Danilo Mandic interviewed Noam Chomsky in his Boston office for Belgrade's Radio Television of Serbia (RTS).

These topics (Balkan wars, Milosevic Trial, Yugoslvia in general and Bosnia and Kosovo in particular) have been very heatly debated on Babble and I thought it may be enlightening to those interested in the Yugoslavian Tragedy to listen to some of Chomsky's views on these topics.

Much of what is said in this interview are things that I have tried ot argue in the many threads on these topics, and I think it is an excellent summary of the dissenting view of the Yugoslavian Tragedy.

Some of the issues Chomsky deals with in this interview are:

- The reasons Nato bombed Serbia had nothing to do with the conflict in Kosovo-Metohia and everything to do with the fact that Serbia (and Montenegro) was the last part of Eastern Europe that did not yet accept the Neoliberal "reforms".

- The accusation of Genocide for Imperialist ends.

- Nato War Crimes

- The hoax of the famous ITN photo of the thin man in the bosnian death camp (For background info click on the Judgment video in this link).

- Srebrenica

- The Milosevic Trial

- Atrocities in Kosovo occured after Nato bombing

- Parallels between Iraq and Yugoslavia

- The Herd of Independent Minds i.e. the support of western intellectual culture of official state positions and their utter hypocrisy
between "our crimes" and "theirs"

- The manipulation of the Corporate Media

- The probable future of Kosovo

[ 27 December 2006: Message edited by: Tom Vouloumanos ]

quote:

---

The manipulation of the Corporate Media

---

Just watched one of the videos you linked to...

quote:

---

- The Herd of Independent Minds i.e. the support of western intellectual culture of official state positions and their utter hypocrisy
between "our crimes" and "theirs"

---

Very good point. Not realizing that facts could be slanted or just made up many liberal intellectuals are willing to support wars of aggression. Iraq war was just very poorly backed up from a intellectual point of view.

Or just media that wants to join in on the fun, like The Guardian during the NATO bombing.

Also, aren't we denying the Serbian Interior Police and their paramilitary adjuncts agency by suggesting that "bombing" caused them to beat up on Albanians? You mean they had no choice? Like robots: "when the bombs fall, we shoot Albanians and chase them off their land and then loot their homes."

Sure Noam...

Look, I'm not sure that bombing was a good policy choice, just that we need to stop pretending like only NATO are guilty and that Milosevic's Serbia doesn't need to shoulder a big hunk of the blame for what went down.

I think there is reticence among some on the left to lay blame at the feet of Milosevic. Partly because of a general "anti-imperial" stance, but perhaps more because of sentimentality for a Socialist Yugoslavia that was long past due before NATO dropped the first bomb.

[ 27 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

quote:

---

The Herd of Independent Minds

---

Oh that's a good one. The pro-Milosevic group never said anything which hadn't been predigested by the Yugoslav state security apparatus or the Yugoslav Communist Party.

PLEASE don't pretend there is anything independent about following the Milosevic line.

quote:

---

Oh that's a good one. The pro-Milosevic group never said anything which hadn't been predigested by the Yugoslav state security apparatus or the Yugoslav Communist Party.

PLEASE don't pretend there is anything independent about following the Milosevic line.

---

From the interview above:

quote:

---

NC: First of all let me just fix the timing. The things I've been quoting are from the late nineties.

DM: Before Kosovo.

NC: Yeah. Now, they needed some event to justify this massive self-adulation, OK? Along came Kosovo fortunately and so now they had to stop genocide. What was the genocide in Kosovo? We know from the Western documentation what it was. In the year prior to the bombing, according to Western sources about two thousand people were killed, the killings were distributed, a lot of them were coming in fact according to British government, which was the most hawkish element of the Alliance, up until January 1999 a majority of killings came from the KLA guerillas who were coming in as they said, you know, to try to incite a harsh Serbian response, which they got, in order to appeal to Western humanitarians to bomb. We know from the Western records that nothing changed between January and March, in fact up until March 20 they indicate nothing. March 20th they indicate an increase in KLA attacks. But, it was ugly but by international standards it was almost invisible unfortunately and it was very distributed. If the British are correct, the majority was coming from the KLA guerillas.

---

quote:

---

The pro-Milosevic group

---

Again, this is another tool that Chomsky mentions. If one attacks the trial of Milosevic, as well as the allegations in order to show imperial aims one therefore has to be "a communist", or "a Milosevic supporter".

quote:

---

DM: I want to ask you about some of the present developments that are being used again to fabricate a lot of these issues. Slobodan Milosevic died last month. What is the significance of his death in your view?

NC: Milosevic was, he committed many crimes, not a nice person, terrible person, but the charges against him would have never have held up. He was originally indicted on the Kosovo charges. The indictment was issued right in the middle of bombing which already nullifies it. It used British, it admittedly used British and the U.S. intelligence right in the middle of bombing, can't possibly take it seriously. However if you look at the indictment, it was for crimes committed after the bombing. There was one exception: Racak. Let's even grant that the claims are true, let's put that aside. So, there was one exception, no evidence that he was involved or you know, it took place,

But almost the entire indictment was for after the bombing. How are those charges going to stand up unless you put Bill Clinton and Tony Blair on the dock alongside? Then they realized that it was a weak case. So they added the early Balkan wars, OK? Lot of horrible things happened there. But the worst crime, the one that they were really going to charge him for that genocide was Srebrenica.

Now, there is a little problem with that: namely there was an extensive, detailed inquiry into it by the Dutch Government, which was the responsible government, there were Dutch forces there, that's a big, you know, hundreds of pages inquiry, and their conclusion is that Milosevic did not know anything about that, and that when it was discovered in Belgrade, they were horrified. Well, suppose that had entered into the testimony?

DM: Does this mean that you are a "Milosevic sympathizer"?

NC: No, he was terrible. In fact he should have been thrown out, in fact he probably would have been thrown out and in the early nineties if the Albanians had voted, it was pretty close. He did all sorts of terrible things but it wasn't a totalitarian state, I mean, there were elections, there was the opposition, a lot of rotten things, but there are rotten things everywhere and I certainly wouldn't want to have dinner with him or talk to him, and yes, he deserves to be tried for crimes, but this trial was never going to hold up, if it was even semi-honest. It was a farce; in fact they were lucky that he died.

DM: In what sense?

NC: Because they did not have to go through out the whole trial. Now they can, you can build up an image about how he would have been convicted as another Hitler.

DM: Had he lived.

NC: But now they don't have to do it.

DM: I just want to bring you back to the

---

quote:

---

DM: …in the United States and in the West in general, because reviewing it you would get the impression - you would be forgiven for imagining that every critic of the NATO intervention was one of two things: either a "Milosevic sympathizer" or someone who doesn't care about genocide. What does this mean?

NC: First of all that's a common feature of intellectual culture. One good U.S. critic, Harold Rosenberg once described intellectuals as the "herd of independent minds." They think they are very independent but they are a stampede in a herd, which is true; when there is a party line, you have to adhere to it and the party line is systematic. The party line is subordination to state power and to state violence. Now you are allowed to criticize it but on a very narrow grounds. You can criticize it because it is not working or for some mistake or benign intentions that went astray or something, like you see right now in Iraq war, the tone of debate about Iraq war but take a look at it - it's very similar to the debate in PRAVDA during the invasion of Afghanistan.

---

quote:

---

Also, aren't we denying the Serbian Interior Police and their paramilitary adjuncts agency by suggesting that "bombing" caused them to beat up on Albanians? You mean they had no choice? Like robots: "when the bombs fall, we shoot Albanians and chase them off their land and then loot their homes."

---

Again from Noam's own words:

quote:

---

NC: Yes. And that's not even questioned. In fact there is a, there was a so-called, an Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Kosovo bombing led by a very respected South African jurist - Justice Goldstone - and they concluded that the bombing was, in their words, "illegal but legitimate". Illegal makes it a war crime. But they said it was legitimate because it was necessary to stop genocide. And then comes the usual inversion of the history.

Actually, Justice Goldstone who was a respectable person, later recognized that the atrocities came after the bombing. And that they were furthermore the anticipated consequence, he did recognize that in a lecture in New York, couple of years ago, he said: "well, nevertheless we can take some comfort in the fact that Serbia was planning it anyway, and the proof for they were planning it is" guess what - "Operation Horse-Shoe", - a probable intelligence fabrication that was publicized after the bombing, so even if it was true, it wouldn't matter. And furthermore, even if that was true, it was a contingency plan. Now look, Israel has a contingency plans to drive all the Palestinians out of the West Bank if there is a conflict, so does that mean that Iran has the right to bomb Israel? Now, the U.S. has contingency plans to invade Canada, OK so does that mean that everybody has a right to bomb the United States?

That's the last straw of justification on the part of a respectable person. But for the "herd of independent minds" it just does not matter. The bombing was because of their "high values", and their "nobility" and was to stop genocide. Say anything else, you know… tons of vilification and abuse comes. But it's not just on this issue, it's on every issue. So try to bring up the idea…take, say, the Vietnam War, a lot of time has passed, a huge amount of scholarship, tons of documentation, blew up the country...

---

We cannot let out oppobrium for NATO's bombing get in the way of our judgement that the Milosevic regime was a bad deal for just about everyone.

Perhaps the funniest thing of all is hearing leftist protectors of Serbia rail on about the paucity of the ideological "War on Terror" in other contexts, and yet the language used by the Serbian government in their war on Albanians in Kosovo was virtually identical. They were forever justifying their various abuses against the Albanians under the guise of "fighting terror". I have a little propaganda pamphlet published by the Serbian government and sold/distributed to Western sources to gain support for Serbia's "anti-terrorism" cause. The little booklet has a map purportedly showing the pressure of an Islamic terror threat on Serbia. Little green arrows (for Islam) are shown swooping in from all directions to the south and east of Europe and converging on Yugoslavia. It bears a striking resemblance to those little maps you see Israel's supporters post - you know, the ones that show a monolithic sea of Arabic Islamic Terror Baddies surrounded poor beleagured little Israel.

Not surprisingly, Israel refused to condemn the Milosevic regime at the UN or elsewhere and maintained diplomatic ties and support for Serbia throughout the whole mess. They even sold weapons to Serbia during the conflict with Bosnia. Their reasons for doing so have everything to do with a confluence of interests - Israel couldn't be seen to be supporting a "Muslim terrorist" (re: nationalist revanchist) uprising. Funny we see through this nonsense when Israel does it, but when it comes to Serbia, so many on the left are still willing to buy the Serbian Ministry of Information party line.

[ 27 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

If you wish to suggest books, I would also strongly suggest Fool's Crusade by Diane Johnstone.

Actually, most on the left (including the radical left) supported the the official Media line about the Yugoslav tragedy, so I am not sure what you are talking about. Later on, and I was involved with this in the nineties, did I see opinions on the left change dramatically (in the last 5 years about). Now, many of those who did not support the bombing were not very vocal against it. Remember the bombing on Yugoslavia was a liberal/social democrat/green humanitarian war. So there was substantial left support for the view that genocide was being committed against Kosovo Albanians, of course all of which as the extensive public western record shows was false. In fact, the KLA (according to British reports) were initially responsible for most of the attrocities which were responded to with equal brutality by the Yugoslav army. That isn't the Serbian Ministry of Information. Nor is the Dutch report about Srebrenica. The fact is that these western sources which are extensive and detailed and which don't support the Milosevic ordered genocide in Srebrenica or Kosovo stories are ignored.

This has nothing to do with party affiliation. We are looking at the extensive western record and comparing it to media and looking at the huge discrepancy, in fact, we come to opposite conclusions (as compared to media reports). This in fact is the story. Now was Yugoslavia a bad place during Titoism, yeah sure, it was not a democracy, did it have good features yeah sure many actually. But does mentioning the bad features (political dicatorship, lack of freedom of speech, lack of free press) of Yugoslavia mean that one doesn't think the good ones (social welfare, living standard, education, health, full employment) have merit and vice versa? So does mentioning the discrepancy of the official media with that of the extensive public record mean that one supports whole heartedly the Yugoslav regime? Of course not.

Many external powers were responsible for the Yugoslav tragedy. It is true that Russia, Ukraine, Israel and even Greece sold arms to Yugoslavia. It is also true that Croatian Forces, Bosnian Muslim Forces, the KLA were armed by the US, Germany, Britain and to a lesser extent France (and it is also true that the Mujahadeen were present in Bosnia and as such arms were sent via Saudi Arabia). In fact everyone who understood the Balkans (i.e. people from there) were very much aware of the external power play that exacerbated and prolonged the conflict.

Now, one can blame every party as well as leader of all the Yugoslavian ethnic groups, but the real story for us, is our complicity and responsibility in this horrible human tragedy, because we have a direct influence over those crimes.

I have debated this issue and linked alot of information in other threads that you may access to via my profile, so I will refrain from getting into the details here. I think though, that you should substantiate your claims against what Chomsky says with information as well in order for the rest of us to review and assess.

quote:

---

Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:
Quote away, Tommy-boy. Nothing in there contradicts what I said. What Chomsky calls the "inversion of history" is also a case of him having amnesia for the decade of human rights abuses committed by the Yugoslav and Serbian governments against the Albanians of Kosovo/a. I'm not suggesting that justifies the bombing, however, to pretend like the only thing Milosevic ever did to Albanians happened after the bombing started is mindless. I suggest you read The Road to War in Serbia (Nebojsa Popov ed.) for a primer on the socio-political conditions in Serbia prior to both the wars with Croatia and Bosnia and Kosovo written by some of Serbia's finer minds.

---

Chomsy said nothing of the kind. What he said was that to call what was happening in Kosovo "genocide" was an insult to the victims of the Holocaust. At no point did Chomsky ever assert that Serb and Serb leadership were not guilty of their own crimes.

He then went on to say that if it was "genocide," then genocide was going on all the time everywhere. He makes the point that what made Serbian war crimes exceptional, was not the intensity of the human rights abuse, but that the human rights abuser was operating outside of the NATO club. He examples Turkey, where the repression of Kurds far outmatched anything taken on by either Milosovic or the Yugolslav federal state.

Watch the movie again.

Secondly, there was nothing exceptional about the Federal Yugoslavian state repressesion of Albania nationalism, as the state sought to repress all types of nationalism except the Federal kind. In fact, the reason Milosivic acted to disband the Federal state, was because the federal state was opposed to his Serb nationalist policy.

Playing up this idea that the Yugoslav state viciously repressed nationalism in all corners of Yugoslvia is to only tell half the story. Conistently, among all of the national groups there were significant groupings of people who opposed the seperatist trend.

[ 27 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:

Chomsy said nothing of the kind. What he said was that to call what was happening in Kosovo "genocide" was an insult to the victims of the Holocaust. At no point did Chomsky ever assert that Serb and Serb leadership were not guilty of their own crimes.

He then went on to say that if it was "genocide," then genocide was going on all the time everywhere. He makes the point that what made Serbian war crimes exceptional, was not the intensity of the human rights abuse, but that the human rights abuser was operating outside of the NATO club.

Watch the movie again.

---

quote:

---

I think though, that you should substantiate your claims against what Chomsky says with information as well in order for the rest of us to review and assess.

---

I'm not going to rehash history for you. But just for fun, let's start with his claims about the KLA using attacks to draw a response from the Serbian authorities. Here, KLA violence is contextless (like Palestinian violence in the Israeli "terrorism" narrative). The violence has nothing to do with conditions in Kosovo/a, nothing to do with the Serbian government making life difficult for Albanians, nothing to do with territorial revanchism. What a crock of shit.

Then, he makes the unsubstantiated claim that the KLA was doing this in order to get the West to bomb. No quote from Thaci, or anyone else in the KLA leadership. No information. So here we have Noam telling a little story about how the KLA manipulated the west into bombing for them in a completely contextless attack on Serbia...

Usually Mr. Chomsky would have a field day with such a ridiculous story. Here, nothing.

[ 27 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:

I didn't bother. Your last sentence sums up my differences with Noam - the abuses in Kosovo were far more substantial than what goes on "everywhere", all of the time. Genocide was probably hyperbole, just as it is when it's used in the case of Israel and the Palestinians. But there are a lot of degrees between what goes on "everywhere" all the time, and genocide.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
As of the date that Milosovic died, having full control of the ground where the purported genocide took place, ICTY prosecutors have yet to find one substantial mass grave.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:

BS. As Chomsky points out Turkish attacks upon Kurds make Milosovic look like a humanitarian. As Chomsky point out. The difference is that the Turks are in Nato, the Serbs outside of it.

---

Two wrongs making a right here, huh? You sound like Israel's mouthpieces, Cue. "Oh, oh, oh, look over THERE! It's waaaaay worse, so you should leave us alone..."

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
Right, which is what Chomsky said. So what is your point.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:

Is only genocide a bad thing?

---

Chomsky's point is that the intervention was predicated upon the idea that genocide was taking place. This was a lie. It was a lie intented to create the propoganda environment that would make it acceptable to the public to take out an independent Serbian regieme.

That was all.

[ 27 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:

---

Maybe if the West sat back even longer we could have gotten proof for genocide in Kosovo too...

---

You've mentioned this before and I believe we discussed this issue. Never once, never did the west sit back on the Yugoslavian tragedy. It was complicit throughout every step of the way. From the initial breakup, to the refusal of accepting any reasonable settlement that did not bring all of the Balkans under US economic rule (as Chomsky explains), it was an active participant in the largest ethnic cleansing namely the Serbs of Krajina (Dalmatia)(See this article by Gregory Elich), it helped create a media narrative over the whole catastrophe in order to support a well prepared bombing. The destruction of the Yugoslavian federation was part of the foreign policy of the West, any story that would lead to that conclusion was repeated and exagerated any report that did not lead to that conclusion was ignored.

Every single dissenting analyst is in agreement with this, including Chomsky, Herman, Johnstone, Parenti, Elich and many many others.

I have provided many links in other posts regarding this that are easily accessible on the babble archives. If need be, I will repeat these links and others.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
Maybe "the west" should intervene in Caledonia too. Who knows what might happen down the line.

---

Are you actually comparing Caledonia with the four Yugoslavian wars? Please don't.

quote:

---

Chomsky's point is that the intervention was predicated upon the idea that genocide was taking place. This was a lie.

---

It wasn't exactly a 'lie', it was an exaggeration by Kosovar leaders which even some in our MS media admitted to later. Just like the twenty thousand systemic rapes in Bosnia weren't exactly a lie. Or the claim that Milosevic had no knowledge of these atrocities at the time. Or the West being the only party to blame for the whole nightmare. Chomsky is getting rather didactic in his old age.

[ 27 December 2006: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tom Vouloumanos:

You've mentioned this before and I believe we discussed this issue. Never once, never did the west sit back on the Yugoslavian tragedy.

---

Please don't blame the "west" for everything that happened. They may have played a double game, particularly at the beginning of the breakdown, I see that now -however- they can't be blamed for what the paramilitaries did on Either side, nor the equally cynical games that the Yugoslav and Russian establishments played themselves.

quote:

---

Every single dissenting analyst is in agreement with this, including Chomsky, Herman, Johnstone, Parenti, Elich and many many others.

---

But every single 'dissenting analyst' doesn't represent every single analysis possible. Not yet.

quote:

---

I have provided many links in other posts regarding this that are easily accessible on the babble archives. If need be, I will repeat these links and others.

---

Actually I'd appreciate it if you Did reopen the last couple you posted from before. I always meant to get back to them but as too often happens I got sidetracked and forgot. Was a series of counter proofs and alternative testimony on a Bosnian warlord, I think put out by Hermann among others.

quote:

---

Contrary to what some on this thread (and similar threads) claim, the foregoing point of view does not make one a Milosevic supporter or an unreformed communist.

---

No of course not, I hope I wasN't implying that.

[ 27 December 2006: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by EriKtheHalfaRed:

It wasn't exactly a 'lie' it was a exaggeration by Kosovar leaders which even some in our MS media admitted to later. Just like the twenty thousand systemic rapes in Bosnia weren't exactly a lie. Or the claim that Milosevic had no knowledge of these atrocities at the time. Or the West being the only party to blame for the whole nightmare. Chomsky is getting rather didactic in his old age.

[ 27 December 2006: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

---

The people who claimed that Milosovic had nothing to do with Srebrenica was the Dutch Goverment, whose army as you may know was the responsible UN party to the events. Chomsky's assertion is based on the conclusions of the commission they convened to investigate the events.

In fact the Dutch report is the only completed document based on a offical investigation, so in fact it is the only authorative source on the issue. But if you prefer the tabloid press as your source, be my guest.

Some other people might think otherwise, so I will provide the link:

quote:

---

Here, KLA violence is contextless (like Palestinian violence in the Israeli "terrorism" narrative). The violence has nothing to do with conditions in Kosovo/a, nothing to do with the Serbian government making life difficult for Albanians, nothing to do with territorial revanchism. What a crock of shit.

---

Have you reviewed any of the mainstream articles on Kosovo before it became famous (before 1989). When there was no real strong support for destroying Yugoslavia at that point.

In fact (an contrary to western mainstream opinion, again the public record on this extensive if anyone wishes or has the patience to review) both Yugoslavia and to a much much greater extent Roumania were supported by the West (US/UK) in order to keep somewhat of a foothold in Eastern Europe, which became important after 1989. Terefore, completely destabilizing Yugoslavia was not policy at the time, since, its breakup, could have sent the largest chunck to the arms of the USSR. Seperatists and Nationalists from Yugoslavia always had friendly relations with the US, the US and Germany, but the time was not ripe for full out support. This changes in 1989.

Tyhe external story was the US imposing the neoliberal order on the last part of Europe that was outside the new world economic order.

To quote away again:

quote:

---

NC: Actually, we have for the first time a very authoratative comment on that from the highest level of Clinton administration, which is something that one could have surmised before, but now it is asserted. This is from Strobe Talbott who was in charge of the…he ran the Pentagon/State Department intelligence Joint Committee on the diplomacy during the whole affair including the bombing, so that's very top of Clinton administration; he just wrote the forward to a book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, and in the forward he says if you really want to understand what the thinking was of the top of Clinton administration this is the book you should read and take a look on John Norris's book and what he says is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians. It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so therefore it had to be eliminated. That's from the highest level.

---

At the same time, we have Russia trying to keep strategic influence in Eastern Europe.

A third battle was going on between Naton "friends" much like Rwanda ( a french-american conflict), Germany was competing (via Croatia) for greater power in the Balkans. Let us rehash history and remember how Hitler wanted a pipeline (Cueball has presented maps in previous threads) from the Caucuses through the Balkans to Germany. This would make the Europeans somewhat inependent of the Americans. The Americans needed to quash such a European design and as such moved quickly in support of the KLA and especially the Alijah Izetbegovic Regime in Bosnia. Another Balkan chess game was played out. France backed Germany and the UK backed the US.

Israel is mentioed above by B.L. Zeebub LLDand yes it got interested when the Saudis sent the Mujahadeen as well as arms to Bosnia. It was a global arms parade by then.

B.L. Zeebub LLD, you use the Palestine analogy, which in some ways applies. In fact, Palestine has been an official enemy of the US and the tragedy of Palestine is completely turned on its head in the mainstream media. But do those who defend Palestinian rights or put the middle eastern conflict in perspective support suicide bombing.

quote:

---

Actually I'd appreciate it if you Did reopen the last couple you posted from before. I always meant to get back to them but as too often happens I got sidetracked and forgot. Was a series of counter proofs and alternative testimony on a Bosnian warlord, I think put out by Hermann among others.

---

Not sure, it is the ones you meant, but here is one post on babble these issues (referring to a rabble article no less (as well as other articles focussing on Milosevic though), I will try to locate others...please remind me which ones you were referring to

quote:

---

Tom. delusions die hard. Don't even bother.

---

I think the problem Cueball is that people don't at least look into some of the resources that are provided.

This quote from Diane Johnstone is always fitting:

quote:

---

I understand the immense difficulty of gaining a clear view of the complex situation in the Balkans. The history of the region and the interplay of internal political conflicts and external influences would be hard to grasp even without propaganda distortions. Nobody can be blamed for being confused. Moreover, by now, many people have invested so much emotion in a one-sided view of the situation that they are scarcely able to consider alternative interpretations.

It is not necessarily because particular journalists or media are "alternative" that they are free from the dominant interpretation and the dominant world view. In fact, in the case of the Yugoslav tragedy, the irony is that "alternative" or "left" activists and writers have frequently taken the lead in likening the Serbs, the people who most wanted to continue to live in multi-cultural Yugoslavia, to Nazi racists, and in calling for military intervention on behalf of ethnically defined secessionist movements [3] -- all supposedly in the name of "multi-cultural Bosnia", a country which, unlike Yugoslavia, would have to be built from scratch by outsiders.

---

Germany's influence in Yugoslavia was already there. I guess you guys don't know many Yugoslavs - they'll tell you that the Mark was the go-to currency on black and gray markets for a long time previous. But hey, keep believing they wanted a pipeline. What was the other red-herring....oh, I remember, coal. The Tripeca mines were the ultimate goal of occupation of Kosovo/a. Citizens of the World, Lignite!

Anyway, you both seem to think that I'm unaware of all this detritus from Johnstone and elsewhere. I'm not. I haven't argued against ANY of it, in fact. Just Noam's little story about contextless KLA violence. I note you haven't refuted what I said about his narrative. Anyway, I guess it's time to start dealing with Johnstone et al.

As for NATO doing a flip-flop, so what? They shouldn't have been buddies with Milosevic in the first place. (Wait, you mean "independant" Milosevic was in bed with NATO?) He was a nasty toad. He began a criminal political sequence that named - variously - Croates, Bosnians, Muslim terrorists, Albanians, etc. as the exterior to Greater Serbia - the long suffering Serbs (never mind they controlled the army and other key institutions in Tito's Yugoslavia) were portrayed as hapless victims of "reactionary" forces amongst them. Poor, poor Serbs were under attack (wait, all the fighting took place outside Serbia, how can this be) from enemies on all sides, just as it had always been in history. No, Tom, the analogousness to Israel isn't "funny", it's dead on, right down to the use of the Holocaust as a political tool.

And Tom, what Milosevic has to say about Arafat is entirely irrelevent to the question of human rights abuses and their analogousness to ISrael/Palestine. What people say and what they do aren't always the same. Ideology has paradoxes, and twists, and turns. The analogy of a revanchist Muslim nationalist group trying to regain land from an imperial power who claims to have supernatural connection to the land fits. This ideology of God-blood-soil was propagated in Serbia for over a decade before the quarrel with NATO. "Oh, but back in 1489 our great Prince fought the battle of Kosovo (and was bitterly defeated) against the incoming hordes. Therefore, it is ours, in spite of who is standing on it now." The analogy to Israel's "biblical rights" is clear and true.

I'm not arguing in favour of NATO's bombing but against the rosy view that some have of Milosevic and his ilk. Poor little Milosevic was the last bastion of independent thinking in the world and should be defended in spite of his crimes, they say. Yeah right. He was perfectly happy to cozy up to NATO, or Russia, or whatever imperial power would let him when it suited. It was his insertion of an expansionist and reactionary nationalist narrative into Yugoslav politics that was the final nail in the coffin. If you want to lament Tito's Yugoslavia, fine. But don't blame NATO. That ship was sunk long before. Your narrative (and that of Chomsky and others) entirely omits the internal forces pulling Yugoslavia apart. Internal forces that may have been exploited in a "chess game" but that doesn't change the fact that they were there. Basically, in your story, everyone is responsible for what went down (NATO, Germany, Russia, Izetbegovic, etc.) but never the biggest Serbian badass of them all.

I notice that none of them (or you) in talking about this neo-liberal agenda, make mention of Milosevic's own privatization schemes. Schemes that essentially criminalised the most profitable sectors of the economy, putting them under the control of him personally, his family, and his buddies. Here we have the wedding of state power with organised crime, backed up by the army and paramilitary groups. That's the "independent" course Milosevic was taking.

So yeah, delusions die hard...

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

quote:

---

But do those who defend Palestinian rights or put the middle eastern conflict in perspective support suicide bombing.

---

The chief of staff of the KLA was in fact a former Croatian General who participated in operation Storm (the ethnic cleansing of Krajina by the Croatian army.) Operation Storm also culminated in NATO action in favour of the Croats, and Bill Clinton even went as far as to say that Operation Storm was good for the Balkans -- 150,000 Serbs driven from their homes not withstanding.

This is not even connect the dots conspiracy stuff, the lines are all there colouring in the picture is all that is required.

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

– Bill Clinton, My Life: Vol II: The
Presidential Years, p265, 2004, 2005

Lets not be too naive here. Most people on this site, were this a description of US funding to Israel would quite rightly understand what this means.

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
[QB]I don't see how you can say that it is impossible that KLA leaders were quite well aware that thier activities might trigger a series of events which culminated in NATO interventions. After all they had plenty of evidence that this would be the case.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
[QB]

The chief of staff of the KLA was in fact a former Croatian General who participated in operation Storm (the ethnic cleansing of Krajina by the Croatian army.)

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
How about "likely."

Balkan politics has since 1804, been heavily influenced by the great power politics, and no nationalist movement there can claim that it was entirely succesful without the support of a great power.

---

Secession was in fact the path that Milosovic supported in tandem with Tudjman in opposition to the federalists. The debate between Tudjman and Milosovic was about how best to devide up Bosnia.

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
[QB]So. That has nothing to do with wether or not thet US was using NATO and the UN as tools for the expression of its own policy, and that the policy it supported was secession, not compromise, even thought there were substantial political grouping within each national group which opposed secession.

---

Firstly, of course the U.S. uses NATO and the UN for the expression of its own policy. There's no crime strictly in that. That's what everyone does. You don't have to be Hans Morgenthau to see that.

Secondly, the forces of "federalism" were beaten long before NATO got involved. Milosevic had struck several fatal blows to federalism long before Tudjman was even elected. Tudjman's election was reactionary. Slovenia's seccession (there was virtually no opposition, Cueball) was already a fait accomplis.. Revoking the autonomous status of Vojvodina and Kosovo in 1989 was a huge step away from federalism. How exactly do you compromise with "Greater Serbia" backed by the "Yugoslav" army?

It's been said that Milosevic was the first politician to start acting as though Tito was dead. The metaphor is perfect.

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

I can hardly follow what you are trying to say.

I have never stated that internal forces were not pulling Yugoslavia apart. In fact, I linked articles that said just that. I even mentioned links between seperatist forces and Western powers and mentioned that western powers were friendly to these forces but they did not at the time (pre-1989) want to support them because the US and the UK had links with Yugoslavia under Tito. I am fully aware of privatizaiton under Milosevic as well as the fact that he and his cronies enriched themselves, but this is absolutely no different to what was going on and is going in every single Eastern European country.

The articles I linked were mainstream news sources dealing with Kosovo before 1989, claiming that a Nationalist movement was growing and that there were clashes between the communist Kosovo autonomous government with seperatist backed forces. These were indigenous problems in Kosovo and were responded to quite harshly by the regime.

Never did I draw a rosy picture, but I have argued that what we did to the Balkans was criminal. Saying that does not mean that Milosevic was a saint of any kind. Again, I have absolutely no idea why you come to the conclusion that when we mentino Nato's deep involvement in war crimes as well as media manipulations of the events that occures that this equates worshiping Milosevic as a socialist hero. Seems like the cold war mentality.

B.L. Zeebub LLD, I have focused (as anyone should) on our deep involvement in the Yugoslav tragedy because we could do something about our own crimes, our involvement. We have influence over our part of the world and as such we are responsible for what our part of the world does. Brining this up, like Chomsky does, doesn't meant the other side are a bunch of good guys, or that the world would be a paradise if it wasn't for the west.

We supported the conflict, we prolonged it, we exacerbated it, we exagerated the crimes of official enemies and ignored and even colluded with the crimes of official allies.

Chomsky merely repeated what Strobe Talbott and John Norris said in a new published book on the whole affait, I mean those were the guys i charge, they admit to this, they are proud of this, they think it was good policy, it's in their book, and they (the ones in charge Talbott and Norris) say that Yugoslavia was bombed because that the US attacked Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro at the time) because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms.

Milosevic trial was a way of justifying the bombing. Smacking srebrenica and all the other attorocities onto him was a way of making the public ignore the fact that the Kosovo genocide wasn't holding up.

Do you disagree with this? If so, let us look into Norris' book and see what the Clinton administration at the highest level was thinking about.

Now by saying this, do we by extension imply that Milosevic was a great socialist hero? No, in fact it is irrelevant.

Furthermore, the western public record shows that there was no genocide in Kosovo (something with which you agree) and that according to some (namely British parlaimentary reports) the KLA were responsible for most of the attrocities. This does not negate the fact that the Yugoslav army responded with equal brutality. Leading to an ethnic war that cost 2,000 lives before the bombing according to NATOs own numbers (with the victims being about half ethnic Albanians and half ethnic Serbs but overwhelmingly Military and Militias) again according to the western public record.

According to the western record pre-89, it was ethnic Serbs, Gorani and Roma who were leaving Kosovo. This was accentuated during the conflict and has lead to all out ethnic cleansing under UN (read Nato) watch in Kosovo.

Does this mean there was no abuse or crimes of any kind by Belgrade of course not. What we are showing is our own media manipulation and our own crimes for our won Imperialist ends in the region.

Pipelines were not the number one issue. I have stated what the number 1 issue was according to the Clinto administration itself. But pipelines were a part of the equation. Michel Collonfor example, has written about this. Geopolitical interests have not changed much, but yes German and US planners were at odds somewhat in the Balkan conflict, like they were over Iraq (Saddam was trading Oil in Euros by then).

ETA:

So my questions are

- do you disagree with the statement that Yugoslavia was bombed because Serbia was not carrying out reforms as is stated in Norris' book?

- do you disagree that basis of the Milosevic trial was to whitewash Nato's crimes?

- do you disagree that the Western Media completely manipulated the public and supported the statements of western governments with respect to Genocide in Kosovo?

- do you accept the Dutch Report that Milosevic was not involved in Srebrenica?

- do you accept western pre-89 reports (thay I linked) that I linked that alleged that ethnic Serbs were being driven out of Kosovo by violent Nationalist clashes?

- do you accept Nato's own reports that 2,000 people mostrly fighters were killed in Kosovo with almost equal numbers on both sides?

- do you accept the assertion that the greatest crimes in Kosovo occured after NATO bombing?

Well if you do, all of this points to deep western complicity, something that should shock you more than any crime you attribute to Milosevic, because you and I both are responsible for the former and not the latter.

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: Tom Vouloumanos ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tom Vouloumanos:
[QB]
ETA:

So my questions are

- do you disagree with the statement that Yugoslavia was bombed because Serbia was not carrying out reforms as is stated in Norris' book?

---

I wasn't privy to the high-level decision-making, and I don't think that even Norris' "confessions" are necessarily the whole picture. I think that was a motivation among many others.

quote:

---

- do you disagree that basis of the Milosevic trial was to whitewash Nato's crimes?

---

Yes. He committed crimes, and should've been tried for them. It's a shame he died before the evidence could be fully layed out and a conclusion drawn, because I think this simply adds fuel to the "see, he wasn't really that bad" fire. Tell that to the people who lost their lives, families and homes to his paramilitary groups and the JNA.

quote:

---

- do you disagree that the Western Media completely manipulated the public and supported the statements of western governments with respect to Genocide in Kosovo?

---

I don't believe in grand media conspiracies. Does the herd do as a herd does? Sure. Is it a consciously directed activity, no way. That's giving them too much credit.

quote:

---

- do you accept the Dutch Report that Milosevic was not involved in Srebrenica?

---

Do I think that Milosevic was directly involved in the attacks by Bosnian Serb forces? No. Do I think he had ultimate command responsibility. Probably. If we're arguing that NATO "exacerbated" the problem by helping the Croatians, Milosevic' ties to the Bosnian Serb Army are even firmer.
Unfortunately, the trial was never completed.

quote:

---

- do you accept western pre-89 reports (thay I linked) that I linked that alleged that ethnic Serbs were being driven out of Kosovo by violent Nationalist clashes?

---

Not at face value. At that time, you'll recall, news coming out of Yugoslavia was still largely vetted and controlled by the central (re: Milosevic-controlled) government. Many of these stories were puffed up by the Serb government to justify their response to Albanian "terrorism".

quote:

---

- do you accept the assertion that the greatest crimes in Kosovo occured after NATO bombing?

---

quote:

---

[QUOTE]- do you accept the Dutch Report that Milosevic was not involved in Srebrenica?

---

Do I think that Milosevic was directly involved in the attacks by Bosnian Serb forces? No. Do I think he had ultimate command responsibility. Probably. [/QUOTE]

Are people who ask and answer their own questions to avoid answering an uncomfortable question being dishonest? Of course.

Is asking and answering one's own diversionary Rumsfeldian questions an annoying new trend that makes debate pointless? Sure!

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jingles:
[QB]

Are people who ask and answer their own questions to avoid answering an uncomfortable question being dishonest? Of course.

---

Right. So parsing out a false question dishonest? I guess that to Jingles, it is.

Do you have anything of substance to add? I guess not.

Should I worry what you think of me? Probably not.

Would I go hunting with you? No way.

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

Since you don't want to answer that, since you seem to accept the NATO government's propaganda narrative of events (and question the veracity of their own official accounts when it differs), you simply created the question you felt safe answering instead.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
That last is something I would like to see coroborated.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jingles:
[QB]He asked a simple question. Basically, who is lying; the Dutch inquiry, or the media and NATO governments?

Since you don't want to answer that, since you seem to accept the NATO government's propaganda narrative of events...
(and question the veracity of their own official accounts when it differs), you simply created the question you felt safe answering instead.

---

Oh it's as simple as Either/Or, eh? I don't think so. Are we to think that everything said by NATO about what when on in Serbia is either a lie, or true? Perhaps there's a mixture of both. My point is that the question proposed is false because it creates a false dichotomy. I'm not scared of that, just not willing to be forced into criteria I don't think apply.

Anyway, as for the rest about "NATO propaganda" Milosevic was a murdering fascist toad. That's not NATO propaganda, that's a decade or more of watching him promulgate chauvinist bullshit, paramilitaries ethnically cleansing people, several wars started in the name of "Greater Serbia" just for starters. Heck, then we get into the crony capitalism propped up by xenophobic distractions, and is it really hard to see why I have no love for the guy? If he'd pulled half of those tricks somewhere else, and NATO had never become involved, I bet no one would have a qualm about anything I've said about him and what happened.

Actually, at the time I argued long and hard against NATO's bombing, but that doesn't change how I feel about ol' Slobodan and the braindead morons who cheered him on year after murderous year.

He and pricks like Holbrooke were a match made in heaven. Both would lie, cheat and steal to keep themselves in power. Both thought brute force was the way out. And neither gave a whit about common people. The neo-libs might be fucking working people, but Milosevic was holding a big dildo of his own...

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

quote:

---

Anyway, as for the rest about "NATO propaganda" Milosevic was a murdering fascist toad. That's not NATO propaganda, that's a decade or more of watching him promulgate chauvinist bullshit, paramilitaries ethnically cleansing people, several wars started in the name of "Greater Serbia" just for starters. Heck, then we get into the crony capitalism propped up by xenophobic distractions, and is it really hard to see why I have no love for the guy? If he'd pulled half of those tricks somewhere else, and NATO had never become involved, I bet no one would have a qualm about anything I've said about him and what happened.

---

Nice triple post. Anyway you have repeatedly mentioned that no evident genocide has taken place, nor did you state that NATO bombing campaign was just.
Then why are you contradicting yourself?
For perspective, did Milosevic carpet bomb any country for 3 months without UN approval?
He may have been a warmonger but he didnt invade or bomb any countries directly. I admit that Croatian war of independence was a gray area, but the invasion would have been undertaken
by the federale army, with or without Milosevic.

Since he did no such things, except sending paramilitaries into Bosnia/Croatia, the brunt of the discussion is directed against validity of NATO bombing campaign. Lets be honest, valid it was not.

Here's the clincher for my argument:
You elaborate how Milosvic was a scheming greedy tyrant. Yes he did have a crony business empire. Yes, he was brutal and power-hungry(but an angel compared with Saddam).
But we weren't debating whether or not he was a nice guy. The obvious comparison: anti-war left that gets tarred as traitors and "pro-Sadam" in the US for opposing the war.
Does it matter that an illegal invasion is directed against a tyrant like Saddam? It still was ILLEGAL, wasn't it?

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: BetterRed ]

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: BetterRed ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by BetterRed:

Nice triple post. Anyway you have repeatedly mentioned that no evident genocide has taken place, nor did you state that NATO bombing campaign was just.
Then why are you contradicting yourself?

---

I'm not. I never said he committed genocide, nor that the bombing was just. Was Milosevic a dirty fascist piece of shit? I'm convinced of it.

quote:

---

For perspective, did Milosevic carpet bomb any country for 3 months without UN approval?
He may have been a warmonger but he didnt invade or bomb any countries directly. I admit that Croatian war of independence was a gray area, but the invasion would have been undertaken
by the federale army, with or without Milosevic.

---

To turn your own formal argument against this - whether or not Saddam was a bigger baddie is irrelevent. I don't like little fascists, or big ones.

quote:

---

It still was ILLEGAL, wasn't it?

---

Of course, and I never argued otherwise, not even at the time it was happening. However, what I'm arguing against is the tendency (whether realised here or not) to be soft touches for Milosevic simply because we find what NATO did to be unnacceptable. As I said in the end, he and Holbrooke, Clinton, etc. were all perfect for one another.

It isn't "neo-libs vs. Milosevic" it's that regimes like Milosevic's are the dirty underside of neo-liberalism. They all did their part to destroy Yugoslavia, sow hatred, and generally stick it to regular folks. I oppose fascisms of all kinds. Even "corner store" fascism.

Milosevic is dead now, and I'd like to help make sure that his memory is never rose-tinted.

I guess what makes this personal for me is that I had a lot of Serbian friends who went through a change. Suddenly, Milosevic could do no wrong, and even if he did, his goals were laudable. To this day, many of them won't admit there was a problem. It was sad, frustrating, and a testament to how easily we fall prey to atavistic nonsense given the right conditions.

[ 29 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

quote:

---

"The [1999] bombing war violates and shreds the basic provisions of the United Nations Charter and other conventions and treaties; the attack on Yugoslavia constitutes the most brazen international aggression since the Nazis attacked Poland to prevent "Polish atrocities" against Germans. The United States has discarded pretensions to international legality and decency, and embarked on a course of raw imperialism run amok."

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Fidel:
According to William Rockler, former prosecutor of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal:

NATO and US Government War Crimes in Yugoslavia

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:

Personally, I think the business after the bombing started was the fruit of a poisonous tree planted by Milosevic as early as 1987. Never mind the decade long repression of Albanians following the revocation of autonomy in 1989. Forced evictions, population resettlement programs, mass firings of Albanian workers and intellectuals. Assasinations, police brutality, etc., etc. I think the crime happened when Milosevic named "Albanian" (actually the term of endearment "shiptar" was more popular amongst fashionable Serbs) as the exterior to "Serbia" and Serbs went along for the fascist ride. The rest, as they say, is history.

---

Yes, I have read this narrative before, and in as much as it is often repeated by authorative sources, there is no doubt in my mind that repression of Kosovar nationalism was not a pretty thing. The question though is one of comparison. Was the main event of attacks triggered by the NATO bombing worse than what preceded it, or not. I was looking for substantiation of your statement that it was worse before, and part of an escalating patern of violence that was inevitable with or without the bombing.

While the seeds of nationalist Serb violence against Kosovars was evident before the attacks as you suggest, I do not think that it logically follows that increased violence was inevitable, even if it was latent.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:

Yes, I have read this narrative before, and in as much as it is often repeated by authorative sources, there is no doubt in my mind that repression of Kosovar nationalism was not a pretty thing. The question though is one of comparison. Was the main event of attacks triggered by the NATO bombing worse than what preceded it, or not. I was looking for substantiation of your statement that it was worse before, and part of an escalating patern of violence that was inevitable with or without the bombing.

---

I can't prove a counterfactual proposition. I don't know if history could have unfolded differently. But I don't think of it as NATO coming in ex nihilo, they were part of the process for a long time. It's like dysfunctional relationship - everyone is to blame for the dynamic.

quote:

---

Chomsky doesn't seem to be arguing such either, I think he is fairly careful to make the point that the bombing was a trigger for an escalation, but not that Milosovic or Serb nationalist are spotless.

---

What I take exception to is the "structural" emphasis. The latent idea here is that the bombing caused the escalation. But aren't we erasing Serb agency then? The Serbian folks who started booting Albanians out of their homes and looting their stuff (the sheer scale of the theft is a side rarely spoken of) are still responsible for war crimes.

There can be no "NATO made me do it" defense.

[ 29 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:

There can be no "NATO made me do it" defense.

[ 29 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

---

But that's exactly what Chossudovsky said in 2002:

quote:

---

The strategic interests of Germany and the US in laying the groundwork for the disintegration of Yugoslavia go unmentioned, as does the role of external creditors and international financial institutions. In the eyes of the global media, Western powers bear no responsibility for the impoverishment and destruction of a nation of 24 million people.

But through their domination of the global financial system, the Western powers, in pursuit of national and collective strategic interests, helped bring the Yugoslav economy to its knees and stirred its simmering ethnic and social conflicts. Now it is the turn of Yugoslavia's war-ravaged successor states to feel the tender mercies of the international financial community.

As the world focused on troop movements and cease-fires, the international financial institutions were busily collecting former Yugoslavia's external debt from its remnant states, while transforming the Balkans into a safe-haven for free enterprise. With a Bosnian peace settlement holding under NATO guns, the West had in late 1995 unveiled a "reconstruction" program that stripped that brutalized country of sovereignty to a degree not seen in Europe since the end of World War II.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Fidel:
Chossudovsky

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Fidel:
NATO-backed neo-Liberal economic medicine has destroyed more than just the Yugoslavian economy. The capitalist economic long run still hasn't kicked in for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

---

And as Chossudovsky pointed out, western news media tended to focus on historic ethnic rivalries instead of the socio-economic upheaval of the NATO-backed IMF reforms imposed on the region. What amounted to Frankensteiny resuscitation of laissez-faire capitalism didn't work in the U.S. after 1929, and it caused economic upheavals in Chile and Argentina. So why should it work any differently in the former Yugoslavia ?. The Russians are trying to reverse the corrupt deals made for oil production sharing agreements signed at a time when that country was on its knees as a result of cold war embargos, OPEC oil wars, and a time when our own capitalist economies in the west were suffering from cyclical downturns, and stagnation, which is a problem from time-to-time with all capitalist and industrial-based economies in general.

[ 29 December 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:

That's one of the troubles I have with Chossudovsky, too. Theoretically, it's a consequence of the "structural" emphasis in Marx, and in Althusser, etc.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:

What I take exception to is the "structural" emphasis. The latent idea here is that the bombing caused the escalation. But aren't we erasing Serb agency then? The Serbian folks who started booting Albanians out of their homes and looting their stuff (the sheer scale of the theft is a side rarely spoken of) are still responsible for war crimes.

There can be no "NATO made me do it" defense.

[ 29 December 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
[QB] in fact NATO bears as much responsibility as anyone else for triggering the events that followed the comencement of the bombing campaign...

---

This is of course broadly true, but not specifically so, since we all are quite well aware of the play of human emotion and the political realities. You and I know that this is not so simple, and as you argued above, it requires necessary "context," to be properly assessed.

While one can not state that the United State arial extermination campaign in the early 70's in Cambodia was directly responsible for the rise of Pol Pot or the specific crimes of him and his followers, it is not as if the United States was not guilty of creating the necessary "context," within which the most radical and repressive elements of Khmer radicalism came to hold sway.

It is not possible to simply assess the situation inside Serbia and Kosovo during the bombing campaign, as merely a null factor, and that Serbians and Serb leadership should be judged completely seperate from the context of their experience, as if the bombing had no efffect.

The fact is that the people who made the decision to bomb Cambodia, and those who later made the decision to bomb Serbia, where quite well aware that their decisions were calculated to create an effect. If they thought it would be ineffectual, they would not have done it, frankly.

The truth is that all individuals respond to physical, and even verbal abuse, differently. Some are cowed immediatly. Some react with reasonable defensive measure, while others are known to fly right of the handle and strike out at whatever target presents itself, rightly or wrongly. When we are speaking about group dynamics, we know that there will always be a fair number of people who react to extreme violence in unreasonable manners, and we also know that as the force and manner of the violence is increased so is the intensity of the reaction.

Extremist Serb reactions were quite predicatable, and given the highly calculated way in which modern war is conducted, certainly not out of the intellectual reach of NATO war planners, nor their knowledge base, or even their direct experience.

Winston Churchill called the Allied bombing campaign over Germany "terror bombing" and the initial bombing campaign in the recent Iraq war went into operation under the epithet "Shock and Awe." Clearly all are aware that the chief object of most bombing campaigns is to have a direct impact on the emotional state of the people who they target, and this was the stated aim of the NATO campaign in 1999, in the former Yugoslavia, which sought to undermine the moral of the Serbian people and thereby errode Slobodan Milosovic's support among Serbs.

Therefore, given that the reaction of some Serbs to the bombing was completely and totally precitable, even to people with a lay knowledge of human intercourse, and not all of Serbs showed Gandhi like moral fortitude it seems to me that NATO war planners must calculated and accepted the risk that there would be violent anti-Kosovar activism, as a result of their actions and therefore must take responsibility for taking those decisions.

[ 30 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
While one can not state that the United State arial extermination campaign in the early 70's in Cambodia was directly responsible for the rise of Pol Pot or the specific crimes of him and his followers, it is not as if the United States was not guilty of creating the necessary "context," within which the most radical and repressive elements of Khmer radicalism came to hold sway.

---

The doctor and the madman did more than bomb Cambodia, Viet Nam, and Laos to kingdom come with saturation bombing and millions of gallons of defoliant, poisoning thousands of acres of farmland for years afterward. The U.S. was accused of aiding and abetting Khmer Rouge through Red Cross and other aid agencies. That's not information which we would find in history books printed in Texas or New York. There were a handful of "independent" news journalists provided with access to "front lines" in Vietnam. I did a college report on it years ago, and two of the privileged reporters were a guy from Texas named "Hunt" and Canada's own Conrad Black among a handful few others. John Pilger was a true independent journalist inside VietNam then. And we have our very own Jerry West who was there in the middle of it.

NATO bombing of Kosovo was so intense that birds migrated from the area and still haven't recovered to previous numbers. Imagine the silence of such an aftermath and peoples struggles just to survive.

[ 30 December 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

---

it is not as if the United States was not guilty of creating the necessary "context," within which the most radical and repressive elements of Khmer radicalism came to hold sway.

---

Other parts of that "context" were the fact that the Khmer Rouge tolerated within its ranks just these radical and repressive elements.

Also part of the "context" was the fact that the Khmer Rouge operated under the usual "democratic centralism", also known as "leader worship."

quote:

---

Originally posted by Fidel:
Harvard and Princeton economists waltzed into Russia (and Yugoslavia) in the 1980's and plopped stacks and stacks of economic reports on infront of leaders...

---

Oh come on off it.

The guardians of Leninism, who had defeated Hitler and then held NATO at bay for decades, were finally done in by a bunch of "waltzing" academics? Don't make me laugh.

quote:

---

Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:
There is a monumental and important difference between understanding why someone might do something, and absolving them of blame.

---

Sure. And I don't see where Chomsky does this.

He repeatedly states throughout the video that Milosevic is not a nice guy "not someone he would go to dinner with," etc. Chomsky is actually attacking the use of hyperbolic distortion in the service of justifying further crimes, not defending Milosovic. He even points out that this idea that anyone who portrays a counterveiling narrative to the NATO narrative is a "Milosovic supporter," the very same falacy you are pursuing.

He seems actually more concerned about the shutting down of free intellectual discourse through the assertion of patriotic imperatives in the intelligencia.

[ 30 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by brookmere:
The plain fact is that the Communist elite had already decided to steal the assets of the Soviet and Yugoslav states for themselves. The foreign "experts" were just brought in for window dressing.

---

Window dressing ?. I don't think so. I think there people and financiers brought in to make it all happen. Not all of the wealth was privatized. Privatization schemes are being challenged by the Russians in courts of law. The Russians believe oil production sharing agreements with multinationals like Shell were signed at a time of economic weakness. It was the height of the cold war and extra-territorial trade embargos which brought wide-spread discontent for hundreds of millions of people living under the Soviet system. If a country can't trade gold or oil for chocolate, oranges or enough wheat, it would cause problems for any government no matter what their agenda was.

Some of the oligarchs have fled Russia to countries with no extradition agreements with Russia, and they've fled with billions of dollars worth of crooked loans and untaxed profits from corrupted privatization schemes.

quote:

---

Originally posted by jeff house:
Yes, I think we should blame the foreign advisors for the fact that the Soviet government and party helped itself to the resources of their country.

Bad, bad foreign advisors! (Who brought them in, anyway?)

---

Jeff, one of the oligarchs made a grab for what is about a quarter of the world's proven nickel ore reserves. They made it "appear" legal by paying something like $200 million dollars for mineral reserves worth many, many billions of dollars more than that token amount by western market standards. You, too, may want to read the Monthly Review article, Harvard's Best and Brightest "Do Russia." They didn't pull all that cash out of thin air.

The formula goes something like: prolonged extra-territorial medieval siege plus massive propaganda is followed by neo-Liberalization schemes. And therefore,

mafia + usury = "free market economy"

[ 30 December 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

One of the reasons I posted this Video interview was that Chomsky has modified his stance regarding Yugoslavia. (So has Znet actually).

Chomsky was always opposed to the bonbing of Yugoslavia and always stated that there was no policy of Genocide throughout the Balkans and that the Serbs were the convenient enemies of the US for their own ends, he has been consistent that there was no humanitarian intervention. Yet, he agreed at the time with much of what was said about Milosevic and with the allegation that the Yugoslav army was the main cause of the Kosovo war. During that time, he admitted that these were issues he had not looked into too much in detail. He was more concerend with the US policy towards the Balkans than the internal dynamics. His long time associate Edward S. Herman though was a dedicated researcher into the internal dynamics of what occured in Yugoslavia, as well as foreign intervention. Herman paid much more attention to the internal details.

Now, Chomsky's conclusions never changed (as to our involvement and illegal bombardment) what did change though was his assessment of certain details: regarding how hostilities began in Kosova, regarding the numbers of victims as well as the circumstances with the respect to the Srebrenica Massacre, regarding Milosevic's role. All of this information regarding the foregoing, Chomsky got from the well documented western record.

His opinions on these subjects come from Dutch UN reports on Srebrenica, Nato and British reports on Kosovo, etc.

Hence, there was somewhat of a shift regarding the details that occured that I found interesting.

With regards to "Greater Serbia", this is another Media myth. In fact Milosevic wanted Smaller Yugoslavia. He saw himself as the inheritor of Tito and Yugoslava Federalism. His aim was to keep as much as the Federal Republic as he could. His main objective was power of course. Therefore, Milosevic was not a Serb nationalist like Vojislav Šešelj (of the Serbian Radical Party, which claimed Chetnik heritage and did support the ideology of Greater Serbia), and he had strong political, personal and ideological differences with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadjic. In fact, Lord Owen (author of the Vance Owen Plan) had stated that he Milosevic was not a nationalist or ethnic purist. In fact a compilation of interviews and speechesshows a consistency in Milosevic' ideology as someone who saw himself as the inheritor of Titoist "socialism" and Yugoslav plurinational federalism. True one can say that Serbs would be at the head of a smaller Yugoslavia by their numbers alone, so it would be convenient for Serbs to want a united Yugoslavia (without Croatia and Slovenia).

It is also true that in this respect Milosevic did support and was allied with Milan Babic and Goran Hadjic who were leaders of the defunct Republic of Krajina. They were Croatian Serbs who wanted their territories to remain part of Yugoslavia. Milosevic was also allied with and supported by Fikret Abdic, who was the leader of the pro-Yugoslav Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovian, he set up an autonomous territory in Bihac and was a bitter enemy of Alija Izetbegovic. Abdic was the most popular politician in Bosnia before hostilites but was pushed out of the way by Izetbegovic because of hist stance against Islamism and Seperatism.

So yes, Milosevic, did support forces that wanted to remain part of the Federation.

This does not make him a hero by any stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, the details of events that took place in Yugoslavia are important in understanding media manipulation in order to gather support for the bombding and destruction of Yugoslavia as the last hold out not of pure socialism or a people's democracy, there was privatization and robbing galore, but as a means to stamp out any resistance (and this was a message to all of eastern europe) of the neo-liberal reforms and to remove any Russian influence in Europe.

There is a secondary story of German-French (EU) and US-uk competition for spheres of influence. The US did not want Germany to further its influence in Eastern Europe and create any possibility of future cooperatoin with resource rich Russia.

(remember Sadam was trading oil in euros, one of the reasons the EU was opposed to bombing Iraq).

Chomsky does not get into these last issues, other authors have and they are worth a look to anyone interested in geopolitics, especially in these much more dangerous times.

I have opposed the bombing of Yugoslavia as well as the kangaroo Court on the former Yugoslavia, because they were tools of imperialism that have laid the ground work of later invasions, the consequences of which we are still dealing with.

quote:

---

Originally posted by jeff house:
Yes, I think we should blame the foreign advisors for the fact that the Soviet government and party helped itself to the resources of their country.

Bad, bad foreign advisors! (Who brought them in, anyway?)

---

They were as ideological as those they thought to replace. The USSR needed more than anything a slow process of reform, not radical neo-liberal free market evangalizing. The reality was that the basic social organizations were not in place to support the western model.

For instance they had no system of taxing personal or corporate income tax, and essential element of supporting an independent government and judiciary. Russians are still getting used to the idea.

These facts were simply ignored by the Harvard neo-liberals whose one-size fits all economic realities ignored local conditions.

But that is only the truth. No one is interested in the truth when one is simply grinding ones own personal axe.

[ 03 January 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:

They were as ideological as those they thought to replace. The USSR needed more than anything a slow process of reform, not radical neo-liberal free market evangalizing. The reality was that the basic social organizations were not in place to support the western model.

---

In fact, we can't really claim to have voted for it ourselves in Canada in spite of what opinion polls say about NAFTA.

Russians Support Putin’s Re-Nationalization of Oil, Control of Media, But See Democratic Future

quote:

---

With regards to "Greater Serbia", this is another Media myth.

---

Sure, Tom. You're trying to draw clear lines between support for maintaining Yugoslavia and Serbian nationalism. The fact is that the ideological architects of Milosevic's rise and success (like Mihailo Markovic, Pavle Ivic, etc.) didn't draw such a distinct line. They tried to hoe a line between the two by advocating a "stronger federation" but with Serbia having greater power. This was all based on the real "myth" which was the notion that Serbians had been historically punished by Slovenes and Croatians under Tito and the Communists. Who am I to believe, them, or you? They wished to change the balance of power within the federation to favour Serbia. Moreover, many Serbs lived outside of Serbia proper, and so maintaining the federation was a manner by which Milosevic could use Serbian identity politics to leverage certain effects in Croatia, etc.

Not to mention the great number of actual Serbians I know who all admit to harboring this idea and having understood it to be the aim of Milosevic's politics. But I suppose they are all misguided about Milosevic, too.

Moreover, when hostilities began, Serbia made wild claims to places such as Dubrovnik, etc. as "historic Serb territory" which was the justification for their attacks on these places.

Sorry, Tommy, no dice. Perhaps you need to re-read the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences Memorandum of 1986 and research the ideological and actual political connections between it's authors and Milosevic's reign. The fact is that publically Milosevic used the language of the old Socialist system to legitimise his politics, which were essentially nationalist in nature. This transition in meaning was engineered by guys like Markovic.

But hey, don't believe me, go check out the Serbian analyses of Milosevic's propaganda done by Serb dissidents like Nebojsa Popov, Vesna Pesic et. al.. They were there and began writing in opposition to the process at the time. We're they opposing a myth?

[ 03 January 2007: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:

Sure, Tom. You're trying to draw clear lines between support for maintaining Yugoslavia and Serbian nationalism. The fact is that the ideological architects of Milosevic's rise and success (like Mihailo Markovic, Pavle Ivic, etc.) didn't draw such a distinct line. They tried to hoe a line between the two by advocating a "stronger federation" but with Serbia having greater power. is was all based on the real "myth" which was the notion that Serbians had been historically punished by Slovenes and Croatians under the Tito and the Communists. Who am I to believe, them, or you? .

---

Nah. This struggle goes way back before that into the mysts of the 19th century and has a lot to do with the fact that Serbia achieved autonomy from the Ottoman Empire earliest, and so became the big brother to all the slavic independence movements.

The clear seperations between the Croats and the Serbs seem to have as much to do with the assertion of Austro-Hungarian authority, and the role that played in creating a distinct evolutionary course in Croatian national development.

Is it worth remembering that the reason the Black Hand killed Franz Ferdinand was because he wanted to elevate the Serbian nationality to the same status as the Austrians, and Hungarians, within the empire, and this was deemed a direct threat to Serbias to pan-slavism.

It is not even very clear to me that the national divisions were recognizably clear prior to WW2, and the primary indicator of Croatian difference from the Serbs is their relgious adeherence to Catholicism. Racially and linguistically their is more coherent connection between the people of the Balkans, then there is between much of Germany or even Great Britain.

And I think this can even be said to include the Muslim population of Bosnia. The Albanians and Greeks seem to be the only national groups of the Balkans that are distinctly non-slavic.

[ 03 January 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
[QB]

Nah. This struggle goes way back before that into the mysts of the 19th century and has a lot to do with the fact that Serbia achieved autonomy from the Ottoman Empire earliest, and so became the big brother to all the slavic independence movements.

---

Whatever Cue, even this theory doesn't go against the theory that there was a conscious mobilisation of nationalist tropes by Milosevic and his propagandists using the guise of "federalism".

quote:

---

It is not even very clear to me that the National divisions were recognizably differnt prior to WW2,

---

quote:

---

non-Slavic

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:

Then you need to bone up on your history. Croatians have claimed that ethnonym for several centuries.
...

---

I have been boning up on my history. This is why I am saying what I am saying.

Dutch, English, and Germans may all being Germanic peoples but linusitically they are incomprehnsible to one another, this is not the case between Croats, Serbs and Slovenes.

As for Milosovic and his itinerant nationalism, no, it was not just Milosovic. Try concieving of as an unholy alliance of Miolosvic and Tudjman against the federal power. The demise of Yugoslavia was something they both agreed to, how to devide Bosnia was another matter.

We (meaning the west) picked ultra-nationalist Tudjman over ultra-nationalist Milosovic, and so the narrative has be skewed by the propogation of propoganda seeking to demonize one, while ignoring our chief client.

[ 03 January 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

Yet I think these differences have been far exacibated by the interference of outside forces, playing on rivalries that elsewhere would not take the form of anything more serious that Scots and Angles fighting over football matches.

But the very vulnerability of the region, and its history of exploitation first by the Ottomans, and then by the Russian, British and Austro-Hugarians, the German Reich and then NATO backing one side against the other, set against the backdrop of a real need for local automony free of great power politics, has led to much of the bad blood.

There always seems to be some hard-done-by disafected local nationalist type around waiting to to bend an ear in Berlin, Moscow, New York or London.

[ 03 January 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
Catholic Germans and Protestant Anglos couldn't even talk to each other, except in sign language. Yet I have spent many hourse listenting to Croats and Serbs shit on each other because they can actually speak to one another. In fact the ability to communicate their petty prejudice probably makes the situation worse.

---

Actually that's kind of funny, I doubt we'd have as much problem with Southern Baptists up here if we spoke a completely different language ourselves. Least not unless we woke up and realised who's buying us out. Anyhow, I doubt that English speaking Germans have any issue with Anglos of any sect nowadays, but I'd agree that less outside meddling would have led to less local antagonism. That's just the historical mileu we all have to consider now, as you yourself wrote. The English just dealt with those kind of problems a couple centuries earlier...then started right in meddling with Others.

And the average Anglo didn't freely choose what church they would follow. It was an insane king of England, Henry VIII, who chose for them. Then his daughter, Mary, insisted they switch back to Catholicism. From Elizabeth on, they were protestant. William of Orange brought German mercenaries with him to the battle of the Boine in Ireland. His wife Mary was the only blood tie to Anglo-Saxon blue bloods. Billy himself was a hunchback who spoke no English whatsoever. For a while, it was a republic under Cromwell. The Germanic tribes showed much treachery toward the other. Way back before the turn of the first millenium, Rollo the Norwegian bowed on bended knee to the Frankish King Charles. And as a show of Viking appreciation to the seat of power, Rollo knocked Charles on his ass as he stood up.

The argument I was trying to make between "Smaller Yugoslvia" vs. "Greater Serbia" was an important one, even if you believe that the lines were not as clear.

Throughout the Balkan wars, there was a constant media frenzy about the Serbs being fascist racists, the new Nazis etc. It is true that the Serbs wanted in general to remain part of Yugoslavia, this was of course logical since they were spread throughout the breakaway republics. Hence, the slogan: "All Serbs in one State". It is also true that the departure of Croatia and Slovenia would numerically raise the number of Serbs within Smaller Yugoslavia, which would de facto raise Milosevic's power base. No one is denying he was a power hungry and corrup politician, no different than any other eastern european leader. It is the hyperbolic picture of him that is painted for propaganda purposes that Chomsky and others have exposed.

Now this is important because presenting the fact that Milosevic was allied with the Serb leaderhsip of Krajina and the Muslim Army of Fikret Abdic as well as the Roma of Kosovo and Pro-Yugoslava Montenegrins show that his motivation was a Smaller Titoist-light Yugoslavia. This is much different that an ethnically pure Greater Serbia whose goal is to drive out the other nationalities and gain as much territory from the dissentegrating republics under Serb hands.

Now, can there be factual convergence between those who wish to maintain a Smaller Yugoslavia (in which numerically Serbs would become a majority) and those who wish for a Greater Serbia, yes, an argument can be made that Chetnik fascists can support this type of Yugoslavia to use it to further their own irredentist and nationalist aims.

But did such a nationalist project have broad political support. The record does not show this at all.

In fact, what we do see, is that Tudjman was responsible for the largest ethnic cleansing in the whole Blakan catastrophe (namely 250,000 Serbs out of Krajina, with US/NATO tacit support, our own Canadian soldiers have spoken out about this, see the Elich article I linked above), we also see that the Media ignored the election of Fikret Abdic (the most populat politician in Bosnia) and leader of the pro-Yugoslav Muslims (another fact also ignored by the Media) who was pushed out by Alija Izetbegovic who clearly had a an islamist fascistic ideology. Both Izetbegovic and Tudjman were supported by the US and NATO.

Now the difference between Smaller Yugoslvia and Greater Serbia becomes more important when one looks at the result between the fact that Croatia after the wars is now almost ethnically pure and that Serbia is about 65% Serb, in essence a multicultural country.

There was a concerted media effort to paint Milosevic as a nationalist racist (the fact that he wasn't doesn't make him a hero or saint of any sort) and to avoid inconvenient truths about Tudjman and Izetbegovic (the most inconvenient truth of them all being that we supported their crimes all along the way).

Another inconvenient truth being ignored presently by the media is violence against ethnic Serbs and Roma (as well as their cultural and religious institutions) in Kosovo under UN/NATO "protection".

So these details are important in the way the media presented a story to us in the west in order for us to form a manufactured opinion regarding a racist ethnonationalist regime in Belgrade vs democratic secular pro-western forces. A falicy that is turned on its head once we look into the issues a little deeper.

But an important media manipulation to support governments eager to vilify a particular Balkan regime for their own ends.

Especially, when officials in these governments (read the Clinton governement) admit to same.

ETA:

quote:

---

Sorry, Tommy, no dice. Perhaps you need to re-read the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences Memorandum of 1986 and research the ideological and actual political connections between it's authors and Milosevic's reign. The fact is that publically Milosevic used the language of the old Socialist system to legitimise his politics, which were essentially nationalist in nature. This transition in meaning was engineered by guys like Markovic.

---

I will refrain from making a psychological analyses as to what people really meant when they said what they said and just stick to what was really said and what the public record shows (rather than media rhetoric)

So after the ethnic cleansing of Krajina Serbs...

quote:

---

After the fall of Krajina, Croatian chief of staff General Zvonimir Cervenko characterized Serbs as "medieval shepherds, troglodytes, destroyers of anything the culture of man has created." During a triumphalist train journey through Croatia and Krajina, Tudjman spoke at each railway station. To great applause, he announced, "There can be no return to the past, to the times when [Serbs] were spreading cancer in the heart of Croatia, a cancer that was destroying the Croatian national being." He then went on to speak of the "ignominious disappearance" of the Serbs from Krajina "so it is as if they have never lived here... They didn't even have time to take with them their filthy money or their filthy underwear!" American ambassador Peter Galbraith dismissed claims that Croatia had engaged in "ethnic cleansing," since he defined this term as something Serbs do. (12)

---

Footnote: (12) "Croats Ready for a Fresh Offense Against Serbs," Patrick Bishop, Electronic Telegraph, 16 August 1995. addresses by Franjo Tudjman, Radio Croatia Network, 26 August 1995. "U.S. Says Croatia is Not Guilty of Ethnic Cleansing," Patrick Moore, Open Media Research Institute, 10 August 1995.

Mesic, who succeeded Tudjman:

quote:

---

December 1991, Mesic, the author of the book "How we brought about the collapse of Yugoslavia", announced in the Croatian parliament: "I think my mission has been accomplished, Yugoslavia no longer exists ."

---

In the Islamic Declaration, Alija Izetbegovic was very clear and vocal on the type of Bosnia he wanted.

quote:

---

"The first and foremost of such conclusions is surely the one on the incompatibility of Islam and non-Islamic systems. There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions. [...] By claiming the right to order its own world by itself, Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of activity of any strange ideology on its own turf. Therefore, there is no question of any laicistic principles, and the state should be an expression of and should support the moral concepts of the religion."

page 22

---

Izetbegovic:

quote:

---

In a recent development of interest, on a visit to the dying Alija Izetbegovic, Bernard Kouchner asked him about the Bosnian Serb concentration camps, whereupon Izetbegovic, surprisingly, admitted that these claims had been inflated with the aim of getting NATO to bomb the Serbs. [17] This important confession has not been mentioned in the U.S. or British mainstream media.

---

All of these statements ignored by the media, whereas the famous speech in Kosovo by MIlosevic in 1989 was touted as the birth cry of Serb nationalism, where in fact it was not as anyone can clearly read.

Rather than the psychological motivation of the men involved, I have focused my energies on Media manipulation in complicity with the crimes of our governments, namely because I and others can have an effect over our own policy.

[ 04 January 2007: Message edited by: Tom Vouloumanos ]

Wrong, Erik. Slavic is indicative of both linguistic and genetic allegiance. Sure, some Slavs, like many Bulgarians or some Russians may have admixture of some other groups, but overall this doesnt matter. If one would compare, its similar to Arab nationalism. Some Arabs are Berber, yet they consider themselves Arab.

You said that pan-Slavism was used by Russian empire. Its only part true. In the Slav Balkans, Slavic cultural and nationalist movements arose independently in the 19th century. Many stressed co-operation, and by 1918 2 panslavist states: Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were created. if the dominant group would try to make an nation-state, then it would've been called Serbia or Czechia.

I just want to correct you, because its ignorant to state that Slavs dont exist as a ethnicity. Its just like saying that Arabs dont exist, and theyre actually a collection of diverse Semitic peoples who speak one language.

quote:

---

Originally posted by EriKtheHalfaRed:
Right now I'm just wondering what other players may have been involved in all the turf wars and how active a role they may have played. I said in my very first post on this that I could understand some of the ambivilence on the left, but until I can get an article which covers all sides of the issues from a fairly non-partisan position I can't make any final judgements either way -not that that matters much either. I'll get to Tom's Re later, others I want to catch up on too.

---

quote:

---

The Albanians and Greeks seem to be the only national groups of the Balkans that are distinctly non-slavic.

---

For a very long time it was common for Bulgarians to call Macedonians Western Bulgarians. Even the placement of their capital, (now close to the border with Macedonia) is a direct result of the original Treaty of San Stefano, signed between Russia and the Ottomans, which included much of Macedonia within Bulgaria, with Sofia at its center.

This was later amended by the Treaty of Berlin, largely at the behest of the Austrians who rejected what they saw as blatant power grab by the Russians in the form of creating a giant client state.

The Balkans are rife with these type of confusions about the actual national identity of the Slavic population, and often have as much to do with what national narrative you are hearing.

[ 04 January 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cueball:
The Balkans are rife with these type of confusions about the actual national identity of the Slavic population, and often have as much to do with what national narrative you are hearing.

---

Indeed. I remember reading somewhere that, during Bulgarian-Macedonian diplomatic meetings, the Macedonians (who insist that Bulgarian and Macedonian are two different languages) often bring translators while the Bulgarians (who insist that they are the same language) do not.

quote:

---

Originally posted by BetterRed:
"Slavic is only meaningful as a linguistic definition"

Wrong, Erik. Slavic is indicative of both linguistic and genetic allegiance. Sure, some Slavs, like many Bulgarians or some Russians may have admixture of some other groups, but overall this doesnt matter. If one would compare, its similar to Arab nationalism. Some Arabs are Berber, yet they consider themselves Arab.

---

That's ethnic identification; until well into the last century most Anglo Canadians saw themselves as "British" -a term rarely accepted in the old countries. There is little and no genetic component to it, though obviously there must have been Some ancient Slavic tribes, probably living between Poland and Belorus, which contributed genes to these diverse groups. A mixed lot themselves no doubt.

quote:

---

You said that pan-Slavism was used by Russian empire. Its only part true. In the Slav Balkans, Slavic cultural and nationalist movements arose independently in the 19th century. Many stressed co-operation, and by 1918 2 panslavist states: Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were created. if the dominant group would try to make an nation-state, then it would've been called Serbia or Czechia.

---

That I'll accept, but it doesn't negate the fact that the Russian empire has used the concept for its own nationalistic/class interests.

quote:

---

And Cueball is right about Yugoslav linguistics. The language was called Serbo-Croat for a reason. Its even more similar than Russian and Ukrainian among themselves. That is a big nuance.

---

Yes, Serbo-Croatian has traditionally been considered one language, it was important to Tito's national project, but now that it's broken up many consider them different languages, as they do Bosniak. Probably best to consider them divergent dialects still, with a fair degree of mutual intelligibility, but as some old wag once said languages are just dialects with a navy.

Not an important point anyhow, beyond remembering that these inter-ethnic divisions can often run deeper than ones between groups with fewer ethnic ties. Depends in part on history and geo-politics, and economic rivalries of course. And the willingness of people to move beyond ancient grievances.

[ 04 January 2007: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Martha (but not Stewart):
There are also Turks, who make up 9.3% of Bulgaria's population. (link) and 3.9% of Macedonia's population (link). And ethnic Hungarians make up 3.5% of Serbia's population (link).

---

In Kiro Glogorov's own words:

quote:

---

"We are Slavs who came to this area in the sixth century ... we are not descendants of the ancient Macedonians."

---

quote:

---

"We are Macedonians but we are Slav Macedonians. That's who we are! We have no connection to Alexander the Greek and his Macedonia.

---

In the Greek province of Macedonia, the majority of the population are desendants of refugees from present-day Turkey. They were part of the 1921-1924 population exchange (i.e. mutual ethnic cleansing, sanctioned by the Great Powers): muslims from (mostly) Greek Macedonia (including Turks, Albanians, Slavs, Roma and Greek muslims) were exchanged for Greek Orthodox Christians (as well as Assyrians and Armenians) from (mostly Smyrna and Pontus)Turkey. To be later joined by Greeks from Constantinople (Istanbul) after the 1955 progrom.

Therefore, a large part of the population of the Greek province of Macedonia, see themselves as Asian Minor (Mikra Asiotes) Greeks. While another part of the population see themselves as culturally Macedonian while ethnically Greece. From the Greek point of view, Macedonia is as Greek as Athens, Sparta, and Crete. The Slavic minority in the Greek province of Macedonia are divided. Most think of themselves as Greeks with a Macedonian dialect (i.e. the same slavic language spoken in the Republic of Macedonia and in Bulgaria with minor phonetic differences), others as Greek Slavophones and others as ethnically Macedonian and still others as ethnically Bulgarian, yet the slavic language they all speak is pretty much the same. There is also a large Vlach minority in the Greek province of Macedonia (especially in one of the prettiest large villages of northern Greece: Metsovo). They refer to themselves as Aroumanians and consider themselves Greeks and get quite upset if their Greek ethnicity is questioned much like the Greek Slavohpones. This is also true of the Arvanites (i.e. Christian Greek speaking Albanophones), who considered their language as a dialect that stems from ancient Greek but who have been stunned that they can substantially understand Albanians. Yet, they are adamant about their Greek idenity as well.

During the Ottoman Empire, the millet system basically allowed autonomy to the various religions and people identified with their religious leaderhsip. Hence, Greeks, Arvanites, Slavs, and Vlachs in certain areas were under the responsibility of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and identified with him as the Ethnarch. So nationality is a funny thing in the Balkans.

As for this whole Macedonia squabble. In essence the Slavic peoples of the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria have similar ancestry. Slavs settled in Macedonia, Thrace and the rest of Greece in the 5th to 6th century. The Bulgars, a Turkic peoples, whose original language is now extinct invaded Thrace and mixed with the Slavonic peoples of Thrace basically giving rise to a new Slavic nation: Bulgaria. The Slavs in Macedonia fell under Serbian rule, the area was called Banovina Vardaska. Therefore the Slavs of Banovina Vardaska were never Serbs but their history was outside the Bulgarian state and their struggle for independence.

In the Balkans, ethnic identity had three criteria: Religion, Language, Region. So "Christian, Slavic, Macedonia" or "Christian Arvanite, Epirus". Territorial identity was important in order to pay taxes to your respective Pasha as well as his underlings, your Archbishop was your legal and political leader and the language determined your village. In certain regions, like Macedonia, the mosaic of peoples and villages was extremely heterogenous. Therefore, in order to create a revolution against the Ottomans in linguistically heterogenous territories, religion and territory were elements of national unity. Hence, during the 19th century we witness a Revolutionary Organization of Macedonia made up of Christians who are Greek, Slavic, Vlach and Arvanite.

When the SFR of Yugoslavia was created, Tito recognized Banovian Vardarska as Macedonia with a distinct Macedonian nation, people, language and Orthodox Church (I think the only Church to be ever recognized as an independent entity by a Communist leader). This had a twin objective: a smaller Serbian Republic would garantee a nore united Yugoslavia. Hence for example, the difference in idenrity between Montenegrins and Serbs was accentuated. While the unity of language: Serbo-Croatian was underlined.