<center><bold><color><param>0100,0100,0100</param><FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
10pt</param>SEEING YUGOSLAVIA THROUGH A DARK GLASS:</center>
<center>Politics, Media and the Ideology of Globalization</center>
</bold> <bold>by Diana Johnstone</bold>
<bold>Diana Johnstone</bold> was the European editor of <underline>In These
Times</underline>
from 1979 to 1990, and press officer of the Green group in the
European Parliament from 1990 to 1996. She is the author of The
Politics of Euromissiles: Europe in America's World (London/New
York, Versa Schucken, 1984) and is currently working on a book
on the former Yugoslavia. This article is an expended version of a
talk given on May 25, 1998, at an international conference on
media held in Athens, Greece.
<center>* * *</center>
Years of experience in and out of both mainstream and
alternative media have made me aware of the power of the
dominant ideology to impose certain interpretations on international
news. During the cold War, most world news for American
consumption had to be framed as part of the Soviet-U.S. contest.
Since then, a new ideological bias frames the news. The way the
violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia has been reported is the most
stunning example.
I must admit that it took me some time to figure this out, even
though I had a long-standing interest in and some knowledge of
Yugoslavia. I spent time there as a student in 1953, living in a
Belgrade dormitory and learning the language. In 1984., in a piece
for "In These Times", I warned that extreme decentralization,
conflicting economic interests between the richer and poorer
regions, austerity policies imposed by the IMF, and the decline of
universal ideals were threatening Yugoslavia with "re-Balkanization"
in the wake of Tito's death and desanctification. "Local ethnic
interests are reasserting themselves". I wrote, "The danger is that
these rival local interests may become involved in the rivalries of
outside powers. This is how the Balkans in the past were a powder
keg of world war." Writing this took no special clairvoyance. The
danger of Yugoslavia's disintegration was quite obvious to all
serious observers well before Slobodan Milosevic arrived on the
scene.
As the country was torn apart in the early nineties, I was
unable to keep up with all that was happening. In those years, my
job as press officer for the Greens in the European Parliament left
me no time to investigate the situation myself. Aware that there
were serious flaws in the way media and politicians were reacting. I
wrote an article warning against combating "nationalism" by taking
sides for one nationalism against another, and against judging a
complex situation by analogy with totally different times and
places. "Every nationalism stimulates others". I noted, "Historical
analogies should be drawn with caution and never allowed to
obscure the facts." However, there was no stopping the tendency
to judge the Balkans, about which most people knew virtually
nothing, by analogy with Hitler Germany, about which people at
least imagined they knew a lot, and which enabled analysis to be
rapidly abandoned in favour of moral certitude and righteous
indignation.
However, it was only later, when I was able to devote
considerable time to my own research, that I realized the extent of
the deception-which is in large part self-deception.
I mention all this to stress that I understand the immense
difficulty of gaining a clear view of the complex situation in the
Balkans. The history of the region and the interplay of internal
political conflicts and external influences would be hard to grasp
even without propaganda distortions. Nobody can be blamed for
being confused. Moreover, by now, many people have invested so
much emotion in a one-sided view of the situation that they are
scarcely able to consider alternative interpretations.
It is not necessarily because particular journalists or media are
"alternative" that they are free from the dominant interpretation and
the dominant world view. In fact, in the case of the Yugoslav
tragedy, the irony is that "alternative" or "left" activists and writers
have - frequently taken the lead in likening the Serbs, the people
who most wanted to continue to live in multi-cultural Yugoslavia, to
Nazi racists, and in calling for military intervention on behalf of
ethnically defined secessionist movements<smaller>1<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
08pt</param><smaller><smaller>1<bigger> "Ethnically defined" because, despite the
argument accepted by the international community that it was the Republics that could
invoke the right to secede, all the political arguments surrounding recognition of
independent Slovenia and Croatia dwelt on
the right of Slovenes and Croats as such to self-determination.<FontFamily><param>C03
Swiss Roman 10pt</param><bigger> - all supposedly in the name of "multi-cultural
Bosnia", a country
which, unlike Yugoslavia, would have to be built from scratch by
outsiders.
<center><bold>The Serbs and Yugoslavia</bold></center>
<flushboth> Like other Christian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, the Serbs
were heavily taxed and denied ownership of property of political
power reserved for Muslims. In the early years of the nineteenth
century, Serb farmers led a revolt that spread to Greece. The
century-long struggle put an end to the Ottoman Empire.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The Habsburg monarchy found it natural that when one empire
receded, another should advance, and sought to gain control over
the lands lost to the Ottoman Turks. Although Serbs had rallied to
the Habsburgs in earlier wars against the Turks, Serbia soon
appeared to Vienna as the main obstacle to its own expansion into
the Balkans. By the end of the nineteenth century, Vienna was
seeking to fragment the Serb-inhabited lands to prevent what it
named "Greater Serbia", taking control of Bosnia-Herzegovina and
fostering the birth of Albanian nationalism (as converts to Islam,
Albanian feudal chieftains enjoyed privileges under the Ottoman
Empire and combated the Christian liberation movements).</flushboth>
<flushboth> Probably because they had been deprived of full citizens rights
under the Ottoman Turks, and because their own society of
farmers and traders was relatively egalitarian, Serb political leaders
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were
extremely receptive to the progressive ideals of the French
Revolution. While all the other liberated Balkan nations imported
German princelings as their new kings, the Serbs promoted their
own pig farmers into a dynasty, one of whose members translated
John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" into Serbian during his student
days. Nowhere in the Balkans did Western progressive ideas
exercise such attraction as in Serbia, no doubt due to the historic
circumstances of the country's emergence from four hundred years
of subjugation.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Meanwhile, intellectuals in Croatia, a province of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire increasingly rankling under subordination to the
Hungarian nobility, initiated the Yugoslav movement for cultural,
and eventually political, unification of the South Slav peoples,
notably the Serbs and Croats, separated by history and religion
(the Serbs having been converted to Christianity by the Greek
Orthodox Church and the Croats by the Roman Catholic Church)
but united by language. The idea of a "Southslavia" was largely
inspired by the national unification of neighbouring Italy, occurring
around the same time.</flushboth>
<flushboth> In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seized the pretext of the
assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand to declare war
and crush Serbia once and for all. When Austria-Hungary lost the
world war it had thus initiated, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia
chose to unite with Serbia in a single kingdom. This decision
enabled both Slovenia and Croatia to go from the losing to the
winning side in World War I, thereby avoiding war reparations and
enlarging their territory, notably on the Adriatic coast, and the
expense of Italy. The joint Kingdom was renamed "Jugoslavia" in
1929. The conflicts between Croats and Serbs that plagued what is
called "the first Yugoslavia" were described by Rebecca West in
her celebrated book, <bold>Black Lamb and Grey Falcon</bold>, first
published in 1941.</flushboth>
<flushboth> In April 1941., Serb patriots in Belgrade led a revolt against an
accord reached between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Nazi
Germany. This led to Nazi bombing of Belgrade, a German
invasion, creation of an independent fascist state of Croatia
(including Bosnia-Herzegovina), and attachment of much of the
Serbian province of Kosovo to Albania, then a puppet of Mussolini's
Italy. The Croatian Ustashe undertook a policy of genocide against
Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies within the territory of their "Greater
Croatia", while the Germans raised 55 divisions among the
Muslims of Bosnia and Albania.</flushboth>
<flushboth> In Serbia itself, the German occupants announced that one
hundred Serbian hostages would be executed for each German
killed by resistance fighters. The threat was carried out. As a
result, the royalist Serbian resistance (the first guerrilla resistance
to Nazi occupation in Europe) led by Draza Mihailovic adopted a
policy of holding off attacks on the Germans in expectation of an
Allied invasion. The Partisans, led by Croatian communist Josip
Broz Tito, adopted a more active strategy of armed resistance,
which made considerable gains in the predominantly Serb border
regions of Croatia and Bosnia and won support from Churchill for its
effectiveness. A civil war developed between Mihailovic's "Chetniks"
and Tito's Partisans - which was also a civil war between Serbs,
since Serbs were the most numerous among the Partisans. These
divisions between Serbs - torn between Serbian and Yugoslav
identity - have never been healed and help explain the deep
confusion among Serbs during the breakup of Yugoslavia.</flushboth>
<flushboth> After World War II, the new Communist Yugoslavia tried to
build "brotherhood and unity" on the myth that all the peoples had
contributed equally to liberation from fascism. Mihailovic was
executed, and school children in post-war Yugoslavia learned more
about the "fascist" nature of his Serbian nationalist Chetniks than
they did about Albanian and bosnian Muslims who had volunteered
for the 55, or even about the killing of Serbs in the Jasenovac death
camp run by Ustashe in Western Bosnia.</flushboth>
<flushboth> After the 1948 break with Moscow, the Yugoslav communist
leadership emphasized its difference from the Soviet bloc by
adopting a policy of "self-management", supposed to lead by fairly
rapid stages to the "withering away of the State". "Tito repeatedly
revised the Constitution to strengthen local authorities, while
retaining final decision-making power for himself. When he died in
1980, he thus left behind a hopelessly complicated system that
could not work without his arbitration". Serbia in particular was
unable to enact vitally necessary reforms because its territory had
been divided up, with two "autonomous provinces," Vojvodina and
Kosovo, able to veto measures taken by Serbia, while Serbia could
not intervene in their affairs.</flushboth>
<flushboth> In the 1980's, the rise in interest rates and unfavourable world
trade conditions dramatically increased the foreign debt Yugoslavia
(like many "third world" countries) had been encouraged to run up
thanks to its standing in the West as a socialist country not
belonging to the Soviet bloc. The IMF arrived with its familiar
austerity measures, which could only be taken by a central
government. The leaders of the richer republics -Slovenia and
Croatia - did not want to pay for the poorer ones. Moreover, in all
former socialist countries, the big political question is privatization
of State and Social property, and local communist leaders in
Slovenia and Croatia could expect to get a greater share for
themselves within the context of division of Yugoslavia into
separate little states.</flushboth>
<flushboth> At that stage, a gradual, negotiated dismantling of Yugoslavia
into smaller States was not impossible. It would have entailed
reaching agreement on division of assets and liabilities, and
numerous adjustments to take into account conflicting interests. If
pursued openly, however, it might have encountered popular
opposition-after all, very many people, perhaps a majority, enjoyed
being citizens of a large country with an enviable international
reputation. What would have been the result of a national
referendum on the question of preservation of Yugoslavia?</flushboth>
<flushboth> None was ever held. The first multiparty elections in postwar
Yugoslavia were held in 1990, not nationwide in all of Yugoslavia,
but separately by each Republic - a method which in itself
reinforces separatist power elites. Sure of the active sympathy of
Germany, Austria, and the Vatican, leaders in Slovenia and
Croatia, prepared the <italic>fait accompli<smaller>2</italic><FontFamily><param>C03
Swiss Roman 08pt</param><smaller><smaller>2<bigger>Recognition of the internal
administrative borders between the republics as "inviolable" international borders was
in effect legal trick, contrary to international law, which turned the Yugoslav army
into an "aggressor" within the boundaries its soldiers had
sworn to defend and which transformed the Serbs within Croatia and Bosnia, who opposed
secession from their country -Yugoslavia, into secessionists. This recognition
flagrantly violated the principles of the 1975 Final Act (known as the Helsinki
Accords) of the Conference on, now organisation
for, Security and Cooperation in Europe, notably the territorial integrity of states
and nonintervention in internal affairs. Truncated Yugoslavia was thereupon expelled
from the OSCI in 1992. sparing its other members from having to hear Belgrade's point
of view. Indeed, the sanctions against
Yugoslavia covered culture and sports, thus eliminating for several crucial years any
opportunity for Serbian Yugoslavs to take part in international forums and events
where the one-sided view of "the Serbs" presented by their adversaries might have been
challenged. <FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman 10pt</param><bigger> of unilateral,
unnegotiated
secession, proclaimed in 1991. Such secession was illegal, under
Yugoslav and international law, and was certain to precipitate civil
war. The key role of German (and Vatican) support was to provide
rapid international recognition of the new independent republics, in
order to transform Yugoslavia into an "aggressor on its own
territory".</flushboth>
<center><bold>Political Motives</bold></center>
<flushboth> The political motives that launched the anti-Serb propaganda
campaign are obvious enough. Claiming that it was impossible to
stay in Yugoslavia because the Serbs were so oppressive was the
pretext for the nationalist leaders in Slovenia and Croatia to set up
their own little statelets which, thanks to early and strong German
support, could "jump the queue" and get into the richmen's
European club ahead of the rest of Yugoslavia.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The terrible paradox is that very many people, in the sincere
desire to oppose racism and aggression, have in fact contributed to
demonizing an entire people, the Serbs, thereby legitimizing both
ethnic separatism and the new role of NATO as occupying power in
the Balkans on behalf of a theoretical "international community".</flushboth>
<flushboth> Already in the 1980's, Croatian and ethnic Albanian separatist
lobbies had stepped up their efforts to win support abroad, notably
in Germany and the United States<smaller>3<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
08pt</param><smaller><smaller>3<bigger>In Washington, the campaign on behalf of
Albanian separatists in Kosovo was spearheaded by Representative Joe Dio Gaurdi of New
York, who after loosing his congressional seat in 1988 has continued his lobbying for
the cause. An early and influential convert to
the cause was Senator Robert Dole. In Germany, the project for the political
unification of all Croatian nationalists, but communists and Ustashe, with aim of
seceding and establishing "Greater Croatia" was followed closely and sympathetically
by the <italic>Bundesnachrichtendienst</italic> (BND, West Germany's
CIA, which hoped to gain its own sphere of influence on the Adriatic from the breakup
of Yugoslavia. The nationalist unification which eventually brought former communist
general Franjo Tudjman to power in Zagreb with the support of the Ustashe diaspora,
got seriously under way after Tito's death
in 1980, during the years when Bonn's current foreign minister Claus Kinkel, was
heading the BND. See Erich Schmidt-Echboom, <italic>Der Schattenkrieger: Klaus Kinkel
und der BND</italic> (Dusseldorf; ECON Verlag, 1995) <FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss
Roman 10pt</param><bigger>, by claiming to be oppressed by Serbs, citing "evidence"
that,
insofar as it had any basis in truth, referred to the 1920-1941
Yugoslav Kingdom, not to the very different post-World War II
Yugoslavia.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The current campaign to demonize the Serbs began in July
1991 with a virulent barrage of articles in the German media, led by
the influential conservative newspaper, the "Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung" (FAZ). In almost daily columns, FAZ editor Johann Georg
Reismuller justified the freshly, and illegally, declared
"independence" of Slovenia and Croatia by describing "Yugo-
Serbs" as essentially Oriental "militarist Bolsheviks" who have "no
place in the European Community". Nineteen months after German
reunification, and for the first time since Hitler's defeat in 1945,
German media resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic
group reminiscent of the pre-war propaganda against the Jews".</flushboth>
<flushboth> This German propaganda binge was the signal that times had
changed seriously. Only a few years earlier, a seemingly broad
German peace movement had stressed the need to put an end to
"enemy stereotypes" (Feindbilder). Yet the sudden ferocious
emergence of the enemy stereotype of "the Serbs" did not shock
liberal of left Germans, who were soon repeating it themselves. It
might seem that the German peace movement had completed its
historic mission once its contribution to altering the image of
Germany had led Gorbachev to endorse reunification. The least one
can say is that the previous efforts at reconciliation with peoples
who suffered from Nazi invasion stopped short when it same to the
Serbs.</flushboth>
<flushboth> In the Bundestag, German Green leader Joschka Fisher
pressed for disavowal of "pacifism" in order to "combat Auschwitz",
thereby equating Serbs with Nazis. In a heady mood of self-
righteous indignation, German politicians across the board joined in
using Germany's past guilt as a reason, not for restraint, as had
been the logic up until reunification, but on the contrary, for
"bearing their share of the military burden". In the name of human
rights, the Federal Republic of Germany abolished its ban on
military operations outside the NATO defensive area. Germany
could once again be a "normal" military power - thanks to the "Serb
threat".</flushboth>
<flushboth> The near unanimity was all the more surprising in that the
"enemy stereotype" of the Serb had been dredged up from the
most belligerent German nationalism of the past. "Serbien muss
sterbien" (a play on the word sterben, to die), meaning "Serbia
must die" was a famous popular war cry of World War I. Serbs had
been singled out for slaughter during the Nazi occupation of
Yugoslavia. One would have thought that the younger generation of
Germans, seemingly so sensitive to the victims of Germany's
aggressive past, would have at least urged caution. Very few did.</flushboth>
<flushboth> On the contrary, what occurred in Germany was a strange sort
of mass transfer of Nazi identity, and guilt, to the Serbs. In the
case of the Germans, this can be seen as a comforting
psychological projection which served to give Germans a fresh and
welcome sense of innocence in the face of the new "criminal"
people, the Serbs, But the hate campaign against Serbs, started in
Germany, did not stop there. Elsewhere, the willingness to single
out one of the Yugoslav peoples as the villain calls for other
explanations.</flushboth>
<center><bold>Media Momentum</center>
<flushboth></bold> From the start, foreign reporters were better treated in
Zagreb
and in Ljubljana, whose secessionist leaders understood the prime
importance of media images in gaining international support, than
in Belgrade. The Albanian secessionists in Kosovo or
"Kosovars"<smaller>4<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
08pt</param><smaller><smaller>4<bigger>Albanians in Albania and in Yugoslavia call
themselves "Shqiptare" but recently have objected to being called that by others.
"Albanians" is an old and accepted term. Especially when addressing international
audiences in the context
of the separatist cause. Kosovo Albanians prefer to call themselves "Kosovars", which
has political implications. Logically, the term should apply to all inhabitants of the
province of Kosovo, regardless of ethnic identity, but by appropriating it for
themselves alone, the Albanian "Kosovars"
imply that Serbs and other non-Albanians are intruders. This is similar to the Muslim
parties appropriation of the term "Bosniak" which implies that the Muslim population
of Bosnia-Herzegovina is more indigenous than the Serbs and Croats, which makes no
sense, since the Bosnian Muslims are simply
Serbs and Croats who converted to Islam after the Ottoman conquest.
<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman 10pt</param><bigger>, the Croatian secessionists
and the Bosnian Muslims hired an
American public relations firm, Ruder Finn, to advance their causes
by demonizing the Serbs<smaller>5<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
08pt</param><smaller><smaller>5<bigger>The role of the Washington public relations
firm, Ruder Finn, is by now well-known, but seems to have raised few doubts as to the
accuracy of the anti-Serb propaganda it successfully diffused.<FontFamily><param>C03
Swiss Roman 10pt</param><bigger>. Ruder Finn deliberately targeted certain
publics, notably the American Jewish community, with a campaign
likening Serbs to Nazis. Feminists were also clearly targeted by
the Croatian nationalist campaign directed out of Zagreb to brand
Serbs as rapists<smaller>6<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
08pt</param><smaller><smaller>6<bigger>No one denies that many rapes occurred during
the civil war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, or that rape is a serious violation
of human rights. So is war, for that matter. From the start, however, inquiry into
rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina focused exclusively on accusations
that Serbs were raping Muslim women as part of a deliberate strategy. The most
inflated figures, freely extricated by multiplying the number of known cases by large
factors, were readily accepted by the media and international organizations. No
interest was shown in detailed and documented
reports of rapes of Serbian women by Muslims or Croats.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The late Nora Beloff, former chief political correspondent of the
"London
Observer", described her own search in verification of the rape charges in a
letter to "The Daily Telegraph" (January 19, 1993). The British Foreign Office
conceded that the rape figures being handled about were really uncorroborated
and referred her to the Danish government, then chairing the European Union.
Copenhagen agreed that the reports were unsubstantiated, but kept repeating
them. Both said that the EU has taken up the "rape atrocity" issue at its
December 1992 Edinburgh Summit exclusively on the basis of a German
initiative. In turn, Fran Wild, in charge of the Bosnian Desk in the German Foreign
Ministry, told Ms. Beloff that the material on Serb rapes came partly from the
Izetbegovic government and partly from the Catholic charity Caritas in Croatia.
No effort had been made to seek corroboration from more impartial
sources.<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman 10pt</param><bigger>.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The Yugoslav story was complicated; anti-Serb stories had the
advantage of being simple and available, and they provided an easy-
to-use moral compass by designating the bad guys.</flushboth>
<flushboth> As the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina got under way in mid-1992,
American journalists who repeated unconfirmed stories of Serbian
atrocities could count on getting published with a chance of a
Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international
reporting was shared between the two authors of the most
sensational "Serb atrocity stories" of the year: Roy Gutman of
"Newsday" and John Burns of the "New York Times". In both
cases, the prize-winning articles were based on hearsay evidence
of dubious credibility. Gutman's articles, mostly based on accounts
by Muslim refugees in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, were collected
in a book rather misleadingly entitled "A Witness to Genocide",
although in fact he had been a "witness" to nothing of the sort, His
allegations that Serbs were running "death camps" were picked up
by Ruder Finn and widely diffused, notably to Jewish organizations.
Burns's story was no more than an interview with a mentally
deranged prisoner in a Sarajevo jail, who confessed to crimes
some of which have been since proved never to have been
committed.</flushboth>
<flushboth> On the other hand, there was no market for stories by a
journalist who discovered that reported Serbian "rape camps" did
not exist (German TV reporter Martin Lettmayer), or who included
information about Muslim or Croat crimes against Serbs (Belgian
journalist Georges Berghezan for one). It became increasingly
impossible to challenge the dominant interpretation in major media.
Editors naturally prefer to keep the story simple: one villain, and as
much blood as possible. Moreover, after the German government
forced the early recognition of Slovenian and Croatian
independence, other Western powers lined up opportunistically
with the anti-Serb position. The United States soon moved
aggressively into the game by picking its own client state - Muslim
Bosnia - out of the ruins.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Foreign news has always ben much easier to distort than
domestic news. Television coverage simply makes the distortion
more convincing. TV crews sent into strange places about which
they know next to nothing, send back images of violence that give
millions of viewers the impression that "everybody knows what is
happening". Such an impression is worse than plain ignorance.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Today, worldwide media such as CNN openly put pressure on
governments to respond to the "public opinion" which the media
themselves create. Christine Amanpour tells the U.S. and the
European Union what they should be doing in Bosnia; to what
extent this is coordinated with U.S. agencies is hard to tell. Indeed,
the whole question of which tail wags the dog is wide open. Do
media manipulate government, does government manipulate media,
or are influential networks manipulating both?</flushboth>
<flushboth> Many officials of Western governments complain openly or
privately of being forced into unwise policy decisions by "the
pressure of public opinion", meaning the media. A particularly
interesting testimony in this regard is that of Otto von Habsburg,
the extremely active and influential octogenarian heir to the defunct
Austro-Hungarian Empire, today a member of the European
Parliament from Bavaria, who has taken a great and one might say
paternal interest in the cause of Croatian independence. "If
Germany recognized Slovenia and Croatia so rapidly", Habsburg
told the Bonn correspondent of the French daily "Figaro"; "even
against the will of (then German foreign minister) Hans-Dietrich
Genscher who did not want to take that step, its because the Bonn
government was subjected to an almost irresistible pressure of
public opinion. In this regard, the German press rendered a very
great service, in particular the 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung' and
Carl Gustav Strohm, that great German journalist who works for Die
Welt".</flushboth>
<flushboth> Still, the virtually universal acceptance of a one-sided view of
Yugoslavia's collapse cannot be attributed solely to political
designs or to sensationalist manipulation of the news by major
media. It also owes a great deal to the ideological uniformity
prevailing among educated liberals who have become the
consensual moral conscience in Northwestern Euro-American
society since the end of the Cold War.</flushboth>
<center><bold>Down with the State</bold></center>
<flushboth> This ideology is the expression in moralistic terms of the
dominant project for reshaping the world since the United States
emerged as sole superpower after the defeat of communism and
collapse of the Soviet Union. United States foreign policy for over a
century has been dictated by a single overriding concern: to open
world markets to American capital</flushboth>
<flushboth>and American enterprise. Today this project is triumphant as
"economic globalization". Throughout the world, government
policies are judged, approved or condemned decisively not by their
populations but by "the markets" meaning the financial markets.
Foreign investors, not domestic voters, decide policy.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The International Monetary Fund and other such agencies are
there to help governments adjust their policies and their societies
to market imperatives.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The shift of decision-making power away from elected
governments, which is an essential aspect of this particular
"economic globalization", is being accompanied by an ideological
assault on the nation-state as a political community exercising
sovereignty over a defined territory. For all its shortcomings, the
nation-state is still the political level most apt to protect citizens'
welfare and the environment from the destructive expansion of
global markets. Dismissing the nation-state as an anachronism, or
condemning it as a mere expression of "nationalist" exclusivism,
overlooks and undermines its long-standing legitimacy as the focal
point of democratic development, in which citizens can organize to
define and defend their interests.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The irony is that many well-intentioned idealists are unwittingly
helping to advance this project by eagerly promoting its moralistic
cover a theoretical global democracy that should replace attempts
to strengthen democracy at the supposedly obsolete nation-state
level.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Within the United States, the link between anti-nation-state
ideology and economic globalization is blurred by the double
standard of U.S. leaders who do not hesitate to invoke the
supremacy of U.S. "national interest" over the very international
institutions they promote in order to advance economic
globalization. This makes it seem that such international
institutions are a serious obstacle to U.S. global power rather than
its expression. However, the United States has the overall military
and political power to design and control key international
institutions (e.g., the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and the
International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia), as well as to
undermine those it dislikes (UNESCO when it was attempting to
promote liberation of media from essentially American control) or to
flout international law with impunity (notably in its Central American
"backyard"). Given the present relationship of forces, weakening
less powerful nation-states cannot strengthen international
democracy, but simply tighten the grip of transnational capital and
the criminal networks that flourish in an environment of lawless
acquisition.</flushboth>
<flushboth> There is no real contradiction between asserting the primacy of
U.S. interests and blasting the nation-state barriers that might
allow some organized defense of the interests of other peoples. But
impressed by the apparent contradiction, some American liberals
are comforted in their belief that nationalism is the number one
enemy of mankind, whereas anything that goes against it is
progressive.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Indeed, an important asset of the anti-nation-state ideology is
its powerful appeal to many liberals and progressives whose
internationalism has been disoriented by the collapse of any
discernable socialist alternative to capitalism and by the disarray of
liberation struggles in the South of the planet.</flushboth>
<flushboth> In the absence of any clear analysis of the contemporary world,
the nation-state is readily identified as the cause of war,
oppression, and violations of human rights. In short, the only
existing context for institutionalized democracy is demonized as
the mere expression of a negative, exclusive ideology,
"nationalism". This contemporary libertarian view overlooks both the
persistence of war in the absence of strong States and the historic
function of the nation-state as framework for the social pact
embodied in democratic forms of legislative decision-making.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Condemnation of the nation-state in a structuralist rather than
historical perspective produces mechanical judgments. What is
smaller than the nation-state, or what transcends the nation-state,
must be better. On the smaller scale, "identities" of all kinds, or
"regions", generally undefined, are automatically considered more
promising by much of the current generation. On the larger scale,
the hope for democracy is being transferred to the European Union,
or to international NGOs, or to theoretical institutions such as the
proposed International Criminal Court. In the enthusiasm for an
envisaged global utopia, certain crucial questions are being
neglected, notably: who will pay for all this? How? Who will enforce
which decisions? Until such practical matters are cleared up, brave
new institutions such as the I.C.C. risk being no more than further
instruments of selective intervention against weaker countries. But
the illusion persists that structures of international democracy can
be built over the heads of States that are not themselves genuinely
supportive of such democracy.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The simplistic interpretation of the Yugoslav crisis as Serbian
"aggression" against peaceful multi-cultural Europe, is virtually
unassailable, because it is not only credible according to this
ideology but seems to confirm it.</flushboth>
<flushboth> It was this ideology that made it possible for the Croatian,
Slovenian, and Albanian secessionists and their supporters in
Germany and the United States in particular to portray the
Yugoslav conflict as the struggle of "oppressed little nations" to
free themselves from aggressive Serbian nationalism. In fact, those
"little nations" were by no means oppressed in Yugoslavia.
Nowhere in the world were and are the cultural rights of national
minorities so extensively developed as in Yugoslavia (including the
small Yugoslavia made up of Serbia and Montenegro). Politically,
not only was Tito himself a Croat and his chief associate, Edvard
Kardelj, a Slovene, but a "national key" quotasystem was
rigorously applied to all top posts in the Federal Administration and
Armed Forces. The famous "self-management socialism" gave
effective control over economic enterprises to Slovenians in
Slovenia, Croatians in Croatia, and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The
economic gap between the parts of Yugoslavia which had
previously belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that is,
Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia's northern province of Vojvodina, on
the one hand, and the parts whose development had been retarded
by Ottoman rule (central Serbia, the Serbian province of Kosovo,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia) continued to widen
throughout both the first and second Yugoslavia. The secession
movement in Slovenia was a typical "secession of the rich from the
poor" (comparable to Umberto Bossi's attempt to detach rich
northern Italy form the rest of the country, in order to avoid paying
taxes for the poor South). In Croatia, this motivation was combined
with the comeback of Ustashe elements which had gone into exile
after World War II.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The nationalist pretext of "oppression" is favoured by the
economic troubles of the 1980's, which led leaders in each
Republic to shun the others, and to overlook the benefits of the
larger Federal market for all the Republics. The first and most
virulent nationalist movements arose in Croatia and Kosovo, where
separatism had been favoured by Axis occupation of the Balkans in
World War II. It is only in the 1980's that a much milder Serbian
nationalist reaction to economic troubles provided the opportunity
for all the others to pinpoint the universal scapegoat: Serbian
nationalism. Western public opinion, knowing little of Yugoslavia
and thinking in terms of analogies with more familiar situations,
readily sympathized with Slovenian and Croatian demands for
independence. In reality, international law interprets "self-
determination" as the right to secede and form an independent
State only in certain (mostly colonial) circumstances, none of
which applied to Slovenia and Croatia<smaller>7<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
08pt</param><smaller><smaller>7<bigger>See: Barbara Delcouri & Olivier Carten,
Ex-Yougoslavie: Droit International, Politique et Ideologies (Brussels: Editions
Bruylam, Editions de l'Universite de Bruxelles, 1997). The authors, specialists in
international law at the Free University of Brussels,
point out that there was no basis under international law for the secession of the
Yugoslav Republics. The principle of "self-determination" was totally inapplicable in
those cases.<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman 10pt</param><bigger>.</flushboth>
<flushboth> All these fact were ignored by international media. Appeals to
the dominant anti-State ideology led to frivolous acceptance in the
West of the very grave act of accepting the unnegotiated breakup of
an existing nation. Yugoslavia, by interpreting ethnic secession as
a proper form of "self-determination", which it is not. There is no
parallel in recent diplomatic annals for such an irresponsible act,
and as a precedent it can only promise endless bloody conflict
around the world.</flushboth>
<center><bold>The New World Order</bold> </center>
<flushboth> In fact, the break-up of Yugoslavia has served to discredit and
further weaken the United Nations, while providing a new role for an
expending NATO. Rather than strengthening international order, it
has helped shift the balance of power within the international order
toward the dominant nation - states, the United States and
Germany. If somebody had announced in 1989 that, well, the Berlin
Wall has come down, now Germany can unite and send military
forces back into Yugoslavia - and what is more in order to enforce a
partition of the country along similar lines to those it imposed when
it occupied the country in 1941 - well, quite a number of people
might have raised objections. However, that is what has happened,
and many of the very people might who have been expected to
object most strongly to what amounts to the most significant act of
historical revisionism since World War II have provided the
ideological cover and excuse.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Perhaps dazed by the end of the Cold War, much of what
remains of the left in the early nineties abandoned its critical
scrutiny of the geostrategic <underline>Realpolitik</underline> underlying great power
policies in general and U.S. policy in particular and seemed to
believe that the world henceforth was determined by purely moral
considerations. </flushboth>
<flushboth> This has much to do with the privatization of "the left" in the
past twenty years or so. The United States has led the way in this
trend. Mass movements aimed at overall political action have
declined, while single-issue movements have managed to continue.
The single-issue movements in turn engender non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) which, because of the requirements of fund-
raising, need to adapt their causes to the mood of the times, in
other words, to the dominant ideology to the media. Massive fund-
raising is easiest for victims, using appeals to sentiment rather
than to reason. Greenpeace has found that it can raise money
more easily for baby seals than for combatting the development of
nuclear weapons. This fact of life steers NGO activity in certain
directions, away from political analysis toward sentiment. On
another level, the NGOs offer idealistic internationalists a rare
opportunity to intervene all around the world in matters of human
rights and human welfare.</flushboth>
<flushboth> And herein lies a new danger. Just as the "civilizing mission" of
bringing Christianity to the heathen provided a justifying pretext for
imperialist conquest of Asia and Africa in the past, today the
protection of "human rights" may be the cloak for a new type of
imperialist military intervention worldwide.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Certainly, human rights are an essential concern of the left.
Moreover, many individuals committed to worthy causes have
turned to NGOs as the only available alternative to the decline of
mass movements - a decline over which they have no control. Even
a small NGO addressing a problem is no doubt better than nothing
at all. The point is that great vigilance is needed, in this as in all
other endeavours, to avoid letting good intentions be manipulated to
serve quite contrary purposes.</flushboth>
<flushboth> In a world now dedicated to brutal economic rivalry, where the
rich get richer and the poor get poorer, human rights abuses can
only increase. From this vast array of mans inhumanity to man,
Western media and governments are unquestionably more
concerned about human rights abuses that obstruct the penetration
of transnational capitalism, to which they are organically linked,
than about, say, the rights of Russian miners who have not been
paid for a year. Media and government selectivity not only
encourages humanitarian NGOs to follow their lead in focusing on
certain countries and certain types of abuses, the case-by-case
approach also distracts from active criticism of global economic
structures that favour the basic human rights abuse of a world split
between staggering wealth and dire poverty.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Cuba is not the only country whose "human rights" may be the
object of extraordinary concern by governments trying to replace
local rulers with more compliant defenders of transnational
interests. Such a motivation can by no means be ruled out in the
case of the campaign against Serbia. In such situations,
humanitarian NGOs risk being cast in the role of the missionaries
of the past - sincere, devoted people who need to be "protected",
this time by NATO military forces. The Somali expedition provided
a rough rehearsal (truly scandalous if examined closely) for this
scenario. On a much larger scale, first Bosnia, then Kosovo,
provide a vast experimental terrain for cooperation between NGOs
and NATO.</flushboth>
<flushboth> There is urgent need to take care to preserve genuine and
legitimate efforts on behalf of human rights from manipulation in the
service of other political ends. This is indeed a delicate challenge.</flushboth>
<center><bold>NGOs and NATO, hand in hand</center>
<flushboth> </bold>In former Yugoslavia, and especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Western NGOs have found a justifying role for themselves
alongside NATO. They gain funding and prestige from the situation.
Local employees of Western NGOs gain political and financial
advantages over other local people, and "democracy" is not the
peoples choice but whatever meets with approval of outside donors.
This breeds arrogance among the outside benefactors, and
cynicism among local people, who have the choice between
opposing the outsiders or seeking to manipulate them. It is an
unhealthy situation, and some of the most self-critical are aware of
the dangers.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Perhaps the most effectively arrogant NGO in regard to former
Yugoslavia is the Vienna office of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki.
On September 18, 1997, that organization issued a long statement
announcing in advance that the Serbian elections to be held three
days later "will be neither free nor fair." This astonishing
intervention was followed by a long list of measures that Serbia and
Yugoslavia must carry- out or else", and that the international
community must take to discipline Serbia and Yugoslavia. These
demands indicated an extremely broad interpretation of obligatory
standards of "human rights" as applied to Serbia, although not,
obviously, to everybody else, since they included new media laws
drafted "in full consultation with the independent media in
Yugoslavia" as well as permission meanwhile to all "unlicensed but
currently operating radio and television stations to broadcast
without interference"<smaller>8<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
08pt</param><smaller><smaller>8<bigger>Some 400 radio and television stations have
been operating in Yugoslavia with temporary licenses or none at all. The vast majority
are in Serbia, a country of less than ten million inhabitants on a small territory of
only 54.872 square miles.<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
10pt</param><bigger>.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Human Rights Watch/Helsinki concluded by calling on the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to
"deny Yugoslavia readmission to the OSCE until there are concrete
improvements in the country's human rights record, including
respect for freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and
minority rights, as well as cooperation with the International
Criminal Tribuna for the former Yugoslavia".</flushboth>
<flushboth> As for the demand to "respect freedom of the press," one may
wonder what measures would satisfy HRW, in light of the fact that
press freedom already exists in Serbia to an extent well beyond
that in many other countries not being served with such an
ultimatum. There exist in Serbia quite a range of media devoted to
attacking the government, not only in Serbo-Croatian, but also in
Albanian. As of one 1998, there were 2.319 print publications and
101 radio and television stations in Yugoslavia, over twice the
number that existed in 1992. Belgrade alone has 14 daily
newspapers. The state-supported national dailies have a joint
circulation of 180.000 compared to around 350.000 for seven
leading opposition dailies".</flushboth>
<flushboth> Moreover, the judiciary in Serbia is certainly no less
independent than in Croatia or Muslim Bosnia, and most certainly
much more so. As for "minority rights," it would be hard to find a
country anywhere in the world where they are better protected in
both theory and practice than in Yugoslavia<smaller>9<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss
Roman 08pt</param><smaller><smaller>9<bigger>Serbia is constitutionally defined as the
nation of all its citizens, and not "of the Serbs" (in contrast to constitutional
provisions of Croatia and Macedonia, for instance). In addition, the 1992 Constitution
of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
(Serbia and Montenegro) as well as the Serbian Constitution guarantee extensive rights
to national minorities, notably the right to education in their own mother tongue, the
right to information media in their own language, and the right to use their own
language in proceedings before a tribunal
of other authority. These rights are not merely formal, but are effectively respected
as is shown by, for instance, the satisfaction of the 400,000-strong Hungarian
minority and the large number of newspapers published by national minorities in
Albanian, Hungarian and other languages. Romani
(Gypsies) are by all accounts better treated in Yugoslavia than elsewhere in the
Balkans. Serbia has a large Muslim population of varied nationalities, including
refugees from Bosnia and a native Serb population of converts to Islam in Southeastern
Kosovo, known as Goranci, whose religious rights
are fully respected, and who have no desire to leave Serbia.<FontFamily><param>C03
Swiss Roman 10pt</param><bigger>.</flushboth>
<flushboth> For those who remember history the Human Rights
Watch/Helsinki ultimatum instantly brings to mind the ultimatum
issued by Vienna to Belgrade after the Sarajevo assassination in
1914 as a pretext for the Austrian invasion which touched off World
War I. The Serbian government gave in to all but one of the
Habsburg demands, but was invaded anyway.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The hostility of this new Vienna power, the International
Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, toward Serbia, is evident in
all its statements, and in those of its executive director Aaron
Rhodes. In a March 18, 1998, column for the International Herald
Tribune, he wrote that Albanians in Kosovo "have lived for years
under conditions similar to those suffered by Jews in Nazi-
controlled parts of Europe just before World War II. They have been
ghettoized. They are not free but politically disenfranchised and
deprived of basic civil liberties".</flushboth>
<flushboth> The comparison could hardly be more incendiary, but the
specific facts to back it up are absent. They are necessarily
absent, since the accusation is totally false. Ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo have never been "politically disenfranchised", and even
Western diplomats have at times urged them to use their right to
vote in order to deprive Milosevic of his electoral majority. But
nationalist leaders have called for a boycott of Serbian elections
since 1981 - well before Milosevic came on the scene -and ethnic
Albanians who dare take part in legal political life are subject to
intimidation and even murder by nationalist Albanian
gunmen<smaller>1<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
08pt</param><smaller><smaller>10<bigger>The March 24, 1998 report of the International
Crisis Group entitled "Kosovo Spring" notes that: "In many spheres of life, including
politics, education and health-care, the boycott of Kosovars of the Yugoslav state is
almost total".
In particular, "Kosovars refuse to participate in Serbian or Yugoslav political life.
The leading Yugoslav political parties all have offices in Kosovo and claim some
Kosovar members, but essentially they are 'Serb only' institutions. In 1997 several
Kosovars accused of collaborating with the
enemy, /i.e., the Serbian State/ were attacked, including Chamijl Gasi, head of the
Socialist Party of Serbia in Glogovac, and a deputy in the Yugoslav Assembly's House
of Citizens, who was shot and wounded in November. The lack of interest of Serb
political parties in wooing Kosovars is
understandable. Kosovars have systematically boycotted the Yugoslav and Serbian
elections since 1981, considering them events in a foreign country.</flushboth>
<flushboth> The ICG, while scarcely pro-Serb, in its conclusions, nevertheless
provides information neglected by mainstream media. This is perhaps, because the ICG
addresses its findings to high-level decision-makers who need to be in possession of a
certain number of facts, rather than to the general
public.</flushboth>
<flushboth><FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
10pt</param><bigger>0<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman 08pt</param><smaller> Gasi
was not the only target of Albanian attacks on fellow Albanians in the
Glogovac municipal district, situated in the Drenica region which the "Kosovo
Liberation Army" tried to control in early 1998. Others included forester Mujo
Sejdi, 52, killed by machine-gun fire near his home on January 12, 1998; postman
Mustafa Kurtaj, 26, killed on his way to work by a group firing automatic rifles;
factory guard Rusdi Ladrovci, ambushed and killed with automatic weapons
apparently after refusing to turn over his official arm to the KLA; among others.
On April 10, 1998, men wearing camouflage uniforms and insignia of the Army
of Albania fired automatic weapons at a passenger car carrying four ethnic
Albanian officials of the Socialist Party of Serbia including Gugna Adem,
President of the Suva Reka Municipal Board, who was gravely injured; and Ibro
Vait, member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia and President
of the SOS district board in the city of Prizren. Numerous such attacks have
been reported by the Yugoslav agency Tanjug, but Western media have shown
scant interest in the fate of ethnic Albanians willing to live with Serbs in a multi-
ethnic Serbia. <FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman 10pt</param><bigger>.</flushboth>
<flushboth> In order to gain international support, inflammatory terms such
as "ghetto" and "apartheid" are used by the very Albanian
nationalist leaders who have created the separation between
populations by leading their community to boycott all institutions of
the Serbian State in order to create a de facto secession. Not only
elections and schools, but even the public health service has been
boycotted, to the detriment of the health of Kosovo Albanians,
especially the children<smaller>1<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
08pt</param><smaller><smaller>11<bigger>In March 1990, during a regular official
vaccination program, rumours were spread that Serb health workers had poisoned over
7,000 Albanian children by injecting them with nerve gas. There was never any proof of
this, as no child was ever shown to suffer from anything
more serious than mass hysteria. This was the signal for a boycott of the Serbian
public health system. Ethnic Albanian doctors and other health workers left the
official institutions to set up a parallel system, so vastly inferior that preventable
childhood diseases reached epidemic proportions.
In September 1996, WHO and UNICEF undertook to assist the main Kosovar parallel health
system, named "Mother Theresa" after the world's most famous ethnic Albanian, a native
of Macedonia, in vaccinating 300,000 children against polio. The worldwide publicity
campaign around this large-scale
immunization program failed to point out that the same service has long been available
to those children from the official health service of Serbia, systematically boycotted
by Albanian parents. Currently, the parallel Kosovar system employs 239 general
practitioners and 140 specialists, compared
to around 2,000 physicians employed by the Serbian public health system there. Serbs
point out that many ethnic Albanians are sensible enough to turn to the government
health system when they are seriously ill. According to official figures, 64% of the
official Serb system health workers and 80%
of the patients in Kosovo are ethnic Albanians.</flushboth>
<flushboth> It is characteristic of the current age of privatization that the
"international community" is ready to ignore a functional government service and even
contribute to a politically inspired effort to bypass and ultimately destroy it. But
then, Kosovo Albanian separatists aware of the taste of the
times, like to speak of Kosovo itself as a "non-governmental organization".</flushboth>
<flushboth><FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman
10pt</param><bigger>1<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman 08pt</param><smaller>
These facts are contained in the "Kosovo Spring" report of the International
Crisis Group.<FontFamily><param>C03 Swiss Roman 10pt</param><bigger>.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Human Rights Watch blanket condemnation of a government
which like it or not was elected, in a country whose existence is
threatened by foreign-backed secessionist movements, contrasts
sharply with the traditional approach of the senior international
human rights organization, Amnesty International.</flushboth>
<flushboth> What can be considered the traditional Amnesty International
approach consists broadly in trying to encourage governments to
enact and abide by humanitarian legal standards. It does this by
calling attention to particular cases of injustice. It asks precise
questions that can be answered precisely. It tries to be fair. It is no
doubt significant that Amnesty International is a grassroots
organization, which operates under the mandate of its contributing
members, and whose rules preclude domination by any large donor.</flushboth>
<flushboth> In the case of Yugoslavia, the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki
approach differs fundamentally from that of Amnesty International in
that it clearly aims not at calling attention to specific abuses that
might be corrected, but at totally condemning the targeted State.
By the excessive nature of its accusations, it does not ally with
reformist forces in the targeted country so much as it undermines
them. Its lack of balance, its rejection of any effort at remaining
neutral between conflicting parties, encourages disintegrative
polarization rather than reconciliation and mutual understanding.
For example, in its reports on Kosovo, Amnesty International
considers reports of abuses from all sides and tries to weigh their
credibility, which is difficult but necessary, since the exaggeration
of human rights abuses against themselves is regularly employed
by Albanian nationalists in Kosovo as a means to win international
support for their secessionist cause. Human Rights Watch, in
contrast, by uncritically endorsing the most extreme anti-Serb
reports and ignoring Serbian sources, helps confirm ethnic
Albanians in their worst fantasies, while encouraging them to
demand international intervention on their behalf rather than seek
compromise and reconciliation with their Serbian neighbours. HRW
therefore contributes, deliberately or inadvertently, to a deepening
cycle of violence that eventually may justify, or require, outside
intervention.</flushboth>
<flushboth> This is an approach which like its partner, economic
globalization, breaks down the defenses and authority of weaker
States. It does not help to enforce democratic institutions at the
national level. The only democracy it reorganizes is that of the
"international community", which is summoned to act according to
the recommendations of Human Rights Watch. This "international
community", the IC, is in reality no democracy. Its decisions are
formally taken at NATO meetings. The IC is not even a
"community"; the initials could more accurately stand for
"imperialist condominium", a joint exercise of domination by the
former imperialist powers, torn apart and weakened by two World
Wars, now brought together under U.S. domination with NATO as
their military arm. Certainly there are frictions between the
members of this condominium, but so long as their rivalries can be
played out within the IC, the price will be paid by smaller and
weaker countries.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Media attention to conflicts in Yugoslavia is sporadic, dictated
by Great Power interests, lobbies, and the institutional ambitions of
"non-governmental organizations" - often linked to powerful
governments - whose competition with each other for financial
support provides motivation for exaggerating the abuses they
specialize in denouncing.</flushboth>
<flushboth> Yugoslavia, a country once known for its independent approach
to socialism and international relations, economically and
politically by far the most liberal country in Eastern Central Europe,
has already been torn apart by Western support to secessionist
movements: What is left is being further reduced to an
ungovernable chaos by a continuation of the same process. The
emerging result is not a charming bouquet of independent little
ethnic democracies, but rather a new type of joint colonial rule by
the IC enforced by NATO. ("CovertAction Quarterly", Wachington
D.C., Fall 1998.)</flushboth>
<nofill>
[PEN-L:3602] Re: Serbia Article
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Sat, 20 Feb 1999 11:25:48 -0600
