DEBATE ON YUGOSLAVIA, PART I

[Borba100@xxxxxxxxxxx]

This debate has a lot of interesting stuff on Yugoslavia..

-- Jared

Debate on the Nonviolence Discussion Board -
Jared Israel and Tony Frye
The following is a debate that took place on the Internet between me and a
fellow named Tony Frye. It is intense (which makes it interesting) and rather
informative.

I'll start a little ways into the debate with my first reply to Frye, who had
objected to some things I said about Kosovo. It's all self-explanatory?

BLAME AND CONSEQUENCE
1 - Jared

In refuting my WHO'S AT FAULT IN YUGOSLAVIA? Tony Frye raises the critical
question for the antiwar movement. If we accepted Frye?s argument, that all
sides in the Balkans conflict share equal blame (e.g., the U.S., Milosevic?s
Serbia and Tudjman?s Croatia) then the passion of our opposition to U.S.
policy would necessarily cool. So let me deal with Frye's assertion, that
Serbia?s President Milosevic is the same as Croatia?s President Tudjman. Is
Frye right?

In August, 1995 the Croatian army, trained and led by a US military
subcontractor (MPRI) and using US planes to bomb and disrupt the
communications and radar of the Serbian Republic in Croatia, called Republika
Srpska Krajina (RSK), launched a massive attack on the mountainous Krajina,
where ethnic Serbs had lived for hundreds of years. The Croats swept through
UN lines, slaughtering some Czech troops and driving 250,000 Serbs, mostly
farmers, from their homes and property in five days. These refugees clogged
the roads. With scant possessions carried in every imaginable way, they
poured into the state of Serbia: men, women, children, tractors, horses;
desperate people, thirsty, hungry, no place to go, their farms burned,
looted, creating a disaster for Serbia, which had been suffering four years
under sanctions as severe as those imposed on Iraq.

About 20,000 people were slaughtered as planes strafed the roads and Croatian
troops ambushed the exhausted refugees from the side. Croatian authorities
said their boys were only firing at snipers; thus the Serbs were guilty even
of their own deaths as they fled land they had ploughed and planted long
before the United States existed, long before Germany was a national entity.
The Western media reported the whole event as interesting news; there was no
concern expressed for the Serbs, sympathy having been preempted by
demonization. For his part, President Clinton said he was not displeased.
This would simplify negotiations, he said.

Afterwards, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman went on a nationwide railroad
tour of celebration. On Aug. 26, 1995, Radio Croatia reported that he said:
"There can be no return to the past, to the times when Serbs were spreading
cancer in the heart of Croatia, a cancer that was destroying the Croatian
national being." Referring to the expulsion of the Serbs, Tudjman continued:
"So it is as if they have never lived here...They didn't even have time to
take with them their filthy money or their filthy underwear!" (See "The
Invasion of Serbian Krajina," by Gregory Elich at:
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/elich/the invasion of the serbian
krajina.htm

Concerning this event, Frye says: "Not only is Tudjman comparable to
Milosevic, they are one and the same. When the Croatian Army was ethnically
cleansing over a quarter of a million Serbs from Krajina back in 1995, there
was a noticeable silence on this from Milosevic."

Tudjman carried out the genocide; Frye says Milosevic did nothing try to stop
him. Leaving aside the factual truth of this very serious criticism of
Milosevic, how can Frye argue that failing to prevent a murder is the same as
committing one?

Frye?s second piece of evidence that Milosevic equals Tudjman is the alleged
massacre at Srebrenica. Says Frye: "There was nothing internationalist about
what happened in Srebrenica in July 1995 (though you can rest assured no
minorities were being 'pampered'), and this type of butchery perfectly
mirrors what the Croats were doing in Krajina the same year."

Here?s what the West claims happened: a group of 3-8,000 men, mostly members
of a Bosnian Islamic Fundamentalist Army which had lost a bloody offensive,
were rounded up by members of the Bosnian Serb Army and slaughtered.

If this charge were true, it would be a war crime. I am convinced it is not
true, not because all Serbs are saints, but because the evidence smells of a
different crime: fabrication. But let's put that aside for a moment and
consider Frye's argument.

The alleged crime was supposedly the work of what the Washington Post calls a
"rogue unit" of the Bosnian Serb army. This army was not under the control of
the state of Serbia, it was an army of an entirely independent state, called
Republika Srpska or RS, the Bosnian Serb Republic.

So Frye's comparison between the alleged actions of some Bosnian Serb troops
and "what the Croats were doing in Krajina the same year" is false; the
Croats in Krajina were members of the regular Army of the Croatian state.

This may seem like nit picking; it is not. Glossing over the distinction
between Serbia proper and the Bosnian Serb Republic (RS) allows the media
(and Frye) to distort the theme, so to speak, of the Serbian state.

Serbia was a Republic in Socialist Yugoslavia. 60% of its citizens are ethnic
Serbs - thus 40% are not. With 26 different ethnic groups, Serbia was by far
the most multiethnic of all the Yugoslav Republics. Today, it is the only one
that remains significantly multiethnic. (Even the refugees in Serbia are
multiethnic, including Croats, Bosnian Moslems, Kosovo Albanians, etc.) This
is no surprise because Serbia has always been the main supporter of the
Yugoslav idea of ethnic unity. Serbs made up the bulk of the Partisans who
formed the government of Socialist Yugoslavia. The multiethnic character of
Serbia is no accident; it reflects the desire of Serbs to live and work with
different nationalities. That's their cultural orientation.

Consistent with this outlook, Serbia has among the most tolerant minorities
policies in the world. Schools and media are funded by the government for 26
ethnic groups, in their own languages. Courts provide translators for nine
languages. Street signs are multi-lingual.

"Serbia" is constitutionally defined as a state of all its citizens not as a
state of the Serbs. In this it differs from other former Yugoslav republics,
for instance Croatia, which is a state of the Croats. Lumping Serbia together
with the RS (Bosnian Serb state) suggests that both are simply collections of
ethnic Serbs and implicitly supports the false notion that Serbia is racially
exclusionary in orientation.

Republika Srpska (RS), the Bosnian Serb nation, is almost entirely ethnic
Serbian. That's because RS is an artifical creation which came into existence
as a reaction to the attempt, by neo-Fascist Croation and Islamic
Fundamentalist factions in Bosnia, to artificially create a Bosnian state by
splitting Bosnia-Herzegovina off from Yugoslavia. Not wanting to be ruled by
Islamica Fundamentalists and Croatian Neo-Nazi's (would you?) the Serbian
community banded together and resisted. In this resistance they were
supported or allied with various Croats and especially non-Fundamentalist
Moslems. The Croatian/Islamic breakaway state was aided, advised and partly
led by covert government forces from the US and Germany. This was part of the
US/German effort to breakup Yugoslavia.

RS is mostly farmland because the Bosnian Serbs comprised the peasant class.
As I've said, the existence of this Serbian farmer-state was not the result
of Serbian Chauvinism, it was a defensive measure to try to avoid being
separated from Yugoslavia. The secessionists were the ones violating both
Yugoslav and international law.

Lumping Serbia and RS together encourages people to think of Serbia as a
racial, rather than a social and political entity; encourages them to think
of Serbs as people with a racial agenda.

There is a good deal of evidence that the US government loathes Serbia
because Serbia hasn't jumped on the privatization bandwagon and because
Serbia is the obstacle to the imperialist takeover of the Balkans.

But NATO can't very well tell its citizens they have to fight the Serbs
because they're an obstacle to imperialism; hence the demonization of the
Serbs as a race. In carrying out this demonization, the NATO media, not
Milosevic, sounds a lot like President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia who said,
after expelling the Serbian people from their homes in the Krajina:

Serbs were spreading cancer in the heart of Croatia, a cancer that was
destroying the Croatian national being...So it is as if they have never lived
here...They didn't even have time to take with them their filthy money or
their filthy underwear. (See Elich,
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/elich/the invasion of the serbian
krajina.htm )

The constant repetition in the media of anti-Serbian horror stories has
created an atmosphere in which people like Frye can with impunity smear "the
Serbs". If he applied this sort of collective-guilt-attack to members of an
ethnic group that had not been properly demonized, they would serve up his
insides on a plate.

Getting back to the argument that Serbia has done stuff as bad as Croatia: If
a massacre had taken place at Srebrenica it would have been a crime, but not
Milosevic's crime. And it wouldn't compare to the forced evacuation of
250,000 people from the Krajina, planned and executed by Croatia and the U.S.

But let us say I am wrong. Let us say Milosevic did control the Bosnian Serb
Army. Let us say the two events were comparable. There would still be a
problem with the Srebrenica massacre.  The problem would be: it did not
happen.

After the alleged massacre, the media talked about "satellite photos of mass
graves". This convinced most people the story was true. But the photos
"somehow got lost in the CIA-State Department-Pentagon-White House
bureaucratic labyrinth." (Washington Post, 10/29/95) And no evidence has been
produced, other than these non-existent photos.

George Pumphrey has written an excellent refutation of the Srebrenica story.
It's at http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/ pumphrey/Srebrenica.htm
Check it out.

By the way, speaking of the Croatian/Serbian comparison, Croatian Pres.
Tudjman wrote a book, "Wastelands," which can be skimmed at:
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/Tudjman.html

Tudjman says: Jewish thinking created the holocaust; Jews did the killing in
the WW II death camps; they were motivated by greed; the Croatian Ustashe
guards were just observers. Tudjman's neo-Ustashe movement has created a
chilling imitation of the W.W.II Croatian state. [In W.W.II,
clerical-fascists set up the first Independent State of Croatia. It was run
by Catholic priests with strong ties to the Fascists, especially Mussolini.
They actually blessed the killing of Serbs, Jews, Roma ("Gypsies"), leftists
and other unacceptables. They killed so brutally even the German Nazis were
shocked.]

When Tudjman resurrected Independent Croatia eight years ago, he chose the
same flag as the WWII State of Croatia, the same currency, the same army
uniforms, even the same Fascist salute. Croatian streets have been renamed
after Ustashe leaders. The monster Archbishop, Stepinac, responsible for the
deaths of hundreds of thousands, was beatified (a step in Sainthood) in a
ceremony led by the Pope and hosted by Tudjman. A total of 600,000 Serbs were
driven out. Jews were terrorized.

None of this happened in Serbia. Serbia has no fascist government propaganda.
Serbia is the only part of the former Yugoslavia that has accepted hundreds
of thousands of refugees of all nationalities. Croatia is defined
constitutionally as a state of the Croats; Serbia is defined constitutionally
as a state of all its citizens, of whatever ethnicity. I'm not saying these
things because I'm pro-Serbian. I'm defending Serbia against a campaign of
outrageous lies for the same reason I defend Black Americans against a
campaign of outrageous lies: because I loathe racism.

The current US claims of genocide in Kosovo are unsupported except by NATO's
media machine; density of misinformation replaces evidence, as with Frye.
Most of the 400 villages burned by evil Serbs as of the NATO Press Conference
on 4/16 were miraculously resurrected within a day, thus outdoing Jesus:
NATO's 4/17 briefing dropped the number to 18. And even then what was the
evidence? What was the evidence of the "18 burned villages"? A satellite
photo in which, according to the NATO general at the press conference, "Da
white stuff dat you see is da burning." Nothing like solid proof. Was it a
photo of a building hit by Humanitarian Missiles? Was it really in Kosovo?
Was it maybe in New Jersey? Was it my aunt Sarah's chest x-ray? Perhaps if
you'd turn it upside down it might be easier to see...

Demonization accompanies genocide; that was the game-plan in the destruction
of Native American society, that was the game plan in the enslavement of
Black Africans and that remains the game-plan in post-Slavery America to this
very day and that is the game plan against the Serbs and Roma ("Gypsies") in
the Balkans. It's all linked to geopolitics. Geopolitics means theft: he
who's land and labor they would steal, they first make unclean.

"They didn't have time to take their dirty underwear and their dirty money."

The Krajina is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Genocide is profitable.

These lies are sent to test us.

BLAME & CONSEQUENCE
2 - FRYE REPLIES

Demonization? Here you are rationalizing the slaughter of Srebrenica
civilians based on some myth of the Bosnian army being a bunch of
fundamentalists. If you want to see fundamentalists, go to Afghanistan. This
is nothing more than ethno-revisionism, plain and simple. If one wanted to
measure the religiosity of people in the Balkans, the Croats and Serbs would
typically be judged as if not more religious than the Bosnian Muslims. If
this isn't religious bigotry, I don't know what is. This is like Pope Urban
II rationalizing the Christian slaughter of Jerusalem's non-Christian
population, including little babies, on account that they were the Infidel,
and deserved to die.

On your denial over Srebrenica, not only is there no "myth" to de-bunk, much
like your purposeful misrepresentations that the US favored the recognition
of Croatia, Srebrenica was a case where the killing occurred in broad
daylight in front of UN soldiers and American satellites. At this point, I
have to ask, if you can rationalize shooting people in the heads and burying
them in mass graves on account of them supposedly being fundamentalists,
could you personally partake in this kind of conduct?

As for saying that all sides are equally to blame for Yugoslavia, if such
things were based on proportionality, it would be no contest: Serb
nationalism helped create the conditions for the break-up Yugoslavia, helped
legitimize Croat nationalism, whose subsequent success was a response to the
ethnic cleansing of the Yugoslav JNA, and it was the JNA and the Bosnian Serb
paramilitaries that were responsible for the vast majority of the crimes and
killings in the formerly unified Yugoslavia. Those weren't "fundamentalist"
Bosnian Muslims running those rape camps (raping on upwards of 20,000 women
according to the UN), but the Bosnian Serbs who were committing these acts.
Then again, like some Balkans version of David Irving, I'm certain you think
the UN is in on some anti-Serb conspiracy here too, and that the rape camps
are all myths, that it never happened, and that even if it did the other side
were fundamentalists. This is starting to sound familiar. It sounds eerily
the same rationalizations used by Germans at the end of WWII. Once you can
rationalize killing people, there is absolutely no end in sight the level of
butchery people can sink themselves to. You can rape them, shoot them, gas
them, incinerate them, dismember them, chop them, bury them, bomb them, claim
their deaths were an "accident," delude yourself into thinking they never
died, or that they did then they had it coming. It is the evil of those who
think their right to live means that others must die. For that, the sinking
of people to accept the use of military force, all sides are to blame.

BLAME AND CONSEQUENCE
3 - JARED

Tony is hysterical. Is he unused to having his Serbophobia challenged?

E.g., he says: " Demonization? Here you are rationalizing the slaughter of
Srebrenica civilians based on some myth of the Bosnian army being a bunch of
fundamentalists." Has Serbophobia rendered Tony immune to the printed word?
What part of "if there had been a massacre it would have been a crime, but
there was no massacre" does he not understand? Pumphrey proves it's a myth.
(Like the Iraqi incubator babies.) Pumphrey can still be found at

http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/pumphrey/Srebrenica.htm Read, Mr.
Frye.

My reason for labeling the Bosnian Army that attacked Srebrenica "Islamic
Fundamentalist" was not to justify atrocities but to communicate a fact. The
Moslems in Bosnia were split and still are. The faction led by Bosnian
President Izetbegovic, which took power illegally, is Islamic Fundamentalist.
The non-fundamentalists fought alongside the Serbs. (Interestingly, the press
described Izetbegovic's Fundamentalists as the "Bosnian government" and the
non-fundamentalists, who had won the election but were forced out as the
rebels.

Serbs and secular Moslems are wise to resist rule by Islamic Fundamentalists.
These people including Izetbegovic, worked with the Nazi?s, forming 2 SS
divisions, and slaughtered the usual "inferior" people and also non-fascist
Moslems.

The media portrayal of the Bosnian Moslem regime as liberal is amazing.
Please read this excerpt from "The Islamic Declaration" ("Islamska
deklaracija") written by Bosnian Pres. Izetbegovic:

"... The first and foremost of such conclusions is surely the one on the
incompatibility of Islam and non-Islamic systems. There can be no peace or
coexistence between the "Islamic faith" and non-Islamic societies and
political institutions. ... Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility
of activity of any strange ideology on its own turf. Therefore, there is no
question of any laicistic principles, and the state should be an expression
and should support the moral concepts of the religion. ..." (p. 22)

Iran supplied arms to Izetbegovic and trainers in terrorism, all with U.S.
approval. It?s documented. You can read more of Izetbegovic's book at:

http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/alija.html

Most of the rest of Tony?s rebuttal is rant. E.g., he repeats the discredited
claim that Bosnian Serbs systematically raped Moslem women. Rape is monstrous
and its cheap propaganda use by these Serbophobes to slander one of the great
victims of the Holocaust when hundreds of thousands of Serbian women were
raped and then slaughtered by Nazi proxies -- including Izetbegovic's friends
-- this is despicable.

Diana Johnstone, former press secretary of the Greens in the Euro Parliament,
wrote an article last fall. (If you want to read the article, please email
me.) Here's a quote on the Bosnian rape issue:

"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 extrapolated 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. The late Nora Beloff, former chief political correspondent of the
London Observer, described her own search for 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 bandied about were
totally 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 had 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 cam 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. Despite the absence of solid and
comprehensive information, a cottage industry has since developed around the
theme. See: Norma von Ragenfeld-Feldman, "The Victimization of Women: Rape
and the Reporting of Rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1993," Dialogue
(Paris), No. 21, March 1997; and Diana Johnstone, "Selective Justice in The
Hague," The Nation, Sept. 22, 1997, pp. 16-21."


CONTINUED