixon in Cambodia - now,
reborn, like Dickens' Scrooge on Christmas Eve - link arms with Tom Hayden
against imperialism in Seattle. Mice are genetically engineered with dorsal
human ears. Revisionism is in the air with the overturning by a trial jury
of government denials of conspiracy to murder Dr. King, with the revelation
that U.S. "defenders of freedom" in Korea massacred noncombatant South
Korean civilians they were supposedly defending, and that American top
military officers in World War II directed looting of boxcars filled with
wedding rings of murdered Jews.

Then there's Daniel Goldhagen, spokesman for the idea that the entire German
population were "willing" participants in the Nazis' holocaust madness,
whipping up the mad enthusiasm of today's Americans for their own
holocaust - against Yugoslavia's Serbs.

America while purporting to stop a holocaust all but launched one of its
own, targeting civilians of Serb nationality as an enemy deserving of being
bombed, pressing sanctions that cause death and disease to innocent
children, and facilitating the murder and dispersion of the Serb minority in
Kosovo. Now the rationale that was used for this draconian treatment,
preventing Serb atrocities against ethnic Albanians, has completely fallen
apart. The holocaust that Yugoslavia's Serbian majority was accused of
waging against the Albanian ethnic group of Kosovo has been refuted and
laughed out of court. After six months of occupation of Kosovo, no evidence
that you'd need to make a case for state-supported genocide - bodies, mass
graves, victims of torture - has been found.1

Starting with the anti-Clinton protests in Greece and echoing through the
internet you can hear the indignant reaction of people who realize they've
been grossly misled: Serb "ethnic cleansing" was a fake. Holocaust II never
happened. Case dismissed.

It's time for America to deny this apocryphal "holocaust," eat crow, and
make restitution to the sturdy people of Yugoslavia for our punishment of
them for a pogrom against an ethnic minority that was never committed. Not
only has America wrongfully judged a whole people guilty of an unproven
genocide, our government appears to have promoted this sham knowingly and
with deliberation.

Indemnification reaching into every tax-sheltered American pocketbook is
due. Exoneration is owed to the Serbian people, who have fallen victims to a
fate worse than bombs: severance from "the international community"- and a
withering imperial attitude that treats them as unworthy of consideration as
fellow-humans. Hitler had a word for the Slavs of East Europe that is reborn
today in the ethnocentrism that has crept into America's perception of the
geopolitically nettlesome Serbs: "Untermenschen". Subhuman. The opposite,
that is, of the"Ubermenschen," the Master Race, the Aryans. Heirs of
yesterday's Germans, Americans are today's Ubermenschen, the civilized, the
supermen, godlike imperial beings blessed with the divine right to give
thumbs ups and thumbs downs to the political behavior of the world's nations
as though doling out Siskel & Ebert movie reviews.2

NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia was not just a war crime, it was a hate crime
against the Serbian Slavs who are its ethnic majority. If 19th Century
Russia had its Slavophiles, patriotic lovers of the motherland, we have our
Slavophobes, hawkish zealots who have sought to criminalize the Serbs as a
people.

In classic "blame the victim" fashion, spokesmen for the NATO countries took
to the airwaves to rouse support for the taking of Kosovo, the stripping of
this precious and strategic territory from Yugoslavia, and the humbling of
this last of the former socialist countries to remain standing. The darkly
ominous picture our government spokespersons painted of Yugoslavia's main
national group, the Serbs, went over the air without either challenge or
verification: in this official view, the Serbs' civilian population had
earned the punishment NATO had heaped on them by their supposed innate
tendency toward "pathological nationalism," their refusal to cooperate
smilingly in the breakup of their own country, and refusal to disavow
Slobodan Milosevic, twice elected president of Serbia and, currently, of all
of Yugoslavia.

What makes this concept of "killer nationalists" so utterly preposterous is
that far from being trapped in ethnic thinking, what really makes these
Slavs so incorrigibly threatening to the West is their espousal of the exact
opposite values, of peace, cultural equality, and tolerance. Nothing could
be more grotesque than to pin the label of ethnic cleansers on a people
known for their tenacious adherence to the concept of "Bratstvo i
Jedinstvo!" (Brotherhood & Unity), a watchword that had symbolized the 26
nationalities' determination to live together since the late 1940's in a
small land area the size of Wyoming.

This slogan of Yugoslavia's fiercely independent post World War II leader
Josip Broz Tito was more than empty words. The generation that grew up after
the war, like couples who discovered interracial dating in the wake of the
Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, had grown up and lived their lives
based on an ingrained belief in Yugoslavia's ideal of multiethnicity and
tolerance.

Yes, hard as it is to believe, Yugoslavia's credo was brotherhood, not
ethnicity. Not only did Yugoslavs not fit the assumption held so dearly by
Georgetown international relations professors: that a person automatically
feels his first allegiance is to the racial, ethnic, or religious group of
his oldest ancestors; they were the complete opposite! Ethnically
assimilated, multicultural, and - rather than religiously fanatical and
sectarian - more likely to be secular and religiously indifferent.

In researching this article I decided to seek confirmation for this
seemingly rosy vision of interethnic amity in the former Yugoslavia from
authentic Serb sources. I had phone conversations and Internet exchanges
with two Serbian-Americans who live in America because of marriage to
Americans. Ms. Gordana Todorov, of Boston, and Petar Makara of New York
spoke with me during the week of November 23rd.

Gordana is a mathematician, a Ph.D., who came here at age 22 after a
childhood in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia's second largest city. Gordana considers
herself a Yugoslav, not a Serb. Her best friend from high school was
Croatian and they stayed friends until the country fell apart in the early
1990's. Gordana's own family originally came from Croatia, but their
Croatian past was a subject never talked about while Gordana was growing up.
It was only in the 90's, she says, that people were moved to bring out their
memories of World War II. Among the things that Yugoslavian Serbs had in
common with Americans was popular movies and music: Gordana remembers seeing
"To Kill a Mockingbird," "Streetcar Named Desire," "Space Odyssey 2001," and
enjoying popular musical artists such as the Platters, Ray Charles, Mahalia
Jackson, the Everly Brothers, Paul Anka, Janice Joplin, the Beatles, and the
Rolling Stones.

Gordana minimized the importance of religious differences amongst the Serbs,
Orthodox, and Muslims of Yugoslavia. They were not great, she says "because
the postwar generation in schools learned that there was no God." It was at
home that they heard about God, in celebrations of Easter and Christmas.
"Teachers believed religion was old-fashioned," she said, "and that science
was a higher form of faith."

According to this staunch believer in her former country's humanity and lack
of ethnic spite, the idea of Yugoslavia was felt in the hearts of the
youngest schoolchildren. One thinks more of "We Are the World" than Hitler's
militaristic marching song the "Horst Wessel Lied" when she reminisces about
the meaning of the "Brotherhood and Unity" slogan as it was taught to her in
school: a symbol, she says, "for mutual tolerance and respect, solidarity in
hard times, and antifascist thinking and action." Instead of preaching hate,
she says her teachers taught songs about the country being filled with love
and pride. "We were all very proud to become part of this big family called
Yugoslavia. When we supported Milosevic it was out of fear, not hate; fear
not of what would happen to us as Serbs but of the collapse of Yugoslavia."

The extremely well-informed Petar Makara, who has a website which has been a
source of enormous corrective information about Yugoslavia, finds the
falsification and negativism about that country has reached such a point
that that name for his former homeland has been removed from most of the
online encyclopedias!

As evidence of the unity of the various peoples of Yugoslavia Makara speaks
of schoolchildren in the six main language groups that make up the country
receiving school instruction in their own languages, though he notes that
the principal language of Yugoslavia was Serbo-Croatian, spoken by all
nationalities including Moslems. He says there are no distingishable
physical differences between Serbs, Croatians, and even Moslems, and no hint
from appearances of who's who. The Slavs, he says, are one people, and it's
been this way for seven centuries.

For a country that lost 23 per cent of its population in the First World
War, the dream was always "let's all be in one country." There is no Croat
"neighborhood," he says, nor, really did anybody think of Croatia as Croatia
(any more than a New Yorker thinks of a person as being from Williamsburg or
Bedford-Stuyvesant rather than Brooklyn).

Well maybe, you may say, the Yugoslavian Serbs weren't genocidal after all,
but didn't they elect a murderous chauvinist in three straight elections? In
a speech to one million people of 28 June, 1989, at the central celebration
marking the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Milosevic uttered
sentiments that have been used by U.S. and NATO officers as proof of his
incurable pro-Serb nationalism and aggressive intentions toward Yugoslavia's
ethnic minorities. Hear President Milosevic in his own words and decide for
yourself if his message is that of a pathological nationalist, or is it the
opposite: a preacher of Yugoslavia's unique commitment to diversity!

"The Serbs have never in the whole of their history conquered and exploited
others. Their national and historical being has been liberational throughout
the whole of history and through two world wars, as it is today. They
liberated themselves and when they could they also helped others to liberate
themselves . . . Disunity among Serb officials made Serbia lag behind and
their inferiority humiliated Serbia. . . . (However) unity in Serbia will
bring prosperity to the Serbian people in Serbia and each one of its
citizens, irrespective of his national or religious affiliation. . . Serbia
has never had only Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members
of other peoples and nationalities also live in it. This is not a
disadvantage for Serbia. I am truly convinced that it is its advantage. . .
A progressive and just democratic society, should not allow people to be
divided in the national and religious respect. The only differences one can
and should allow . . . are between hard working people and idlers and
between honest people and dishonest people. . . Yugoslavia is a
multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full
equality for all nationalities that live in it. . . The threat is that the
question of one nation being endangered by the others can be posed one day -
and this can then start a wave of suspicions, accusations, and intolerance,
a wave that invariably grows and is difficult to stop. This threat has been
hanging like a sword over our heads all the time. Internal and external
enemies of multi-national communities are aware of this and therefore they
organize their activity against multinational societies mostly by fomenting
national conflicts. . . Equal and harmonious relations among the Yugoslav
peoples are a necessary condition for the existence of Yugoslavia . . .Equal
and united people can above all become a part of the civilization toward
which mankind is moving. . . Words devoted to unity, solidarity, and
cooperation among people have no greater significance anywhere on the soil
of our motherland than they have here in the field of Kosovo." - Compiled by
the National Technical Information Service of the U.S. Department of
Commerce, published on Emperors-clothes.com.

If "the speech" shows anything, it's that hyper- nationalism and ethnic
dissension did not spring from the mind of Slobodan Milosevic or the Serbian
people. These were brought to Yugoslavia strictly from outside.3

Bent on staking out a United States military presence in the heart of Europe
and on keeping Yugoslavia's relaxed, multi- ethnic, pro-worker, and, until
the late 1980's, relatively prosperous social model from spreading elsewhere
on the continent, America chose to press each of Yugoslavia's five non-Serb
republics to become a sovereign state, scraping the bottom of the barrel in
its search for hired guns to carry out this policy of separatism and
rebellion.

Down at the bottom of the barrel indeed is where they found pro-Nazi
terrorists in Croatia, and pro-Muslim drug runners and gangsters and
descendants of World War II's pro-Nazi Albanian Skanderberg SS division in
Kosovo, to carry out the operation. Thanks to American foreign and military
aid to these elements, a full-fledged Renaissance of Fascism was held on
Yugoslavian soil.

In Croatia it was a coming into the open of Nazi sympathizers who had either
collaborated with the Germans in World War II or styled themselves after the
fascist militants of those years when Croatia had its own version of
Hitler's Gestapo, the Ustashe ("the uprising"). The Ustashe, one of the most
murderous fascist movements in all of Europe, is credited with extermination
of 500,000 Serbs, Jews, and gypsies in German-style death camps. The founder
of today's Croatia's drive for independence from Yugoslavia, which took
place in 1991, and mastermind of its uprooting of 200,000 Serbs from Croatia
in the early 1990's, was Franjo Tudjman, the Croatian General who died on
December 10th. Tudjman is generally credited with having fomented the ethnic
bloodshed in Croatia of the 1990's that started the string of secessions.

Tudjman may best be remembered for his openly avowed hatred of other ethnic
nationalities. In his book Impasses he wrote "A Jew is still a Jew. Even in
the concentration camps they retained their bad characteristics:
selfishness, perfidy, meanness, slyness and treachery."4

Those who have accused President Milosevic of genocide against the Muslims
of Kosovo should remember that over 200,000 Muslims continued to live in
Belgrade without reprisal or threat even throughout the NATO bombing, and
continue to live there today. Before choosing sides between Serbia and
Croatia, those who have honored Tudjman as a fighter for Western democratic
values should confront the Tudjman legacy of revived Croatian fascist
marching songs, anthems, flags, and salutes, and policy of racial exclusion.
Tudjman's obituary quoted words of his that can serve as an emblem of the
new kind of friends whom the U.S. has chosen to support in place of the
partisans of "Brotherhood & Tolerance" of old Yugoslavia: "Thank God," said
Tudjman,"my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew."5

The Slavs survived their years as slave laborers for the Third Reich only to
hear voices of would-be conquerors that today call once again, four decades
later, for their subjection.6 Since last fall, writers for opinion-making
magazines have been rallying Americans for a final go-round against
Yugoslavia that seems ready to happen this spring in Montenegro. Yugoslavia,
which translated means the land of the South Slavs but currently consists of
just two remaining Slavic republics, Serbia and Montenegro, is being dressed
for extinction as a national entity. It would then no longer be called
Yugoslavia - just Serbia.

Lining up for a berth on the first ship out of port to Montenegro, their
flak jacket pockets bulging with lurid tropes and lethal similes, the
American high imperial writers corps dress themselves in the shoes of
Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War of the mid 1930's, fighting fascist
dictators with pen in hand. Filled with determination to help win back
Yugoslavia's regions from that devious villain, the ever- so-politely named
"Mr." (not "President") Milosevic, off they go to Montenegro to fire the
first verbal shots in what they hoped will be America's and NATO's next
shooting war.

Mark Schapiro even titles his collection of interviews with Yugoslavian
exiles and draft-dodgers with a nod to the label that's been given to
Hemingway and his expatriate friends in Europe in the years between the two
World Wars: "Serbia's Lost Generation." (Mother Jones, Sept.-Oct., 1999).

Montenegro, "which refused to enforce the Yugoslavian mandatory service law,
and still does today" has been one place of refuge for lost souls from the
former Yugoslavia, along with Hungary and other bordering countries that are
now stuffed to overflowing. Schapiro's estimate of 100,000 to 300,000 young
men fleeing Serbia to avoid military service may however be taken to have
the same numerical credibility as NATO's claims of "ethnically cleansed"
non-Serb civilians. Either that, or maybe he's right and all along the
borders of Serbia there are legions of expatriates, stranded and unable to
get visas - "well- educated," "sophisticated," and Westernized (miraculously
considering that they're all products of that Neanderthal tyrant Milosevic's
universities)- who'd pour back into their former homeland in a minute behind
the tanks of a NATO invasion even in spite of having little appetite for the
present ruined landscape of their country.

The fact that all Schapiro can find for an interview focus-group are one
family in Hungary and 20 draft age expatriates housed in a single Debrenecen
jail does not deter him from using them as symbols of a major demographic
entity for whom he seeks to stir American support. He says Americans should
sympathize with these exiles' suffering from loss of national identity, and
should support their return to their homeland so that, even if it takes
another ten years to do so, they can become "the new power in Yugoslavia."

In the same issue of Mother Jones is Todd Gitlin's now- notorious defense of
the NATO bombing of Kosovo ("The End of the Absolute No"). It puts to rest
any fears among our military and industrial establishment that the dead
bodies of once young New Leftists will rise from their academic graves and
take to the streets once again to denounce the relentless U.S. bombings of
helpless foreign countries.

His article is full of hints to the NATO warlords that he and the "friends"
he says he has all over the country will stand aside the next time a Kosovo
happens. Next time, instead of agonizing and dithering over such
unpleasantries of war as linking arms with "strange bedfellows" (meaning
presumably the mafia goons of the fascist KLA), they won't be so slow to
support a military action. No, they won't scruple about such trifling things
as "winning pretty" or get all upset about the "hideous means" used by NATO
(by which he presumably means such things as bombing pediatric hospitals,
use of cluster bombs, and sending planes to the same bombing site that had
been hit fifteen minutes earlier just to slaughter the rescuers and
survivors). After all, NATO was just trying to "do their best." Let's not
get hung up with striving for "purity." Next time, this so-called new
leftist, whose idea of radicalism seems to find its fulfillment in tearing
down the expectations of humane behavior written into Geneva's universally
accepted war codes, says in effect to his NATO overlords: "Just go for it!"

Another member of the cast of characters of this remake of a Hemingway tale
with writer as action hero is William Finnegan whose frontline reporting
behind enemy lines even led to his temporary detention in that looming war
zone.

The title of his New Yorker article "Letter from the Balkans: The Next War"
tells us that for him the die is cast and Montenegro's being the next Kosovo
is a done deal.

I'll just highlight the tabloid words Finnegan uses to describe the
nefarious Milosevic and his killer Serbs: "big, incorrigibly aggressive
Serbia . . . Belgrade's next attempt to conquer and brutally absorb a
neighbor . . . (Milosevic won't allow Montenegro to secede without a fight)
any more than he allowed Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo to leave
unmauled . . . Milosevic has been the main perpetrator of the military
aggression, the political brutalization, and the sheer criminal rapacity . .
. a powerful and dangerous figure . . . ruthlessly . . .playing on the fears
of the . . . masses, . . . Montenegro is trying to escape the ogre's
clutches without war. . . " You do get the idea by now, don't you? Poor Mr.
Finnegan needs to get these words off his chest and not carry all that hate
around inside him. Even if Montenegro is pried from the dictator's grip,
Milosevic will probably still be around, so Mr. Finnegan may as well learn
to live in the same world with this man - as the first step toward his own
inner healing!

For either Finnegan has problems of advanced psychological inconsistency or
his editor has altered the text to the point of leaving it wracked with
illogic and contradiction. Finnegan's ostensible purpose is to paint
Milosevic as a rampaging aggressor against his neighbors, an invader of
foreign countries, a threat to the stability of Europe. Yet at the same
time, he also concedes that Milosevic's engagements against Slovenia,
Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo were simply for the legitimate purpose of
preventing secession and preserving the borders of Yugoslavia, the country
to which he had, after all, been elected President!

Finnegan describes the dispersion of Serb emigres all over the Balkans as a
flight from Serbia and the creation of an exiled diaspora community that he
labels "Outer Serbia" - even though, once again, four of the five
sanctuaries for these emigres that he makes you think are foreign countries
are not foreign countries at all, but simply former republics of Yugoslavia!
Though large numbers of people were displaced from Serbia by the NATO
bombing, sizable Serbian populations have lived in all geographic areas of
Yugoslavia since long before the coming of Slobodan Milosevic. Moving to
another part of Yugoslavia to escape the bombing hardly deserves Finnegan's
stark description of "fleeing the country."

In Montenegro, for example, as he himself admits, Montenegrin natives and
Serbs are indissolubly linked by (Serbian) language, history, and Orthodox
religious roots. So much so that as Finnegan concedes, "it's not clear in
Montenegro exactly who considers himself a Serb and who considers himself a
Montenegrin." He quotes his Montenegrin Serb translator, Tijana, as saying
that at one time she had no sense of national differences at all: "When I
was a kid, I didn't even know I was a Serb. And I didn't know if my friends
were Muslims, or Croats, or what. That was Yugoslavia. My parents weren't
nationalists. They still aren't."

The purpose of Finnegan's article is to portray the passionate nostalgia
felt by his defeated interviewees as derived not from a wholly logical love
of their now smashed homeland, Yugoslavia, but from a dangerous unquenchable
nationalism that's a genetic birthright of Serbs. The Serbs are implied to
be an alien species, with a trait of irrational self-pity that easily spills
over into revanchism. Once again logic fails him, however, when he distorts
a Yugoslav army lieutenant's "hatred for Albanian, Bosnian Muslim, and
Catholic Croat politicians who had torn apart his former functioning
country" by portraying it as a "racist scorn" for them as ethnic Albanians,
Muslims, and Catholics per se.

Finnegan rejects the angry complaint by former Bosnian Serb President Nicola
Poplasen, whom he interviews, that all Balkan nationalities are being
treated as "lower beings," as raging paranoia, even though Poplasen's rage
clearly, and logically, springs from having been forcibly removed, as
Finnegan himself notes, from his office by Bosnia's NATO occupiers! And
finally he labels Milosevic a Hitler, a dictator in search of a war, who
keeps his power by exploiting "Serbs' fears, national myths, martial
traditions, and sense of righteous victimhood" right after saying, in the
immediately preceding paragraphs, that the Milosevic brand of Serbian
nationalism "can best be understood simply as an unusually tortured effort
to consolidate a state among the ashes of Communist Yugoslavia."

Now which is it, Mr. Finnegan? Is Milosevic rallying Serbs who live in
"foreign" countries (that is, with friends and families in the former
Yugoslavian republics of Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia) to join him in a
"war of conquest" against Montenegro - like a Hitler who marched into
Czechoslovakia on the false pretext of rescuing German citizens from ethnic
discrimination? Or is this NATO nemesis the leader of a people more sinned
against than sinning, an unjustly persecuted and outcast population whom
thanks to journalists like you "nobody wants to live next to," whose
reaction to being thrown out of their homes in a country they had grown up
in and loved is simply to want to stick together and defend what's left?

Will someone please explain why allegiance to Yugoslavian Serbia is
considered "pathological nationalism," while allegiance to Ireland, Italy,
Israel, the Queen of England, the American Legion, the Elks, the Masonic
brotherhood, the Mormon Church, football, boola boola fraternities at Yale,
country line dancing, Oprah Winfrey, or either of the political parties is
considered the pluralistic life's blood of our democracy?

But surely the writer who'll be handed the match to personally light the
fuse on the bomb that will start the next Western war against Yugoslavia via
an invasion of Montenegro, is Christopher Hitchens. In honor of a uniquely
incendiary prose style that outdoes the competition in arousing hate for any
subject it touches, Hitchens earns an unlikely comparison with, of all
people, novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, credited by Lincoln as "the little
lady who started the Civil War." Who but Hitchens could use phrases like
"Slobodan Milosevic's demented 'Greater Serbia," "the endgame of a
half-diseased and half-romantic national frenzy," and "the nightmare state
of which Slobodan Milosevic is still the president"?

Having startlingly focused your attention, Hitchens who seemed to have
decisively burned Bill Clinton at the stake in his book No One Left to Lie
To published early last year, has no qualms about turning right around and
serving as an operative for Clinton's war aims in Yugoslavia by conducting
an interview with the President of Montenegro, Milo Djukanovic, that
appeared with the title "Thunder in the Black Mountains" in Vanity Fair,
November, 1999. Hitchens's purpose is to be the facilitator for the aspiring
renegade Djukanovic to make his debut in the role of heroic freedom fighter
on the Western stage.

Relishing the final dismantling of the old Yugoslavia, Djukanovic launches
into the interview ever so brashly by proclaiming "The Fascist idea of
'Greater Serbia' is now dead!" Through the kind of remarkable coincidences
that occur only with the most expert press agentry, only one day after his
interview with Hitchens Djukanovic announced that he intended to seek full
control over Montenegro's armed forces, complete economic independence, a
one-chamber parliament, and a referendum on these objectives within one
year. Hitchens says he arrived for the interview, as if by utter
coincidence, "on exactly the right day" to hear the man declare his
intention to demand independence from Yugoslavia because it just "happened"
to be the 85th anniversary of the anniversary of the British Empire's
declaration of war on Germany in 1914, an event that resulted in
Montenegro's loss of its independence when it opted to side with Serbia and
was then overrun by an Austro-Hungarian occupation. Liberated in 1918 by a
Serb army that kept close reins on the plebiscite that linked Montenegro to
Serbia ever since, this small but strategically coastal province was a
staunch center of hardline party communism before becoming known in more
recent years for its friendliness to Western lifestyles, car theft rings,
drug smuggling, and its strong cooperation with the NATO war effort. Let's
be on top of this one, says Hitchens, not wait for Montenegro to degenerate
into a violent conflict while "we" who have a duty to intervene stand aside.
"This one has been coming for a long time," says this master of the
inflammatory comparison, "coming like Christmas, coming like a heart attack.
There's no excuse for being unprepared." Hitchens has already declared war
in Montenegro. If you're NATO and you don't do what he's telling you to do,
you risk getting a tongue-lashing by Hitchens. Frankly, if you're NATO,
waging a war must seem a lot more pleasant.

Afterword

It will be noted that I have mostly just summarized the above articles and
their view that America should finish the job in Yugoslavia by backing the
secession of Montenegro. Rather than present a point by point rebuttal, for
the most part I've allowed the writers' views to be judged on their own, as
though resting a case without calling witnesses. My purpose is simply to
draw attention to the existence of a pro-war media campaign in which the
group of writers cited here have played their part.

The humbling of the Slavs and the nation of Yugoslavia have been a long-held
dream of Western European powers such as Austria and Germany. The American
magazine writers noted here are merely inheriting and dusting off this
ancient wish to conquer the Serbs.

If one seeks grounds for a reply, I suggest that readers go back into
history to discover who the Serbs of Yugoslavia really are. Is there
something heroically independent in these Balkan people that threatens the
West's claim to the right of being the dominant power? Yugoslavia's
resistance to Nazi conquest has earned a place in history as the key to the
defeat of the German armies in Europe. What the history books have failed to
keep alive in the minds of Americans today is just how incredible and
improbable the Yugoslavian performance in the World War II years really was.
In every other Balkan country invaded by Hitler's armies, there was no
resistance or armed confrontation. The keys to the country were handed to
the invaders by prior agreement, and that was that. As the German armies set
out for Yugoslavia in 1941, that country was expected to do the same. But,
in spite of being hopelessly surrounded, the people surprised the world by
rebelling throughout the country. D. F. Fleming describes the Yugoslavian
resistance as an inspiration to the world as follows: "Revulsion and
rebellion swept the entire country. Plain people of every occupation
indignantly revolted, peasants and townspeople. The people knew what
(surrender to the Axis) meant and swept their own Government out of power
overnight. . . The Nazis had to act instantly, for two reasons. The
heartwarming example of the Yugoslavs was stirring the other Balkan peoples
to consider whether they too should throw all discretion to the winds and
strike for freedom. But equally vital was the delay in the invasion of
Russia which the Yugoslav revolt caused. It was essential to have the
Balkans firmly under control, before beginning the assault on Russia. So the
Germans acted in furious haste and with total brutality . . .Belgrade was
blitzed from the air in the first day . . . vengefully to deprive of their
chief possession the little peoples who had defied the Nazis. . . The
resistance of the Greeks and Yugoslavs was 'hopeless,' yet it gave hope to
all mankind and very probably prevented the conquest of the old world by the
Nazis. Such 'futile,' immortal resistance had not been expected by Berlin.
Hitler had taken over all the other Balkan states one at a time without war.
He did not expect the last of his victims to resist."7

As Serbian-American Petar Makara describes it, the Serbs held out against a
Nazi invasion longer than any East European country. In 1941 one-third of
Serbia was actually liberated from the Germans. Nowhere else did this
happen. Time and Life magazines electrified the world with pictures of
German soldiers being held as prisoners of the Serb resistance.

After World War II, Yugoslavia found a new threat in Winston Churchill's
determination to halt Soviet expansion in East Europe. Even before war's
end, Churchill grew wary of the Greek and Yugoslavian partisans who were
supposedly his allies in fighting the Germans. "In 1944 Churchill crushed
the Greek communist-led partisans ruthlessly, but no one was able to
suppress Tito's communists in Yugoslavia. Even Moscow failed to manage them
for long after the war."8

A total of 1,014,000 Yugoslavians died in World War II, 487,000 of them
Serbs.9

Obiously this is a people that has paid its dues and established unique
credentials as fighters against tyranny and racism.

Is it not possible for us today to look beyond the writers of the 1990's who
have tried to portray the Serbs as an inherently chauvinistic and murderous
ethnic society, and to look at their full history of commitment to freedom
before making such a truth- twisting judgment of them as a people. Notes

1 Brian Mitchell, "How Many Really Died in Kosovo? Body Count So Far Doesn't
Support Charges of 'Genocide,'" Investor's Business Daily, 11/17/99. "The
Trepca mines in Kosovo were alleged to hold 1,000 bodies of Albanians
murdered by Serbs. If the bodies weren't just dumped down mine shafts, they
were supposed to have been burnt or dissolved in acid in the mines' smelter.
. . The Mirror of London wrote that the name Trepca would 'live alongside
those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka. . . etched in the memories of
those whose loved ones met a bestial end in true Nazi Final Solution
fashion.' But no bodies were found at Trepca. No human remains at all,
according to the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia -
the ICTY. And all of Kosovo has turned up far fewer bodies than expected.
The results have raised the question of whether Western officials
deliberately exaggerated the suffering in Kosovo to justify intervention.
During the bombing, NATO officials reported as many as 225,000 Albanian men
missing. After the bombing, officials said the Serbs had murdered 10,000
Albanians. The ICTY now believes over 11,000 people, mostly Albanians were
killed in war crimes. But so far investigators have found the bodies of only
2,108 presumed victims, including some Serbs. . . The ICTY has already
investigated the sites most likely to yield the best evidence against
Serbian leaders. Pathologist Emilio Perez Pujol, who headed a team of
Spanish investigators in Kosovo, recently told the Times of London, 'I
calculate that the final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most.
This includes lots of strange deaths that can't be blamed on anyone in
particular." Many were killed after NATO began bombing. Critics of the
bombing wonder whether fewer people might have died if NATO had not
intervened. Alice Mahon, who chairs a committee on the Balkans as a member
of the British Parliament, told The Times, 'When you consider that 1,500
civilians or more were killed during the NATO bombing, you have to ask
whether the intervention was justified.' . . . During the war, Clinton
accused Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic of 'singling out whole peoples
for destruction because of their ethnicity and faith.' . . . Asked if NATO
committed war crimes by bombing civilians, Clinton told reporters on June
25, 'NATO did not commit war crimes. NATO stopped war crimes. NATO stopped
deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide.' By June 1,
U.S. and NATO officials were claiming 225,000 men missing and 6,000 killed
'in summary executions,' according to NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. Within
days, senior British officials had pushed the number of dead to 10,000 'It's
very difficult to give an overall number, but what's clear is that the
picture is far worse than we thought,' said David Gowan, Britain's war
crimes ambassador, in June. The opposite seems now more likely. The 195
sites that yielded up to 2,108 bodies were supposed to have held 4,256
bodies. Many early reports of 'mass graves' appear to have been exaggerated.
The ICTY won't say how many mass graves it has found. Too many 'mass graves'
have turned out like Ljubenic. At Ljubenic, Italian troops first claimed to
have found a grave with 350 bodies, 'the largest suspected mass grave in
Kosovo so far,' according to the news service Agence France-Presse. The next
day, the same news service reported the Italians had actually found only
five bodies at the site."

2 The comparison of America's self-appointed role as world's "sole
superpower" with the world-saving mission of Germany under the Nazis is made
by Jan Oberg, "The Real Kosovo Mission," Daily Republican, 8/9/99. "Nazism's
main feature is our contempt for weakness and a celebration of strength,
power, and heroism. The Strong SHALL rule over the Weaker. The good/stronger
has a right, or God-given authority, to control or eradicate the evil/weaker
who only deserves our contempt. The stronger takes upon him a burden of
civilisation, sacrifices and acts heroically in the name of a higher
principle or 'law.' Thus he is never made responsible for his deeds; he has
a higher mandate and is above common law . . . Those carrying out the
leader's orders are conveniently also relieved from responsibility, no
matter how criminal they may be - since they too aim to drive out Evil and
(re)install Good. . . An integral part of the Nazi ideology is to PRETEND to
fight idealistically for high moral goals and against evil while promoting
one's own petty cause and meanness. The world is black and white. . .
Aggression and idealism melt into one . . . the criminal is seen as a hero.
Projection means ascribing to others the 'dark sides' we find inside
ourselves and abhor. Could it be that Western leaders and media, when
calling Milosevic Hitler, signaled their fear or unpleasant awareness that
their own project could be seen as 'Hitlerist?'"

3 The opening of the door to foreign takeover of Yugoslavia's individual
republics through encouragement of separatist nationalisms has been blamed
on the impoverishment imposed on the population to repay loans extended by
the West's International Monetary Fund during the 1980's. "NATO is really
nothing but a collection agency for the IMF: it is meddling in the Balkans
because the Western powers are determined to collect their debts. Because
Bosnia and other states from Yugoslavia are in IMF financial custody, money
that should be going into reconstruction is being funneled into repayment of
debts to foreign creditors." David Fennario, "The West is to Blame for
Balkan Fiasco," Montreal Gazette, 5/30/99. Fennario links the West's backing
of neo-fascist separatists in Croatia and Kosovo as a defense against the
angry resistance of Serbia's masses to the austerity measures demanded by
the IMF as guarantee that Yugoslavia would have the ability to repay. See
also Michael Parenti, "The Destruction of Yugoslavia," Antiwar.com, 6/99:
"Yugoslavia was the one country in Eastern Europe that would not voluntarily
overthrow what remained of its socialist system and install a free-market
economic order. Hence the goal of the U.S. was to transform Yugoslavia into
a cluster of weak right-wing republics incapable of charting a course of
self- development, . . . a shattered economy wide open to transnational
companies that could invest and rebuild on their own terms." This strategy,
of forcing nationalistic separatism on the individual provinces of
Yugoslavia, was epitomized in the bill President Bush pushed Congress into
passing in 1991: the Foreign Operations Appropriations Law, which provided
that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence within six
months would lose U.S. financial support. Parenti quotes U.S. General Wesley
Clark, Commander of Operation Allied Force, as proof that the goal of the
West's military action was to destroy the authority of Yugoslavia's central
government - "to demolish, destroy, devastate, degrade, and ultimately
eliminate the essential infrastructure of Yugoslavia." For a revealing look
at the West's wish to convert a fragmented and disempowered Yugoslavia into
a militarily imposed business opportunity zone by replacing the national
economy, see Benn Steil & Susan L.W. Woodward, "A European 'New Deal' for
the Balkans," Foreign Affairs, LXXVIII, No. 6, November/December, 1999. "A
radical but sensible alternative is to abandon national currencies and adopt
. . . the euro. This way the Balkans' central bank functions would be either
transferred to the European Central Bank or eliminated . . . Development
assistance should be used to leverage private western financing of Balkan
projects . . . The West should make equity investments in Balkan business a
priority. No positive political change can occur (in Serbia) until the
damaging psychological effects of isolation are reversed and the legitimacy
of a pro-Western platform is restored after the damage done by the NATO
bombing campaign. (Hence) NATO and the United States must maintain a
presence in the region for some time. . . The proliferating military bases
in the region already provide the support for a NATO land headquarters." In
the same magazine, an article suggests the superiority of an ethnically
purified, Muslim-only Kosovo to a Bosnia (now run under as a shared
government by three ethnic groups) as the location for such a base, and
supports a redeployment of "human, financial, and diplomatic resources from
Bosnia to Kosovo" where, the authors say, the UN administration has "powers
like those of the emperor: there is very little it cannot do." Ivo H Daalder
and Michael B.G. Froman, "Dayton's Incomplete Peace," Ibid., pp. 110- 111.

4 "Franjo Tudjman, Ex-Communist General Who Led Croatia's Secession, Is Dead
at 77," New York Times, 12/11/99.

5 Ibid.

6 "From the great height of their own racial superiority the (Germans)
looked down upon the Slavs as inferior beings, Untermenschen, and did
everything within their power to destroy any human dignity in them." D. F.
Fleming, The Cold War & Its Origins, Norwich, 1961, Volume I, p. 145. A plan
to strip Yugoslavia of its post-World War II advances and reduce it along
with the rest of the East European countries to a seedlot and pack horse for
a resurgent "colonial" Germany is alleged by Prof. Sean Gervasi, "Why is
NATO in Yugoslavia?" Emperors Clothes.com, December, 1999. Originally
presented in Prague, Czech Republic, 13-14 January, 1996.

7 Fleming, pp. 128-129.

8 Fleming, p. 159. People searching for a villain in the Balkans may instead
of using President Milosevic want to turn back the clock and try Winston
Churchill. Some of the first seeds of NATO and the Cold War between the West
and Soviet Russia were planted by Churchill who had lobbied as early as 1944
for "some sort of bloc against the Soviet Union." In 1943, Churchill lobbied
tenaciously, but finally unsuccessfully, for an Allied assault on the
Balkans. "Churchill's yearning," says Fleming, "to keep the Russians out of
the Balkans made no more sense politically than it did militarily," mainly
because the Russian armies had earned the right to have a security zone for
Russia in the Balkans by their prodigious military effort against the
Germans. (p. 166) Churchill's obsession with stopping the spread of Russian
influence was lifelong and took precedence over any other consideration. In
1927, he spoke in Mussolini's Rome with enthusiasm for the accomplishments
of Italian fascism: "If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been
entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle
against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism." "Address to the
Roman Fascists," January, 1927, in Salvemini, The Fascist Dictatorship, p.
20. Historian William Henry Chamberlin locates the origins of the Cold War
in Churchill's realization that the West would need to carry on the fight
against Russia, a fight that was only necessary because by America's entry
into the war "we prevented Hitler from finishing off Stalin." Chamberlin
credits Churchill not only with initiating the Cold War but also introducing
modern warfare's bombing of civilians (such as we have seen in NATO's war in
Yugoslavia) as a matter of strategy: "Hitler had tried to induce the British
to agree to bomb only military objectives. . .The British decisively
rebuffed this proposal. In the British decision to ignore the distinction
between military and civilian targets may be found the seeds of the
destruction of many continental cities. . . .Churchill told the House of
Commons on Sept. 21, 1943: 'To achieve this there are no lengths of violence
to which we will not go.'" "The Bankruptcy of Policy" in Harry Elmer Barnes,
ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Caldwell, Idaho, 1953, p. 531.

9 Dr. Robert M. Bowman, "Kosovo: Chronology of the Conflict in Kosovo,"
Space & Security News, Institute for Space & Security Studies, Vol XVI, No.
2, Sept. 1999.

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