The current issue of the Nation Magazine has an extraordinarily long
article titled “Western Promises” that accuses the Western imperialists
being soft on the late Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbs. It was
written by Marc Perelman, the diplomatic correspondent of the Forward, a
Jewish-American weekly in NY with historic ties to the social democratic
leadership of the ILGWU.
Perelman uses nearly 6000 words to make the case that the U.S. and
Britain “sabotaged” the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and allowed Serb criminals to go scot-free.
It relies heavily on the word of one Florence Hartmann, a Serbophobe
reporter for Le Monde in the early 1990s who became an assistant to
Carla Le Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the ICTY. Hartmann is the author
of one of those typically one-sided biographies of Slobodan Milosevic
that makes him out to be Satan’s Spawn. Perelman’s article, however,
relies heavily on her latest book titled “Paix et châtiment: Les guerres
secrètes de la politique et de la justice internationales” (Peace and
Punishment: The Secret Wars of Politics and International Justice) that
is not yet available in English.
Hartmann is even too much for Marcus Tanner, who covered Yugoslavia for
the Independent and hewed to their Serbophobe editorial position. In a
review of a collection of articles on Yugoslavia co-edited by fellow
Serbophobes Roy Gutman and David Rieff, Tanner dismissed Hartmann as an
untrustworthy crank:
Some of the articles are sermons and rants. Florence Hartmann’s
piece on Bosnia is just a series of accusations that have been bundled
together. That “Milosevic made it his mission to set Yugoslavia’s ethnic
and national groups against one another” is one of a great many “facts”
that are baldly asserted without any supporting evidence.
Why the Nation Magazine would waste 9 pages circulating ideas that
stemmed from Ms. Hartmann is somewhat beyond me, but then again they had
the “wisdom” to publish the awful Joaquin Villalobos’s attack on Hugo
Chavez.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/a-serbophobe-outburst-in-the-nation-magazine/
