Posted on 03/16/2006 10:33:46 AM PST by West Coast Conservative
"No one now disputes that stopping Slobodan Milosevic was the right thing to do, wrote the Wall Street Journal this week, several days after the deposed Serbian strongman expired in his cell in The Hague. Its an appealing sentiment, suggesting as it does that the man who presided over the deaths of 250,000 people in Yugoslavia in the 1990s died unsung and unmourned. In reality, however, even Slobodan Milosevic had his defenders. What is more, they are the same voices--largely on the far Left but also on the isolationist Right--who have now taken up the cause of Saddam Hussein.
Many of them congregated under the banner of the infamous International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM). Founded in March of 2001 as a personal cheering section for the indicted dictator, the group, whose 1,300 members included the Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, devoted its efforts to charging NATO leaders with crimes against humanity. At the same time, the group cast Milosevic as the latest of the freedom fighters and patriots to fall victim to Western imperial conquest. In one of its more coherent statements of support, ICDSM asserted that Milosevics only crime was to resist U.S. rule to terrorized slaves ruled by local fascists (conveniently labeled victims of oppression by the pro-NATO media) and all of it dominated by the U.S. and its allies, especially Germany and England. Nowhere did the ICDSM bother to acknowledge the atrocities committed under Milosevic, from the shelling of Muslim and Croat civilians by Serbian paramilitaries, to the routine executions and rapes, to the wholesale destruction of villages and mass expulsion of non-Serbs that added ethnic cleansing to the lexicon of mans inhumanity to man.
Emblematic of the apologists studied disregard for Milosevics murderous past was a 2004 letter protesting his trial, addressed to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Its author was none other than ICDSM co-chairman Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. Attorney General, all-seasons anti-American activist and, most recently, attorney for Saddam Hussein. Rather than address the specifics of the more than 60 charges against Milosevic, Clark assailed the very legitimacy of the trial. As Clark saw it, the spectacle of this huge onslaught by an enormous prosecution support team with vast resources pitted against a single man, defending himself, cut off from all effective assistance, his supporters under attack everywhere and his health slipping away from the constant strain, portrays the essence of unfairness, of persecution. Never mind that, in 2004, Milosevic had literally pleaded for the right to represent himself, over the objections of prosecutors troubled that his heart condition rendered him unfit for the task.
Unconcerned with the facts of the case, Clark advanced the claim that Milosevic had wanted only to protect and preserve Yugoslavia and sought to shift the blame onto nationalist and ethnic groups determined to dismember the country--a spectacularly mendacious portrait of the man who had stoked nationalist and ethnic grievances to cement his hold on power and exterminate innocent civilians whose presence conflicted with his dream of Greater Serbia. For a more scrupulous account of Milosevics dirty work, one need only consult Samantha Powerss Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Of the campaign waged by Milosevic and his henchmen against non-Serb minorities, Powers reflects that Theirs was a deliberate policy of destruction and degradation: destruction so this avowed enemy race would have no homes to which to return; degradation so the former inhabitants would not stand tall--and thus would not dare again stand--in Serb-held territory.
No one, save perhaps Milosevic himself, expended greater efforts to cover up this destruction than Edward Herman. As a longtime co-author of Noam Chomsky, Herman, a former professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had a long history of furnishing excuses for Communist killers. In 1977, Chomsky and Herman had famously authored an article for the Nation exonerating the Khmer Rouge and scoffing at the accounts of its victims. In the Communist apparatchik Milosevic, Herman spotted a natural ally.
Accordingly, Herman spent much of the 1990s rehabilitating Milosevics reputation. It is a commentary on Hermans commitment--to say nothing of his political views--that in 1995 he founded the Srebrenica Research Group to defend the indefensible: the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys by Serb forces in Srebrenica. Despite the preponderance of evidence attesting to the massacre--including forensic evidence and a list of deceased and missing numbering in the thousands--Hermans group judged it, incredibly, as a fabrication of the imperialist West, intended to undermine socialism in Serbia. Later, in an essay for the 2000 book Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, Herman allowed that genocide had indeed taken place. In keeping with tradition, however, he reposed the blame not on Milosevic and his marauding military but on the NATO bombing campaign, writing that the "humanitarian bombing created more pain and ethnic cleansing than existed prior to the supposedly humane action."
Hermans collaborator Noam Chomsky sounded a kindred theme. In his 1999 book The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, a contemptuous attack on the notion that allied intervention in the Balkans could be considered a humanitarian action, Chomsky blamed the NATO bombing for the destruction of the civilian society in the former Yugoslavia. That Milosevic might have had hand in that this destruction was a proposition that did not delay the MIT radical.
Like Herman, Chomsky was not above flirting with genocide denial. For instance, he praised the work of fringe journalist Diana Johnstone, whose 2002 book, Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions, was among the most scandalous to be written about the conflict. Beyond proffering the standard revisionism of Milosevics reign, Johnstone, an advisor to Hermans Srebrenica Research Group, denied the demonstrable fact that rape had been systematically committed by Serb forces and claimed that Serb-run concentration camps in Omarska and Trnopolje were really refugee and transit centers--the preferred propaganda line of the Serbian authorities--to which Muslims traveled for protection and could leave whenever they pleased. (Video and photographic evidence, as well as interviews with detainees, argued differently.) And these were not even the most farfetched of Johnstones claims.
As in her regular articles, published in the far-Left magazine Counterpunch, Johnstone also denied that a massacre had taken place at Srebrenica. On no credible evidence, Johnstone claimed that Srebrenica, far from an ordinary village, was a Muslim military base. As for the thousands of Muslim men who were never again found alive, Johnstone assured her readers that this was an invention of Muslim authorities that had failed to reveal the whereabouts of these men, preferring to let them be counted among the missing, that is, among the massacred. Johnstone conceded that a large, unspecified number of these men were ambushed and killed as they fled in scenes of terrible panic, but discounted its significance. Srebrenica, she concluded, was a massacre such as occurs in war when fleeing troops are ambushed by superior forces. In other words, what happened at Srebrenica, was not, as the historical consensus had it, a mass execution of civilians, but a lopsided clash between two military forces.
Chomsky initially defended Fools' Crusade on the merits if its argument. In a signed letter to the leftist Swedish magazine Ordfront, co-authored with fellow radicals Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, Chomsky endorsed Johnstone's book as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition. Chomsky further pronounced it quite serious and important. In an interview with the Britains left-wing Guardian, Chomsky further identified himself with Johnstones malign theory, describing the Srebrenica massacre as probably overstated. Emma Brockes, the journalist who conducted the interview, also noted that, just as Johnstone had done, Chomsky dismissively placed the word massacre in quotations. Unlike Johnstone, however, Chomsky lacked the courage of his convictions. When the interview appeared on October 31, 2005, Chomsky remonstrated that he had never doubted that a massacre had taken place. Rather, he now insisted, he had only defended Johnstones right to free speech--a face-saving defense plainly incompatible with the facts. Even so, the Guardian, after first defending the story, caved to Chomskys complaints and published an undeserved apology.
Not all of Milosevics defenders were as reluctant as Chomsky to be seen as whitewashing his crimes. The most notorious atrocities for which Milosevic is accused never happened, declared a 2001 petition denouncing the witch-hunt against Slobodan Milosevic. Its signatories included the Communist writer Michael Parenti, ICDSM Vice-Chairman Jared Israel, and William Blum, an inveterate conspiracy theorist who has earned the favorable notice of Osama Bin Laden. The radical press proved equally charitable. Accepting at face value Milosevics self-serving claims to victimhood--the Serbian dictator had long portrayed himself as the target of a New Fascism even as he was its leading exponent--the Marxist-Leninist Workers World editorialized that Milosevic has earned the respect of working-class activists worldwide. Writing in the 2002 edition of the New Statesman, Milosevic votary Neil Clark stated that his worst crime was to carry on being socialist. Not to be outdone, Ramsey Clarks International Action Center, a reliable champion of anti-American regimes, has now released a statement waxing nostalgic over Milosevics death and sobbing that the peoples of the Balkans and of the world will be indebted to him.
In condemning the NATO campaign against their socialist hero, the far Left found an ally in the isolationist Right. Pat Buchanan, writing in 1999, euphemized Milosevics genocidal campaign against non-Serbs as an admirable attempt to hold onto a province that is the birthplace of Serbian nationhood, and chided the New World Order, led by the United States, for intervening in the internal affairs of another country. When notorious conspiracy theorist and Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo wasnt alleging a longstanding US plan to destabilize the Balkans, he was unabashedly rooting for Milosevic to beat his rap for war crimes; the title of a 2002 Raimondo column cheered, Go Slobo, Go! Nor did these pundits reconsider their sympathy for Milosevic. Commenting on his death this Sunday, paleoconservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts opted for posthumous revisionism. Milosevic, he claimed, was caught up in the post-Soviet era break-up of Yugoslavia, and was damned for trying to protect Yugoslavias territorial integrity. On both extremes of the political spectrum, Milosevic was the victim, never the victimizer.
Missing from the far Lefts encomia and the far Rights excuse-making is any honest reckoning with Milosevics blood-soaked legacy. After a decade of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, much of it directly incited by Milosevic, the UN Criminal Tribunal counted 11,334 bodies in 529 gravesites, with as many as 6,000 missing. Many of them were the victims of the Vojska Jugoslavije, the Yugoslav Army, which terrorized and was responsible for the deaths of untold civilians. According to a detailed 593-page report by Human Rights Watch, the army was commanded by Milosevic until October of 2000. Nor will it do, as Milosevics defenders attempt, to equate the genocidal tactics of Milosevics armies with the undeniable atrocities committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army and the tragic errors of NATOs bombing strikes. As the journalist Alec Russell, a former Balkan correspondent, has reported, more than 90 percent of the of the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia were perpetrated by Serbs.
If there is any sadness in Milosevics death, it is that the world was denied an official verdict to formalize the judgment long ago rendered by history. More regrettable is that until the dictators dying day there were those who, out of political sympathy, plain-old anti-Americanism, or both, were willing to forgive him everything.
Weasel words.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-Day_War
27 June 1991
(First blood) In the afternoon of 27 June, the Slovenian TO shot down two JNA helicopters over Ljubljana, killing the occupants (one of whom, ironically, was a Slovenian pilot).
The TO also took up position around JNA barracks in various locations, effectively besieging them, and launched a series of attacks on JNA forces across Slovenia. At Brnik, a TO unit attacked the JNA troops holding the airport, and at Trzin a firefight developed in which four JNA soldiers and one TO soldier were killed and the remainder of the JNA unit was forced to surrender. Attacks were also launched by Slovenian TO units on JNA tank columns at Pesnica, Ormoz and Koseze, near Ilirska Bistrica.
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I think the fact that the war ended quickly with Yugoslavs kind of mislead the Euros and Clinton era State Dept hacks into thinking that would be the result throughout Yugoslavia. They did not have the foresight to realize that if Yugoslavia was torn apart in areas where there was overlap in ethnic peoples who have a history of tension with each other (and cultural/religious incompatibility) there would be bloody fighting.
In my opinion, that is the unintended consequences of the Slovenian war that fooled the West into a full steam on drive to break up Yugoslavia without much thought.
I'm surprised that David Horowitz would let his magazine
be used for one sided propaganda.
Speak to Tom Gambill, who lived in Kosovo over 4 years, about that. He says dead bodies of Serbs are showing up and they are being gradually snuffed out. 1500 Serb CIVILIANS (mainly elderly) were killed within 2 or 3 years after NATO took control and allowed the Albanians to kill with impunity.
Media is silent on kidnapping and systematic murder of Serbs.
First of all, there shouldn't be a choice. It's not an either/or situation. The burned Churches also means there will be dead bodies. The Churches should not be burned in the first place. March 17-18, 2004, was well organized. It was the first time a riot of this level occurred. The riots happened under a false pretense, first of all. Point is, people died from the violence. On March 18, it was designated burn churches this day. The burned churches meant that they have virtually no control over the events in Kosovo due to the corrupt system which also includes participation of the international community.
After the "retaliation killings" of Serbs, began a systematic targeting of Serbs. One case in point, in my region, an old man and woman was murdered by the Black Eagles, (Albanian Terrorist group) Post 1999. As a result, the entire village packed up and left.......in a few days.
Very few if any arrests were made. If any arrests were made the perp(s) were usually released for lack of evidence or no witnesses. It was frustrating to the CivPol because many perps were caught, and any evidence was mitigated by one excuse or another.
The media has been silent about the murdered Serbs........and violence that has occurred not only to Serbs but also to moderate Albanians who belonged to the LDK.
Was it Slovenia in a seizure of the arsenals, The answer to that is a clear yes.
or the JNA in moving in, The answer to that is no.
or the Slovenes in shooting first? The answer to that is also yes.
My strong feelings are based on getting the truth out. I saw under Clinton an Orwellian demonization of a people (I am not a Serb) that did not bode well for the future. Clearly, the result of that was 9/11 - since support for Muslims by the State Dept allowed a network to develop in the world that reached into the USA that enabled 9/11 to happen. At least two of the 9/11 killers were vets of the Bosnian Muslim army.
Truth and lies have consequences.
Well said, Proctor.
The artiecle, "Slobo's Stooges" manages to avoid any mention of either "BIN LADEN", "IRANIAN VEVAK" or "MUJAHIDEEN" which I must admit is some feat.
Maybe all Hitchens, etc. should be known as "BIN LADEN'S STOOGES".
"Maybe all Hitchens, etc. should be known as "BIN LADEN'S STOOGES".
That should've read,
"Maybe Laksin , Hitchens, etc. should be known as "BIN LADEN'S STOOGES".
My apologies.
Sorry for the messy text... didn't realize the html conditions, so here it goes again
Okay, I registered to reply in this thread :)
Slovenia and Yugoslavia... the conflict known as the 10 day war; aka Slovenian war aka Slovenian war of independence,... It wasn't just Slovenia Vs Serbia; it was Slovenia VS Jugoslav National Army (JNA). The fault for the conflict can't be laid at serbian feet... at least not completely (since the JNA command was composed of a multi-national staff... although serb&ppl from montenegro were in majority).
some records of 10 day war:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-Day_War
www.answers.com/topic/ten-day-war
www.uvi.si/10years/path/war/
In one of your previous posts you stated that the war started on the 27th of June... with Slovenian TO shooting down jugoslav helicopters. The war actually started on the 26th of June (since you copy pasted from wikipedia... you might at least have added the first day:
"On the morning of 26 June, units of the Yugoslav People's Army's 13th Corps left their barracks in Rijeka, Croatia to move towards Slovenia's borders with Italy. The move immediately led to a strong reaction from local Slovenians, who organised spontaneous barricades and demonstrations against the JNA's actions. There was, as yet, no fighting, and both sides appeared to have an unofficial policy of not being the first to open fire."
Or even the 25th of June: "On 25 June 1991 the Federal Executive Council convened in Belgrade. It issued a decree for the protection of the national borders in Slovenia, which gave the YPA and federal police forces the green light for an armed attack on Slovenia." <---this text also disaprooves that it was a slovenian who shot first... it states that the first shot was fired on 26th of june at 14:30 in Divaca by a YPA officer, as a threat to the Slovenian demonstrators.
Of course you can disaproove that since it comes from a slovenian official site; but I have yet to find a site to claim anything else. And before you ask... yes I am slovenian, but I'm also 1/4 serb if we look at the geneology.
The Yugoslav wars were a bad thing for the region... Slovenia came out of it barely scratched (after we had 4945 yugoslav army and federal police members they simply backed off)... it was croatia and bosnia where blood flowed. We did what we could... (accepted 250.000 refugees mostly bosnian muslims from the years 92-95... and we have 2 mil total population which beat us down economically) and now we have peacekeeping forces in bosnia.
To make it short... Yugoslavia was a set of unfortunate incidents, there is no single side at fault here (you could even say that the west is at fault since it didn't want to pressure Yugoslavia to break up peacefully - rather they told slovenians that even if we managed to seceed from yugoslavia we wouldn't be recognised for the next 20 years... we joined the UN by 22 may 92).
Kosovo was a bloodbath for both sides... neither side is holy and both sides did things that should never have been done; but then again it's the history of the place that caused it. Kosovo isn't a 10 or 20 year old conflict... Kosovo conflict started in WWI when serbs slaughtered a whole lot of indogenous ppl... or even before with the turks,... You see, you can go into past for as long as you want, that place was always bloody (Battle of Kosovo in 1389), and it won't be peacefull for a long long while. But it's better atm than it was before the intervention - I've spoken to our soldiers there (and with our soldiers who got back from afghanistan like a week ago :) ); there are conflicts, but people mostly stick to their ethnic group rather than killing each other.
Yugoslav troops moved to the borders with Italy but only after Slovenia was hinting at leaving the federation.
The Yugoslav army at this time was not the Serbian army - if there were more Serbs in the army at this time is because they were the majority in Yugoslavia.
The Slovenians drew first blood - probably they felt enboldened because the Germans said they would back them up against Yugoslavia.
The Serbians had no history with the Slovenians - the Serbs did have fearful history under Croatian and Muslim rule.
After Slovenia the Serbs realizing Yugoslavia may be over then went into defense mode - trying to protect Serbs against the Croats and Muslims who were so evil to the Serbs in generations past. Anyone who denies this was so is a liar.
The West - and by that I mean mostly Germany and some agenda driven State Dept hacks fooled themselves over what happened in Slovenia thinking since it was so quick and relatively blood free that if they could do the same in Croatia and Bosnia - they fooled themselves into not realizing that the Serbs would fight to the death rather than be ruled by Muslims and Croatian Nazis.
Slovenia wasn't just hinting about leaving, the choice was made a year before we actually seceeded; voter turnout at the plebiscite was 93.2 percent, with 88.2 percent voting for an independent and sovereign Slovenia.
It's not like we didn't try to do things politically before, for the better part of the 80's we tried to change yugoslavia into a confederation. Slovenia couldn't last in a federation anymore, certain generals were making statemens like "we'll move all the slovenians into kosovo and vice versa". An ancient nation like ours couldn't be forced into another millenia of being subjugated to another nation.
Yugoslavian army prepared for war, we just beat them at their own game... for us sending even more yugoslav troops into Slovenia was a definite threath to our independence.
All in all, it could have been better, yugoslav army could have just respected our desire for independence... but it also could have been worse, for example if those planes which were sent to bombard Ljubljana actually came to Slovenia (which they didn't, cause mesic stopped the planes and recalled them back to their airports, otherwise the civilian casualties would have been much worse).
Yugoslavia was nearly unbearable in the last years, it wasn't the politicians who had the actual control, it was the army; army generals who only knew how to make theaths. The first shots between TO (slovenian territorial defence) and JNA were fired at Pekre (TO's study centre) long before the war even began.
http://www.uvi.si/10years/path/chronology/ <----read the first part and you'll understand a part of the reason why Yugoslavia fell apart
The American South wanted to break from the Federal govt as well - I would be a hypocrite as an American to then state that the Yugoslavs had no right to try and prevent the secession of the various states that made up Yugoslavia.
And just like in America - the secessionists fired first.
Pekre:
The Day of the Slovenian Armed Forces is celebrated to mark 15 May 1991. On this day, the first class of Slovenian conscripts arrived at training centres at Ig near Ljubljana, and Pekre near Maribor. This meant the fulfilment of the constitutional law adopted by the Slovenian parliament on 8 March 1991. The provisions of this law stipulated that it was no longer obligatory for Slovenian citizens to do military service in the then Yugoslav Peoples Army. The first class of 300 soldiers swore their allegiance to the country on June 2, 1991. The Yugoslav Army (YA) and the political authorities at the high est level were strongly against this decision. Both training centres were protected by special Territorial Defence protection units. As early as a week after the arrival of the conscripts, on 23 May, the YA special forces with their armour vehicles provoked an incident in the immediate surroundings of the training centre in Maribor, as a pretext to attack the facility. The Slovenian leadership offered a resolute response. This was the first time the telephone lines and the electricity in the concerned military installations were cut. The tension and anti-YA attitude of the population was escalating, especially after 24 May, when a military armour vehicle ran over a local, Josef Simik in Pekre, thus causing the first civilian casualty. The events in Pekre were a prelude to the war for independence that started on 25 June 1991.
Josef wasn't shot... he got overran by a tank as he tried to block the doors at the JNA barracks with his body (Tienmann anyone?).
Btw, where did you get the info that a slovenian shot first? Everything that I've read so far states that a yugoslav started by shooting against the civilian demonstrators.
Besieging is an act of war. Shooting down a helicopter is an act of war.
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