AUT: British Helsinki Human Rights Group

["Michael Pugliese" <michael098762001@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    John Laughland of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group and Neil
Clark have very similiar politics and have both written for The American
Conservative of Pat Buchanan and The Spectator.
    Both aligned w/ these currents on the left, as well...
The Left Revisionists
By Marko Attila Hoare
November 2003
http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/hoare.htm
Milosevic as martyr

Pinter has joined the â??International Committee to Defend Slobodan
Milosevicâ??, organised by Milosevicâ??s passionate admirer Jared Israel,
aimed at rescuing Milosevic from trial by the ICTY. Israel, who is reduced
to translating Milosevicâ??s speeches in an effort to prove his idol is not
a racist, represents the left revisionist in its purest form, without any
of the dissembling. According to a petition for Milosevicâ??s release from
prison issued by Israel, â??Milosevic the so-called â??ethnic cleanserâ??
preached multinational unity, not nationalist intoleranceâ??; â??Milosevic
conducted no persecution of Albanian civiliansâ??; â??The most notorious
â??atrocitiesâ?? for which Milosevic is accused never happenedâ??; â??Crimes were
committed in Yugoslavia - but not by Milosevicâ??. Not only was Milosevic
not guilty of genocide, but he was in fact a freedom fighter against US
imperialism: â??Slobodan Milosevic's real offence was that he tried to keep
the 26 nationalities that comprise Yugoslavia free from US and NATO
colonization and occupation; his nation's resources, industries, and media
 from being stolen by multinational corporations; his nation's institutions
 from being controlled by US consultants and advisers.â?? The Serbian
opposition, by contrast, were merely part of the conspiracy: â??His real
offence was to defend his nation's freedom and sovereignty from a
political â??oppositionâ?? bought and paid for by the United States and
installed into power by US specialists in psychological operations. He and
all those now under attack resisted Western colonization to the very end,
even as American naval ships waited off the coast of Yugoslavia to ensure
the â??correctâ?? results in Yugoslavia's contested elections.â??[59] Thus
Milosevic becomes a Christ-like figure; a martyr on the cross, while the
Serbian opposition to him becomes the collective Judas. Similarly, Neil
Clark in the New Statesman says of Milosevic that â??When faced with the
incessant violence of western-trained separatist groups, he had little
option but to use military means to try to prevent the break-up of his
country and to defend the Serbian and Roma people from being driven out of
the lands they had inhabited for centuries.â?? Far from being a war
criminal, Milosevic is a â??prisoner of conscienceâ?? at the ICTY whose â??worst
crime was to carry on being a socialistâ??.[60]

This sense of Milosevic as a socialist martyr and the ICTY as a form of
Inquisition permeates the thought of the left revisionists, who view him
as their man â??fighting backâ?? against the Western enemy. Milosevic,
currently threatened with life imprisonment in one of the worldâ??s most
comfortable prisons, signed the 1995 Dayton Accord that recognised the
ICTY and pledged the arrest of Bosnian Serb war criminals. That was after
his political enemy Radovan Karadzic had been indicted by the Tribunal
while Milosevic was still on friendly terms with Washington. Now that he
is in the dock himself he has decided that the ICTY is illegitimate after
all. It is not however just Milosevicâ??s hypocrisy regarding the ICTY that
is overlooked by the left revisionists, nor the fact that he is receiving
a fair trial, unlike the men of Srebrenica who were massacred without a
trial and whose rights were not championed by the left revisionists. The
latter ignore the fact that in both Serbia and Croatia the ICTY is
supported by the democrats and anti-nationalists and opposed by the
fascists and criminals. In Serbia the student movement â??Otporâ?? that
spearheaded Milosevicâ??s overthrow, and Velimir Ilic, Mayor of Cacak and
one of the organisers of the overthrow of the regime, support the ICTY
while the supporters of Milosevic and Vojislav Seselj oppose it. This may
not seem a convincing argument to the left revisionists who no doubt view
the overthrow of Milosevic as a counterrevolution, but what of the genuine
Serbian anti-fascist left that Milosevic overthrew in 1987? It is often
forgotten today that Milosevicâ??s first victims, before even the Albanians,
were Serb Communists: the supporters of Dragisa Pavlovic and Ivan
Stambolic, the latter murdered by Milosevic shortly before his overthrow.
To those Serbian Communists brave enough to oppose Milosevicâ??s
war-mongering policies and anti-Albanian chauvinism we may add Latinka
Perovic, the liberal Communist leader purged by Tito in 1972; Bogdan
Bogdanovic, former mayor of Belgrade; Draza Markovic, uncle of Milosevicâ??s
wife Mira Markovic; Milos Minic, prosecutor at the trial of Chetnik leader
Draza Mihailovic; and many others. Then there are the Serbian human rights
activists Natasa Kandic and Sonja Biserko who stood up for the rights of
the Albanians when it was most difficult. All those living support the
ICTY; none of their voices are heard by the left revisionists.

Similarly in Croatia the current, moderate regime of Stipe Mesic and Ivica
Racan has put on trial Croats guilty of killing Serbs in 1991, rejected
Croatian irredentism in Bosnia, and reaffirmed the Partisan legacy. It
supports the ICTY. So do those anti-nationalist Croats who defended the
rights of the Serb minority when it was most unpopular, such as Ivo Banac
and Ivan Zvonimir Cicak of the Croatian Helsinki Committee and the famous
satirical newspaper Feral Tribune. By contrast the Tudjmanites and
Ustashas are opposed to it and have mobilised mass demonstrations in
defence of their war criminals. Thus ironically the left revisionists who
have spent the last ten years demonising the Croats as fascists now align
themselves with the Croatian fascists and against the Croatian liberals.
But it would be wrong to suppose that the left revisionists know or care
about this; they oppose the ICTY for the sake of their own political
agenda, not for the sake of the Serbs and Croats. David Chandler, in his
negative assessment of the ICTY published in New Left Review, does not
even bother to discuss which political currents in Serbia and Croatia
support the Tribunal and which oppose it, as if the Tribunal has no
relevance to anything outside the left revisionistsâ?? anti-American
crusade.[61] So sure are they that the ICTY is part of the international
conspiracy against Europeâ??s last socialist state that they predicted
repeatedly that no Croat could possibly be indicted for crimes against
Serbs during Operation Storm in 1995, because the US supported this
Croatian military operation and surely would not let â??its ownâ?? Tribunal
indict â??its own Croatsâ??. Chomsky claimed in 2000 that â??there is little
likelihood that the Tribunal will pay attention to its 150-page
â??Indictment Operation Storm: A Prima Facie Caseâ??, reviewing the war crimes
committed by Croatian forces that drove some 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in
August 1995 with crucial US involvementâ??.[62] In May 2001 the ICTY did
indeed indict Croatian General Ante Gotovina, a former favourite of Franjo
Tudjman, for crimes against Serb civilians during Operation Storm. Two and
a half months later Seumas Milne wrote of the â??logistical US backing for
the massacres and ethnic cleansing in the Krajina region of Croatia in
1995â?? and stated confidently that â??War crimes indictments in the latter
case are, needless to say, not expectedâ??, therefore managing to predict
incorrectly something that had already happened.[63]

The bitterness of the left-revisionist campaign to deny the genocide in
the former Yugoslavia carried out by Milosevic and the Serb nationalists
reflects a neo-Stalinist determination to champion Europeâ??s last
â??socialistâ?? dictatorship against all the overwhelming evidence of its
murderous and corrupt nature. This involves deliberately disregarding the
responsibility of this regime for the destruction of Yugoslavia and
upholding its chauvinistic discourse on Croats, Muslims, and Albanians.
The left revisionists are neither progressives nor genuine
anti-imperialists. Their a-historical, anti-democratic worldview and their
refusal to condemn fascism or to stand up for the rights of its victims,
make them morally complicit in the crimes that have taken place in the
former Yugoslavia.

Marko Attila Hoare is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of History,
University of Cambridge. He is the author of a short history of the
Bosnian Army (How Bosnia Armed, Saqi Books, London, 2004). He is currently
completing a major work on the Partisan movement of resistance in
Yugoslavia during World War II.

An extended version of this article appears in the December 2003 edition
of the Journal of Genocide Research.

--
Michael Pugliese


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