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Lenin’s Tomb
Just skimmed the story on the 9/11 truther site you linked to. So the allegation is that somebody is anti semitic because of their father? Not sure how that can be fair.
Have you got any evidence that he links to Nazi websites that are popular in eastern Europe, like Delich did?
I think being in a political coma throughout the 1990s has forever stunted me from understanding anything about the Balkans.
The Caucuses and the Middle East I can hold my own. But when you start bringing Croatia into things..... It warbles the mind.
I love Marko's trope, the 'non-activist' in UCU (could we call them the silent majority?), who are (silently, non-actively), because of their inherent hardworking decency (fighting for - nay, caring about - only wages and working conditions), always and forever opposed to extreme political positions. Well, I've been pretty silent and inactive in UCU now for a while, but I'll still chomp down on a South African grapefruit in the morniong before I'll let an Israeli one in the house. Where would I be, in my silence and my inactivity, if it weren't for Marko and his woodwormish ilk.
(of course, the silent and the inactive aren't all that silent or inactive, since Engage have in the past couple of months embarked on a spamming campaign into, as far as I can tell, pretty much every UCU member's inbox. Wanna know about the latest typo on an SWP leaflet? -- check your email from Engage. I've tried to get them to stop, it doesn't work)
Mike, there is no allegation that Hoare is anti-Semitic. There is rather proof that his pretence of objecting to anti-Semitic innuendo in the UCU question is malicious and hypocritical, because he has
- actively engaged in propaganda to elicit funding and arms for powerful and active Serb-kiling, Roma-killing openly anti-Semitic neofascists in control of a self-proclaimed state of Croatia.
-celebrated the murderous military conquests carried out by those neofascist anti-Semites, deeming the bloodiest not only justifiable but "morally and legally" necessary.
- supported his parents' tireless attacks on critics of these neofascists, smears of those with whom they disagreed as dupes of "Belgrade" and other such horseshit, which went so far as a malicious libel suit designed to silence such criticism
- relentlessly attacked and smeared American and British Jews who have objected to their governments underwriting, arming and supporting the murderous campaigns of these fascist anti-Semites
- engaged in what a Wiesenthal center employee has called "Holocaust denial denial" when he insisted that descriptions of Tudjman - who claimed "the Jews" were in charge in Jasenovac, the largest of over two dozen Ustasa wartime concentration camps - as an anti-Semite were exaggerated because he had merely "once mentioned" that he was glad his wife wasn't Jewish.
None of this of course makes Hoare an antisemite himself, though some of the language he uses when attacking ethnic Jews he disagrees with, especially over the issue of the Croatian neofascist nationalists, shows some echoes of an old anticommie rhetoric of Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy that might raise some eyebrows, and this may account for the popularity of his writing with the self-proclaimed racists at "Stirpes". But his reams of writing about the Balkans surely proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that his pretended intolerance for anti-Semitism is selective, insincere and an opportunistic fraud, and that he is, with the others at HP, maliciously and cynically trying to smear critics of the various murderous ethnic supremacist policies he supports (in the Balkans, in the Middle East and elsewhere) as anti-Semites or insufficiently antiantiSemites. Because usually he sees nothing so wrong with anti-Semites that would make him hesitate to support arming them to the eyes or giving them propaganda and diplomatic cover and a green light to go on their racist killing sprees. He has repeatedly stressed that there was nothing so objectionable about the ruling Croatian neofascists' antisemitic, antiroma, antiserb ideology that would render their authoritarian rule over a population of Jews, Roma and Serbs less than legitimate or rightly open to the contest or resistance of that population, or which would compromise the anti-Semitic Croatian neofascists' unilateral declaration of sovereignty over the territory of another country whose long settled population loathed, opposed, and rejected their claims to sovereignty and whom they deemed 'foreign' and, with US backing, expropriated, expelled and murdered.
ugh, man, must we see that mug without any artistic alienation or mockery? i won't be able to digest my lunch today...wasteland indeed!
"franco tudjman" is quite neat,though...
Qlipoth, it would do you good to admit, as Futurecast did, that your grasp of the Balkans is SHITE. Of course Tudjman is a latent neo-Nazi antisemitic maniac. But the fact is that people - especially on the left - are generally aware of that. What Hoare and Magas, and others like them address, is the campaign of disinformation that has led many leftists to be apologetics for Serbian aggression, genocide, and war crimes in the Balkans in the 1990s. This imbalance has always existed, due to a very powerful Serbian lobby in the West - the Allies in WWII, for instance, supported the Chetniks, not the Partisans, until 1943, when they discovered that the Chetniks were collaborating with the Germans. Everyone knows about the NDH and the Ustasha collaboration, but few people talk about the fact that the WWII government of Serbia was a quisling state too, and that in fact Belgrade was the first city in Europe to be declared judenrein - Jew-free. Moreover, it would do well to focus on more recent events.
I cannot even hope to address all the errors - of fact and judgment - in your ranting commentary (ranting and absent punctuation sure helps to get the message across quickly without pausing too long over the facts), but I will address one crucial one, which you gloss over pretty quickly:
You say: "the legal Federal government comes to the aid of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens"....Sure, you mean the JNA - the Yugoslav National Army - coming to the aid of Serbs in Croatia? Several problems here:
1. if this was the motive for the JNA's intervention, what were they doing in Slovenia a year earlier? What were they doing in parts of Croatia that had no Serb population to speak of? What were they doing besieging and bombarding Dubrovnik? Vukovar? Their operations were far from limited to Krajina. And after that, what were they doing occupying parts of Bosnia that had no significant Serb population, turning what were once (before the war) overwhelmingly majority Muslim towns - Foca, Gorazde, Srebrenica - into Muslim-free towns?? What were they doing besieging and indiscriminately bombarding Sarajevo - where I spent most of the war under siege - for three years, including its Serb, Croat, Muslim, and Jewish civilian population (my mother is a Serb, born in Belgrade, incidentally)
2. By 1991 the federal government was no longer the "legal Federal government" - Yugoslavia had ceased to exist long before Croatia and Slovenia declared independence. Under the Yugoslav constitution any change of borders within the Federation meant that the federation was effectively dissolved. And before there was any talk of independence, Milosevic, in an aggressive expansionist move, annexed the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, in an attempt to control 3 of the 8 votes in the federal League of Communists. (Imagine, say, Gordon Brown abolishing the devolved powers of the Welsh and Scottish assemblies in order to control their votes in the EU Parliament.) This is what sparked the walkout of the Croatian and Slovene representatives (before Tudjman ever appeared on the scene) eventually leading to the declaration of independence. And this is what also, long before Tudjman, independence, etc - while all six republics were still controlled by their respective League of Communists - dissolved the Federal state, from a constitutional viewpoint.
3. In what sense were the Serbs in Krajina 'citizens'? They were not citizens of Serbia, by any means, since no such citizenship existed. The Federal State of Yugoslavia, from the viewpoint of international law, and Yugoslav constitutional law, no longer existed in 1991. They certainly had a claim to citizenship in Croatia, and prior to them taking up arms and declaring (with no historical precedent) an independent republic in Krajina, there was no violence and they were not threatened. (Also incidentally, my grandpa is a Serb and had a house on the Dalmatian coast and we stayed in that house in 1994 after escaping the Serb siege of Sarajevo) This is in contrast to the situation in Bosnia, where Karadzic and co made repeated threats of "we will destroy you" - openly, and in Parliament - to the Muslims if they voted for independence. So no matter what you think of the Russian argument that they are defending their own citizens in South Ossetia (to whom they have over the years surreptitiously handed out Russian passports), this has no relevance here. In any case, Croatia did not initiate military activities - in 1991 it hardly had an army worthy of standing up to the JNA. All the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia - Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia - were initiated from Serbia, in one way or another, mostly by controlling the JNA or supplying arms to Bosnian and Croatian Serbs (which by 1991 was mostly Serb)...And it doesn't matter how you justify it, war is war, and in the end the only thing that matters is who started it, who took the first step toward violence.
"And it doesn't matter how you justify it, war is war, and in the end the only thing that matters is who started it, who took the first step toward violence"
No it is not the only thing that matters, and is absolutely the wrong basis for discussion if your concern is with the way civilians are targetted in such wars. The constant attempt to associate particular ethnicities with innocence or guilt, flows out of the attempt to make certain states guilty and others innocent on the basis of 'who started it'. All states are guilty and civilians on either side are not, irrespective of 'who started it', Given the nature of contemporary States and their dynamic. If we take the current situation in Georgia, the speed with which people have taken to dismissing the Georgian interventions effects on civilians because they imagine the Russians 'started it' is only matched by those who see things the other way and prefer to ignore those who in recent weeks were thrown out of Georgia in retaliation. Its an entirely diseased way of looking at these conflicts which emerges directly out of the dishonourable tradition established by pro-intervention liberals in the 1990's in the Balkan's who insisted on seeing this conflict as a re-run of the Spanish civil war. Others who knew it certainly wasn't responded by imagining that the Serbian state were the good guys. This kind of thinking is not helpful.
I'm afraid that that kind of thinking certainly did not start with the liberals in the 1990s. Civilian atrocities? Sure. They happen in war. There is a nice argument here by Zizek, who notes that, yes, the Allies committed atrocities in WWII - Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fire-bombing of Japanese and German cities, Dresden, etc. And these should certainly be dealt with. But does this in any way affect which side we should ultimately support? Nope. And it doesn't come down simply to the fact that the Nazis killed MORE people - it comes down to the fact that they initiated the violence - that they sent millions to the gas chambers and ovens with no provocation from anyone.
Saying that 'all states are guilty' is precisely the diseased way of thinking about the Balkans promoted by Western right-wing politicians who secretly supported the genocidal project of Greater Serbia - Lord Owen, Cyrus Vance, General Mackenzie, etc. "All sides are equally guilty, some of them just killed more." This neutral stance the right-wing militarists wished to disseminate in the West was aimed precisely at doing nothing and maintaining the arms embargo - because Western neutrality favoured Serbia, given that, at least in 1991-92, it had the overwhelming military superiority, having inherited the Yugoslav National Army, and maintaining the international embargo on Yugoslavia meant Bosnia and Croatia could not, without difficulty, arm themselves.
And to add to my previous comment, Milosevic not only tore Yugoslavia apart, but was in fact responsible for the likes of Tudjman coming to power, and for the sweeping victories of nationalist parties in the 1990 elections. His rise to power, culminating in the 1989 annexation of Vojvodina and Kosovo in an attempt to control the League of Communists, was precisely the trigger that shifted support to the nationalists. Milosevic himself coming, ostensibly from the Communist party (a wolf in sheep's clothing, for lack of a better analogy), the Communist leagues of the other republics - which in the 1990 elections in Bosnia ran as the SDP (my father was a member and served in the wartime Bosnian government in Sarajevo) - had little chance of distancing themselves completely from Milosevic in the eyes of the electorate. The same wave of nationalism swept all over Yugoslavia in the 1990s - except that in Serbia, where it originated, in typically covert fashion the nationalists came from within the Communist party itself. It is a travesty of Tito's Yugoslavia that many people on the left have no clue about this.
But my position is not to be assimilated to Realism whose critiques of tribalism never include themselves. Your first assumption that in all wars the main decision is to decide which side to support is without any merit at all. If, rather then being a cynical diplomat your a socialist activist in Serbia, Croatia or Bosnia, rather then working out which side your on, your first thought might be to work out how to stop the conflict between your respective masters. Your second thought, if this fails, need not be the kind of 'I've started so I've finished logic' of a Clare Short (ie ok now we better decide which side we are on) but, how best to bring this to an end. None of this implies Realism and it has nothing whatsoever in common with David Owen. The great difficulties in these discussions is the belief that the only choices are Liberal Internationalism or Realism. These doctrines turn out to be simply different masks put on by the same people depending on the nature of the conflict. If you don't believe that the conflict concerns your interests you wear the mask of a realist. If you think it does you wear the mask of a liberal internationalist. Justice of course occurs in wars which you have a stake in, base interests and unproductive passions in those you don't. The poverty of this framework is not improved by referring to Zizek. But anyone familiar with the Marxist tradition will know that the formulation 'what matters is who started it' was lampooned by Lenin when he was reproaching socialists for failing to oppose the first world war. 'Who started it' is the least important of questions for a Marxist. What matters is the nature of the system, the nature of the war and its relationship to that system, and therefore the correct stance to take up towards the war, and how best to weaken the hold of this system, and these states over the populations which live on both sides.
This is not I think the logic of David Owen.
Deleuzer, look up the word "begins".
And this favourite Ustashe apologist tidbit: "but few people talk about the fact that the WWII government of Serbia was a quisling state too, and that in fact Belgrade was the first city in Europe to be declared judenrein - Jew-free" is becoming a red flag.
plenty of people talk about this lately, and those people all appear to have the same motive. It's not as if there is a government in Serbia declaring itself the inheritors of local Nazi collaborators, celebrating actual collaborators, etc. People, like you, bring this up as a volkish tit for tat to attack critics of the existing fascists in Croatia who celebrate and apolgise for the Ustasha, revive their emblems, sing their songs, proudly proclaim themselves their heirs, kill people, expell people, steal people' s property, deny people citizenship, intimidate witnesses against a Nazi era war criminal, etc.. No one is claiming Croats as a group are guilty of the crimes of fascists then or now; rather the point is that so many people in Croatia are bullied and victimised and ruled over despotically by these racist fascist antisemitic scum; you however insinuate that Serbs as a group have something to do with Nazi collaborators, making this relevant to the present, and complain that not enough people "talk about" this criminal past of Serbs as a group, implying an injustice is committed by this just too much talk going on about the fact that Croatia is run by a bunch of fascists, who have not been very nice to their too sanguine and indulgent early non-fascist supporters either. This lets everyone know right away where you are coming from. That your mother is a Serb doesn't seem too pertinent; there are misogynists in the world and all their mothers are women.
Anyway, either antiSemitism is intolerable and outrageous or it isn't. If it's no big deal when awfully visible and grand as with Tudjman and company then it's no big deal when it consists of a single link on a closed mailing list. If it's okay for antiSemites to "liberate Krajina" violently and rule Croatia, then really one can hardly be screaming bloody murder over Jenna Delich's "circulating" an article, whether it is the one she circulated, or something by Hoare you can pick up on aryan supremacist websites.
That passive voice by the way - "to be declared" - so common when this little charming Nazi era history tidbit it advanced over recent years, is another hint of your sincerity level. Dragging this fact, as supposed evidence of some kind of ethnic Serb group stain, into your ugly volkish analysis is the kind of disgraceful thing that the nationalists of the former FRY and their supporters have unfortunately returned almost to respectability. Not quite though.
Anyway, one cannot discuss anything seriously with someone who opens with an "ethnic guilt" gambit like that.
"The Federal State of Yugoslavia, from the viewpoint of international law, and Yugoslav constitutional law, no longer existed in 1991"
what a joke. As I am sure your father in the Bosnian wartime government has explained to you, the FRY was an international debtor with a substantial treasury of assets. This entity could not simply be dissolved by the unilateral secessions of Slovenia and Croatia, nor had the gangs running those republics recognised international legal rights to unilaterally declare what territory + assets, debts + population they owned and were responsible for.
" Milosevic not only tore Yugoslavia apart, but was in fact responsible for the likes of Tudjman coming to power"
And who knows, he may be responsible also for the opinions of Jenna Delich toward the State of Israel. You seem to be very determined to miss the point, deleuzer.
"And it doesn't come down simply to the fact that the Nazis killed MORE people - it comes down to the fact that they initiated the violence - that they sent millions to the gas chambers and ovens with no provocation from anyone."
First, the idea that the holocaust is what initiated the Second World War is stupidly ludicrous.
Second, the idea that 'who started it' is the means by which we decide on goodies and baddies is fantastically dumb, unless every historical scenario is to be reimagined until we have histories in which the event that triggers World War II is the start of the holocaust. By this reasoning, a state would be supported, even as it committed genocide, so long as it was attacked at the outset of the conflict.
Mad.
qlipoth, is it true that you are a 9/11 Truther?
sarah p - is it true that you are a dumbass troll?
Qlipoth has every right to disagree with Marko Attila Hoare. But he doesn't have the right to tell lies about him - especially stupid lies that are refuted by a five minute glance at Hoare's own website.
The whole brunt of Qlipoth's repulsive article is to suggest that the entire Hoare family are closet sympathisers with Tudjman, the Ustasha, Croatian neo-nazis etc.
But here's Hoare on the Ustashas, whom Qlipoth seems to think he glorifies: "The Ustashas - Croat fascists - were a movement of traitors and murderers who have been disgracing and undermining Croatia ever since they emerged at the end of the 1920s. Their treason culminated in the 1940s, when they established and ran the NDH on behalf of Hitler".
As for Tudjman, Hoare had this to say about him: "it would be bestowing undue recognition on Tudjman to describe him as having ‘led’ the Croatian struggle for independence; he was a traitor and a stooge of Slobodan Milosevic and the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). Tudjman in 1990-91 sabotaged the plan of his own defence minister, General Martin Spegelj, to defeat the JNA through a pre-emptive strike, preferring to restrain Croatian resistance in the hope of appeasing and collaborating with the JNA and Milosevic;.... he attacked Croatia’s own Bosnian allies in the back in collusion with Croatia’s own Great Serbian enemies; he planned to hand over bits of Croatian territory to Milosevic and Karadzic in return for bits of Serb-held Bosnian territory; ... Croatia was liberated despite Tudjman, not because of him, and Tudjman was, more than any other individual, the architect of the partial Great Serb victory in the Bosnian war. Tudjman was Croatia’s Draza Mihailovic - a traitor, chauvinist and collaborator with the occupiers".
Traitor, stooge, collaborator - these are not the words of someone who is a fan of Tudjman.
Qlipoth is right about just one things - Hoare did describe Operation Storm as the "liberation" of the Krajina. He did so for the good reason that it was a liberation. A large slice of Croatian territory that had been annexed by Serbia was freed from the occupying forces. This was a blow from which the Greater Serbia project could never recover.
Yes, crimes were committed by the Croatian army during Operation Storm. Crimes were also committed by the Red Army during the liberation of eastern Europe from the Nazis, but nobody on the left denies that this was indeed a liberation.
Qlipoth talks about the ethnic cleansing of the Serb population from the Krajina in 1995, conveniently forgetting that Serb forces had ethnically cleansed Croats from the same region in 1991. One crime does not excuse another of course, but people who think they are on the left should make some effort to understand the history they write about.
Qlipoth is effectively an apologist for the Milosevic regime and for the onslaughts against Croatia and Bosnia planned in Belgrade. He is one of those who lament the fate of the aggressor, but can spare no tears for his victims.
"qlipoth, is it true that you are a 9/11 Truther?"
Qlipoth is a group blog and some of the contributors evidently don't believe Osama Bin Laden and Sadam Hussein sent anthrax to NBC, etc.
Paul Favet, what I said is that the elder Hoare and Magas have denied Tudjman's ANTISEMITISM and the younger Hoare has never considered Tudjman and company's ANTISEMITISM to disqualify them from "liberating Krajina" or receiving the largesse in guns, approval and cash of the very same British taxpayers whose insufficient vigilance against antisemitism is now shreiking about.
Your quotes do not mention Tudjman's antisemitism.
In fact they confirm Hoare's persistent view that policy in Croatia is to be judged solely by its benefits to an entity "Croatia" requiring no definition apparently but provided with "allies" and "enemies" suggesting the sort of thing it might be.
This is what Hoare has had to say on HP about Tudjman's ANTISEMITISM:
"The SWP opposed the Croatian struggle for national independence in the early 1990s by pointing out that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had mentioned that he was glad his wife was neither Serbian nor Jewish; it nevertheless supports the Palestinian struggle for national independence, even though Hamas and other Palestinian groups have a much worse record on anti-Semitism than Tudjman’s Croat nationalists (the SWP itself probably does as well, but that’s a whole different article). "
Now stop your self righteousness and dishonest; this person is utterly cynical, opportunist, disingenuous beyond belief, and his supposed horror of antisemitism he is using to attack opponents of ruthless Israeli policy is a shameless fraud.
"Yes, crimes were committed by the Croatian army during Operation Storm. Crimes were also committed by the Red Army during the liberation of eastern Europe from the Nazis, but nobody on the left denies that this was indeed a liberation"
But a) its extremely eccentric to regard the partitioning of any country which involved ethnic cleansing on all sides, leaving aside for the moment the no doubt fascinating question of 'who started it' as a 'liberation' and related to this b) the distinction has already been pointed out to you between a war in which crimes are committed as a by-product and a war whose whole purpose was a crime (this on a previous thread: I think to keep rolling out the same arguments regardless of previous refutations, is not so much a sign of redundancy, as a belief that the facts just don't matter. Its what makes your statement about socialists finding out the background so ironic. This is of course only neccessary when one is excusing the good guys.
Just what an earth makes anyone who is a socialist associate the term 'liberation' with anything to do with the conflict in the former Yugoslavia? What is so extraordinary is the sentimental handwringing which backs up this celebration of war crimes (so long as its the 'right' side of course).
Or in other words those like Fauvet who wrongly believe that our position is motivated by anti-americanism as opposed to the fight for socialism, are in fact far worse hypocrites of precisely the kind they accuse us of being. Liberal internationalism for Croatia. Realism for Serbia. Liberal Internationalism for Georgia, Realism for South Osstetia. Liberal Internationalism for Iraq. Realism for Palestinians. And on and on in lockstep with global geo-politics at every possible turn, with almost no exceptions at any point. Thats whats so wierd about the decent left. They're mirror images of the Stalinism they denounce.
He's a Eustonite scum bag that Paul, speaking of apologetics that's a good term to describe that fucked up Manifesto.
" He is one of those who lament the fate of the aggressor, but can spare no tears for his victims."
Don't think you're fooling me into imagining you actually believe this.You're performing for an imaginary jury. And recall you are defending an apologist for the Israeli and US occupations of Palestine and Iraq who is engaged in a disgusting campaign to intimidate critics of these occupations by smearing them as antiSemites, while he claims that critics of the neoNazi who ran Croatia as a despot in all but name "opposed the Croatian struggle for independence" - lie, they only felt as did ever other sane person that the breakup should be peaceful and negotiated among the republics instead of achieved through unilateral secessionist embezzlement rackets unleashing a brutal war and appealing to imperialist intervention - "by pointing out that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman once had mentioned that he was glad his wife was neither Serbian nor Jewish". Hoare obviously wants to leave his readers with the impression that this remark, as if in passing, was the sole basis for criticsm of Tudjman's open Ustasha revival and brazen antisemitism and for opposing funding, arming and support for his regime.
As is usually the case the fantastic 'decentpedia' is marvelous on the latest outbreak of decency around Georgia (just how these people can read this blog without immediately deciding to terminate themselves I'll never understand):
http://decentpedia.blogspot.com/...08/
georgia.html
This is very funny as well:
http://decentpedia.blogspot.com/...02/
serious.html
Thing is this anti-semitism doesn't seem to be related to criticism of Israel. Its the old hat, old fashioned, not really very significant kind of anti-semitism which involves twisted genocidal fantasies not the new dangerous anti-semitism which involves lecturers being concerned about human rights abuses in the occupied territories. For goodness sake qlipoth you really must get your priorities straight. Fancy being worried about Ustashe paramilitaries and swastikas. How outre of you.
"Qlipoth talks about the ethnic cleansing of the Serb population from the Krajina in 1995, conveniently forgetting that Serb forces had ethnically cleansed Croats from the same region in 1991."
I haven't forgotten any ethnic cleansing, not of Belgrade under Nazi occupation, not of Ustasha ruled Croatia, not of North America, not of Australia, not of New Orleans, not of Palestine, not of Lebanon, not that ongoing in Iraq...You are defending someone who justifies most of these crimes, either because "somebody else started it" or some other excuse.
And don't lecture me about rhetorical tactics when you are defending someone who is without the least scruple, the least respect for truth, who is a gross propagandist perpetually sacrificing honesty to vile opportunistic spin, lies and distortion. Here’s the smearmeister Hoare going to work on Noam Chomsky for “far-left” “revisionist” “moral relativism’”, “cold-blooded immoralism” and hypocrisy and sinister and self-righteous bias against, of course, all things virtuously “Western”:
Twenty-five years ago Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman complained of the poor image conveyed by the Western media of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
Really now, has someone who writes like this the least integrity? it continues:
They wrote that “What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasising alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered.” Today both authors use similar arguments to downplay the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians and to shift the blame for it away from the Milosevic regime and onto the US. In Chomsky’s words, Turkey is guilty of “massive atrocities” against the Kurds; Indonesia of “aggression and massacre” of “near-genocidal levels” in East Timor; Israel of “murderous and destructive” operations in Lebanon; but there is no mention of Kurdish, East Timorese, or Palestinian atrocities. By contrast, Chomsky uses no such emotive language when discussing the Serbian killing of Albanians; they are a “response” and “reaction” to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) attacks. Meanwhile the KLA was guilty of “targeting Serb police and civilians”; “killing six Serbian teenagers”; the “killing of a Serb judge, police, and civilians”; and so on. The picture Chomsky consequently sketches is of atrocities by both sides and, since KLA actions were “designed to elicit a violent and disproportionate Serbian response”, the implication is that the Milosevic regime was less to blame than the KLA. When a US client massacres innocent civilians it is wholly to blame; when a ‘socialist’ regime does so it is the victims who are primarily to blame.
There is a term for this attitude: moral relativism. In its far-left variety there are two sides to its coin. On the one hand there is a holier-than-thou condemnation of every Western failing (“What about the Kurds/Palestinians/East Timorese?”), allowing the left revisionists always to damn Western policy for its moral imperfections no matter what it is. The West is therefore damned simultaneously for intervening in Kosovo and for colluding in the Turkish oppression of the Kurds and for maintaining sanctions against Iraq, though it is clear that ultimately the West cannot easily reject military intervention, sanctions, and appeasement all at the same time. Combined with this all-trumping moralism in the left-revisionist mind-set, like the opposite pole of a magnet, is a cold-blooded immoralism, according to which the left-winger is absolutely unmoved by the crimes of the Revolution _performed for the greater good_. More striking even than the defence or denial of crimes against humanity carried out by the left revisionists is their sheer lack of any positive vision for the future or political raison d’etre whatsoever.
You will be struck by the similarity of the rhetorical tactics and content of this loathsome mendacious screed to speeches given by Goebbels which are no doubt familiar to Hoare, though that does not prove that Goebbels was actually Hoare’s direct inspiration.
I just find it amazing how people were once leftists can fall for this crap. either they once believed that only americans were bad guys and when they discover other things going wrong they suddenly flip. if that was the case though they'd have to be so deeply stupid that its unclear why anyone would care what they thought before OR after anyway. No it must be something else. Very puzzling.
What seems to happen is that the centre of their concern ceases to be humanity and becomes a much-maligned entity called the west. apparently the worst danger we face in the world is a loss of 'faith' in this entity. There is a lot of 'faith' of this kind about and there can be nothing more loathsome to it then blasphamy. Note the use of the term 'moral relativism'. What this means is not recognising the superiority of the west. basically.
the west isn't a place incidently. its a state of mind.
So is New York.
Maybe it isn't a co-incidence.
Qlipoth, you talk about
"the existing fascists in Croatia who celebrate and apolgise for the Ustasha, revive their emblems, sing their songs, proudly proclaim themselves their heirs, kill people, expell people, steal people' s property"...
You been to Serbia recently? Ever heard the word "Chetnik"? Yep, just as you put it - self-proclaimed proud heirs of Nazi collaborators who sing their songs, carry their embems, kill people, all that. One particular breed seen in Bosnia during the war, among Arkan's White Eagles and other units loosely attached to the JNA, is the "weekend Chetnik" (I believe they even coined the term) - guys with a lot of money, with families and kids back home in Serbia, who would take weekends out, join the fight in Bosnia, kill, maim, pillage, and bring some loot back home. I'm not fucking kidding. And they would then talk about it. Go learn some history and give me a fucking break, man.
QLIPOTH: "That your mother is a Serb doesn't seem too pertinent; there are misogynists in the world and all their mothers are women."
Sure, then let me clarify: my mother is a Serb who lived in Sarajevo throughout the war, under Serb bombardment, and edited the only daily newspaper that kept publishing throughout the war, with her Serb, Croat, and Muslim colleagues, and her opinions on the current political situation in the Balkans differ in no way from mine. Ah, but I know, you will deploy here the typical Zionist tactic and call her a 'self-hating Serb'...(as in 'self-hating Jew'...to which Larry David has a great quip - 'yes I hate myself, but not because I'm Jewish'...similarly, yes, I hate myself, but not because I'm half-Serb, I like a lot of the things I get from that side of the family)
QLIPOTH: "Anyway, either antiSemitism is intolerable and outrageous or it isn't...."
Well it depends on precisely what you mean by anti-Semitism. I really wasn't addressing the controversy over boycotting Israeli academics, only your comments on the Balkans. But if you want to get into it, then you have to be precise, otherwise you are simply agreeing with the Zionists, i.e. that any criticism of Israel is antisemitism, or whatever. To me, antisemitism IS intolerable, but the argument isn't ABOUT that, it is about WHAT IS ANTI-SEMITISM, or more precisely WHAT IS THE RIGHT WAY TO OPPOSE ISRAEL. I don't think even Hoare is necessarily saying that the boycott is directly anti-Semitic, and there is nothing contradictory or hypocritical in the approach - he does say that he opposed the boycott of Serbian academics too, because it is the wrong way according to him, to oppose the Serbian government or Serbian nationalism, and he is entitled to that opinion, even if I don't entirely agree with it. And I have to say, the analogy is very apt - Serbia today is very much the Israel of the Balkans, only its ties to the West aren't as strong. (But they do exist, as I will explain below)
QLIPOTH: "That passive voice by the way - "to be declared" - so common when this little charming Nazi era history tidbit it advanced over recent years, is another hint of your sincerity level."
From the European Jewish Congress (http://www.eurojewcong.org/ejc/news.php?
id_article=129) :
'Already in August 1942, a German report stated that "the problem of Jews and Gypsies has been solved; Serbia is the only country where this problem no longer exists." Belgrade was the first city in Europe officially declared Judenrein.'
So, go fuck yourself.
QLIPOTH: "As I am sure your father in the Bosnian wartime government has explained to you, the FRY was an international debtor with a substantial treasury of assets. This entity could not simply be dissolved by the unilateral secessions of Slovenia and Croatia, nor had the gangs running those republics recognised international legal rights to unilaterally declare what territory + assets, debts + population they owned and were responsible for."
No, my father did not explain that to me; I just happen to have a first class law degree from a formidable law school (UCL), have studied international and constitutional law, and happen to know that you are talking out of your ass.
What's more, you didn't even read what I wrote very carefully and are putting words into my mouth - from the viewpoint of Yugoslav constitutional law, Yugoslavia was NOT dissolved by the unilateral secession of Slovenia and Croatia, I explicitly said that; it was dissolved BEFORE that by the unilateral annexation by Serbia of the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina in 1989 in a megalomaniacal power grab by Milosevic; the Yugoslav constitution of 1974, I repeat, explicitly stipulated that any unilateral change of borders by any of the republics meant the effective dissolution of the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ, not FRY, which is what it became after 1991)...
When Croatia and Slovenia declared independence, SFRJ was already effectively dissolved, from the viewpoint of its own constitutional text.
As for assets, debts, etc - those are still being divided up/dealt with today, for your information, and many residents and authorities in the former Republics still have outstanding claims against Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian banks, and against the present-day Belgrade government, which is obviously NOT the government of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ), which for all intents and purposes, including state responsibility under international law, and under its own constitutional law, did not exist in 1991.
QLIPOTH: 'Milosevic not only tore Yugoslavia apart, but was in fact responsible for the likes of Tudjman coming to power" And who knows, he may be responsible also for the opinions of Jenna Delich toward the State of Israel. You seem to be very determined to miss the point, deleuzer.
And you seem to be very determined not to have a point at all, and to ignore the most basic and easily verifiable facts.
Andrew Bartlett: "First, the idea that the holocaust is what initiated the Second World War is stupidly ludicrous...Second, the idea that 'who started it' is the means by which we decide on goodies and baddies is fantastically dumb, unless every historical scenario is to be reimagined until we have histories in which the event that triggers World War II is the start of the holocaust. By this reasoning, a state would be supported, even as it committed genocide, so long as it was attacked at the outset of the conflict."
I did not mean to suggest that - in fact, if you want to put it in legalistic terms (which is not at all where I was going), the Nazis WERE 'provoked'; their justification for invading Poland was similar to the American justification for invading Iraq, or even more, the Soviet justification for invading Georgia, or the Georgian justification for invading South Ossetia, or the Israeli justification for attacking Lebanon two years ago, or - in fact - FRY's justification (as seen by Qlipoth) for invading Croatia...They were 'protecting' German citizens in the sliver of Germany which, after WWI, could only be accessed through Polish territory, and responding to an alleged Polish border assault (so the Israel-Lebanon war is perhaps the best analogy, but the others work too)...
So, no, I wasn't being a legalist, and did not mean to suggest AT ALL that it doesn't matter what states do, so long as the other party starts it. But the point still holds: the fact that the Allies committed atrocities should in no way lead to an ambiguous stance or doubt that the Nazis were the bad guys and the ones we should be fighting.
The thing that many people miss about the Balkans is that it wasn't a fight between three or four or however many ethnic groups. It was a fight between fascist ethno-nationalism on one side - Serbian and Croatian in the first place - and socialist multi-culturalism on the other side. One very keen observer (I believe it may have been my Serb mother in fact) noted that the one thing shared by all the cities that saw the greatest or most poignant destruction in the Balkan wars, at the hands of Serbian and Croatian nationalists - Sarajevo, Vukovar, Mostar, Dubrovnik (relative to the intensity of the war in Croatia, which was less intense than in Bosnia), even Srebrenica, though it was smaller and majority Muslim - was their place as symbols of multiculturalism and inter-ethnic harmony. The very fact that the most vicious fighting was in Bosnia, not Croatia, also testifies to that fact, even though one could easily say that relations between Croatian Serbs and Croats were much worse prior to the war and there was more 'fuel for the fire'. In Western media, the Bosnian government in Sarajevo was often referred to as the 'Muslim' government, which it clearly wasn't - there were Serbs and Croats in it, and even Jews, such as the one-time mayor of the Central municipality, Igor Gaon; the commander of the Bosnian army (also mixed and also labelled 'Muslim' in some mainstream media, at least early on) was Jovan Divjak, a pure-blooded Serb who defected from the JNA. And the crucial point about war crimes committed by the Bosnian army - by Muslim units in particular - was that they tended to be individual or at relatively low levels of command responsibility; moreover, to the extent that they were not, they were largely dealt with during the war or in prompt fashion - Musan Topalovic Caco, one of only a handful of Muslim war criminals with any major command responsibility and by far the most notorious - was apprehended DURING the war, in 1993/4, by BOSNIAN army police, and SHOT while trying to escape. It is also noteworthy that his crimes were by no means directed at Serbs and Croats alone, but at any Sarajevans he felt like harassing.
So there weren't three or four sides during the war, but fundamentally only TWO; and although the Serbs and Croats often fought against each ot
So there weren't three or four sides during the war, but fundamentally only TWO; and although the Serbs and Croats often fought against each other in a tactical sense, their overall ideological project is the same; and sadly many leftists in the West supported the wrong side, or at least failed to support the right one, which was that represented by the multi-ethnic government in Sarajevo, of which the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia - the former League of Communists of Bosnia, led by Nijaz Durakovic (Muslim), Bogic Bogicevic (Serb), and Ivo Komsic (Croat) - was a member.
JohnG, you say:
This is not I think the logic of David Owen.
Well it is, actually. 'How best to bring this to an end' is PRECISELY the logic of Owen and co. The logic of Western politicians involved in the Balkans early on, and especially those on the Centre-Right, was 'Serbia is militarily superior, they have the army, they have inherited most of the SFRJ state infrastructure, they can stabilize the region, the best thing is not to get involved, maintain the embargo (so the Bosnians and Croats can't arm themselves, more weapons=more blood), AND IT WILL END SOON.' So if you really want a formula, I think it would have to be 'how best to end it soon with the RIGHT OUTCOME'. Otherwise, the fascists win.
It is only when it became clear that the Bosnians had armed themselves and that Serbia wouldn't stabilize the region, that NATO intervened. And I dare say, contrary to conventional wisdom, (you can accuse me of a Zizekian 180-degree turn, and I accept it wholeheartedly) that the intervention in Bosnia, though ostensibly targeting Serb positions tactically, was not in reality strategically directed at the Serbs, at the Serb army, or at Serbia. If you had followed the conflict carefully at the time, and knew what was going on, this would be pretty clear. The fact is that in 1995, when NATO intervened in Bosnia, the Karadzic's Serbs in Bosnia were on the defensive; the Bosnian army, which was by now a formidable force (remember, led by Jovo Divjak, a Serb himself) had retaken swathes of territory, especially in northern Bosnia and were closing in on Bihac - if NATO hadn't intervened, there would have been no partition, no Dayton accords, no Republika Srpska. They allowed Oluja to go on in Croatia (which happened just before, overlapping a bit), but they intervened in the middle of the Bosnian army offensive, just when Mladic and Karadzic's Bosnian Serb Fascist army was about to LOSE the war. They in fact threatened the Bosnian Army command to halt all operations before they intervened. This is a fact. And given Milosevic's relationship to the West - no less complex than Saddam's - I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he had something to do with it.
So, while I agree with the criticisms of the way Oluja was carried out and broadly with all criticism of Croatian nationalism and Tudjman - so long as this is not being apologetic for the Serbian variety - my point is simply that the Left - or at least Leftist intellectuals this side of the world - has completely misapprehended the Balkans. (On a more optimistic note, many leftist politicians got it right - and Milosevic's ostensibly 'Socialist Party' was denied membership in the Socialist International, by an almost unanimous vote of 150-something parties from 130 countries, on charges of 'nationalism and war-mongering'; to this day, no party from Serbia has full member status, while the Socialist and Social Democratic parties from all the other former republics, including Montenegro I believe, do, and have practically since their founding.)
And on the intervention point - another indication is how miniscule NATO's intervention in Bosnia - a far larger conflict than Kosovo - was in reality. They destroyed a few Serb tanks and a few artillery pieces and bunkers, and that was it. War over. It was just a symbolic cover-up for their real aims, which led to the notorious Dayton Accords.
Deleuzer: The thing that many people miss about the Balkans is that it wasn't a fight between three or four or however many ethnic groups. It was a fight between fascist ethno-nationalism on one side - Serbian and Croatian in the first place - and socialist multi-culturalism on the other side.
---
This is one of the hazards, I suppose, that one risks by reading nonsense such as "Anti-Oedipus". I imagine that the tendency to adapt to American State Department liberalism must be encouraged somehow by an overdose of Lacan, based on the evidence of the Zizek and the unfortunate Mr. Deleuzer.
They destroyed a few Serb tanks and a few artillery pieces and bunkers, and that was it.
Crucial enough given that it gave the Croat-Bosnian side an air power that the Serb side lacked, and crucial enough in that it destroyed Serbian defences sufficiently to permit the successfull ethnic cleansing of the Krajine in 1995, which all western powers backed.
James O: You need to learn some geography, and some history, and get a sense of timing, man. Krajina is in Croatia. As I said, Oluja happened before the Bosnian offensive, and was pretty much over by the time of the NATO intervention in Bosnia, so the NATO intervention had no impact on Oluja, or Krajina.
Airpower that the Serb side lacked? You are TOTALLY FUCKING CLUELESS. The 'Serb side' you mention happens to include what used to be the Yugoslav National Army, (JNA) which in 1990, at the start of the Yugoslav conflict, was, er, well, something like the 4th or 5th largest army in the world. I am not fucking kidding. You see, to steer an independent course of the Soviet Union and of the West, and run the non-aligned movement, our old man Tito had to invest in some military infrastructure. And when SFRJ broke up and most of the remaining officers turned out to be Serb nationalists, and after massive desertions by non-Serbs from the JNA (after the invasion of Croatia and Slovenia), Serbia basically inherited all of this. They had fucking airpower. They had a fucking navy. They had fucking Soviet tanks and howitzers and guided missiles. And don't fucking tell me they didn't because I spent two fucking years in Sarajevo listening to their fucking MIG jets flying overhead and their tanks and howitzers dropping fucking bombs on us, you fuckhead.
So no, the intervention didn't give the Croat-Bosnian side the much-needed airpower. As I said, the fascist Karadzic Serbs were on the brink of capitulation BEFORE the intervention. The NATO intervention basically prevented that, because NATO threatened the Bosnian army to stop their offensive BEFORE they intervened, and then everyone sat down and carved up Bosnia like good little kids. Much-needed airpower - yeah right - to destroy a couple of tanks and howitzers out of the thousands of tanks and howitzers they positioned around Sarajevo. What a joke.
You're all a bunch of fucked-up, media-fed wankers. State department liberalism? Nice one. How about the fact that you're all a bunch of proto-fascist idiots who can't fathom the reality of the events you talk about, because to you they exist only as TV screen images or bits of text on the internet or in some book you read in college in some Baudrillardian dystopian nightmare?
Yep, this is indeed Lenin's Tomb. If Heidegger is right, and Being is not simply Presence, then Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin did not die on January 21st, 1924 in Moscow, Russia; He survived that death. He died decades later, in your heads - in the words and deeds of morons like yourselves. He died when Milosevic and Tudjman were born - not the living human beings, but the Milosevic and Tudjman and the Balkans in your stupid heads.
"As for assets, debts, etc - those are still being divided up/dealt with today, for your information"
For my information, thank you for looking that up Deleuzer.You seem to be correcting me for not making an error (Sfry not fry, inheritor of army, apparatus, liabilities and assets). As for your law degree, you must know this degree is quite common, and not very impressive in itself, especially when you advance a shaky argument as if it were unambiguous and incontestable, that the Federal state magically vanished when Milosevic' revoked the autonomy of provinces (not republics, but effectively enjoying that status), but continued to borrow money, make interest payments, attend the UN and the COE, have ambassadors all over the world, own large businesses, draft citizens into its army, issue passports recognised worldover, collect taxes...etc.. That's an interesting state of non existence for a nation state to endure, to be sure, and I'm sure you would impress some people when you give the argument you've practised before a mirror. Someone must have pointed out to you at least once that the dissolution of an entity which is the owner of the public equity of tens of millions of people, a state of which tens of millions of people are citizens and "stakeholders" and which owed money to international lenders doesn't vanish into thin air, can't and shouldn't, because some official or administration violates a law and because the lawyers for some fascist or not quite fascist gangsters can write up an argument. Probably would go over very well with Zizek's fanclub, though, as of course it has the additional benefit of completely mystifying the war, as if there was after all nothing to fight over but just an escalation of ethnic name calling into nose bloodying into massive military violence which can be discussed in the infantile fashion favoured by that crowd.
"no Dayton accords"
Dayton accords? Surely there were no Dayton accords! They did not exist! As according to you, counsellor, at least one non-existent country was a party to those agreements (Signatories: Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republic of Croatia, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia)
"but I know, you will deploy here the typical Zionist tactic and call her a 'self-hating Serb'...(as in 'self-hating Jew'...to which Larry David has a great quip"
A true Zizekian you provide yourself with an interlocutor engaging in invective as childish and racist as you are. (i'm not calling you a child or a racist; this is a comment on your argument, its assumptions, and its tactics).
What is antisemitism? It's true that Tudjman viewed Zionism as another instance of racist colonial aggression in the tradition of Nazism, as do many non-fascist non-antiSemite critics of Israeli policy and the Israeli state, but this is beside the point; what is antisemitic in his writing and views and those he promoted is his belief in a collective "the Jews" with a collective history and characteristics. The story about Jews being in charge at Jasenovac rests on these ideas about The Jewish Mind and Character. His government offered constant affronts to its own Jewish citizens, and Roma citizens, and gay citizens, indeed to the majority of Croatian citizens who are not fascist, in its glorification of the Ustasha past; I don't need to list the elements, you can find them easily with a web search. You want to blame a single individual, Milosevic for this, okay, that's dumb and creepy but irrelevant to the question, which is, regardless of who is really to blame, this was an outrageously openly antiSemitic government and Hoare still thought British and American taxpayers, Jewish and Gentile, should be forced to recognise and indeed to underwrite it. To give it material support, to enhance its power over people. Given this, it must be obvious to all that Hoare is insincere in the current kniption he is throwing about the tone of an article "circulated" by a private individual on a mailing list and other people's entirely rational refusal to make a big issue out of it. This is a war on rational adult discourse itself, a campaign of murdochisation and zizekisation of public discourse. If you take a deep breath and try to stop imagining you are a pundit on television clashing with imbeciles who talk about "self hating" Serbs and Jews, you may retrieve enough of your banished rationality and extract yourself from this degraded form of opportunistic cynical discourse popularised by frauds and clowns like Zizek to understand the point being made.
"
'Already in August 1942, a German report stated that "the problem of Jews and Gypsies has been solved; Serbia is the only country where this problem no longer exists." Belgrade was the first city in Europe officially declared Judenrein.'
So, go fuck yourself."
Charming. (Speaking of "arguing like a Zionist".) My point was just this, that Nazi occupiers did the declaring. But your paragraph leaves the declaration's source unspecified, as is common with people who perform this fashionable routine, in order to leave open the possibility for the reader to suppose that local collaborators did the "declaring" and accomplished the thing declared etc. What you are obvously trying to insinuate is an exaggerated idea of collaboration in Belgrade, when in fact the mass slaughter of Jews carried out by Nazis in Serbia whose results are described in that report - who authored it by the way? - were carried out with the murderous repression of an uprising against Nazi occupiers.
You don't have to go fuck yourself, but just know what playing this game of nazi-collaboration-points-by- ethnic-group makes you look like. And if you validate such odious forms of pseudo-argument, remember the final scores may not come out the way you want them to. The reason people bring up the Ustasha in discussions of Tudjman and his party is not because they are ethnic Croats but because their members included Ustasha veterans and they adorned themselves in Ustasha symbols, flags, and they ardently recuperated that Nazi puppet state, declaring themselves the heirs. The reason there is "less talk" of the Nazi collaborators in Belgrade is nobody is doing anything similar. You want to foist that history on ethnic Serbs, regardless of their politics or actions, to "even out" things between the ethnic teams you've constructed in a very dubious and icky way. No one foisted the Ustasha flag and currency on Croatia but Tudjman and co themselves.
um deleuzer would that be the same media which has been quite anti-serb and supported western intervention in the Balkans? Inchorant much?
I mean incoherant, damn, I guess my spelling mistake will outweigh deleuzers asshole-ness!
Alas, SGuy, the correct spelling is ``incoherent''. Well, third time's a charm, so they say.
Anyway, nothing like the conflict/wars in what was Yugoslavia to spark a heated discussion, yes?
"As I said, the fascist Karadzic Serbs were on the brink of capitulation BEFORE the intervention. The NATO intervention basically prevented that, because NATO threatened the Bosnian army to stop their offensive BEFORE they intervened, and then everyone sat down and carved up Bosnia like good little kids. Much-needed airpower - yeah right - to destroy a couple of tanks and howitzers out of the thousands of tanks and howitzers they positioned around Sarajevo. What a joke."
Well perhaps your dad and his colleagues in the wartime government of Bosnia should have considered the welfare of the population of Bosnia at Lisbon rather than their own financial interests and ambitions and the desires of their imperialist patron to reduce the whole region to servitude and misery. After all, the citizens and residents of the republic of Bosnia were far from unanimously in favour of independence (referendum 'yes' was 63% only, with many Serbs boycotting - your father and his colleagues aimed to fleece an awful lot of people of the country of their birth and citizenship and lifetime of taxpaying.) These US puppet gangsters in power in Sarajevo, refusing a peaceful resolution out of their own private ambitions and greed, took the crucial rejectionist step and chose war to turn Sarajevo, whose multiethnic population did not vote unanimously or even in majority for them and did not support their reactionary agenda, from a beautiful and prosperous city into the poisonous shithole it is today. Acknowledging some culpability here on the part of a grotesquely corrupt and selfinterested gang of neolib secessionists would be a more persuasive sign of sincerity than recycling the "its all one evil man's fault and Serbs collaborated with Nazis too" fable in ZizekMurdoch style. No thinking person blames the people of the former Yugoslavia for their own suffering, in Bosnia, Croatia, or Serbia. The principle powers responsible for the escalation of violence and the resulting immiseration of the population of the whole former country are the United States government and the German government; their client elites, with a lot to gain by sacrificing the lives and welfare of the populations they claimed as constituencies or citizenries, were also crucial actors in exacerbating the conflict, and armed forces under every single one including your father's gang took the opportunity of the crisis to go on sprees of Roma killing (I suppose you have a too-little-talked-about story of Roma collaboration with Nazis prepared to "put that in perspective"); they gained a lot and ordinary working people paid the price.
``I imagine that the tendency to adapt to American State Department liberalism must be encouraged somehow by an overdose of Lacan, based on the evidence of the Zizek and the unfortunate Mr. Deleuzer.''
Um... Louis, Deleuzer says that he was in Sarajevo during the siege thereof by Bosnian Serb forces. I have no reason to doubt this, and I rather suspect such experience would be more important than reading Anti-Oedipus in determining his outlook on the conflict in Bosnia. And whatever else may be true of Karadic, Mladic, et al, they deserve to fry for what the forces under their command did in that siege.
But I have also read Diana Johnstone's book Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, and it seems to me that Deleuzer is ignoring Itzebegovic & his ilk, who wanted to turn Bosnia into an Islamic state. Further, I, at least, find Johnstone's argument persuasive, to wit that the governments of the US, Britain, Germany, &c wanted to see the breakup of Yugoslavia in order to impose their will on the pieces that remained so as to get rid of what had been the socialism of the Yugoslav League of Communists and make sure that it did not return.
This, it is likely, was not the desire of most of the inhabitants of Sarejevo at least not before the various militias split the population of that city up along the conflict lines from the rest of Bosnia, but it does suggest to me that things in Bosnia were more complicated than what Deleuzer says above.
of course maybe it should be incoherant because that last post of his definately had a major rant component!
SGuy: looking back at said post, I agree, but the discussion does seem to have degenerated towards the end :-(
Part of the heat seems to come from a basic disagreement about what the facts of the matter are. Could we at least agree on the malign role that NATO played in the breakup of Yugoslavia and the civil war in Bosnia?
QLIPOTH: "when you advance a shaky argument as if it were unambiguous and incontestable, that the Federal state magically vanished when Milosevic' revoked the autonomy of provinces (not republics, but effectively enjoying that status), but continued to borrow money, make interest payments, attend the UN and the COE, have ambassadors all over the world"
That is precisely the point - that when a state, in its constitutional configuration, ceases to exist as such, its institutions DO NOT vanish and inevitably continue functioning, as institutions do, (the 'living dead') and must subsequently either be apportioned, etc; or a new constitutional settlement must be negotiated; imagine, say, the UK Parliament annuls the Acts of Union; from that moment on, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, under its (however weird) constitutional arrangements, no longer exists as a legal entity; nevertheless, as you say, its institutions do not simply vanish and must then be somehow dealt with, or a new Act must be passed, with new terms. This is precisely what the Slovene and Croat members of the League of Communists sought in 1990 - a re-negotiation of the constitutional terms of the Federation, for various reasons, but most notably on account of Milosevic annexing Vojvodina and Kosovo and thus unilaterally taking 3 of the 8 votes in the League of Communists. (especially given that Kosovo and Vojvodina had their own representatives precisely on account of their autonomy). The Serb representatives (who were now 3, although the constitutional standing of this construction was a fraud) shouted down all proposals and refused any re-negotiation or loosening of the Federation; which is when the Croat and Slovene representatives walked out.
Moreover, if international actors aren't aware of the constitutional impact of such an annexation, that even further complicates things..
QLIPOTH: " "no Dayton accords" Dayton accords? Surely there were no Dayton accords! They did not exist! As according to you, counsellor, at least one non-existent country was a party to those agreements..."
I'm sorry that you're either dislexic or lack basic reading skills, Qlipoth, so let me repeat what I said: if NATO hadn't intervened, there would have been no Dayton accords, and Bosnia wouldn't have been carved up into ethnically-defined entities, but would have retained at least the semblance of a truly multi-ethnic state. I suppose that being poorly-versed in Balkan history and recent events, such points have to be spelled out for you very clearly.
As it is, NATO ordered the Bosnian army to halt its offensive, dropped a few bombs on the Serbs, and US negotiators sat everyone down to carve up the country; the Bosnian army even gave up a lot of territory they had just re-taken in the offensive.
QLIPOTH: A true Zizekian you provide yourself with an interlocutor engaging in invective as childish and racist as you are.
No, you provided me with that interlocutor, when you suggested that my mother being Serb was of no relevance, as having a woman for a mother doesn't prevent one from being a misogynist.
QLIPOTH: What is antisemitism? It's true that Tudjman viewed Zionism as another instance of racist colonial aggression...
Nothing I said bears on Tudjman's stance and I in no way meant to suggest that Tudjman was not a fascist antisemite, at all. Nor do I necessarily agree with Hoare's basic premise that the boycott of academics is the wrong way to oppose a fascist state.
QLIPOTH: What you are obvously trying to insinuate is an exaggerated idea of collaboration in Belgrade, when in fact the mass slaughter of Jews carried out by Nazis in Serbia whose results are described in that report - who authored it by the way?
Beats me, but you're very close to splitting hairs here. The government of Nedic in WWII declared Belgrade Judenfrei, together with the Nazis. The Chetniks, who were royalists and collaborated with the Nazis, collaborated with the Nedic government, and were the representatives of the government in exile of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It would also do well to ask yourself why a greater percentage of Jews survived in one country, and less in another. I'm not saying it's anything like a mathematical equation, but you get the idea. (wink wink...how do Nazis invading foreign countries find the people they're looking for)
QLIPOTH: The reason there is "less talk" of the Nazi collaborators in Belgrade is nobody is doing anything similar.
Really? It's amazing how often you say "Ustasha" and how long you can go in this discussion, QLIPOTH, without ever using the word "Chetnik". Now I won't say anything about repression, but is there by chance an elephant in your room wearing a kokarda you bought last week on the street in Belgrade?
sGuy: um deleuzer would that be the same media which has been quite anti-serb and supported western intervention in the Balkans?
Um, yes, sGuy, precisely that same, very same, Western media, which, as I said in an earlier comment, WANTED YOU TO THINK that the intervention in Bosnia (we have to be precise geographically here) was against the bad Serbs, which it was TACTICALLY, but this is only to cover up the fact that it was STRATEGICALLY temporally placed to halt the Bosnian offensive and ensure the carving up of Bosnia into ethnic cantons. To ensure, in other words, that no trace of Tito's Yugoslavia remained - Bosnia being, as Tito himself often suggested, its multi-ethnic core - that Yugoslavia was, permanently and effectively DEAD. This was the real aim of the NATO intervention - killing Yugoslavia by giving birth to Republika Srpska as a legitimate entity.
QLIPOTH: "Well perhaps your dad and his colleagues in the wartime government of Bosnia should have considered the welfare of the population of Bosnia at Lisbon..."
My father wasn't in the government then; but all sane people in Bosnia opposed Lisbon anyway, precisely because it meant the same kind of carving up of the country along ethnic lines that in the end happened, and even worse; moreover, at the time nobody took seriously the idea that the alternative was all-out war, despite Karadzic's open threats (he was considered to be a bit crazy even). To put it in perspective, imagine that some wacky white supremacist BNP MPs want to carve out a portion of Wales as an independently administered entity defined along ethnic lines as English, or some such drivel; and threaten violence if it isn't carved up in this way. Well, that's kind of how it looked then.
After all, the citizens and residents of the republic of Bosnia were far from unanimously in favour of independence (referendum 'yes' was 63% only, with many Serbs boycotting...
WRONG. Get your facts straight. It was 63% turnout (which is more than any US Presidential election in over 50 years, btw), with a whopping 98% in favour of independence. That means that 61% of the electorate voted for independence. (Way more than any Quebec referendum, and incidentally, in a case which does set some kind of precedent, where the Canadian constitutional court said that a mere majority of 51% would not be sufficient. I think 61% is a pretty convincing majority)...And while many Serbs did stay away, many also did not.
So you still can't get the facts straight and you're full of SHIT.
QLIPOTH:"...armed forces under every single one including your father's gang took the opportunity of the crisis to go on sprees of Roma killing (I suppose you have a too-little-talked-about story of Roma collaboration with Nazis prepared to "put that in perspective"); they gained a lot and ordinary working people paid the price."
I don't even know what this sentence means. There were entire Roma units in the Bosnian army, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Serbs or Croats killed a few of them, although I am not aware of any Roma-killing-sprees. I understand if you feel the need to invent facts in your situation, though.
Feeder of Felines: "But I have also read Diana Johnstone's book Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, and it seems to me that Deleuzer is ignoring Itzebegovic & his ilk, who wanted to turn Bosnia into an Islamic state. Further, I, at least, find Johnstone's argument persuasive, to wit that the governments of the US, Britain, Germany, &c wanted to see the breakup of Yugoslavia in order to impose their will on the pieces that remained so as to get rid of what had been the socialism of the Yugoslav League of Communists and make sure that it did not return."
As I made very clear, I totally agree that the governments of US and Britain and co wanted to ensure the Death of Tito's Yugoslavia, but they did so precisely in the opposite way from that imagined by Johnstone, as I roughly outlined above - i.e. the NATO intervention in Bosnia (not Kosovo) was aimed precisely at preventing the defeat of the Serbs and ensuring ethnic partition.
Moreover, I am familiar with Johnstone - you see, she used to publish articles for In These Times, a leftist journal in the US. A few years ago, they stopped publishing her pieces. You know why? Because they discovered that she was an old college friend of Mirjana Markovic, Slobodan Milosevic's wife. Now, imagine a similar 'objective' journalistic account in support of the Iraq war, denying or downplaying American atrocities, providing supposed 'evidence' of WMD, claiming the Abu Ghraib photos were staged, etc - - written by a journalist who, as it later turns out, is an old college friend of Dick Cheney's wife. Wouldn't get very far on the credibility points, would it? Well this is precisely the position Johnstone is in when she downplays or denies Serb atrocities, distorts facts, etc - skillfully mixing fact and fiction, the credible and the incredible (a skill Qlipoth certainly seems familiar with)...and putting yet another nail in the coffin of T
...in the coffin of Tito's Yugoslavia.
As for Izetbegovic, while he was a devout Muslim, and while I can understand how this can conjure up some negative connotations in your British and American or whatever minds you have (in spite of yourselves, you are subjects and victims of orientalist cultural practices, however subtly, however you may think yourself free of them), he never aimed anything like having an Islamic state - how the hell do you start an Islamic state by deliberately sharing a government with Serbs, Croats, and Jews, Socialists, Communists, and by appointing a full-blooded SERB (Jovan Divjak) as commander-in-chief of your Army, which in its ranks also includes many Serbs, Croats, and even a few Jews and Roma?
Some more facts: while Izetbegovic was jailed in the 1980s for his allegedly extremist views, he was merely the victim of an unfortunate policy in the way Yugoslavia dealt with nationalism. The misfortune was that Yugoslav officials, especially after Tito's passing, felt the compulsion to treat all ethnic groups, and therefore all nationalisms, regardless of their intensity, EQUALLY - but here were are dealing, sadly, with a very liberal, rather than Marxist notion of Equality. This meant, in practice, that if there was a crackdown on Serb or Croat nationalism, there had to be a crackdown on Muslim/Bosniak 'nationalists' as well. So following the surge of ethno-fascist protests in Zagreb and Belgrade in the 1970s and 80s, which were legitimately, although excessively repressed, we had the infamous Sarajevo trial - in which Izetbegovic, a devout Muslim, an Islamic scholar, and a member of a Muslim youth organization, along with a group of others, was sentenced to a prison term for his allegedly extreme views - no more extreme in reality, or even less extreme, I might add, than those of one T.S. Eliot writing about Christianity. (he, unlike Izetbegovic, was an anti-semite)
And another note on Izetbegovic: he and Kiro Gligorov, the one-time Macedonian President, were the authors of what is universally deemed to be the very last real political effort at bringing everyone to the negotiating table - before the shit hit the fan - and hold the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia together. So we're not even talking Bosnia here; not only did he not want to start an Islamic state in Bosnia, he didn't even want independence until there really was no way out (remaining in a Serb-dominated FRY); Izetbegovic was one of a very few politicians in power in 1991-92 who didn't even want to let the old Yugoslavia go.
"although I am not aware of any Roma-killing-sprees. "
Figures.
"were entire Roma units in the Bosnian army,"
one unit, according to the Roma Association in Sarajevo, known as "the Swarthy Brigade". (Members have been denied certain rights due to them as veterans). Was there actually another? Or is the plural just another case of your habitual propagandistic style, counsellor?
(There were of course Roma fighting with all the official forces in Bosnia.)
I must say I have rarely seen such an effecive and comprehensive demolition of the arguments of those on the left who acted as de facto apologists for Belgrade during the war against multi-ethnic Bosnia and in partticular the Bosniak muslims as that delivered by deleuzer. Most impressive.
"claiming the Abu Ghraib photos were staged, etc - - written by a journalist who, as it later turns out, is an old college friend of Dick Cheney's wife."
But we are to listen to you then? Who multiplies Roma units of the Bosnian army like fungus? You are not an old college friend of the wife of a member of the Bosian wartime government but the son of the wife of a member of the Bosnian wartime government. Even closer. Yet you bring this forward as a credential rather than a disclosure of bias.
Yes, and unlike Diana Johnstone, I bring it forward. I state my fucking case and I hide nothing, you dupe. Thanks for pointing that out, QLIPOTH.
As for the facts, you can verify them just as easily as anyone else. So far, you're mostly the one getting them wrong, if we go by everything that is a matter of public record.
"at the time nobody took seriously the idea that the alternative was all-out war,"
Yeah right. You've forgotten widely publicised remarks of Javier Solana was warning of a terrible war if the EC (before mastricht) recognised Slovenia and Croatia.
I guess you had to be someone who reads a newspaper to have know that though.
You are just brimming over with excuses. Admittedly carving up Bosnia ethnically is as disgusting an idea as the seperatists determination to carve up Yugoslavia in that fashion. But it's laughable to suggest that the Bosnian seperatists, determined to carve out their own country even though about half the population of the territory they claimed would be theirs didn't like the idea, were somehow on principle opposed to carving up countries this way. The truth is the US told them they could get them more if there was a war, and they believed them and went for it.
"I hide nothing...QLIPOTH"
So your name is really deleuzer? We, like Proyect, took it for a psood in honour of a philosophe.
"unlike Diana Johnstone, I bring it forward"
Yeah you bring a lot forward. Lots of helpful information about Serb racial guilts and journalists whose reporting you would rather not respond to in an honest fashion:
Rostam Pourzal : During the 1990s, you were among the few Western journalists whose reporting on conflicts in the former Yugoslavia differed from the straight villains-versus-victims narrative of NATO that justified military intervention. Why did so few even among left-leaning Western opinion-makers welcome alternative coverage of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans?
Diana Johnstone: That is a question that I cannot easily answer, since the opinion-makers who rejected my coverage of the Balkans failed to explain their reasons to me. For example, the editor of The Nation, who had requested my contributions, simply failed to respond to my messages from Kosovo offering on-the-spot coverage.
In These Times also rejected my articles from Kosovo without explanation. Years later, I learned that a temporary junior editor wrote on a web site that I was banned because of a "long personal friendship with Milosevic's wife, Mira Markovic." In reality, I never even met Mira Markovic
I suppose she's lying and you have some evidence of this long relationship which suggests a motive for bias in her reporting.
That John Palmer declares himself impressed by deleuzer's delusional, splenetic, scolding approach to this discussion is indicative of the kind of moral hysteria this subject induces, equal only to the topic of paedophilia on which no one can be sensible for two seconds. deleuzer certainly knows how to fling ordure, but this talent is not to be confused with either wit or insight. The lower primates have mastered the art.
But look at what deleuzer does, in the name of glorious Titoite 'socialism'. Everything Izetbegovic and the Bosnian government does is wonderful, only the other parties ever do anything objectionable. Secession is fine, regardless of the consequences for the populations in the seceding territories, because the FRY had notionally 'disappeared'. Any war that follows? - why, it's all Milosevic's fault. Plucky little Bosnia fought only for "socialist multiculturalism" (all hail those socialists and multiculturalists flown in by helicopter). Its little camps and torture chambers were all imagined by Orientalists. Repression of Roma? Heaven forfend! It must be an invention. Bosnian army atrocities, including the deliberate attempts to provoke attacks on civilian infrastructure and buildings? Never happened, presumably. So ebullient about his/her mastery of the facts, yet can't get a single thing right.
I am certainly impressed by deleuzer, but more as a specimen of the frenzied irrationality that this topic provokes than any didactic prowess displayed.
QLIPOTH: "You've forgotten widely publicised remarks of Javier Solana was warning of a terrible war if the EC (before mastricht) recognised Slovenia and Croatia."
No, I don't remember that, and it bears no relevance to the point. I said "nobody took seriously the notion that the alternative was all out war". you are clearly missing the simple linguistic meaning of this statement, so let me spell it out for you once again:
1. as indicated by a prior sentence ('nobody sane in Bosnia...') I wasn't talking about Javier Solana or people in Europe who had no clue what was going on in Bosnia (but probably were in cahoots with Milosevic and co, and therefore knew what was coming).
2. "nobody took seriously" is not meant to indicate that there were no statements to that effect; as I mentioned, yes, Karadzic did make open genocidal threats, on television, in Parliament; but NOBODY TOOK THEM REALLY SERIOUSLY - and precisely the reason why I drew the analogy with British white supremacists carving out a portion of Wales was to, er, 'bring it home' (assuming you're located somewhere in the British Isles) - to convey just how ludicrous the notion of an all-out war over ethnic territory seemed in Bosnia in 1992; especially given how westerners tend to have all kinds of ideas about 'ancient Balkan hatreds' and the like.
QLIPOTH: You are just brimming over with excuses. Admittedly carving up Bosnia ethnically is as disgusting an idea as the seperatists determination to carve up Yugoslavia in that fashion.
Right, well, thanks for just ignoring my sincere and heartfelt efforts so far at bringing to your attention some FACTS that illustrate how it wasn't the separatists, but the nationalists led by Milosevic who ultimately caused Yugoslavia demise. At least I can live on in the certainty that anyone reasonably intelligent reading this will see how your statements say more about your reading and comprehension skills than about my arguments. (Not least the fact that you skimmed entirely over the last portion about Izetbegovic).
QLIPOTH: But it's laughable to suggest that the Bosnian seperatists, determined to carve out their own country even though about half the population of the territory they claimed would be theirs didn't like the idea, were somehow on principle opposed to carving up countries this way.
Your grasp of logic and simple demographics is really apalling. First, the point about Izetbegovic and Gligorov, above. 'Bosnian separatists' as you put it, were the last to make any real attempt to hold Yugoslavia together. When that didn't work (due to mainly Serbian and Croatian nationalist opposition), they realized that remaining in a now even more Serb-dominated Federation (without Slovenia and Croatia), with a nationalist government in Serbia keen on the Greater Serbia project, was suicidal. In other words, they separated off precisely in the hope of preserving an ethnically-mixed Bosnia, when Yugoslavia itself couldn't be held together.
Moreover, this was just some 'point of principle', as in we are in principle opposed to ethnic partition. All sane people in Bosnia were opposed to partition, to Lisbon, to everything that smacked of partition, even more so because, to put it figuratively, the wall of partition would run through many people's living rooms and bedrooms.
QLIPOTH: The truth is the US told them they could get them more if there was a war, and they believed them and went for it.
Yes, sure, QLIPOTH, the US told the poor stupid Bosnians, who in 1992 were hardly armed, whose capital city Sarajevo was at the time protected only by a police force, even whose territorial defence weapons caches (which every Republic of SFRJ had) had been confiscated by the JNA in the months prior to war, and who was up against what was then the 4th largest army in the world (the JNA), with an airforce, a navy, and several hundred thousand troops - yes, sure, the US told the poor stupid Bosnians, you can go up against all that in a war, and get more. SUre, that's what happened. Why, it makes perfect sense.
So your name is really deleuzer? We, like Proyect, took it for a psood in honour of a philosophe.
My real name, and my family's names, are a matter of public record as well, and you would easily be able to find that out by clicking on the link to my blog posted with every comment, and reading my dissertation or linking to my website.
But that's not the point, is it? It's not about names but about backgrounds. You yourself spoke of 'disclosure'. I disclosed my background. So to clarify, let me again thank you for pointing out that, unlike Johnstone, I have been honest.
Deluezer - You're an angry little man arent' you, you're unable to write a straight sentence without pouring bile over your keyboard. NATO airpower patrolled the no-fly zones making any any Serb airforce unusable. As a conseuqence, given that NATO acted as an ancillary to the Croat/Bosnian side, it was only the Anti-Serb forces which possessed an air force, and an airforce which was used to attack Serb positions before and during Operaion Storm. Indeed, this is an uncontroversial fact, and it's even celebrated by liberal bombers like Paul Fauvet. That you would seek to pretend otherwise is understandable, given that it's a large weakness in your claims. 'Operation Deliberate Force' in 1995 also destrpyed any Serb airpower in Bosnia. Both these operations on behalf of the Bosnian/Croat side were regarded as crucial to tipping the military balance against the Serb side and forcing them to acquiese in the paritiion of the region under the Dayton accords.
Ah, but I did speak of Bosnian war crimes...and I will no more. If you are an intelligent person half-worth my time, you will someday do the research yourself, properly, and find out. But I'm not holding my breath.
Like I said, Lenin is dead; you have buried him with your own stupidity, ignorance of facts, ignorance of simple logic, your twisting of the truth and argument, your proto-fascist sympathies, your absorption in the western capitalist information/indoctrination matrix. Among other things. I find nothing shocking any longer about the fact that all of Europe is going Right-wing, with the likes of you nincompoops and nitwits representing the so-called Left.
Over and Out,
Boris Knezevic
Tito's pioneer, grandson of partisans, son of Marxist communists, lost and alienated in a world thoroughly gone mad
'Bosnian separatists' as you put it, were the last to make any real attempt to hold Yugoslavia together. When that didn't work (due to mainly Serbian and Croatian nationalist opposition), they realized that remaining in a now even more Serb-dominated Federation (without Slovenia and Croatia), with a nationalist government in Serbia keen on the Greater Serbia project, was suicidal.
This is typically disingenuous and symptomatic of the entire apologetic approach undertaken by you in this argument. The Serbian government was certainly not pursuing equalitarian relations between the remaining Yugoslav republics, and it is quite likely that Milosevic had cut a deal with Tudjman to carve up Bosnia. But the pretense that this means that Izetbegovic was just holding out for a liveable compromise based on a version of the old Titoist order is preposterous. The SDA pushed for the partition of Bosnia at the negotiations. For example, it didn't reject Vance-Owen on the basis of principled opposition to partition, but because the nature of the proposed partition was insufficiently advantageous to them. It didn't just want a multicultural 'socialist' enclave to survive within the ruins of the old Yugoslavia. Your other pretense - that no one in Bosnia seriously anticipated war - is absurd. The SDA had been building up militias since the summer of 1991 and procuring weapons from Slovenia from the Autumn of that year. Get real: the Bosnian crooks that you are defending are in principle no better politically than their opposite numbers.
Ah, but I did speak of Bosnian war crimes
You have systematically denied them, revised them, excused them, offered up an extended family of contextual mitigations for what the Bosnian secessionists did, pretended that they represented the Titoite 'socialist' dream, ignored facts, distorted others... and all with this infantile, anathematizing attitude that hardly does credit to the ancestry that you boast of.
James O, like I said, the balance had already tipped BEFORE (strictly speaking in temporal terms) any NATO intervention. The NATO intervention STOPPED the Bosnian Army offensive. So by the time they destroyed a FEW JNA airplanes, that was no longer relevant. There was no Bosnian army offensive any more, everybody went to the negotiating table to carve up the country, and the Bosnians even gave up much of their territory - including what were once majority-Muslim towns such as Foca and Srebrenica. I cannot spell it out any clearer.
And yes, while there were no-fly zones, they were repeatedly violated. But that's far from the point.
The simple point I have been repeatedly trying to make is that NATO only intervened to STOP the war when the Serb fasicsts were no longer, as you yourself say, the militarily superior force. In 1992/93, when Bosnia was clamoring for intervention, the Serbs were FAR superior, having inherited the 4th largest army in the world. In 1995, they were no longer superior, and were on the wane. I really really cannot spell it out any clearer.
OK now I'm really done.
You lie, Lenin. But since I'm done, this will just be a copy and paste operation of my above comments (I know there's a lot to read, but it would be awful kind of you to do so before commenting, as I have read this whole bloody stream):
"the crucial point about war crimes committed by the Bosnian army - by Muslim units in particular - was that they tended to be individual or at relatively low levels of command responsibility; moreover, to the extent that they were not, they were largely dealt with during the war or in prompt fashion - Musan Topalovic Caco, one of only a handful of Muslim war criminals with any major command responsibility and by far the most notorious - was apprehended DURING the war, in 1993/4, by BOSNIAN army police, and SHOT while trying to escape. It is also noteworthy that his crimes were by no means directed at Serbs and Croats alone, but at any Sarajevans he felt like harassing."
it's true that serba was the oppressor nation at the time and that the western powerssupported the retention of Serbian priveledge. Public imperialist opposition to some Serbian excesses was not qualitatively different to public imperialist opposition to some of the excesses of apartheid South Africa or Ian Smith's regime. To call for Serb resistance to NATO in such a context was nefarious.
I say this as a trotskyist activist who supports the Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan resistances, I do not come from a liberal interventionsit position or anything of the sort.
deleuzer, serrusly, why do you think that the existence of a segregated roma unit called with a racist name like that in Bosnia is reassuring? do you know what the situation is for roma in BiH today? and why do you spread defamatory rumours you pick up on the web about Diana Johnstone? you call these "FACTS"? This is innuendo, spin and lies; you're obviously full of shit, and obviously have no interest in seriously making a case for your views of a complex situation, as I noted from the start when you open with the now most popular racial guilt anecdote. All you are doing here is trying to bully and smear, spin and deceive. You are flagrantly indifferent to the truth. You were in Sarajevo under seige and saw Diana Johnstone havng sex with Milosevic's wife after which they danced on the bodies of slain multiculturalists crying Heil Hitler! kill the Bosniaks! until the multiple "all roma" (like wolfowitz' peppy "all african american" regiment that liberated dachau) units chased them into the sewers from which they had emerged. We can read all about this, you assure us, in "the public record", which is I assume made of porcelain and stored in the smallest room in your apartment.
I see, so you're claiming that NATO's intervention - which targeted only the Serb side and is universally regarded as of crucial importance in the Croat/Bosnian occupation of the Krajina - was actually designed to prevent an anti-Serb victory. For some strange reason, you've neglected to provide any facts to support this claim.
'it's true that serba was the oppressor nation at the time and that the western powerssupported the retention of Serbian priveledge'
The 'oppressor nation' in the Bosnian wars was whichever ethnic group dominated in the area, so across much of eastern Bosnia the oppressors were Serbs, in the Serb villages around Srebrenica the oppressors were Oric's Muslim pogromists. In the Krajina they were Croation Ustashi. Socialists don't pick and choose which group is oppressed. And your claim that the western powers supported 'Serbian privelige' should be tested with the record of their intervention exclusively on the Bosnian/Croat side.
the crucial point about war crimes committed by the Bosnian army - by Muslim units in particular - was that they tended to be individual or at relatively low levels of command responsibility
Well, this is exactly the kind of horseshit I'm talking about. This is, precisely, revisionism, denial, excuse-making, etc. General Enver Hadzihasanovic, General Mehmed Alagic and Colonel Amir Kubura were not at "relatively low levels of command responsibility", for example. To take another example, the camps at which atrocities were carried out were part of a system of repressive apparati operated by the government and military, and these atrocities were systemic rather than 'individual'. The massacre of Bosnians in Markale market in 1994 was hardly an off-the-cuff design by a few low-level thugs. The repeated atrocities in the area of Srebrenica that preceded the massive Serbian massacre there were, again, not 'individual' actions. They were all part of the logic of a war that was sectarian to its very core, and the atrocities carried out reflect that sectarian hatred.
What you have been doing here is, haughtily and noisily, apologising for some of the worst criminals in that conflict, those in the Bosnian government. This is a grotesque travesty of socialism, of Marxism, and possibly even of Titoism (which I don't admire as much as you evidently do).
Lenin - You have to face facts - on this issue deleuzer has wiped you out on the basis of fact not rhetoric. Having at one time lived briefly in Sarajevo and Tuzla it was clear to me at that time (1968) that Bosnia was one of the few parts of the former Yugoslavia where the FRY slogans about multi-ethnicity were an actual lived experience. That is why the former "communists" - Milosevic and Tudjman - shared an abiding hatred of Bosnia and a determination to destroy it in the interests of ethnic centred Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia. I was there is part to distribute to known oppositionist socialists copies of Kuron and Mozelewski's famous "Open Letter to the (Polish) Party" publication (which was being distributed by IS and other European trotskyist groups at the time.) But even then it was possible to detect reserves of Serb nationalism even among anti Tito opposition socialist groups such as Praxis in Belgrade. That same - I am sure - was true of some oppositionists in Croatia. Finally thanks to deleuzer for nailing the lie that the War Crimes Tribunal only went after Serb and Croat criminals.
Do you even know where Markale is, and who was responsible for it? It's in Sarajevo, and it was a Serbian shell. This is a simple mistake - it's like if you were arguing about the Vietnam war and listed the massacre at Mai Lai as a VietCong atrocity. Facts, facts.
And you: empty allegations, and more empty allegations. Do the numbers, do the research, have a think, maybe you'll come to the right conclusion.
how do I unsubscribe from the comment stream?
on this issue deleuzer has wiped you out on the basis of fact not rhetoric
I am not impressed by strident assertions. Try formulating an argument, and one that engages with something I have said.
Do you even know where Markale is, and who was responsible for it? It's in Sarajevo, and it was a Serbian shell
I do know where it is, but your sense of who was responsible is curiously at odds with the views of UNPROFOR, which accused the Bosnian government forces of "firing to provoke the Serbs, and of using hospitals and public buildings as cover for such fire".
Do you have a case, or would you prefer to continue obfuscating in this fashion?
UNPROFOR, led by people like Gen. Lewis Mackenzie, a well-known Tory politician in Canada who at times openly sympathized with the Serbs, testified against any intervention before US congress, even against humanitarian aid for besieged Sarajevans saying it's best not to get involved (see congressional record), and was after publication of book on Bosnia revealed to be on a speaking tour on the payroll of a Serbian-American lobby group, which itself admitted this fact.
Another thing worth thinking about is the military logistics of a crowded, modern european city besieged on all sides. How do you defend? Where do you fire from where there aren't civilian targets? If you move people, where do you move them? WHere is safety?
What a load of Tory crap.
"Apparati" is not the plural of "apparatus", as anybody familiar with the difference between second and fourth declension Latin nouns should know. Therefore everything Lenin has just said is in shameless bad faith, wilfully inaccurate where not flagrantly mendacious, and entirely wrong. It is regrettably typical of certain sections of the left to indulge, for whatever misguided reasons, in this kind of craven apologetics for the worst sorts of bad Latin grammar.
"US told the poor stupid Bosnians, you can go up against all that in a war, and get more. SUre, that's what happened. Why, it makes perfect sense."
"The Bosnians" were not at the negotiating table in Lisbon; a clique of gangsters with their own interests was there, a clique who had to worry a) about its own electorate, much of which did not support its agenda, especially in Sarajevo and b) about political competition from centre and left in Bosnia, as well as about the FRY; this clique was there to negotiate with other such cliques over spoils of the dismantling of a big country. They were promised US patronage and given instructions; they followed them and came out quite rich. The population was sacrificed to their aims and ambitions. Which does make perfect sense, but naturally doesn't fit a Zizekian fairytale.
Sometime during my youth an Australian singer with a fake yodel had a hit with a song called "I remember you".
John Palmer, I remember you. You're the one who found nicer way. For you, but not for the left.
Yes Im aware of the ultimate goal of NATO, still dont know why we become media junkies. Yet you remain so pure in your anti-serb stance because the media was being 'sneaky'.
UNPROFOR, led by people like Gen. Lewis Mackenzie, a well-known Tory politician in Canada who at times openly sympathized with the Serbs, testified against any intervention before US congress, even against humanitarian aid for besieged Sarajevans saying it's best not to get involved (see congressional record), and was after publication of book on Bosnia revealed to be on a speaking tour on the payroll of a Serbian-American lobby group, which itself admitted this fact.
The curious thing is, I didn't even mention General Lewis Mackenzie. He was not involved in this judgment, and UNPROFOR - for all its faults - was neither represented exclusively by one of its Generals, nor seconded to the government of the FRY. UN experts had determined, according to General Sir Michael Rose (no Tory as far as I am aware, and certainly no sympathiser with the Bosnian Serb forces), that the shot came from the Bosniak side. UNPROFOR itself openly declared that the Bosnian forces repeatedly engaged in 'false flag' operations to provoke Serbian attacks on civilian buildings. That, again, had nothing to do with General Lewis Mackenzie. You are going to absurd lengths to avoid pinning any guilt whatsoever on the Bosnian forces for anything other than incidental atrocities. Your rendition of the negotiations process, of the politics of Izetbegovic and the SDA and of the causes of the breakdown of the FRY, is clearly designed to cover up for those self-interested crooks, who treated the population of Bosnia as raw material for a massive act of accumulation.
Another thing worth thinking about is the military logistics of a crowded, modern european city besieged on all sides. How do you defend? Where do you fire from where there aren't civilian targets?
Honestly, this is an unexpected degeneration on your part. I live in a crowded, modern European city, and I must say I don't think the first place I'd want to be firing from would be a hospital - if I was interested in the well-being of those around me, that is. Nor would I consider bombing any part of the city in order to provoke further attacks, and thus gain leverage in international diplomacy or even stimulate a NATO military attack on opposition [Bosnian Serb] positions. Your efforts at expiation are becoming increasingly outlandish.
But even if you discount the suspicions raised by UN experts and assume that the SRK carried out the shelling of the Markale market (let's say because they were repeatedly shelling civilian targets in the preceding period), does this in any way vitiate the fact that the Bosnian forces committed systematic atrocities directed from the highest levels, and following the same sectarian pattern of atrocities carried out by other forces?
lenin let me tell you about General sir Michael Rose. he used to subscribe to In These Times, but they cancelled his subscription when they found out that he's had an affair with Izetbegovic's wife. At least that's what deleuzer wrote above. I think. I only skimmed, admittedly.
And your efforts at logic and factual accuracy - and even wit - Lenin and Qlipoth, are becoming increasingly pathetic. You latch on to a half-truth here and there, yet you have hardly said anything about 90% of what constitutes my basic position here, and you haven't even entered into the argument.
Yes, General Sir Michael Hugh Rose KCB CBE etc etc etc - I remember him; another member of the Anglo-American upper classes, who allowed thousands of Muslim civilians to fry in plain sight, claiming he 'had no mandate' to do anything. Just the kind I trust.
"Nor would I consider bombing any part of the city in order to provoke further attacks"
City? what city? The Serb army around Sarajevo were not in a city, and were not civilians. We are talking about an army, with artillery, bunkered up in the forested hills - and Sarajevo is the perfect place to do it, if you've ever been there - just imagine a deep pit, with a city in it. Do you have any idea what it's like to live under siege? What would you do? Just wait, until people like Michael Rose and Gen. Mackenzie feel pity on you? Tsk, tsk.
Lenin is dead, and you've got your head up your fascist imperialist arse.
Yes, General Sir Michael Hugh Rose KCB CBE etc etc etc - I remember him; another member of the Anglo-American upper classes, who allowed thousands of Muslim civilians to fry in plain sight, claiming he 'had no mandate' to do anything. Just the kind I trust.
You know, this isn't really an argument.
City? what city? The Serb army around Sarajevo were not in a city
Try to remain in touch with us earthbound saps, would you? I was referring to the apparent/alleged false flag op in Markale.
Lenin is dead, and you've got your head up your fascist imperialist arse.
This is a reflection of the vulgarian, juvenile attitude that you have taken to this argument, apparently with a sense of genuine entitlement just because daddy was a war criminal.
You wouldn't be able to distinguish an argument or a fact from a piece of cow dung, Lenin, as should be obvious to anyone reading this entire discussion with half a brain. You don't even know yourself what you were referring to, and I really mean that, literally. Not to mention your pathetic sense of entitlement about being some kind of leftist voice on the net when you have no clue as to what is really going on outside the four corners of your own head. Say what you will about my juvenile insults, at least they are not libelous, and your existential apathy, along with the existential apathy of thousands of capitalist drones like yourself pretending to be something else, has caused more innocent deaths in the world that anything anyone in my family has ever done.
"I must say I don't think the first place I'd want to be firing from would be a hospital - if I was interested in the well-being of those around me, that is."
You almost make it sound as if the people defending Sarajevo were the attackers, and the Serb army besieging it were only retaliating. My gosh. Moreover, it's as if the Bosnian army did nothing but fire from the roofs of hospitals. (There was only one major hospital functioning in the city anyway) What about the rest of the indiscriminate shelling and snipering of the city for 3 years, amounting to about 300-something shell impacts per day? What about an anti-armor tank shell that hit the apartment building I lived in on a particular day, blasting through one wall, and dismembering the body of the aunt of my neighbour, which we saw carried out in pieces through the smoke? There were no Bosnian artillery anywhere around firing.
Moreover, if you want to go by the opinions of international experts and institutions, according to the Hague tribunal ICTY, the Markale massacre was caused by a shell fired from Serb positions.
You see, the point of fighting when you are under siege, is not to provoke the other side (as you stupidly suggest) but to BREAK the siege.
If lenin is dead, deleuzer appears to be a bilious zombie who can't stay dead despite his stated intentions.
You see, the point of fighting when you are under siege, is not to provoke the other side (as you stupidly suggest) but to BREAK the siege.
a) I didn't suggest it, UNPROFOR did, and b) 'it' in this case is not a reference to 'fighting' but to using civilian infrastructure as bait.
Any other half-assed cheap wisdom you'd like to throw my way?
In a besieged city, almost everything is civilian infrastructure. (a lesson the Americans learned for the 100th time in Iraq, the Israelis in Lebanon, the West bank - in fact your reasoning sounds very much like theirs with respect to Hamas/Hezbollah)...
That's why urban warfare is bad.
Should I rephrase that as a haiku, given that you've narrowed this discussion to a point and ignored about 99% of it?
-Undead Zombie
This is a good article:
There is thus decisive evidence that the initial U.S. backing of Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic did not, in fact, constitute genuine support of the Bosnian Muslim people and their legitimate interests. This is clear from the fact that the West had been aware that the recognition of Bosnia as an independent state was a prelude to war. This is also clear from an analysis of ensuing events. It was not long after the Bosnian conflict flared into full-scale war that support for the fledgling Bosnian state ceased. As former Canadian Ambassador James Bisset observes of both these policies:
“The United States dispatched its Ambassador from Belgrade to Sarajevo, who encouraged the Muslim leader, Alia Izetbegovic to withdraw his signature from the agreement he had signed along with his Serbian and Croatian counterparts. This U.S. intervention guaranteed civil war in Bosnia and the death and displacement of thousands of people.”[19]
That there is convincing evidence that Izetbegovic himself was not genuinely representative of the real interests of Bosnian Muslims further clarifies the duplicity of the U.S. policy. IAC analyst Sara Flounders reports that Muslim groups in two separate areas of Bosnia had challenged the government led by Alija Izetbegovic, disputing his claim that he represented the interests of the Muslim community. These groups supported “a policy of cooperation and trade with the other nationalities of the region”, and “condemned Izetbegovic for right-wing nationalist policies and reliance on U.S. military aid.” According to the elected Bosnian Muslim government in the city of Tuzla, the “U.S.-supervised rewrite of the Bosnian constitution [via the Dayton Accord] gave power only to the most extreme right-wing nationalist forces of Izetbegovic’s Party for Democratic Action and neo-fascist Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union. Other political forces even among Muslims were excluded.”[20]
For example, “[A] Bosnian Muslim group in the northwest Bihac area led by Fikret Adbic had declared its autonomy from the U.S.-backed government based in Sarajevo”, most probably doubting the sincerity of U.S. motives. In response, the U.S. intervened to crush Fikret Adbik’s Muslim movement through the use of Izetbegovic’s forces as a U.S. proxy army. Accordingly, the arms embargo that had been imposed by the international community on Bosnia-Herzegovina was temporarily violated by the U.S. to siphon military assistance to Izetbegovic’s forces, which were then deployed against Adbik’s Bosnia Muslim government of northwest Bihac.[21] Adbik’s regime had been staunchly opposed to U.S. intervention in the region. No doubt this was at least part of the reason behind the U.S.-backed attempt to eliminate his movement.[22] Retired U.S. Air Force General Charles G. Boyd, former Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. European Command from 1992 to 1995, noted that Adbik’s government was seen as a threat to U.S. interests in the Balkans because it was “one of the few examples of successful multi-ethnic cooperation in the Balkans… Adbic, a powerful local businessman, was a member of the Bosnian collective presidency. He outpolled Izetbegovic in national elections and had been expelled from the government” when Izetbegovic rejected the Lisbon agreement under U.S. pressure.[23]
Opposed to a possible success for Adbik’s government, the U.S. reacted by using the Izetbegovic regime to launch a military attack against these Muslim forces that desired peace with their Serbian and Croatian neighbors. “This attack on an elected Muslim Bosnian government was organized by the U.S.,” records Flounders. Six U.S. generals participated in planning the August 1994 offensive which, ironically, was in violation of the international community’s own imposed ceasefire, as well as a UN-declared safe area.[24]
British Balkans expert Joan Hoey, a Research Associate at the UK-based Centre for Defense and International Security Studies and an analyst with the Economics Intelligence Unit specialising in Eastern Europe, reported these events in detail:
“[T]he Bosnian Fifth Corps launched an offensive in northwest Bosnia against fellow Bosnian Muslims loyal to Fikret Abdic, a Bihac politician and businessman who had made his peace with the Serbs and Croats. After concerted shelling, the towns of Velika Kladusa and Cazin both in the Bihac pocket, fell to the Fifth Corps. Some 30,000 Abdic loyalists fled to Serb-held territory across the border in Croatia.”[25]
Though Izetbegovic’s U.S.-backed offensive in the Bihac was at first successful, the Bosnian Serbs in alliance with Croatian Serbs and Adbic’s Bosnian Muslim forces, reorganised to initiate an effective counter strategy. In response, “U.S. bombers under NATO command came to Izetbegovic’s defense. In the U.S. media, neither the U.S. role in planning the offensive nor the fact that the U.S.-backed forces were the ones to violate the cease-fire was examined.”[26] Joan Hoey recorded the catastrophic results in some detail:
“In October, the Fifth Corps launched an offensive out of the UN-designated ‘safe area’ of Bihac, cutting a swath through Serbian territory around the enclave. The safe zone of Bihac was used as a staging area for attacks against Serb populated areas on the Grabez plateau, leading to the expulsion of about 10,000 Serbs, who escaped to neighboring Serb-held Croatia, following the tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims who had fled the earlier Bosnian Fifth Corps offensive.”[27]
The initial U.S. support of Izetbegovic’s government - evidently accompanied by the deception and manipulation of the regime - demonstrated that the U.S. had been willing and capable of intervening in accord with furthering its own domination of the region. Yet in accordance with strategic interests, U.S. support of the fledgling state was short-lived. As the war continued and expanded, so did the West’s appeasement of war criminals responsible for the massacre and ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslim civilians.
Having exploited Izetbegovic to attack and subdue the elements in the region opposed to a U.S./Western presence in the Balkans, the U.S. had no qualms about leaving the civilian population at the mercy of Serb aggressors...
19] Bisset, James, ‘The Claims and Assertions by NATO about Kosovo were Lies’, op. cit.
[20] Flounders, Sara, ‘Bosnia Tragedy: The unknown role of the Pentagon’, op. cit.
[21] Only after having thereby achieved its objective of crushing Adbik’s independent Muslim government, did the U.S. begin adhering once more to the comprehensive embargo on the Bosnian Muslims.
[22] See for example ‘CIA agents training Bosnian army’, The Guardian, 17 Nov 1994; ‘America’s secret Bosnia agenda’, The Observer, 20 Nov 1994.
[23] Foreign Affairs, September/October 1995.
[24] This was reported by the British press in November 1994 in newspapers such as The Guardian, The Observer and The Independent, as well as by the French and German press.
[25] The Nation, 30 January 1995.
[26] Flounders, Sara, ‘Bosnia Tragedy: The unknown role of the Pentagon’, op. cit.
[27] The Nation, 30 January 1995. Although there is no doubt that Bosnian Muslim casualties prepondered significantly in the Yugoslav crisis as a whole, it is an important fact rarely noted by most commentators that Bosnian Muslim forces also committed war crimes and atrocities against Serbs as well as their fellow Muslims. This is clear even from the testimony of a Bosnian army chief, Nasir Oric, who had the audacity to even boast of the bloody raids on Serb villages where he presided over ruthless massacres of at least hundreds of civilians (See Toronto Star, 16 July 1995; Washington Post, 16 February 1994; ‘Call that safe?’, Economist, 15-21 July 1995).
Here
I haven't 'narrowed this discussion': you have. You keep returning to this single point because it is the one point where you think you can defend the behaviour of the BiH and their political masters. You keep avoiding the issue too, which is not whether 'almost everything' is civilian infrastructure, but of whether there are deliberate efforts to draw SRK fire onto such parts of the civilian infrastructure as are likely to be densely populated by large numbers of civilians (ie, said hospitals and public buildings). UNPROFOR alleged it, not I. In fact, let us take this one step further. Philip Corwin's memoir recalls that BiH provocations weren't just intended to draw Serb fire. They were also aimed at coercing UNPROFOR. Thus UNPROFOR troops were repeatedly shelled by BiH forces, more or less each morning. And UNPROFOR's attitude, given that its role was to be co-belligerents with the US and the local clients, was to refuse to mention these in its situation reports or even protest too vigorously (Philip Corwin, Dubious Mandate, pp 154-56). Now, I just raise this because this account, very much from the inside, suggests that UNPROFOR wasn't the anti-SDA conspiracy that you have identified.
Now, I'm sure you'll tell me an amusing anecdote about Philip Corwin, but there is a point where it becomes unseemly to claim that everyone involved who disagrees with your eccentric purview was just lying.
If you want to avoid this topic, since you complain that 99% of the facts are being left out (and how!), would you like to try to justify your earlier claim that Bosniak atrocities were generally low-level and, where not so, generally immediately cracked down on? Or would you prefer to persist with this abortive circularity (and then blaming me for your homiletic ineptitude)?
and deleuzer, don't exhaust yourself trying to invent an individual smear to discredit every single source there - remember you can cover a lot of Izetbegovic' opponents and rivals collectively with "and as we know Islam condones lying to the infidel" perhaps spiced with reminders of some WWII collaboration.
“The United States dispatched its Ambassador from Belgrade to Sarajevo, who encouraged the Muslim leader, Alia Izetbegovic to withdraw his signature from the agreement he had signed along with his Serbian and Croatian counterparts. This U.S. intervention guaranteed civil war in Bosnia and the death and displacement of thousands of people.”[19]
I don't know whether Bissett is right about this or not, but if he is then Zimmerman's intervention was perfectly continuous with his previous record. His brief since 1989 had been to reinforce the message that Yugoslavia was no longer important to the US as the 'national security' ally that it had been in the Cold War; it would no longer be supported internationally; and the US would not consider legitimate its army's definition of its constitutional obligation to defend the borders of the FRY. The US was not aligned with a resurgent Germany in its early attempts at stimulating a full-blown break-up, but the way in which it came to support such a break-up and the wars that Zimmerman himself had warned would ensue was by making the SDA its client. Concerned that Germany was "getting out ahead of the US" as Eagleburger put it, by January 1992 the US was arguing for its European cohorts to support Bosnian secession.
So by the time of March of that year, Izetbegovic was a US client. If he reneged on a peace deal one week after, and suffered no censure for it, then one has to at least suppose that his gun-runners and paymasters didn't object to what he did. The cantonisation plan (the "Balkan Switzerland" as Karadzic put it) was far from the ideal of 'multiculturalism' - much less 'socialist multiculturalism' - that deleuzer purports to be defending. Indeed, it is far from any circumstance for Bosnia that one could consider ideal. Even so, as every party involved understood, reneging on the deal meant war. It encouraged the Croatian leadership to believe that they could wrest more territory by means of war, and it led to the Bosnian Serb leadership to use its superior military capabilities to try and create 'facts on the ground', to bolster its territorial strength in advance of any future agreement.
yeah - I think it's plain; the US and Germany offered everybody the cantonisation as the only alternative to war but also as an important prelude, setting the parameters, to legitimise from the start the notion of this ethnic division and to legitimise the most odious parties on all sides and their seperatist right wing insanity; the very proposal was an element of fostering animosities along ethnic lines; then the US maneuvered to start and prolong the war to destroy the country and kill everybody and make this catastrophe of defenceless people and destroyed infrastructure and trauma and then delivered the cantonisation but under very direct imperial control, with a population unable to contest it at all. That last element, the direct control, was the chief goal, impossible in the beginning of the decade, and it was this that required the war, which strengthened the local crazies, helped them crush their rivals, shattered the population and destroyed their capacity to resist. And this is why Izetbegovic went along - because he hadn't a hope in hell of consolidating power in more normal circumstances and plundering an undestroyed Bosnia because his ultra right lunacy was really not that popular, especially among influential urban elites, and he would not have ever been in the position he aimed to occupy, and did occupy, in an ordinary-ish democracy at peace and in okay economic shape where rival parties could function normally and the popualtion could have some influence over the state's policies.
Say what you will about my juvenile insults, at least they are not libelous,
Apart from that bit where you called him a "fascist", sure.
...and your existential apathy, along with the existential apathy of thousands of capitalist drones like yourself pretending to be something else, has caused more innocent deaths in the world that anything anyone in my family has ever done.
Ahem ahem cough raw nerve cough cough.
I won't even discuss anything with Qlipoth any longer, because I just cannot take this douchebag seriously at all.
Lenin, I mentioned Musan Topalovic Caco, you can look that up. He was shot by Bosnian military police while trying to escape. As for others, well, you are free to look up the history of cooperation with the Hague tribunal on all sides, and the extent of crimes. It is a matter of public record - and I don't mean articles on the net of dubious provenance, look in the ICTYs own records, it's all freely available. I do not invent any smears on anyone, and I stand by everything I have said, most of it is a matter of public record. (including Gen. Rose's role in massacres of Bosnian muslims).
As I keep saying, atrocities are often committed on all sides in a war - they certainly were in WWII and almost every war since - but that has nothing to do with which side one should support. Many Leftists who were apologetics for Serbian nationalism unwittingly supported the ethno-fascist side in the Balkans.
And as for the NATO intervention in Bosnia, if you really want to be a Leninist, and if you really know shit about the situation on the ground in 1995, or do some real research, and if you ask yourself the pertinent question - 'who is benefitting from this intervention now?' - you should be able to figure it out. Fact and logic. Yes, they wanted partition, but Milosevic was their man, and after they ensured he ripped up Yugoslavia (as outlined above) they made sure Bosnia was dismembered too, by the Dayton Accords. Hook and sinker.
btw, the article posted by qlipoth, spells the name Fikret Abdic (spelled like that, with an accent acu above the c) 3 different ways in the article; that should tell you something about diligence. I mean, if you can't fucking copyedit, what can you do?
Moreover, my claim was never that Izetbegovic was the leader of Muslims, but precisely that he was NOT - he was the elected President of Bosnia, sharing power with Serb Mirko Pejanovic (who was also in Sarajevo) and a multi-ethnic government which the SDP (former league of communists) was part of. That is precisely the point - that he was not the leader of Muslims, but of the multi-ethnic faction in the Balkan war, the only one that leftist intellectuals should have been supporting, for all its flaws.
As for Fikret Abdic, he was the head of Agrokomerc (a big chicken meat company) and was one of a group of - the closest thing I can think of is the Russian oligarchs.
John Palmer: "Lenin - You have to face facts - on this issue deleuzer has wiped you out on the basis of fact not rhetoric"
OMG!!
Facts?!!...What Facts??
Give me ONE example.
It's ok, deleuzer.
You can stop posting now. We get it. UNPROFOR and the west were working with Milosevic and Lenin is a neocon fascist.
OMG!!
An example of John Palmer's 'facts'.
He wrote, 'Having at one time lived briefly in Sarajevo and Tuzla it was clear to me at that time (1968) that Bosnia was one of the few parts of the former Yugoslavia where the FRY slogans about multi-ethnicity were an actual lived experience.'
In fact, the most multi-ethnic part of the former Yugoslavia was, and still is, Serbia.
As for the Muslims, they ethnically cleansed Srebrenica of all Serbs and allowed the commander of the city to massacre the Serbian civilian population in the surrounding villages. The ICTY didn't even charge Oric with any of this, only lesser crimes of which he was predictably acquitted.
More inconvenient facts:
Fikret Abdic polled more votes than Izetbegovic who hijacked the presidential position which was supposed to rotate between the other members of the collective presidency. His thousands of followers later allied themselves with the Serbs against the Mujaheddin. Other Muslims were part of the Bosnian Serb army.
For example, the Bosnian Muslim Ismet Djuheric who said this,
'In August 1992 I formed my own unit within the Army of the Republic of Srpska. Most of its members were Muslims, but there were also a few Serbs and Croats. Its name was the independent Muslim unit "Mesa Selimovic" [famous Bosnia Muslim writer], and it existed within the Army of the Republic of Srpska until the end of the war. '
http://www.ex-yupress.com/dani/d...ani/
dani27.html
For Palmer, these Muslims didn't exist - and 'multi-ethnic', 'socialist' welcomed Naser Oric as a hero and allowed him to run a nightclub in the town.
Fikret Abdic polled more votes than Izetbegovic who hijacked the presidential position which was supposed to rotate between the other members of the collective presidency.
Can't you read? I just told you Fikret Abdic is a confessed mass murderer* with close ties to American and Israeli intelligence who can't type more than twenty words a minute as the Presidential competency tests revealed. When asked how he expected to govern in a crisis with he said "Don't worry about it. I'll keep my secretary".
*of poultry
``How can we trust 9/11 Truther scum on any of this?
Seriously. People who are willing to invent conspiracies out of thin air about the US killing thousands of its own people can't be trusted as reliable historians.''
Um... Who is the 9/11 truther in all of this, anyway? Is ``Mike'' one of our trolls? If so, consider deleting this response once you delete the post it responds to. All the same, anyone who isn't at least a bit skeptical about the Official Story on 9/11 just isn't paying attention to the known facts, such as they are, or so it seems to me.
We can't be certain about what actually happened, because of the unseemly haste with which the structural steel from the twin towers and Bldg 7 was recycled, eliminating the primary evidence by which the cause of the collapse of the three buildings could have been ascertained.
For that reason, my view is that agnosticism is the only reasonable credal stance about what happened.
If there was a conspiracy, other than the official one (meaning a conspiracy hatched by al Quaida), I wouldn't really know where to start pointing the finger, except by asking the question cui bono? That question seems to lead in several directions, including the real estate company that owned Bldg 7, and took over the management of the twin towers in July 2001: they walked away with an insurance settlement of several billion dollars---hardly chump change, even for a New York corporate real estate agency. I make no accusations, but one cannot ignore them, even if one might have thought that the primary beneficiaries were George W. Bush, ``Shotgun Dick'' Cheney, et al. (Was al-Quaida a beneficiary? Perhaps in the end, via the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But one is reminded of Chairman Mao's observation about the upshot of the French Revolution: ``too soon to tell''. :-)
How can we trust 9/11 Truther scum on any of this?
Seriously. People who are willing to invent conspiracies out of thin air about the US killing thousands of its own people can't be trusted as reliable historians.
Mike | 8 Sep, 00:13 | #
I very much doubt the US government carried out 9/11, but it's well known that as an institution it has killed at least thousands of its own citizens throughout history through wars, drafts, poverty and police brutality. Add to that millions of foreigners of course.
Resistor - You betray almost complete ignorance of the realities of the Bosnian war. You seem unaware that the Bosnian government during the long, bloody seige of Sarajevo contained ethnic Serbs and "Catholics" (Croats)_- as well as Muslims, Jews and total unbelievers. There were senior Bosnian Serbs at the highest level in the Bosnian military. Can resistor tell me of any Muslims who formed part of the command of the Serb regular forces and para-militaries who were unleashed by Belgrade architects of blitzkrieg against Bosnia? The attrocities committed at Srbrenica and some many other places can only be compared to the Nazi SD death squads before the opening of the extermination camps.
yeah, everyone just picks their favorite ethnic group among these liberals and pseudo-leftists here and then defends them as if their lives depended on it. but how many john palmers et alia speak our language fluently?
as a stateless bosnian refugee in the 1990s -- and a cute and calm teenager at that (not one of the "aggressive foreigner" sort (HINT: thick layer of sarcasm), i haven't seen too much effort at helping us. germany, UK, sweden, france, austria -- all doors were shut. in croatia, refugees mostly couldn't go to school.
yeah, the english speaking colonies (US, Australia, Canada) took some of us -- young, literate, and perhaps the most important qualification -- (seen as) white.
did anyone of the liberals here actually do anything for the refugees? my guess is: if not being completely an armchair Serb/Muslim/Croat, they preferred to work for that shitty little protectorate (whose passport i carry, by the way) after dayton. i'm sure that paid well -- just don't blather to me about your (highly selective) humanitarianism.
PS couple of months before expelling us, the german government had us fill out cards with "ethnicity" so they would know what canton to send us to.
oh well, my little family (parents and moi) had four ethnicities between the three of us, and that's not even counting what i wanted to write and they did not allow -- scilicet, "bosnian yugoslav".
western enlightenment? where? and do any of the smartasses above have an advice to that situation?
sadrugestrane - I quite believe the indifference and hostility with which many refugees - of all ethnicities from Bosnia and other republics of the FRY - were received in different European states. I was involved myself with a number of campaigns to prevent the forced "repatriation" of two Bosniak families to potentially hostile areas in the so-called Republika Serbska from the UK. However I note you do not challenge my wider political point.
"the most multi-ethnic part of the former Yugoslavia was, and still is, Serbia."
one of the many lies perpetrated by the Belgrade government in its attempts to cleanse its reputation. Is that, by chance, on account of the 40,000 Chinese that Milosevic shipped over to swing the election?
I am in some sympathy with the comments of Futurecast at the start of this debate.
I am also aware that whenever I read anything on this particular subject the only thing I learn by the time I am finished is that I apparently know even less about it than when I started reading.
Okay, the answer may be that I am just thick - I'm willing to accept that.
But for the benefit of this thicko, what are the actual points of agreement between you all on this subject?
Are there any?
Is that, by chance, on account of the 40,000 Chinese that Milosevic shipped over to swing the election?
Oh, brilliant: an attempt to prove how multicultural and liberal you are... by race-baiting Chinise migrants.
race-baiting? Nothing against Chinese immigrants. It's a fact, though, that Milosevic arranged this in exchange for votes.
...
yeah, and then they all left after the election.
But for the benefit of this thicko, what are the actual points of agreement between you all on this subject?
Well, we may all agree or disagree on a great deal that is of factual relevance, but it is the 'big picture' that is in dispute here. To that extent, it is the vast majority of posters here vs deleuzer and his nodding dog, John Palmer. On that big picture, deleuzer wants us to believe that Izetbegovic and the SDA were defending socialist multiculturalism. Whereas a) I don't think there was any socialism to defend, and b) I don't accept that Izetbegovic's nationalist project had anything to do with multiculturalism, or that it was in principle superior to that of the other nationalist forces (it was just military and politically weaker). The other point at which I disagree with deleuzer is where he, accepting that the US was an imperialist force in the Balkans, tries to airbrush out the fact that the Bosnian leadership was a US client. Thus, we are assured that secretly, though the US was supplying the BiH with weapons and shipping in thousands of Wahabbi fighters on its behalf, it was actually doing so to bring about a pro-Serb policy, namely the division of Bosnia. And while it may appear that Izetbegovic accepted partition in principle, he was actually concealing a deep-seated socialist multiculturalism when he pushed for the sectarian redivision of the territory.
The only fact I would dispute there is that Izetbegovic "pushed for the sectarian redivision of the territory." That is patently false. Izetbegovic's government rejected Lisbon precisely because of partition. Partition was unacceptable, as Izetbegovic's government was ethnically mixed, and included the SDP, the former League of Communists of Bosnia, as mentioned a few times already, and his co-member of the Presidency throughout the war was Mirko Pejanovic, a Serb and today the president of the Serb Citizens Alliance in Sarajevo. The defence of Sarajevo from the Serbs was organized by Jovan Divjak, a Serb, and later a commander in the Bosnian army.
Another fact: the last ever political effort at holding the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia together was organized by Izetbegovic and Kiro Gligorov, the Macedonian President, in 1992.
Moreover, the US wasn't supplying BiH with weapons, but most western countries did ignore the embargo, though officially upholding it, because it was obviously unjust, given that the Serbs had most of the weapons in the beginning.
As for the rest, well, yes, if you are in the position of Western right-wing politicians who are trying to portray all three sides as equal, that is, equally nationalist, then precisely what you would do would be to radicalize the Bosnian side by shipping in Islamic fundamentalist fighters from the middle east. This at once eases the pressure on the UN (since it's just three nationalist fanatical groups fighting) and at the same time gives credibility to the Serb claim that the Muslims are fanatics, and ensures partition.
Yet these mujahedeen hardly constituted the bulk of the Bosnian army, which as I repeat, was not only ethnically mixed (and we're not talking a few symbolic Serbs and Croats here), but had Serbs and Croats in its leadership.
Moreover, the Bosnian side was the only one coerced into signing Dayton, while the Serb and Croat parties gladly accepted it, in spite of the fact that the NATO intervention which brought everyone to the table was ostensibly on behalf of Bosnia and against the Serbs.
But if you like, Lenin, you can just ignore all these easily verifiable facts, since they don't fit into your nice construction.
deleuzer, you should meet Dejan. I'm sure you'd have lots and lots of easily verifiable facts to talk about.
The only fact I would dispute there is that Izetbegovic "pushed for the sectarian redivision of the territory." That is patently false. Izetbegovic's government rejected Lisbon precisely because of partition. Partition was unacceptable, as Izetbegovic's government was ethnically mixed.
This seems a point, but Izetbegovic HAD surely already accepted this partition and indeed signed up to it until meeting US ambassador Warren Zimmermann and then suddenly changed him mind.
Is this not the case?
Izetbegovic's government rejected Lisbon precisely because of partition
Izetbegovic accepted partition, signing up to Lisbon before reneging a week later, on the advice of Warren Zimmerman. He then went on to negotiate on the basis of partition in future deals. And reneged again, I need hardly add. The Bush administration's position was to encourage Izetbegovic to reject partition, with a promise that they would back him if he got into difficulties. And it was only when it was clear that they were supporting him that Izetbegovic changed his mind on Lisbon, because it gave him the opportunity to maximise the hold of his SDA party on the maximum amount of territory.
This fiction that you are trying to maintain, that Izetbegovic entertained a principled (as opposed to opportunistic) opposition to partition, is just unsustainable in light of the known facts. I know why you're trying to maintain that fiction - because it was the one Izetbegovic himself offered in his defense when it was clear that most Bosnians were not in favour of such a settlement. But he knew what he was doing when he signed the damned agreement - he would do anything at that point to secure a secession and maximise the power of his clique.
if you are in the position of Western right-wing politicians who are trying to portray all three sides as equal, that is, equally nationalist, then precisely what you would do would be to radicalize the Bosnian side by shipping in Islamic fundamentalist fighters from the middle east.
This is just lunacy. Izetbegovic solicited these fighters. The US, in alliance with Iran, provided them. The idea that the Bosnian leadership was just the victim of a right-wing plot is absurd.
And it never occurs to you that Izetbegovic was initially coerced to sign it by European politicians, and by the fact that Karadzic and Boban, who were in favour of the agreement, had military power, and Karadzic had even threatened in Parliament, on TV "we will destroy you"?
That is, at least, the story of Jaime Gama, the current president of the Portuguese parliament, from the Socialist Party, whom I met a couple of years back while visiting a Portuguese friend whose mother is a schoolfriend of Gama. He was in Lisbon in 1992.
Why else would Izetbegovic be trying to hold Yugoslavia together with Gligorov?
"This is just lunacy. Izetbegovic solicited these fighters. The US, in alliance with Iran, provided them. The idea that the Bosnian leadership was just the victim of a right-wing plot is absurd."
Yet the very tone of your statement makes it clear that you are offering mere conjecture - as in "why, THAT's just absurd, therefore THIS must be true."
Your increasing stridency betokens your increasing desperation "Lenin." During the genocidal onslaught of the Serb forces - including Arkan's and Seselj's "Sicherheitdienst" paramilitaries - the Sarajevo government was multi-ethnic. There was a "Serb" defence minister as well as senior "Serb" - (Orthodox) and "Croat" (Catholic) army commanders. Do you seriously expect anyone to believe that Belgrade or Zagreb ran multi-ethnic governments and armies?
As for Karadzic's TV appearance ("we will destroy you"), it's a matter of public record.
Marxists have a semi-apriori approach to the facts. It is what makes it superior to empiricism. However, what the SWP are displaying here is not a semi-apriori approach but a wholly metaphysical one which refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good narrative - in this case a gramscian stalinist over-arching understanding of hegemony. What Richard calls `the big picture'.
You have put up a good and necessary fight here deleuzer but you have no chance of persuading the SWP that they are wrong. They have spent years rationalising what went on in the ex-Yugoslavia and will spend years wasting time denying events in Georgia. Meanwhile reality moves on.
Have a look at this photo,
http://www.bhdani.com/arhiva/275...275/
radovan.jpg
Which shows Izetbegovic, Karadzic and the Bosnian Croat leader, Stjepan Kljuić when they were nationalist allies against the Socialist Party
Palmer writes, 'Do you seriously expect anyone to believe that Belgrade or Zagreb ran multi-ethnic governments and armies?'
Well Belgrade did and I posted evidence that Muslims formed part of the Bosnian Serb army. Evidence that Palmer ignored. Inconvenient facts perhaps?
David, I hope someone pays you to construct gnomic non-sequiturs like this, because I would hate to think you were just wasting your time.
The JNA leadership below wanted to declare a state of emergency to keep Yugoslavia together, this was oppose by the Slovene and Croat nationalists.
From
http://yugoslavtruth.blogspot.co...inated-
jna.html
Who led the "Serb-dominated" JNA?
In Yugoslavia’s final years the Federal Defence Minister was Kadijevic, a self-declared Yugoslav from Croatia of a mixed marriage (his father was a Serb, his mother a Croat, and he was married to a Croat), and his Deputies were Admiral Stane Brovet, a Slovene, and Josip Gregoric, a Croat. The Chief of Staff of the JNA was General Blagoje Adzic, a Serb from Bosnia, and his five deputies consisted of one Serb, two Croats, one Slovene and one Montenegrin. The JNA was organisationally divided into three military districts, as well as an additional navy district and air force and air defence fields, and, in fact, most of the top positions were held by Croats at the time. The commander of the First Military District of the JNA (the largest, based in Belgrade) was Anton Lukezic, a Croat, who was succeeded after his retirement by Aleksandar Spirkovski, a Macedonian, while the District’s Chief of Staff was Andrija Silic, a Croat. The commander of the Third Military District (based in Skopje) was Zivota Avramovic, a Serb, and the commander of the Fifth Military District (based in Zagreb) was Martin Spegelj, a Croat, and then, after he retired in spring 1990, Konrad Kolsek, a Slovene. The navy was headed by Admiral Bozidar Grubisic, a Croat, while both the commander of the air force and air defence, Anton Tus, and his deputy, Zvonko Jurjevic, were Croats. The chief of the JNA’s counter-intelligence service (KOS), meanwhile, was a Serb, General Vasiljevic, but his Deputy was General Simo Tumanov, a Macedonian, and Slovenes and Croats held other top positions in the JNA’s security organs (http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/030630ED.htm). The head of the internal communist organisation of the army until its dissolution in January 1991, which was a very powerful organisation and contained almost all JNA members, was Admiral Petar Simic, yet another Croat. (http://www.un.org/icty/transe14-1/980505it.htm)
How anyone could possibly call this “Serb-domination” is beyond me - out of the 21 persons in top JNA positions mentioned above 10 were Croats, 4 Serbs, 3 Slovenes, 2 Macedonians, 1 Montenegrin and 1 a Yugoslav.
What are you trying to prove Resistor? That Sarajevo wasn't besieged? That the Serbian Stalinists and Restorationists didn't block with fascistic ethnic cleansers in a frenzied land grab in Bosnia as tney broke up Yugoslavia? Were you not opposed to the siege of Sarajevo and other enclaves? What vitory will you achieve if you persuade people to believe these things never happened? Don't waste your talents on such nonsense.
Richard: What is your opinion of Gramsci?
Why don't you ask me my opinion of Stalin, while you're at it?
No, I ask specifically about Gramsci because his influence seems to be all pervasive both in the left and in universities particularly in international studies.
I still fail to see the relevance. I have never studied Gramsci, and my opinion of him wouldn't be of great interest, and has nothing to do with the arguments I have been making.
Frankly, all this scholastic drollery, in addition to the point you chipped in about Pluckly Little Georgia disinclines me to take you seriously. Do you have an actual argument you would like to share with me?
Well a quick search of the site shows a lot of fulsome praise for Gramsci. I'm not sure it is solastic drollery. You mentioned the question of the `big picture' so it must surely be legitimate to ask you how you construct that big picture. It was you who identified it as central to the debate.
I have mentioned Gramsci a few times in previous posts, but most sustained discussions of Gramsci have been guest posts. The reason Gramsci is being raised here is not because of anything I have said, but because of a preoccupation of yours.
The point about the 'big picture' is not particularly complicated, and wasn't intended to be. I may agree or disagree with deleuzer about this particular empirical detail, but the main difference between us is that he accepts that the Bosnian leadership defended "socialist multiculturalism" and was inherently more politically progressive than the other nationalist forces, and I find that an utterly preposterous and insupportable assumption. You can blather about metaphysics, but it doesn't get any more metaphysical than deleuzer's fanciful depictions of the Bosnian leadership, which you have come here to retrospectively endorse.
I don't think you have to have any illusions in the Bosnian leadership to have defended the right of Bosnia to defend its people and its integrity and I can assure you I do not speak retrospectively. Why do you find the defense of Sarajevo utterly preposterous and insupportable?
". It is what makes it superior to empiricism"
I can honestly see why Marxists are anti-empirical. Given that the over-whelming empirical evidence is agin you, as is most academic theory ( or at least that part of the academic world at least that is conversant with mathematics : the evil bourgeois economics)
Still lets not give up hope, maybe china will abandon capitalism, revert to Marxism (Stalinism and Maoism are weasel word for the same ideology) and maybe this time it will not be evil "State Capitalism" and starvation, but marvelous brilliant Utopia!! full of people realising their potential. Learning perhaps to fly! And Grow Unicorn horns!
Ah fuck it. They'd starve wouldnt they? Drop their per-capita income by 95%. Still there are a world of other failed experiments across all continents, all which followed "marxist economics" (snigger) all of which y'all can, and lets be honest about it, *must* ignore. Empricism is for science not cults.
yes, absolutely, because nobody has ever starved under capitalism, of course...
Are you a creationist fionn?
Fuck. What I stay stilll stands.
I am still non the wiser.
Thanks n'no thanks ya all.
Ken
Yes, resistor, of course the JNA was made up of all ethnicities, being the Yugoslav National Army. And where do you think all the Croats and Slovenes and Bosnians in the JNA went when the JNA first invaded Slovenia and then Croatia, and then Bosnia? Of course, they deserted and joined their respective national territorial defenses. Dumbass.
And once they deserted, where do you think all the JNA artillery and tanks and airplanes ended up? In the Bosnian Army? There was no Bosnian Army. Sarajevo was initally defended by policemen with a few machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. They were digging in in the hills around Sarajevo. In the months before the war, the JNA even confiscated weapons caches of the Bosnian Territorial Defence (each of the Republics had such an organization in addition to the JNA).
again, back to those who think that they're pro-bosnian: i know it's nice and heart-warming to be in an ngo, to rationalize anti-muslim prejudices (those are european muslims we're defending here, not those filthy arabs), but you're dreaming.
politically izetbegovic's party offered no solution at all to those of us from mixed marriages, just as little as tudjman, milosevic and the rest of those opportunistic goons did. TOKENISM on all three sides.
and nota bene: i love arabic to the point of insanity and in spite of a mostly serbian father, am much more likely to embrace (and understand) a mujahid than a chetnik. horribile dictu, no? (my yugo subconsciousness must be telling me to prance around with latin, proving i'm "western" after all. next time i'll pepper it with arabic instead.)
today's bosnia is no place for a socialist (hell, let me be honest: far-leftist, anti-communist) from a mixed marriage with zero connections.
Yes fionn, speaking of unicorns, maybe if enough state spending is cut and enough privatisation is done the free market will work! No more crisis, everyone will get rich and the environment will be saved while making lots of money doing it! Mathematics? snigger! all that precious math and they couldn't figure out that trading in debt was bad news.
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