The dismantling of Yugoslavia: A study in inhumanitarian intervention (and a Western liberal-left intellectual and moral collapse)

Monthly Review

Volumn 59, Issue 5, 2007, Pages 1-57

  Herman, Edward S ^a   Peterson, David ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 35548938243     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-059-05-2007-09_1     Document Type: Article

References (306)

1. Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 26;
2. Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 33;
3. Noel Malcolm, Bosnia, rev. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 212;
4. Roy Gutman, introduction, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), xviii;
5. David Rieff, "The Balkans," Toronto Globe and Mail, July 19, 1997.
6. Tim Judah, "Is Milosevic Planning Another Balkan War?" Scotland on Sunday, March 19, 2000;
7. Florence Hartmann, "Bosnia," in Roy Gutman & David Rieff, eds., Crimes of War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), 50-51;
8. Marlise Simons, "Slobodan Milosevic, 64, Former Yugoslav Leader Accused of War Crimes, Dies," New York Times, March 12, 2006;
9. Mark Danner, "America and the Bosnia Genocide," New York Re view of Books, December 4, 1997;
10. Ed Vulliamy, "Profile: Mira Milosevic," The Observer, July 8, 2001.
11. Harold Lydall, Yugoslavia in Crisis (New York: Clarendon Press, 1989), esp. 40-71;
12. and John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 322. In Lydall's words, "the year 1979 was climacteric: from that year onwards, the trend of economic change [was] in almost all respects downwards" (40).
13. Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983), esp. chap. 7; here 1; 152; 157.
14. Warren Zimmermann, "The Last Ambassador," Foreign Affairs, March/April, 1995.
15. Dijana Plestlna, Regional Development in Communist Yugoslavia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), table 6.1, 180. For what these numbers represent, see n. 9, xxvii.
16. World Development Report 1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), table 21, "Total external debt," 245.
17. Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), esp. figure 3.3, 54.
18. Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. 345-70, here 361.
19. Also see "Unemployment Rate by Republic or Province," 384.
20. As Dijana Plestina sums up her study: "[E]conomic regionalism, that is, the pursuit of one's own region's economic interests, explains better than any other factor the Yugoslav socialist regime's overall failure in narrowing regional economic inequalities." Regional Development in Communist Yugoslavia, 173. She adds that by 1990, the disparity in per capita income between Slovenia and Kosovo had reached as high as 8:1.
21. Robert M. Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 27-52.
22. Diana Johnstone, Fools' Crusade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 24.
23. The logic of the constitutional crisis that led to Yugoslavia's violent breakup is best exemplified by the oft-quoted, oft-misrepresented, and perhaps apocryphal quip attributed to a Macedonian political figure: "Why should I be a minority in your State, when you can be a minority in mine?"
24. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, 36-40.
25. Perhaps the most accessible copy of the Arbitration (or Badinter) Commission's Opinions is to be found within the electronic archives of the European Journal of International Law 3, no. 1 (1992), and 4, no. 1 (1993), http://www.ejil.org.
26. According to Yugoslavia's 1981 census, out of a total population of 22.4 million, Slovenia was 90.5 percent Slovene; "Serbia proper" 85.4 percent Serb; Croatia 75.1 percent Croat and 11.5 percent Serbs; Montenegro 68.5 percent Montenegrin; Macedonia 67 percent Macedonian; and Bosnia-Herzegovina 39.5 percent Muslim, 32 percent Serb, and 18.4 percent Croat. The autonomous region of Kosovo was 77.4 percent Albanian; and Vojvodina 54.4 percent Serb and 19 percent Hungarian. See Cohen and Warwick, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic, appendix A, "The Ethnic Composition of Yugoslavia," table A.1, 164.
27. See the invaluable memoir of David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995).
28. On covert aid to the Croatian and Muslim forces, see the report by the House Committee on International Relations (a.k.a. the "Iranian Green Light Subcommittee"), Final Report of the Select Subcommittee to Investigate the United States Role in Iranian Arms Transfers to Croatia and Bosnia, U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997);
29. and Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992-1995 (London: Lit Verlag, 2003), esp. 157-218.
30. NATO remained the sole military enforcer of Dayton from January 1996 through December 2005, when it was joined by a European Union force (EUFOR).
31. See David Chandler, Bosnia (Sterling, VI: Pluto Press, 1999);
32. David Chandler, Empire in Denial (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006).
33. George Robertson, Testimony before the Select Committee on Defense, U.K. House of Commons, March 24, 1999, par. 391.
34. On covert aid to the KLA, see, e.g., Ian Bruce, "Serbs used CIA phone to call in convoy raid," The Herald (Glasgow), April 19, 1999;
35. Tom Walker & Aidan Laverty, "CIA aided Kosovo guerrilla army," Sunday Times, March 12, 2000;
36. "NATO Faces Combat With KLA Forces Which the US Trained and Armed," Defense and Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, February, 2001;
37. Peter Beaumont et al., "'CIA's bastard army ran riot in Balkans,'" The Observer, March 11, 2001;
38. James Bissett, "We created a monster," Toronto Globe and Mail, July 31, 2001.
39. Martti Ahtisaari, Report of the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General on Kosovo's future status (S/2007/168), March 26, 2007, par. 5; par. 15.
40. See Johan Galtung et al., "Ahtisaari's Kosovo proposal," Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, May 11, 2007.
41. Milosevic Trial Transcript, February 12, 2002, 19;
42. Dusko Doder & Louise Branson, Milosevic (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 3-4; also 43ff.
43. See "Speech by Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo Polje," BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, April 28, 1987;
44. and "Slobodan Milosevic addresses rally at Gazimestan," BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, June 30, 1989.
45. For our reference to the Brioni Transcripts of July 31, 1995, see Milosevic Trial Transcript, June 26, 2003, 23200 (lines 1-10).
46. Ken Silverstein quotes a writer for Soldier of Fortune magazine, who noted that as of early 1995, the Croatian military "consisted of criminal rabble, a bunch of fucking losers. MPRI [i.e., the Virginia-based Military Professional Resources Incorporated] turned them into something resembling an army." Private Warriors (New York: Verso, 2000), 173.
47. Alija Izetbegovic, Islamic De-claration, 1970, 1990, 30, as posted to the Web site of the Balkan Repository Project, http://www.balkanarchive.org. yu.
48. David Rieff, Slaughterhouse, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 10.
49. Daniel Williams & R. Jeffrey Smith, "Crusader for Serb Honor Was Defiant Until the End," Washington Post, March 12, 2006;
50. Mark Danner, "Endgame in Kosovo," New York Review of Books, April 7, 1999.
51. Milosevic Trial Transcript, November 16, 2004, 33460-63.
52. See Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43223ff; here 43225, lines 9-10.
53. Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43224, lines 11-12.
54. Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43227, line 6 through 43228, line 3, emphases added.
55. For the Badinter sources, see note 15, above.
56. According to the opening words of the Preamble to the 1974 Constitution of the SFRY, "The nations of Yugoslavia, preceding from the right of every nation to self-determination, including the right to secession, on the basis of their will freely expressed in the common struggle of all nations and nationalities in the National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution..." (emphases added). See Snezana Trifunovska, ed., Yugoslavia Through Documents (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1994), 224-33, here 224. No fragment among this Constitution's 10 principles or 406 articles contradicted what its preamble unambiguously proclaimed, and earlier constitutions (e.g., 1963 and 1971) had as well: That the "subjects" to whom the rights of self-determination and secession belonged were explicitly defined as nations - real flesh and bone people, not republican units in the federation - of which Yugoslavia recognized six equally: Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, and Slovenes.
57. See Peter Radan, The Break-up of Yugoslavia and International Law (New York: Routledge, 2002), 216-22. Here we add that the Slovene and Croat declarations of independence of June 25, 1991, each separately affirmed the "right of the Slovene nation to self-determination" and the "right of the Croatian nation to self-determination." Thus, as the two triggers for Yugoslavia's breakup, this fact underscored the belief then prevalent in Yugoslavia that the legal subject to whom the rights of self-determination and secession belonged was the nations, and not, as the Badinter Commission would later rule, the republics (i.e., mere administrative units within the SFRY).
58. See Trifunovska, Yugoslavia Through Documents, (a) Republic of Slovenia Assembly Declaration of Independence, Ljubljana, June 25, 1991, 286;
59. and (b) Constitutional Decision on the Sovereignty and Independence of the Republic of Croatia, Zagreb, June 25, 1991, 299.
60. See, e.g., Owen, Balkan Odyssey;
61. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy;
62. Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds, 2nd. ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995);
63. and Steven L. Burg & Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).
64. See, e.g., Hans C. von Sponeck, A Different Kind of War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
65. In the fifty-one months between the September 25, 1991, date on which Res. 713 was adopted (it initiated an arms embargo on Yugoslavia), and the December 21, 1995, date of Res. 1035 (to help enforce the Dayton Accords), the Security Council devoted 27 percent of its resolutions to the former Yugoslavia-more to this one theater of conflict than to any other during a comparable period in UN history, including Iraq.
66. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Supplement to An Agenda for Peace (S/1995/1), January 3, 1995, pars. 35-36.
67. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 982 (1995) and 987 (1995) (S/1995/444), May 30, 1995, par. 16. This important document expressed the fears then rampant inside the UN that UNPROFOR had violated its peacekeeping mandate (i.e., strict neutrality) and become a party to the conflict (i.e., against the Bosnian Serbs).
68. Richard Holbrooke, To End A War, rev. ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 99-103.
69. See also Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force: The UN and NATO Campaign in Bosnia 1995 (Lancaster: Centre for Defence and International Security Studies, 1999).
70. Perry Anderson, "Made in USA," The Nation, April 2, 2007.
71. In his memoirs of the five years he spent as Secretary-General, Boutros-Ghali recounts a conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who told him, after his rejection by the United States: "You symbolize the United Nations, and the American Congress is hostile to the United Nations. You are also blamed for trying to control American military power. You used the 'dual key' to oppose NATO air strikes against the Serbs. Your stance was very badly perceived by military circles in Washington." Unvanquished (New York: Random House, 1999), 332-33.
72. Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2004), 106-07;
73. Kofi Annan, "Secretary-General Reflects on 'Intervention' in Thirty-Fifth Annual Ditchley Foundation Lecture" (SG/SM/6613), June 26, 1998.
74. Kofi Annan, "Secretary-General calls for unconditional respect for human rights of Kosovo citizens" (SG/SM/6878), January 28, 1999, emphasis added.
75. "Statement by the North Atlantic Council on Kosovo," NATO Press Release (99)12, January 30, 1999.
76. Federal Republic of Yugoslavia v. United States of America, International Court of Justice, Order of June 2, 1999, pars. 19-31. Each of Yugoslavia's other nine complaints eventually was dismissed according to the same reasoning: The one naming Spain on June 2, 1999, and the other eight on December 15, 2004.
77. Kofi Annan, "We the Peoples" (A/54/2000), March, 2000, esp. 42-53, here 48;
78. and In Larger Freedom (A/59/2005), March, 2005, par. 135.
79. UNSC Res. 827, May 25, 1993. Par. 2 states that the Security Council's "sole purpose" in establishing the ICTY is "prosecuting persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law in the territory of the former Yugoslavia...."
80. Elaine Sciolino, "U.S. Names Figures It Wants Charged with War Crimes," New York Times, December 17, 1992.
81. Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, "Re-marks at the United States Supreme Court," Press Release, ICTY, April 5, 1999.
82. NATO Daily Press Briefings, May 16 and 17, 1999, http://www.nato.int.
83. Aside from the circulation that transcripts of NATO's daily press conferences received over the M2 Presswire, the only contemporaneous report to have quoted any part of Jamie Shea's comments on the NATO-ICTY relationship appears to have been Farhan Haq, "Milosevic Indictment Heralds New Era," Inter Press Service, May 27, 1999. Haq also quoted Robert Hayden: "Mr. Shea clearly knows that he who pays the piper calls the tune."
84. See Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, esp. 117-46;
85. Antonio Cassese's interview with L'Unita was reported in "Karadzic a Pariah, Says War Crimes Tribunal Chief," ANP English News Bulletin, July 27, 1995;
86. "Statement by Justice Louise Arbour, Prosecutor" (JL/PIU/404-E), ICTY, May 27, 1999.
87. On January 16, 1999, the day after FRY forces had organized an action at the KLA-dominated Kosovo town of Racak, accompanied by invited OSCE observers and AP photographers, and had fought a battle there with KLA fighters, some 40-45 bodies were found in different locations, approx. twenty of them in a single ravine. U.S. and OSCE official William Walker rushed to the scene, declared it a massacre, and got ICTY prosecutor Louise Arbour to announce on the same day that she had "launched an investigation into the most recent massacre in Kosovo" without her having seen the bodies or received any further information. There is serious doubt as to whether this was a massacre at all, as no such evidence was found there by the OSCE observers, the AP photographers, or a French reporter present on the day of the battle and the bodies were found only after the KLA had returned to Racak. For discussions of this controversy, see Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "CNN: Selling NATO's War Globally," in Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000), 117-19;
88. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, 238-44;
89. and Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder, 72-80; 134-36.
90. Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, 176-206;
91. Carla Del Ponte, Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, IC-TY, June, 2000, par. 90.
92. Barbara Crossette, "U.N. War Crimes Prosecutor Declines to Investigate NATO," New York Times, June 3, 2000.
93. Del Ponte, Final Report, par. 90.
94. Louise Arbour, Prosecutor of the Tribunal Against Slobodan Milosevic et al. (IT-99-37), ICTY, May 22, 1999. See scheduled A-G, which list 344 "persons known by name" alleged to have been killed in Kosovo.
95. Ian Williams, "Revisionism: The Numbers Game in Kosovo," Toronto Star, November 23, 1999.
96. Kofi A. Annan, "May we all learn and act on the lessons of Srebrenica" (SG/SM/9993), July 11, 2005.
97. See "Former Yugoslavia: Srebrenica: help for families still awaiting news," ICRC News, September 13, 1995, http://www.icrc.org;
98. "8,000 missing, presumed dead, from fallen enclave," Agence France Presse, September 14, 1995;
99. Maud S. Beelman, "Red Cross Says 8,000 People from Fallen Safe Area Are Missing," Associated Press, September 14, 1995;
100. "8,000 Muslims Missing," the New York Times, September 15, 1995, reprinting the AP report.
101. Also see the entry for "Bosnia and Herzegovina," Annual Report 1995, ICRC, May 31, 1996, par. 16, http://www.icrc.org.
102. At their peak, estimates of deaths caused at the World Trade Center in New York City reached as high as 6,886; but this was eventually reduced to 2,749. See Ula Ilnytzky, "Report drops trade center death toll by three, to 2,749," Associated Press, January 23, 2004.
103. Judge Almiro Rodrigues, Judgment in Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic (IT-98-33-T), ICTY, August 2, 2001, par. 73. We add here that the 2,028 estimate was based on exhumations in whole or in part of twenty-three Srebrenica-related gravesites through 2001. We believe that there are at least twenty more "known" sites that have yet to be exhumed, although presumably less "promising." See Dean Manning, Witness Statement, Prosecutor v. Slobodan Milosevic (IT-02-54-T), November 24, 2003, pars. 27-29.
104. Judgment in Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic, par. 84; par. 598.
105. Judgment in Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic, par. 82.
106. Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, 156.
107. See, e.g., "Notification regarding anniversary of Serbs suffering in the aggression of Croatian army on the Serb Krajina in the August 95," as posted to the Web site of the Veritas Documentation Information Center (last accessed June 23, 2007), http://www.verit.as.org.yu. Veritas reports 1,883 ethnic Serbs killed during Operation Storm through the end of August, 1995. At tenth anniversary ceremonies in Belgrade, various survivor groups that represent former Krajina Serbs estimated as many as 2,627 Serbs had gone missing in the Krajina between 1991 and 1995.
108. See "Patriarch Pavle holds memorial service for Serb victims of operation Oluja," August 4, 2005, http://www.srbija.sr.gov.yu.
109. Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, 337.
110. "The situation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina" (S/PV3564), UN Security Council, August 10, 1995, 6.
111. "Serbia, Croatia mark 10th anniversary of Krajina Serb expulsion," RIA Novosti, August 6, 2005;
112. "'Oluja' 10 years on - Serbs mourn while Croats celebrate," Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 4, 2005;
113. and Zoran Radosavljevic, "Croats cheer 1995 army triumph, reach out to Serbs," Reuters, August 5, 2005.
114. Kofi A. Annan, "May we all learn and act on the lessons of Srebrenica" (SG/SM/9993), United Nations Secretary-General, July 11, 2005.
115. We based these findings on searches carried out with three databases: Factiva ("All Sources"), NewsBank ("North America"), and Nexis ("Major Papers," "Magazines and Journals," and "Wire Services"). Our search parameters were: "Srebrenica" and "world war" for the period July 1-31, 2005;
116. and "Operation Storm" and "world war" for the period August 1-31, 2005. Note that our point is very conservative: The disparity in the media's treatment of Srebrenica and Operation storm is actually greater than "scores of times" and "15 times" suggests.
117. Nebojsa Malic, "Remembering the Storm," AntiWar.com, August 4, 2005, http://www.antiwar.com.
118. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm (Boston: South End Press, 1979), esp. 135-294;
119. and Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 2nd Ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), esp. 260-96.
120. Also see Edward S. Herman, "Pol Pot, Faurisson, and the Process of Derogation," in Carlos P. Otero, ed., Noam Chomsky, Critical Assessments, vol. 3, Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 1994), 598-615.
121. Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm, 292.
122. Michael lgnatieff, "Counting Bodies in Kosovo," New York Times, November 21, 1999.
123. U.S. Rep. Frank McCloskey, "The US Is Appeasing Fascism and Genocide," Christian Science Monitor, December 31, 1992;
124. John A. Callcott, "Bosnia-Herzegovina peace talks break for five days," United Press International, January 4, 1993;
125. "Remarks of Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic to the Carnegie Endowment," Federal News Service, January 8, 1993.
126. Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), xi; 43;
127. Rieff, Slaughterhouse, 17.
128. Carla Del Ponte, Prosecutor of the Tribunal against Slobodan Milosevic (IT-01-51-1), ICTY, November 22, 2001, pars. 5-9.
129. George Kenney, "The Bosnian Calculation," New York Times Magazine, April 23, 1995.
130. Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, "War-related Deaths in the 1992-1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina," European Journal of Population 21, (June 2005): 187-215; here 209; and n. 12, 213. These numbers are arrived at as follows: Tabeau and Bijak give 16,700 as their best "guesstimate" for Serb civilian deaths in the Bosnian wars (see their n. 12, 213). Taking this as a reasonable estimate in a murky field, we can make a further rough estimate of Bosnian Muslim civilian deaths by taking the Tabeau-Bijak total of Bosnian civilian deaths, 55,261, subtracting out the 16,700 Serbs plus 8,294 Croat and "Other" civilian deaths, giving us a Muslim civilian total of 31,000. The Croat-Other numbers are obtained by applying Tabeau and Bijak's ratio of Croat-Other deaths to total deaths that they use in an alternative calculation (see their table 5, 204). It should be noted that Tabeau and Bijak were working for the ICTY and testified for the prosecution during the Milosevic trial, so that their biases, if they exist, are not likely to show up in inflating Serb casualties. Last, we should also note that Milan Bogdanic, one of the co-directors of the Institute for Missing Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has reported the recovery of 3,251 sets of remains from as many as sixty-three "mass graves" containing Serbs, activities that have aroused zero interest in the Western media
131. (see "Serb officials say mass grave discovered in northwestern Bosnia," BBC Worldwide Monitoring, February 21, 2006).
132. See Mirsad Tokaca et al., "Status of Database by Centers," Research and Documentation Center, http://www.idc.org.
133. Also see Nidzara Ahmetasevic, "Bosnia's Book of the Dead," Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, June 21, 2007;
134. and Christian Jennings, "Book of Dead names nearly 100,000 victims," The Scotsman, June 22, 2007.
135. See, e.g., B. Coghlan et al., "Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo," The Lancet (367), January 7, 2006, 44-51. Already over three years old, this study concludes that "about 3.9 million people have died as a result of the conflict between August, 1998, and April, 2004."
136. See Brendan O'Shea, Crisis at Bihac (Gloucestershire, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 1998).
137. The databases used were Factiva and Nexis. The media universe consisted of the mass-circulation dailies Boston Globe, Financial Times, The Guardian/Observer, The Independent, New York Times, The Times (London), Toronto Globe and Mail, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, and the weekly magazines The Economist, Maclean's, and Newsweek, for all regular publication dates through May 31, 2007.
138. Vesna Peric Zimonjic, "Five years on, Milosevic is still in the dock," The Independent, February 13, 2006.
139. Aida Cerkez-Robinson, "Research shows many estimates of Bosnian war death toll were severely inflated," Associated Press, June 21, 2007. The Financial Times devoted 77 words to the RDCs downward revisions, the New York Times 102, and the Guardian Weekly 72.
140. See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Milosevic's Death in the Propaganda System," in Peter Phillips, ed.. Censored 2007 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 387-88. The databases used were Factiva and Nexis. The media universe consisted of large numbers of English-language sources deriving from wire services (including AFP, AP, DPA, Reuters, and many others), European, Canadian, and U.S. print, TV, and radio, and other regions (e.g., Australia, though by no means only), and covered the eleven day period beginning with Milosevic's death on March 11, 2006.
141. "A Discussion With Carla Del Ponte," The Charlie Rose Show, June 20, 2007.
142. According to The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, "Some six hundred thousand people were murdered at Jasenovac, mostly Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and opponents of the Ustasa regime" (740). Israel Gutman, ed. (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Publishing House, 1990), vol. 2, 739-40.
143. Elaine Sciolino, "U.S. Names Figures It Wants Charged with War Crimes," New York Times, December 17, 1992.
144. Sara Dareshori, Weighing the Evidence, Human Rights Watch, December 2006, 5.
145. At the time of Milosevic's June 28, 2001, transfer to the Scheveningen prison at The Hague, the only indictment he faced was the initial one for Kosovo (May 22, 1999).
146. The charge of "genocide" appears in both the initial and the amended indictments of Milosevic for Bosnia, but in none of the three indictments for Kosovo, and none of the three indictments for Croatia.
147. John Laughland, Travesty (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007), 97 and passim.
148. Also see Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, chaps. 4-5, 117-75;
149. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, 91-109;
150. and Hans Köchler, Global Justice or Global Revenge? International Criminal Justice at the Crossroads (New York: Springer-Wien, 2003), annex 1, 353-56.
151. Laughland, Travesty, chaps. 5-6, 88-124.
152. Laughland, Travesty, 110-24.
153. Also see David Chandler, The 'Butcher of the Balkans'? (University of Westminster, UK, 2006), http://www.davidchandler.org. This paper was drafted at the request of Milosevic's defense team. But since Milosevic predeceased its submission, it was never formally submitted.
154. Laughland, Travesty, 203-04.
155. We use the terms "Mujahedin" and "jihad" with a great deal of caution, and note, for example, the Western media's frequently prejudicial usage of these terms to denigrate "their" religiously motivated foreign fighters or mercenaries in contradistinction to "our" business-like professionals.
156. Richard J. Aldrich, "America used Islamists to arm the Bosnian Muslims," The Guardian, April 22, 2002.
157. Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992-1995, 207-08.
158. See, e.g., Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2003);
159. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win (New York: Random House, 2005);
160. and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, "The Iraq Effect," Mother Jones, March/April, 2007.
161. Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, The 9/11 Commission Report (Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States) (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004), 155.
162. The 9/11 Commission Report, 147; n. 5, 488.
163. The 9/11 Commission Report, 58.
164. See Memorandum on War Crimes and Crimes and Genocide in Eastern Bosnia (Communes of Bratunac, Skelani and Srebrenica) Committed Against the Serb Population from April 1992 to April 1993 (A/48/177-S/25835), May 24, 1993.
165. See "Excerpt from the National Intelligence Estimate," Washington Post, September 27, 2006, which reproduced the "Key Judgments" section of "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States."
166. Mahbub ul Haq et al., Human Development Report 1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), table 1.1, 15. The HDI for this year combined national income per capita, longevity, and knowledge, i.e., literacy rates and years of schooling.
167. Kevin Watkins et al., Human Development Report 2006 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), table 1, 283-86.
168. Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe (New York: Times Books, 1996), 71.
169. G. Schäfer, ed., Europe in Figures (Luxembourg: Statistical Office of the European Communities, 2007), table 6.1, 152.
170. Christopher Condon, "A leap to international visibility," Financial Times, December 13, 2006.
171. Also see Richard Bernstein, "Slovenia Strides Westward and Does Not Look Back," New York Times, July 26, 2006;
172. and Christopher Emsden, "With Slovenia, ECB Will Add a Hawk," Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2006.
173. Nada Merheb et al., The State of the World's Refugees 2006 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), annex 7, 224. These rankings are based on the number of refugees per 1,000 inhabitants living in a country of asylum as of December 31, 2004. For every 1,000 inhabitants, Chad hosted 26.7, Serbia and Montenegro 26.3, and Bosnia-Herzegovina 5.7. Although more current data are not available, the breakup of Serbia and Montenegro in 2006 likely increased Serbia's percentage, i.e., by subtracting Montenegro's approx. 630,000 population from the total.
174. For the numbers dating from 1995, see Merheb et al., The State of the World's Refugees 2006, annex 5, "Refugee population by origin, 1995-2004," 217-20. Space limitations prevent us from including these numbers in the table.
175. "Serbia and Montenegro: Kosovo," UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
176. See "The Balkans" Web site hosted by UNHCR, http://www.unhcr.org.
177. We are referring to multiple bombing raids on Kosovo Albanian convoys in April and May 1999. In the last of these (at least that we know of), at Korisa on May 13, several dozen were killed, and several dozen more wounded. See Amnesty International, "Collateral Damage" or Unlawful Killings? Violations of the Laws of War by NATO during Operation Allied Force, June 6, 2000, esp. sections 5.2 and 5. 7.
178. And for a detailed account of earlier bombing raids, see Robert Fisk, "Convoy of the Damned," The Independent, November 28, 1999.
179. As the Washington Post reported in 1991, target selection during the first Iraq war was aimed at "disabling Iraqi society at large." "The worst civilian suffering...has resulted not from the bombs that went astray but from precision-guided weapons that hit exactly where they were aimed - at electrical plants, oil refineries and transportation networks." In the words of a confidential source who "played a central role in the air campaign," so-called "Strategic bombing... strikes against 'all those things that allow a nation to sustain itself.'" Barton Gellman, "Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq; Officials Acknowledge Strategy Went Beyond Purely Military Targets," Washington Post, June 23, 1991.
180. Pekka Haavisto et al., The Kosovo Conflict (Balkans Task Force, UN Environment Program: October 1999), esp. 29-61.
181. William Booth, "Milosevic Foes Appeal to West To Help Serbia," Washington Post, July 6, 1999;
182. Chris Hedges, "Serbian Town Bombed by NATO Fears Effects of Toxic Chemicals," New York Times, July 14, 1999.
183. See "Background Note: Serbia," Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, U.S. Department of State, October, 2006;
184. also see the entry for "Serbia" in the CIA's World Factbook 2007.
185. David Vujanovic, "Ultra-nationalist win clouds Serbia's future," Agence France Presse, January 22, 2007;
186. Beth Kampschror, "Serb elections complicate Kosovo issue," Christian Science Monitor, January 23, 2007;
187. and Dusan Stojanovic, "Serbian Radical Party Riding High," Associated Press, January 24, 2007.
188. See "Background Note: Bosnia," Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, U.S. Department of State, February, 2007;
189. also see the entry for "Bosnia and Herzegovina" in the World Factbook 2007, Central Intelligence Agency.
190. Michael Pugh, "Crime and Capitalism in Kosovo's Transformation, " in Tonny Brems Knudsen and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, eds., Kosovo between War and Peace (New York: Routledge, 2006).
191. Tom Walker, "Rampage of the mafia may delay Kosovo independence," Sunday Times, April 9, 2006;
192. Bojan Pancevski, "Report damns West's record in reviving Kosovo," Daily Telegraph, March 19, 2007;
193. and Svante E. Cornell and Michael Jonsson, "Creating a state of denial," International Herald Tribune, March 23, 2007.
194. Paddy Ashdown, "BiH Open for Investments," Office of the High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, December 9, 2003. Ashdown uttered these words while attending a conference in London to promote Bosnia to foreign investors.
195. Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement (S/2007/168/Add.1), March 26, 2007, General Principles, Article 1.1.
196. See, e.g., Christian Brunner, "The Situation of Internally Displaced Persons in Serbia and Montenegro," ICRC, May, 2005;
197. "IDPs from Kosovo," Global IDP Project, Norwegian Refugee Council, September 22, 2005;
198. and "Position on the Continued International Protection Needs of Individuals from Kosovo," UNHCR, June, 2006.
199. Kai Eide, A comprehensive review of the developments in Kosovo (S/2005/635), October 7, 2005, par. 52; par. 54.
200. R. Nicholas Burns, "The Outlook for the Independence of Kosovo," U.S. Department of State, April 17, 2007.
201. Bill Clinton, "Remarks by the President to the American Society of Newspaper Editors," Federal Documents Clearing House, April 15, 1999.
202. See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 2nd Ed., 2001), xxvii-xxix, and 143-67.
203. Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell," (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 268-69.
204. Power, "A Problem from Hell," 277-78.
205. See, e.g., Carl Savich, "Celebici," Serbianna, November 11, 2003, http://www.serbianna.com;
206. "Rape and War," Serbianna, December 1, 2006, http://serbianna.com;
207. and Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, 71-2.
208. Power, "A Problem from Hell, " 276. Power adds: "In July 45 percent of Americans had disapproved of U.S. air strikes and 35 percent approved. Now, without any guidance from their leaders, 53 percent of Americans approved, whereas 33 percent disapproved. Roughly the same percentage supported contributing U.S. forces to a humanitarian or peacekeeping mission" (276).
209. For the original debunking of this image, see Thomas Deichmann, "The Picture That Fooled The World," LM (formerly Living Marxism), February, 1997.
210. See also Diana Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, 72-3;
211. and Peter Brock, Media Cleansing (Los Angeles: GM Books, 2005), 246-56.
212. Power, "A Problem from Hell, " 472-73.
213. See the entry for "Detentions," in "Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo: Fact Sheet based on information from U.S. Government sources," U.S. Department of State, April 19, 1999, http://www.state.gov.
214. See Heinz Loquai, Der Kosovo-Konflikt. Wege in einen vermeidbaren Krieg (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2000). In English, Loquai's title translates as "The Kosovo Conflict: The War That Could Have Been Avoided." Although NATO launched its war on March 24, 1999, news of the German Defense and Foreign Ministries' knowledge of "Operation Horseshoe," alleged to have been a preexisting Serbian plan to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of its Albanian inhabitants, was not publicized until Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer released it on April 6 - some thirteen days later. "I have come to the conclusion that no such operation ever existed," Loquai, a retired Brigadier General in the Bundeswehr, told the London Times. "The criticism of the war [in Germany], which had grown into a fire that was almost out of control, was completely extinguished by [the news of] Operation Horseshoe."
215. See Franz-Josef Hutsch, "Hufeisenplan - das KriegsrätselKein Zweifel," Hamburger Abendblatt, March 21, 2000;
216. and John Goetz and Tom Walker, "Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake, says general," Sunday Times, April 2, 2000.
217. See, e.g., John F. Burns, "A Killer's Tale," New York Times, November 27, 1992;
218. and John F. Burns, "Bosnia War Crime Trial Hears Serb's Confession," New York Times, March 14, 1993.
219. See Brock, Media Cleansing, esp. 163-76.
220. See Kit R. Roane, "Symbol of Inhumanity in Bosnia Now Says 'Not Me,'" New York Times, January 31, 1996;
221. Chris Hedges, "Jailed Serb's 'Victims' Found Alive, Embarrassing Bosnia," New York Times, March 1, 1997;
222. and Jonathan Randal, "Serb Convicted of Murders Demanding Retrial After 2 'Victims' Found Alive," Washington Post, March 15, 1997.
223. See, e.g., Roy Gutman, "Prisoners of Serbia's War," Newsday, July 19, 1992;
224. Roy Gutman, "Like Auschwitz," Newsday, July 21, 1992;
225. and Roy Gutman, "Bosnia's Camps of Death," Newsday, August 2, 1992.
226. Also see Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), which collects all of Gutman's bylined work for Newsday from November 21, 1991 to June 22, 1993. Gutman's twenty-six-page introduction to this book ranks among the most factually inaccurate and openly prejudicial documents published in the English language.
227. Power, "A Problem from Hell," 269-70.
228. See Brock, Media Cleansing, esp. 85-116.
229. Roy Gutman, "Bosnia's Camps of Death," Newsday, August 2, 1992.
230. See Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, 78-80.
231. Charles Lane, "War Stories," New Republic, January 3, 1994, emphasis added.
232. Thom Shanker, "Sexual Violence," Crimes of War, 323.
233. For full accounts of this remarkable case of demonization and media willingness to report outlandish falsehoods, see Brock, Media Cleansing, 59-72;
234. and Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, 78-90.
235. David Rohde, "Evidence Indicates Bosnia Massacre," Christian Science Monitor, August 18, 1995;
236. "How a Serb Massacre Was Exposed, " Christian Science Monitor, August 25, 1995, emphasis added;
237. "Bosnia Muslims Were Killed by The Truckload," Christian Science Monitor, October 2, 1995;
238. "Eye-witnesses Confirm Massacre in Bosnia," Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 1995, emphasis added.
239. Also see Rohde, "Serbia Held Responsible For Massacre of Bosnians, " Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 1995;
240. "Graves Found That Confirm Bosnia Massacre," Christian Science Monitor, November 16, 1995;
241. "What the US Knows and Won't Reveal," Christian Science Monitor, November 16, 1995.
242. Also see his Endgame (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).
243. See Milosevic Trial Transcript (IT-02-54), June 1, 2005, 40275ff.
244. Tim Judah and Daniel Sunter, "How the video that put Serbia in dock was brought to light," The Observer, June 5, 2005;
245. Nicholas Wood and Marlise Simons, "Videotape of Serbian Police Killing 6 Muslims From Srebrenica Grips Balkans," New York Times, June 12, 2005;
246. Daniel Williams, "Srebrenica Video Vindicates Long Pursuit by Serb Activist," Washington Post, June 25, 2005.
247. Bill Schiller, "Fearsome Muslim warlord eludes Bosnian Serb forces," Toronto Star, July 16, 1995.
248. Bill Schiller, "Muslims' hero vows he'll fight to the last man," Toronto Star, January 31, 1994;
249. and John Pomfret, "Weapons, Cash and Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica's Tough Guy," Washington Post, February 16, 1994.
250. See Carla Del Ponte, The Pros ecutor of the Tribunal Against Naser Oric (IT-03-68-1), March 28, 2003, pars. 22-38.
251. Tanja Subotic, "Bosnia minister urges action on war crimes videos," Agence France Presse, August 8, 2006;
252. "TV shows footage of ex-Bosnian army chief ordering torching of Serb villages," BBC Worldwide Monitoring, August 7, 2005;
253. Anton Nikiforov, "ICTY Weekly Press Briefing," August 9, 2006;
254. "Bosnian Muslim brigade commander arrested for war crimes," Agence France Presse, November 2, 2006.
255. For the 4,000 figure, see "Statement to the Press by Carla Del Ponte" (FH/RI.S./550-e), ICTY, December 20, 2000, par. 16, http://www.un.org;
256. and for the number of missing in Kosovo, see "Over 18,000 persons still missing in the Balkans," ICRC, August 30, 2006, http://www.icrc.org. At the time, the ICRC listed a total of 2,284 persons as "missing" in Kosovo.
257. Note that estimates of uprooted persons frequently fail to account for large numbers of Roma, who simply never register with any agency. See Paul Polansky, The Current Plight of the Kosovo Roma, Voice of Roma Web site, 2001, 5; 13, http://www.scn.org.
258. Also see Tilman Zulch, Until the Very Last 'Gipsy' Has Fled the Country, Society for Threatened Peoples International, Human Rights Report No. 21, (Göttingen), September 6, 1999;
259. and Andrej Grubacic, "Kosovo's Unworthy Victims," ZNet, April 30, 2007.
260. As usage of the phrase "mongrel races" to denigrate an ethnic group contradicts the long-held, publicly expressed beliefs of the late Slobodan Milosevic and his wife Mirjana Markovic, we suspect that Ed Vulliamy's attribution of this phrase to one or both of them to denigrate Bosnia's Muslims or the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo is a fabrication. Although we have found a total of five different instances in which the phrase "mongrel races" was attributed to Milosevic and/or his wife, we have been unable to get a single confirmation from any of the three British newspapers in which the articles were published of an authentic, original source for it. Neither the three journalists under whose bylines the articles were published (i.e., Allan Hall, Vicky Spavin, and Ed Vulliamy), nor the three newspapers that published them (i.e., Scottish Daily Record, The Scotsman, and The Observer), have responded to our repeated requests for information about their sources for the alleged quote. (See Allan Hall, "The Glamorous Witch Wife and the Drug Lord Son," Scottish Daily Record, October 6, 2000;
261. N.A., "Saturday profile: Mirjana Markovic," The Scotsman, October 7, 2000;
262. Vicky Spavin, "Deadlier than the Male," Scottish Daily Record, April 5, 2001;
263. Allan Hall, "Power-Mad Couple Who Ruled by Terror," The Scotsman, June 29, 2001;
264. and Ed Vulliamy, "The Observer Profile: Mira Milosevic," The Observer, July 8, 2001.)
265. Michael Scharf, "Indicted For War Crimes, Then What?" Washington Post, October 3, 1999.
266. Paul Hockenos, "Milosevic Wins Again?" In These Times, May 15, 1999.
267. Mary Kaldor, "Sarajevo's Reproach, " The Progressive, September, 1993;
268. Dennis J. Kucinich, "What I learned from the War," The Progressive, August, 1999;
269. and Wayne Madsen, "Mercenaries in Kosovo," The Progressive, August, 1999.
270. See, e.g., Alexander Cockburn, "The Laptop Bombardiers," The Nation, May 23, 1994;
271. and Alexander Cockburn, "Where Are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?" CounterPunch, March 24/25, 2007.
272. Christopher Hitchens, "Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia," The Nation, October 23, 1995.
273. For an indication of Hitchens' trajectory in recent years, see "A War to Be Proud Of," Weekly Standard, September 5/12, 2005. Two sentences will suffice: "By the middle of 1990, Saddam Hussein had abolished Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was attempting to erase the identity and the existence of Bosnia. It turned out that we had not by any means escaped the reach of atavistic, aggressive, expansionist, and totalitarian ideology." As is now standard for Hitchens, the four modifiers preceding "ideology" do not refer to Washington or to U.S. conduct globally, but rather to Washington's official enemies.
274. Ian Williams, "Kosovo Another Bosnia?," The Nation, March 30, 1998;
275. Ian Williams and Bogdan Denitch, "The Case Against Inaction," The Nation, April 26, 1999;
276. Ian Williams, "You can't negotiate with a war criminal," Slate, May 27, 1999.
277. See, e.g., Richard Falk, "Reflections on the War," The Nation, June 22, 1999;
278. and "Kosovo Revisited," The Nation, April 10, 2000.
279. See the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4 and passim.
280. Richard Falk, Human Rights Horizons (New York: Routledge, 2000), 179-80.
281. The Kosovo Report, 290-91; 10.
282. Cf. Richard Falk, "Why International Law Matters," The Nation, March 10, 2003. Notice that between twenty-four and thirty-six months before this reassessment appeared, Falk had argued not only that in certain cases international law shouldn't matter, but that the law ought to be rewritten to make everything alright.
283. George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, esp. chap. 5, eptember 17, 2002.
284. See Noam Chomsky, Failed States (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), esp. 79-101.
285. George Kenney, "Rolling Thunder," The Nation, June 14, 1999;
286. and "Humanitarian Intervention," The Nation, July 14, 2003.
287. See Edward S. Herman, "Johnstone on the Balkan Wars," Z Magazine, February, 2003;
288. Edward S. Herman, "How America Gets Away With Murder," Z Magazine, June, 2004;
289. Edward S. Herman, "Media Cleansing," Z Magazine, January, 2006;
290. and Edward S. Herman, "Travesty," Z Magazine, April, 2007.
291. See Monthly Review, June, 1999; here quoting Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Kosovo and the New Imperialism."
292. John Rosenthal, "Kosovo and 'the Jewish Question,'" Monthly Review, February, 2000.
293. Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007).
294. See, e.g., Sean Gervasi, "Germany, the U.S., and the Yugoslav Crisis," Covert Action, Winter, 1992-93;
295. Michel Chossudovsky, "Dismantling Yugoslavia-Colonizing Bosnia," Covert Action, Spring, 1996;
296. Ellen Ray and Bill Schaap, "NATO and Beyond," Covert Action, Spring-Summer, 1999;
297. Diana Johnstone, "NATO's Parallel Wars," Covert Action, Spring-Summer, 1999;
298. and Gregory Elich, "The CIA's Covert War," Covert Action, April-June, 2001.
299. Bill Clinton, "In the President's Words," New York Times, March 25, 1999;
300. Jürgen Habermas, "Bestiality and Humanity," in William Joseph Buckley, Kosovo (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 314-15;
301. Vaclav Havel, "Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State," New York Review of Books, June 10, 1999;
302. Tony Blair, "A New Moral Crusade," Newsweek, June 14, 1999;
303. Kofi Annan, "Two concepts of sovereignty," The Economist, September 18, 1999.
304. See Bruno Simma, "NATO, the UN and the Use of Force, European Journal of International Law 10, no. 1, 1999, http://www.ejil.org.
305. And for NATO's Strategic Concept, adopted in Washington DC. on April 24, 1999, http://www.nato.int.
306. Köchler, Global Justice or Global Revenge?, 147.