Serbia owed justice in Kosovo
The Japan Times - Monday, July 2, 2007
By GREGORY CLARK
No commentator likes to sound like a conspiracy nut. But if that is the fate of
anyone who tries to challenge the distortions involved in painting Serbia as
criminally guilty over Kosovo and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, then so
be it.
Let's go back to the beginning. When Nazi Germany tried to occupy Yugoslavia
during World War II, the Croat and Muslim minorities there backed the Nazis in
their campaign against the mainly Serbian resistance. Even the Nazis are said to
have been impressed by the brutality with which the Croatian forces — the
dreaded Ustashi — set out to massacre and cleanse whole villages and even towns
of their Serbian populations. Some 1 million Serbs died as a result, many of
them in the Croatian death camp at Jasenovac, said to rival some Nazi Holocaust
operations in scale and atrocity.
With the war over, Serb revenge seemed inevitable. But the Yugoslav resistance
leader, Tito, managed to restrain passions by allowing Serbian domination of the
central government while dividing the nation into semi-autonomous regions with
mixed ethnic populations. But it was an uneasy compromise, as I saw on the
ground in the former Yugoslavia of the '60s and as even we in distant Australia
probably realized better than most.
There we saw frequent attacks by recalcitrant Ustashi elements on Yugoslav
diplomatic missions and the large Serbian immigrant community. We took it for
granted that in any breakup of post-communist Yugoslavia it would be insanity to
ask the large Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia to accept rule by their
former pro-Nazi Croatian and Muslim oppressors. But insanity prevailed, thanks
largely to pressure from Germany, Britain and the United States, all seeking to
expand influence into yet another Eastern Europe ex-communist nation.
In short, the subsequent fighting was inevitable, as were the atrocities, by all
sides. But the Serbs could at least claim they were seeking mainly to recover
some of the towns and villages they had lost under the Nazis. Much is made of
Serbian revenge killings in the Bosnian district of Srebrenica in 1995. But we
see no mention of the wartime and postwar killings of Serbs in that area, which
had reduced the Serbian population from a prewar level of over half to less than
one third. Nor do we find much mention of the atrocities involved in expelling
hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Croatia.
Enter the Kosovo problem.
To assist the Muslim side during the 1992-1995 Bosnian fighting, British and
U.S. intelligence organs resorted to the extraordinary recruitment and training
of Islamic extremists from Afghanistan's anti-Soviet wars of the 1980s. Help and
training was also given to Albanian Muslim extremists setting up their Kosovo
Liberation Army to launch guerrilla attacks against isolated Serbian
communities. (These long-suspected facts were confirmed by Britain's former
environment minister Michael Meacher writing in The Guardian newspaper
recently).
Even more extraordinary was the way Serbian attempts to prevent or retaliate
against those KLA attacks were denounced as the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo's
Albanians (ironically it was the KLA that invented the term, to describe its
plan to drive out the Serbian minority). The U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization move to bomb Serbia into submission followed soon after, even
though it was the KLA, not Belgrade, that violated a 1998 ceasefire organized by
the U.S.
The propaganda war used to justify Western policies over Kosovo was unrelenting.
We were told that 500,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed there by the Serbs
(miraculously we are now given a figure of around 10,000). Much was made of a
1989 speech by former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic said to call for
"ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. But one has only to read the speech to realize it
said the exact opposite — that it was a call for moderation in handling ethnic
Albanian hostility to a justifiably stronger Serbian political presence there;
the idea that the 10 percent Serbian minority there would set out deliberately
to expel the large ethnic Albanian majority was patently absurd from the start.
Yet that absurdity has regularly been trundled out by allegedly objective
Western commentators relying heavily on the 1999 flight of ethnic Albanians to
neighboring Macedonia as proof. But that flight was temporary, and came after
the U.S./NATO bombing attacks, not before. Some of it was also staged.
Almost nowhere do we see any mention of the hundreds of thousands of Serbs,
Jews, Gypsies and moderate ethnic Albanians since expelled permanently from
Kosovo by the now dominant extremists. Meanwhile we are supposed to be annoyed
by Belgrade's and Moscow's resistance to a Kosovo independence that would almost
certainly see the remaining ethnic minorities even further victimized.
The implications for the future are frightening. The propaganda victory over
Kosovo seems to have convinced our Western policymakers that they can say
anything they like on any issue and rely on spin, black information and a lazy
or compliant media to get away with it.
The 1999 ultimatum given Belgrade over Kosovo was pure blackmail: Either you
agree to our demands, no matter how unreasonable (including the demand to put
not only Kosovo but also Serbia under NATO military occupation), or we use our
dominant air power to wreck your economic and social infrastructure. The
subsequent destruction of Serbia's industries, including its only car factory,
was pure vandalism.
Even Belgrade's willingness to accept a Kosovo under the control of moderate
ethnic Albanians was rejected, in favor of the KLA Muslim extremists the U.S.
had long supported. Ironically some of those extremists have now joined al-Qaida's
anti-U.S. jihad.
On the 50th anniversary of their original unification, the EU powers
congratulated themselves on the way they had kept Europe free of war ever since
1945. They did not seem even to notice how they had just gone to war with a
European nation called Serbia. Serbia was the one European nation to resist Nazi
German domination (the others either surrendered or collaborated). Its capital,
Belgrade, was viciously bombed as a result. The next time it was bombed was by a
NATO that included Germany and many of the other former collaborator nations,
this time to force it to submit over Kosovo. Little wonder the Serbs remain
angry.
Gregory Clark is a former Australian government
official and currently vice president of Akita International University. A
translation of this article will appear at www.gregoryclark.net
Original URL: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20070702gc.html
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