Informazione
Subject: Why we still need to be anti-imperialists, by Jean Bricmont
[fwd]
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 16:34:56 +0200
From: hde_tollenaere
Why we still need to be anti-imperialists
by Jean Bricmont [Belgian philosopher]
Why we still need to be anti-imperialists...
It seems evident, from the attitude of the capitalist
world to Soviet Russia, of the Entente to the
Central Empires, and of England to Ireland and
India, that there is no depth of cruelty, perfidy or
brutality from which the present holders of power
will shrink when they feel themselves threatened.
If, in order to oust them, nothing short of
religious fanaticism will serve, it is they who are
the prime sources of the resultant evil - To make
the transition with a minimum of bloodshed, with a
maximum of preservation of whatever has value in our
existing civilization is a difficult problem - I
wish I could think that its solution would be
facilitated by some slight degree of moderation and
humane feeling on the part of those who enjoy unjust
privileges in the world as it is.
Bertrand Russell
During recent years, there has been a rebirth of a
global challenge to the existing socio-economic
order, challenge that had almost completely
disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This
movement is still weak, both materially and
ideologically. I want to argue here that one of its
weaknesses is that insufficient attention is paid to
the military aspects of the uneven relations that
are criticized at the economic level. This
weakness is itself in part due to the ideological
framework within which the discourse about human
rights takes place.
I shall first review briefly an historical precedent to
the present "war on terrorism", namely the Cold
War. I shall argue that the way it is presented,
also within most of the left, reflects the
ideological prejudices of the dominant powers. Then,
I'll discuss some frequent delusions in the left
about power, war and human rights. Some of this part
will be polemical; but it is a fact that the recent
wars, specially the Kosovo one, were supported to a
surprising extent by liberals and leftists and
that the opposition to them by "revolutionaries" or
"radicals" has been extraordinarily weak . In the
concluding section, I shall try to make some
constructive suggestions.
1.The cold war as reality and as fiction.
At the beginning of the Cold War, George Kennan, who
was then heading the State Department policy
planning staff, outlined what was to be the
effective guidelines of U.S. policy in the coming
years:
We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3%
of its population... In this situation, we cannot
fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our
real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern
of relationships which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity... We need not deceive
ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of
altruism and world-benefaction...We should cease to
talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as
human rights, the raising of living standards and
democratization. The day is not far off when we are
going to have to deal in straight power concepts.
The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans,
the better .
The way this " pattern of relationships" has been set
up was essentially to "kill hope", as William Blum
puts it . Namely, destroy any hope of an independent
development that would allow the Third World to
"divert" its natural and human resources towards the
need of the poor majority of its population. This
can also be called the "rotten apple" theory . Any
country, specially a poor one, that manages to escape
from the global domination system poses the "threat
of the good example": it might be imitated by
others, more important countries. That is why countries
that are by themselves economically marginal, like
Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua or even tiny Grenada have
to be dealt with in one of two ways: either by
imposing, through subversion and warfare, a government
favorable to Western interests or by destroying
them sufficiently so that any alternative
development path that they might follow will be too
harsh to be attractive.
It might be added that this has been the strategy of
the powerful for a long time, including vis-a-vis
the Paris Commune, the Russian revolution
or the Spanish one. Neither the phenomenon of
"Leninism" nor similar tendencies among Third World
nationalists can possibly be understood if one
fails to take into account the fact that their
authoritarianism derives in large part from a
desire to avoid the fate of the Paris Commune and of
other more democratic attempts at social change or
simply to try to preserve a minimal form of national
independence in the face of formidable threats.
That the Leninist path also led to failure does not
imply that the problem it tried to solve does not
exist.
It would take too long to review here the long series
of coups, invasions, support for brutal
dictatorships, and boycotts/sanctions made by the
United States during the so-called Cold War. But
it is worthwhile to give some examples of what one
may call the mentality of the planners, i.e. of
intellectuals, bureaucrats, lawyers working for the US
government or its allies or strongly supporting tem,
especially when we hear that, at the beginning of
its war against Afghanistan, the United States
ordered Pakistan to close its borders with
Afghanistan, through which most food aid was
passing, or when we are told, in regard to the
forthcoming war with Iraq, that defeat for the
United States is not an option.
Consider first the following advice, given during the
Vietnam war, in 1966, and which can be found in
Pentagon Papers :
Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not
only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion
abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk
of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union.
Destruction of locks and dams, however -- if handled
right -- might (perhaps after the next Pause) offer
promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does
not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice,
it leads after time to widespread starvation (more
than a million?) unless food is provided -- which we
could offer "at the conference table".
And the now universally famous Samuel Huntington wrote
around that time that the Vietcong is "a powerful
force which cannot be dislodged from its
constituency so long as the constituency continues to
exist." And to solve that problem, he was urging
the "direct application of mechanical and
conventional power... on such a massive scale as to
produce a massive migration from countryside to
city" . This idea was adopted as the "forced
urbanization" policy.
Turning to war in Afghanistan, we learn that:
Indeed, the war has been a near-perfect laboratory,
according to Michael Vickers, a military analyst at
the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments,
a defense think tank. Vickers, a former Army officer
and CIA operative, said the success came because the
al Qaeda network and the Taliban government
sheltering it were overmatched opponents. "When
great powers fight smaller wars -- precursor wars in
between the old military world and the new military
world -- you can experiment more because there's
no doubt you're going to win," he said. "You
experiment, and there is real feedback. You don't
get that very much in the military." "This was a new
way of war, a new operational concept," Vickers
said. "And it was a pretty significant innovation,
because we got fairly rapid regime change with it.
This wasn't on the shelf. This was the way we planned
to overthrow governments."
In a recently released pamphlet of the British Foreign
Policy Centre, Robert Cooper, an advisor of Tony
Blair who represented the British government at the
Bonn talks that produced the interim Hamid Karzai
administration in Afghanistan, calls for a "defensive
imperialism" and for Western countries to deal
with "old-fashioned states outside the postmodern
continent of Europe with the rougher methods of an
earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception,
whatever is necessary to deal with those who still
live in the nineteenth century..."
Finally, here is the advice about Palestine given by a
prominent US lawyer:
"Israel should announce an immediate unilateral
cessation in retaliation against terrorist attacks.
This moratorium would be in effect for a short
period, say four or five days, to give the Palestinian
leadership an opportunity to respond to the new
policy. It would also make it clear to the world
that Israel is taking an important step in ending what
has become a cycle of violence.
Following the end of the moratorium, Israel would
institute the following new policy if Palestinian
terrorism were to resume. It will announce precisely
what it will do in response to the next act of
terrorism. For example, it could announce the first
act of terrorism following the moratorium will
result in the destruction of a small village which has
been used as a base for terrorist operations. The
residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then
troops will come in and bulldoze all of the
buildings.
The response will be automatic. The order will have
been given in advance of the terrorist attacks and
there will be no discretion. The point is to make
the automatic destruction of the village the fault of
the Palestinian terrorists who had advance
warnings of the specific consequences of their
action. The soldiers would simply be acting as the
means for carrying out a previously announced
policy of retaliation against a designated target.
Further acts of terrorism would trigger further
destruction of specifically named locations. The
"waiting list" targets would be made public and
circulated throughout the Palestinian-controlled
areas."
What is truly frightening about those cynical and
aggressive statements (and the many similar ones
that could be quoted) is that they come from people
advising or praising governments that enjoy an almost
complete monopoly of weapons of mass destruction,
are supported by the major world news media and
control fairly obedient domestic populations.
It is also important to refute the standard excuse for
support of regimes of terror given by
pro-intervention intellectuals, namely that all this
was the result of "excesses" in the otherwise
noble pursuit of "fighting communism". Had this been
the case, why not support reformist regimes as an
effective bulwark against truly communist ones? Arbenz,
Mossadegh, Lumumba, Allende or Goulart were in no
sense communists. Nor were the Arab and African
nationalists that the United States opposed either in
their struggle against Zionism or against Apartheid.
Also, why continue similar "excesses", such as years
of bombing Iraq, long after the collapse of the
Soviet Union? Observe also that, contrary to what is
commonly said, the United States did not entirely
"lose" the Vietnam War. It did indeed fail to
achieve its maximal objective of imposing its own
client regime in South Vietnam. But, through
massive bombings and defoliation, it did manage to
destroy the material basis of any successful
alternative development able to serve as a model.
However, the partial defeat in Vietnam and the horrors
of that war led many people to question the
legitimacy of U.S. domination over the world. A
counteroffensive was needed to recover the initiative
at the level of rhetoric and image. The instrument
for this was the human rights ideology proclaimed by
President Carter (1976-1980). The basic tenet of
this ideology can be stated quite simply: since
human and democratic rights are better respected,
in general, in the West than in other countries, it
is our right, indeed our duty, to intervene, if
necessary by military means, in order to enforce the
respect for those rights abroad. The basic fallacy
of this ideology should be obvious: the fact that a
particular society is internally democratic in no
way implies that it will have an altruistic attitude
towards the rest of the world. To take an extreme case,
consider Israel; there is no doubt that it is
internally more democratic towards its own
citizens, at least the Jewish ones, than most Arab
states.
But that does not imply, to put it mildly, that it can
be relied upon to defend the human rights of Arabs
in Palestine, Lebanon or elsewhere. Likewise, the
Greek cities were democratic for their citizens, and
used slave labor. Similar remarks can be made about
European colonialism, which, incidentally, was
also often justified in the name of "human rights" .
For the Vietnamese bombed by the United States or
the Iraqis dying from the embargo, the fact that the
United States is a "free country" with a "free
press" does them little good so long as the press
remains silent and the population reacts with simple
patriotism or indifference. The U.S. press did
finally criticize the Vietnam war when the elite
concluded that the war had became too costly to
the United States. That contrasts with the media
silence over the slow extermination of the Iraqis,
which costs nothing in terms of U.S. casualties or
political protest at home.
The human rights ideology, as used by the United States
and its Western supporters, rests on an extremely
selective reading of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. Only the sections on Civil and
Political Rights are referred to, and even these are
interpreted according to double standards . Take
Article 14 that grants the right to seek asylum
abroad from persecution. Its implementation is
extraordinarily politicized by the United States:
out of more that 24,000 Haitians intercepted by U.S.
forces from 1981 through 1990, 11 were granted
asylum, in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000
Cubans. Or consider Article 13, granting the right to
leave any country, including one's own. During the
Cold War, the United States refused to grant
passports to U.S. citizens such as the famous singer
Paul Robeson, who had the effrontery to be both
black and communist.
This right to leave was however constantly invoked with
great passion against the refusal by the Soviet
Union to allow Jews to emigrate. But the end of
Article 13, which adds "and to return to his country"
is ignored. No wonder; the day after the Universal
Declaration was ratified, the United Nations passed
Resolution 194, which affirms the right of Palestinians
to return to their homes (or to receive
compensations).
The declaration also contains Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights, including a right to health care,
social security and adequate standard of living
(Article 25). Whatever one thinks of those rights, they
are part of the Declaration and have the same
status for the signatories as any other part of the
Universal Declaration. Nevertheless, the President
Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, could call them a "letter to Santa
Claus" without provoking much reaction. (This is in
itself an interesting example of 'relativism' -
just think of the reactions in the West if some
Third World leader called the first part a "letter to
Santa Claus").
In the West, the Civil Rights part of the Universal
Declaration is held to have absolute priority over
the Economic and Social parts. In case this seems an
obvious priority, imagine being one of those two or
three billion people (about half of mankind) who
have to survive on more or less two dollars a day.
How would you weigh Cuban efforts to maintain public
health, education and availability of basic
necessities for the poor in comparison to the
limitations imposed on civil liberties? These efforts
continued long after Cuba was no longer being
'subsidized' by the Soviet Union -- and while it was
suffering from a very severe embargo as well as from
numerous acts of sabotage caused by the single
superpower, forcing the Cuban government to divert
resources to defense, counter-spying, etc.
Considering the relationship of forces, if Cuba
introduced liberal democracy as demanded by the
United States, one could expect the Cuban emigre-lobby
in the United States, backed by Washington, to
bribe politicians, finance media and subvert the new
"democratic process" to ensure the takeover by a
pro-U.S. regime that would adopt neo-liberal
"reforms" putting an end to the existing social
benefits. This does not mean that socio-economic
rights should be used to justify the abandonment of
civil liberties. All such rights should be part of a
just society. But given the world relationship of
forces, the constant exclusive emphasis on
political rights by the rich countries must be seen as
self-serving and therefore not a valid promotion of
universal values.
The following comments, taken from the Jesuit
Salvadorian journal 'Processo', illustrate nicely
the double standards of the U.S. human rights
discourse: If Lech Walesa had been doing his organizing
work in El Salvador, he would have already entered
into the ranks of the disappeared - at the hand of
'heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes'; or
have been blown to pieces in a dynamite attack on
his union headquarters. If Alexander Dubcek were a
politician in our country, he would have been
assassinated like Hector Oqueli [the social democratic
leader assassinated in Guatemala, by Salvadorian death
squads, according to the Guatemalan government]. If
Andrei Sakharov had worked here in favour of human
rights, he would have met the same fate as Herbert
Anaya [one of the many murdered leaders of the
independent Salvadorian Human Rights Commission CDHES].
If Ota-Sik or Vaclav Havel had been carrying out their
intellectual work in El Salvador, they would have been
found one sinister morning, lying on the patio of a
university campus with their heads destroyed by the
bullets of an elite army battalion.
Another striking example of double standards was
attested by no less than Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
recipient of the highest award bestowed by
International League for the Rights of Man. In 1975,
the newly independent ex-Portuguese colony of East
Timor was invaded by Indonesia, a regional client of
the United States, which supplied most of its weapons.
The United Nations failed to come to the aid of
the East Timorese, thanks to Moynihan, who was
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time and
who proudly recalled in his memoirs:
The Department of State desired that the United Nations
prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it
undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried
it forward with no inconsiderable success.
Moynihan even cited figures showing that the Indonesian
invasion killed "10 percent of the population,
almost the proportion of casualties experienced by
the Soviet Union during the Second World War." Along
with Huntington and several U.S. theologians,
Moynihan is one of the 60 signers of the "letter
from America" sent to European newspapers exalting the
U.S. assault on Afghanistan as part of a "Just War".
The human rights policy also signaled a change of
operational tactics. During the Vietnam war period,
there was much talk about "nation building",
meaning building strong anticommunist states in the
Third World.
The United States drew the lesson from Vietnam that it
was easier to destroy an unfriendly state that to
build a friendly one. The Islamic fundamentalists in
Afghanistan, the contras and the Miskitos Indians in
Nicaragua, Savimbi in Angola, the UCK in Kosovo, most
of the separatist forces in the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia (and probably now in China), have been
supported by the United States in what one might call
an enterprise of state deconstruction. This has
the added advantage of provoking less opposition
among liberals and leftists, given the latter's
prejudice in favor of whoever appears to be the
underdog, whether guerrillas versus a regular army,
traditional societies versus a modern state, or
ethnic minorities versus democratic majorities.
In the end, the Cold War was quite similar to the
present "war on terrorism": a continuation of
centuries of domination by the advanced industrial
powers of the rest of the world, ensuring popular
support at home thanks to a clever and scary
rhetoric. Of course, there was a real conflict, as
there is now. But, then as now, the relationship of
forces was enormously unequal, the response
totally disproportionate to the actual dangers, and
the real goals, although concealed, not hard to figure
out.
2. Good and Bad Arguments
Perhaps the most striking success of our ideological
system is the extent to which its assumptions are
shared by critics on the left, even honest ones. To
take one example, consider the widely shared
expectation that a "peace dividend" would follow the
demise of the Warsaw Pact. This was about as
realistic as expecting Genghis Khan to stop half way
through his conquests. In reality, the victors (NATO
and the United States) immediately started to
expand and seek fresh justifications for their
aggressive military posture. This mirage, as well as
similar confusions concerning later operations
against Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan, show that
we urgently need to clarify our thinking about the
basis of our objections to Western aggression, and
to its apologists. This is necessary even, or
especially, when aggressive interventions are
successful, and when the declared targets are
individuals such as Saddam Hussein, Milosevic or bin
Laden who, leftists are persuaded, are not "our kind of
guys".
The reincarnations of Hitler
The main argument used by the pro-war party to
intimidate its opponents is extraordinarily
simple: we are always confronted by the latest form
of fascism. Saddam is Hitler, Milosevic is Hitler,
bin Laden is Hitler, as were Nasser or Arafat before
them. We (the West) should therefore intervene to
liberate poor and oppressed people -- Kosovar Albanians
or Afghan women, considered more or less the
present-day equivalent of the Jews in Nazi-dominated
Europe . Left alone, our governments and public opinion
are too selfish, uninformed and indifferent to
human suffering. Therefore, the role of
intellectuals is to arouse public opinion and to put
pressure on the governments so that they dare commit
themselves more actively to the defense of our
values. Note in passing that, for many of those
intellectuals, whom one might call the humanitarian
warriors , doing business is morally dubious (it may
lead to all kinds of compromises with dictatorships)
while waging war, or at the very least imposing
trade sanctions, is the really noble thing to do.
For classical liberals, it was the other way
around: wars were seen to strengthen states, their
armies, police and bureaucracies, while commerce
promoted human exchanges and better mutual
understanding. Note also that the fact that the United
States usually refuses to negotiate with its
enemies (e.g., imposition of unacceptable conditions
on the Serbs in Rambouillet, refusal even to
consider legal extradition proceedings for bin Laden)
is not an effective argument against such
intellectuals. Their view is that we should seize
every opportunity to wage wars that can topple
dictatorships and brutal regimes, in order to spread
democracy and respect for human rights. Nor is
there any point in complaining about the "collateral
damage" of Western aggressions. The humanitarian
warriors can always cite the "greater good" obtained
by imposing liberal regimes. For them, the great good
fortune of our time is that overwhelming military
force is in the hand of powers, like the United
States, committed to the defense of liberal values. The
only problem is the reluctance of the general
public, sometimes influenced by the left, to let
their governments commit themselves even more actively
to that just struggle. That is why, as Christopher
Hitchens put it, Osama bin Laden "saved us". By
provoking the United States, he forced its leaders
into a fight that, otherwise, they might not have had
the guts to lead. We can be sure that whatever
countries will be targeted by the United States in
the future, the humanitarian warriors will applaud,
even if no evidence whatsoever links them to
"terrorism". Such countries are likely to qualify
as brutal dictatorships, and such he main targets of
the Western "defenders of human rights".
Munich for ever
The inevitable companion of the "new Hitlers" discourse
is stigmatization of critics as the new Chamberlains
and Daladiers playing into their hands. This is
done without recalling what "Munich" was all about.
There was a part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland,
with a predominantly German population that wanted
to be part of Germany; its annexation by Germany was
accepted at Munich by Britain and France. That sent
a message to the main rising power of the time that
international law didn't matter and that it could do
as it pleased. And it is now understood, rightly, that
this was sending the wrong signal to Hitler. But
what about the right of self-determination of the
Sudeten? What would our pro-intervention left have
said at that time? The case of Kosovo quickly comes to
mind. There, a majority of the population wanted
to be detached from Yugoslavia and become part of
what one might call Natoland. And the major power of
our time used that opportunity to brush aside
international law. Future historians may well
identify the aggression against Yugoslavia as a major
turning point in a new form of imperial reconquest
of the world. And who were the real Chamberlains at
that time may have to be reevaluated. As noted above,
the fact that the United States is not at all
similar to Nazi Germany internally implies less than
what is usually supposed for the fate of the people
on the wrong side of the guns.
Before indicating how I think one should respond to the
apologists for "just" wars, I will discuss a certain
number of arguments frequently used by people who
oppose Western aggressions but that should be avoided
as counterproductive.
(1 of 2 - follows)
[fwd]
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 16:34:56 +0200
From: hde_tollenaere
Why we still need to be anti-imperialists
by Jean Bricmont [Belgian philosopher]
Why we still need to be anti-imperialists...
It seems evident, from the attitude of the capitalist
world to Soviet Russia, of the Entente to the
Central Empires, and of England to Ireland and
India, that there is no depth of cruelty, perfidy or
brutality from which the present holders of power
will shrink when they feel themselves threatened.
If, in order to oust them, nothing short of
religious fanaticism will serve, it is they who are
the prime sources of the resultant evil - To make
the transition with a minimum of bloodshed, with a
maximum of preservation of whatever has value in our
existing civilization is a difficult problem - I
wish I could think that its solution would be
facilitated by some slight degree of moderation and
humane feeling on the part of those who enjoy unjust
privileges in the world as it is.
Bertrand Russell
During recent years, there has been a rebirth of a
global challenge to the existing socio-economic
order, challenge that had almost completely
disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This
movement is still weak, both materially and
ideologically. I want to argue here that one of its
weaknesses is that insufficient attention is paid to
the military aspects of the uneven relations that
are criticized at the economic level. This
weakness is itself in part due to the ideological
framework within which the discourse about human
rights takes place.
I shall first review briefly an historical precedent to
the present "war on terrorism", namely the Cold
War. I shall argue that the way it is presented,
also within most of the left, reflects the
ideological prejudices of the dominant powers. Then,
I'll discuss some frequent delusions in the left
about power, war and human rights. Some of this part
will be polemical; but it is a fact that the recent
wars, specially the Kosovo one, were supported to a
surprising extent by liberals and leftists and
that the opposition to them by "revolutionaries" or
"radicals" has been extraordinarily weak . In the
concluding section, I shall try to make some
constructive suggestions.
1.The cold war as reality and as fiction.
At the beginning of the Cold War, George Kennan, who
was then heading the State Department policy
planning staff, outlined what was to be the
effective guidelines of U.S. policy in the coming
years:
We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3%
of its population... In this situation, we cannot
fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our
real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern
of relationships which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity... We need not deceive
ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of
altruism and world-benefaction...We should cease to
talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as
human rights, the raising of living standards and
democratization. The day is not far off when we are
going to have to deal in straight power concepts.
The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans,
the better .
The way this " pattern of relationships" has been set
up was essentially to "kill hope", as William Blum
puts it . Namely, destroy any hope of an independent
development that would allow the Third World to
"divert" its natural and human resources towards the
need of the poor majority of its population. This
can also be called the "rotten apple" theory . Any
country, specially a poor one, that manages to escape
from the global domination system poses the "threat
of the good example": it might be imitated by
others, more important countries. That is why countries
that are by themselves economically marginal, like
Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua or even tiny Grenada have
to be dealt with in one of two ways: either by
imposing, through subversion and warfare, a government
favorable to Western interests or by destroying
them sufficiently so that any alternative
development path that they might follow will be too
harsh to be attractive.
It might be added that this has been the strategy of
the powerful for a long time, including vis-a-vis
the Paris Commune, the Russian revolution
or the Spanish one. Neither the phenomenon of
"Leninism" nor similar tendencies among Third World
nationalists can possibly be understood if one
fails to take into account the fact that their
authoritarianism derives in large part from a
desire to avoid the fate of the Paris Commune and of
other more democratic attempts at social change or
simply to try to preserve a minimal form of national
independence in the face of formidable threats.
That the Leninist path also led to failure does not
imply that the problem it tried to solve does not
exist.
It would take too long to review here the long series
of coups, invasions, support for brutal
dictatorships, and boycotts/sanctions made by the
United States during the so-called Cold War. But
it is worthwhile to give some examples of what one
may call the mentality of the planners, i.e. of
intellectuals, bureaucrats, lawyers working for the US
government or its allies or strongly supporting tem,
especially when we hear that, at the beginning of
its war against Afghanistan, the United States
ordered Pakistan to close its borders with
Afghanistan, through which most food aid was
passing, or when we are told, in regard to the
forthcoming war with Iraq, that defeat for the
United States is not an option.
Consider first the following advice, given during the
Vietnam war, in 1966, and which can be found in
Pentagon Papers :
Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not
only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion
abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk
of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union.
Destruction of locks and dams, however -- if handled
right -- might (perhaps after the next Pause) offer
promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does
not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice,
it leads after time to widespread starvation (more
than a million?) unless food is provided -- which we
could offer "at the conference table".
And the now universally famous Samuel Huntington wrote
around that time that the Vietcong is "a powerful
force which cannot be dislodged from its
constituency so long as the constituency continues to
exist." And to solve that problem, he was urging
the "direct application of mechanical and
conventional power... on such a massive scale as to
produce a massive migration from countryside to
city" . This idea was adopted as the "forced
urbanization" policy.
Turning to war in Afghanistan, we learn that:
Indeed, the war has been a near-perfect laboratory,
according to Michael Vickers, a military analyst at
the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments,
a defense think tank. Vickers, a former Army officer
and CIA operative, said the success came because the
al Qaeda network and the Taliban government
sheltering it were overmatched opponents. "When
great powers fight smaller wars -- precursor wars in
between the old military world and the new military
world -- you can experiment more because there's
no doubt you're going to win," he said. "You
experiment, and there is real feedback. You don't
get that very much in the military." "This was a new
way of war, a new operational concept," Vickers
said. "And it was a pretty significant innovation,
because we got fairly rapid regime change with it.
This wasn't on the shelf. This was the way we planned
to overthrow governments."
In a recently released pamphlet of the British Foreign
Policy Centre, Robert Cooper, an advisor of Tony
Blair who represented the British government at the
Bonn talks that produced the interim Hamid Karzai
administration in Afghanistan, calls for a "defensive
imperialism" and for Western countries to deal
with "old-fashioned states outside the postmodern
continent of Europe with the rougher methods of an
earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception,
whatever is necessary to deal with those who still
live in the nineteenth century..."
Finally, here is the advice about Palestine given by a
prominent US lawyer:
"Israel should announce an immediate unilateral
cessation in retaliation against terrorist attacks.
This moratorium would be in effect for a short
period, say four or five days, to give the Palestinian
leadership an opportunity to respond to the new
policy. It would also make it clear to the world
that Israel is taking an important step in ending what
has become a cycle of violence.
Following the end of the moratorium, Israel would
institute the following new policy if Palestinian
terrorism were to resume. It will announce precisely
what it will do in response to the next act of
terrorism. For example, it could announce the first
act of terrorism following the moratorium will
result in the destruction of a small village which has
been used as a base for terrorist operations. The
residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then
troops will come in and bulldoze all of the
buildings.
The response will be automatic. The order will have
been given in advance of the terrorist attacks and
there will be no discretion. The point is to make
the automatic destruction of the village the fault of
the Palestinian terrorists who had advance
warnings of the specific consequences of their
action. The soldiers would simply be acting as the
means for carrying out a previously announced
policy of retaliation against a designated target.
Further acts of terrorism would trigger further
destruction of specifically named locations. The
"waiting list" targets would be made public and
circulated throughout the Palestinian-controlled
areas."
What is truly frightening about those cynical and
aggressive statements (and the many similar ones
that could be quoted) is that they come from people
advising or praising governments that enjoy an almost
complete monopoly of weapons of mass destruction,
are supported by the major world news media and
control fairly obedient domestic populations.
It is also important to refute the standard excuse for
support of regimes of terror given by
pro-intervention intellectuals, namely that all this
was the result of "excesses" in the otherwise
noble pursuit of "fighting communism". Had this been
the case, why not support reformist regimes as an
effective bulwark against truly communist ones? Arbenz,
Mossadegh, Lumumba, Allende or Goulart were in no
sense communists. Nor were the Arab and African
nationalists that the United States opposed either in
their struggle against Zionism or against Apartheid.
Also, why continue similar "excesses", such as years
of bombing Iraq, long after the collapse of the
Soviet Union? Observe also that, contrary to what is
commonly said, the United States did not entirely
"lose" the Vietnam War. It did indeed fail to
achieve its maximal objective of imposing its own
client regime in South Vietnam. But, through
massive bombings and defoliation, it did manage to
destroy the material basis of any successful
alternative development able to serve as a model.
However, the partial defeat in Vietnam and the horrors
of that war led many people to question the
legitimacy of U.S. domination over the world. A
counteroffensive was needed to recover the initiative
at the level of rhetoric and image. The instrument
for this was the human rights ideology proclaimed by
President Carter (1976-1980). The basic tenet of
this ideology can be stated quite simply: since
human and democratic rights are better respected,
in general, in the West than in other countries, it
is our right, indeed our duty, to intervene, if
necessary by military means, in order to enforce the
respect for those rights abroad. The basic fallacy
of this ideology should be obvious: the fact that a
particular society is internally democratic in no
way implies that it will have an altruistic attitude
towards the rest of the world. To take an extreme case,
consider Israel; there is no doubt that it is
internally more democratic towards its own
citizens, at least the Jewish ones, than most Arab
states.
But that does not imply, to put it mildly, that it can
be relied upon to defend the human rights of Arabs
in Palestine, Lebanon or elsewhere. Likewise, the
Greek cities were democratic for their citizens, and
used slave labor. Similar remarks can be made about
European colonialism, which, incidentally, was
also often justified in the name of "human rights" .
For the Vietnamese bombed by the United States or
the Iraqis dying from the embargo, the fact that the
United States is a "free country" with a "free
press" does them little good so long as the press
remains silent and the population reacts with simple
patriotism or indifference. The U.S. press did
finally criticize the Vietnam war when the elite
concluded that the war had became too costly to
the United States. That contrasts with the media
silence over the slow extermination of the Iraqis,
which costs nothing in terms of U.S. casualties or
political protest at home.
The human rights ideology, as used by the United States
and its Western supporters, rests on an extremely
selective reading of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. Only the sections on Civil and
Political Rights are referred to, and even these are
interpreted according to double standards . Take
Article 14 that grants the right to seek asylum
abroad from persecution. Its implementation is
extraordinarily politicized by the United States:
out of more that 24,000 Haitians intercepted by U.S.
forces from 1981 through 1990, 11 were granted
asylum, in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000
Cubans. Or consider Article 13, granting the right to
leave any country, including one's own. During the
Cold War, the United States refused to grant
passports to U.S. citizens such as the famous singer
Paul Robeson, who had the effrontery to be both
black and communist.
This right to leave was however constantly invoked with
great passion against the refusal by the Soviet
Union to allow Jews to emigrate. But the end of
Article 13, which adds "and to return to his country"
is ignored. No wonder; the day after the Universal
Declaration was ratified, the United Nations passed
Resolution 194, which affirms the right of Palestinians
to return to their homes (or to receive
compensations).
The declaration also contains Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights, including a right to health care,
social security and adequate standard of living
(Article 25). Whatever one thinks of those rights, they
are part of the Declaration and have the same
status for the signatories as any other part of the
Universal Declaration. Nevertheless, the President
Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, could call them a "letter to Santa
Claus" without provoking much reaction. (This is in
itself an interesting example of 'relativism' -
just think of the reactions in the West if some
Third World leader called the first part a "letter to
Santa Claus").
In the West, the Civil Rights part of the Universal
Declaration is held to have absolute priority over
the Economic and Social parts. In case this seems an
obvious priority, imagine being one of those two or
three billion people (about half of mankind) who
have to survive on more or less two dollars a day.
How would you weigh Cuban efforts to maintain public
health, education and availability of basic
necessities for the poor in comparison to the
limitations imposed on civil liberties? These efforts
continued long after Cuba was no longer being
'subsidized' by the Soviet Union -- and while it was
suffering from a very severe embargo as well as from
numerous acts of sabotage caused by the single
superpower, forcing the Cuban government to divert
resources to defense, counter-spying, etc.
Considering the relationship of forces, if Cuba
introduced liberal democracy as demanded by the
United States, one could expect the Cuban emigre-lobby
in the United States, backed by Washington, to
bribe politicians, finance media and subvert the new
"democratic process" to ensure the takeover by a
pro-U.S. regime that would adopt neo-liberal
"reforms" putting an end to the existing social
benefits. This does not mean that socio-economic
rights should be used to justify the abandonment of
civil liberties. All such rights should be part of a
just society. But given the world relationship of
forces, the constant exclusive emphasis on
political rights by the rich countries must be seen as
self-serving and therefore not a valid promotion of
universal values.
The following comments, taken from the Jesuit
Salvadorian journal 'Processo', illustrate nicely
the double standards of the U.S. human rights
discourse: If Lech Walesa had been doing his organizing
work in El Salvador, he would have already entered
into the ranks of the disappeared - at the hand of
'heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes'; or
have been blown to pieces in a dynamite attack on
his union headquarters. If Alexander Dubcek were a
politician in our country, he would have been
assassinated like Hector Oqueli [the social democratic
leader assassinated in Guatemala, by Salvadorian death
squads, according to the Guatemalan government]. If
Andrei Sakharov had worked here in favour of human
rights, he would have met the same fate as Herbert
Anaya [one of the many murdered leaders of the
independent Salvadorian Human Rights Commission CDHES].
If Ota-Sik or Vaclav Havel had been carrying out their
intellectual work in El Salvador, they would have been
found one sinister morning, lying on the patio of a
university campus with their heads destroyed by the
bullets of an elite army battalion.
Another striking example of double standards was
attested by no less than Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
recipient of the highest award bestowed by
International League for the Rights of Man. In 1975,
the newly independent ex-Portuguese colony of East
Timor was invaded by Indonesia, a regional client of
the United States, which supplied most of its weapons.
The United Nations failed to come to the aid of
the East Timorese, thanks to Moynihan, who was
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time and
who proudly recalled in his memoirs:
The Department of State desired that the United Nations
prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it
undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried
it forward with no inconsiderable success.
Moynihan even cited figures showing that the Indonesian
invasion killed "10 percent of the population,
almost the proportion of casualties experienced by
the Soviet Union during the Second World War." Along
with Huntington and several U.S. theologians,
Moynihan is one of the 60 signers of the "letter
from America" sent to European newspapers exalting the
U.S. assault on Afghanistan as part of a "Just War".
The human rights policy also signaled a change of
operational tactics. During the Vietnam war period,
there was much talk about "nation building",
meaning building strong anticommunist states in the
Third World.
The United States drew the lesson from Vietnam that it
was easier to destroy an unfriendly state that to
build a friendly one. The Islamic fundamentalists in
Afghanistan, the contras and the Miskitos Indians in
Nicaragua, Savimbi in Angola, the UCK in Kosovo, most
of the separatist forces in the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia (and probably now in China), have been
supported by the United States in what one might call
an enterprise of state deconstruction. This has
the added advantage of provoking less opposition
among liberals and leftists, given the latter's
prejudice in favor of whoever appears to be the
underdog, whether guerrillas versus a regular army,
traditional societies versus a modern state, or
ethnic minorities versus democratic majorities.
In the end, the Cold War was quite similar to the
present "war on terrorism": a continuation of
centuries of domination by the advanced industrial
powers of the rest of the world, ensuring popular
support at home thanks to a clever and scary
rhetoric. Of course, there was a real conflict, as
there is now. But, then as now, the relationship of
forces was enormously unequal, the response
totally disproportionate to the actual dangers, and
the real goals, although concealed, not hard to figure
out.
2. Good and Bad Arguments
Perhaps the most striking success of our ideological
system is the extent to which its assumptions are
shared by critics on the left, even honest ones. To
take one example, consider the widely shared
expectation that a "peace dividend" would follow the
demise of the Warsaw Pact. This was about as
realistic as expecting Genghis Khan to stop half way
through his conquests. In reality, the victors (NATO
and the United States) immediately started to
expand and seek fresh justifications for their
aggressive military posture. This mirage, as well as
similar confusions concerning later operations
against Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan, show that
we urgently need to clarify our thinking about the
basis of our objections to Western aggression, and
to its apologists. This is necessary even, or
especially, when aggressive interventions are
successful, and when the declared targets are
individuals such as Saddam Hussein, Milosevic or bin
Laden who, leftists are persuaded, are not "our kind of
guys".
The reincarnations of Hitler
The main argument used by the pro-war party to
intimidate its opponents is extraordinarily
simple: we are always confronted by the latest form
of fascism. Saddam is Hitler, Milosevic is Hitler,
bin Laden is Hitler, as were Nasser or Arafat before
them. We (the West) should therefore intervene to
liberate poor and oppressed people -- Kosovar Albanians
or Afghan women, considered more or less the
present-day equivalent of the Jews in Nazi-dominated
Europe . Left alone, our governments and public opinion
are too selfish, uninformed and indifferent to
human suffering. Therefore, the role of
intellectuals is to arouse public opinion and to put
pressure on the governments so that they dare commit
themselves more actively to the defense of our
values. Note in passing that, for many of those
intellectuals, whom one might call the humanitarian
warriors , doing business is morally dubious (it may
lead to all kinds of compromises with dictatorships)
while waging war, or at the very least imposing
trade sanctions, is the really noble thing to do.
For classical liberals, it was the other way
around: wars were seen to strengthen states, their
armies, police and bureaucracies, while commerce
promoted human exchanges and better mutual
understanding. Note also that the fact that the United
States usually refuses to negotiate with its
enemies (e.g., imposition of unacceptable conditions
on the Serbs in Rambouillet, refusal even to
consider legal extradition proceedings for bin Laden)
is not an effective argument against such
intellectuals. Their view is that we should seize
every opportunity to wage wars that can topple
dictatorships and brutal regimes, in order to spread
democracy and respect for human rights. Nor is
there any point in complaining about the "collateral
damage" of Western aggressions. The humanitarian
warriors can always cite the "greater good" obtained
by imposing liberal regimes. For them, the great good
fortune of our time is that overwhelming military
force is in the hand of powers, like the United
States, committed to the defense of liberal values. The
only problem is the reluctance of the general
public, sometimes influenced by the left, to let
their governments commit themselves even more actively
to that just struggle. That is why, as Christopher
Hitchens put it, Osama bin Laden "saved us". By
provoking the United States, he forced its leaders
into a fight that, otherwise, they might not have had
the guts to lead. We can be sure that whatever
countries will be targeted by the United States in
the future, the humanitarian warriors will applaud,
even if no evidence whatsoever links them to
"terrorism". Such countries are likely to qualify
as brutal dictatorships, and such he main targets of
the Western "defenders of human rights".
Munich for ever
The inevitable companion of the "new Hitlers" discourse
is stigmatization of critics as the new Chamberlains
and Daladiers playing into their hands. This is
done without recalling what "Munich" was all about.
There was a part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland,
with a predominantly German population that wanted
to be part of Germany; its annexation by Germany was
accepted at Munich by Britain and France. That sent
a message to the main rising power of the time that
international law didn't matter and that it could do
as it pleased. And it is now understood, rightly, that
this was sending the wrong signal to Hitler. But
what about the right of self-determination of the
Sudeten? What would our pro-intervention left have
said at that time? The case of Kosovo quickly comes to
mind. There, a majority of the population wanted
to be detached from Yugoslavia and become part of
what one might call Natoland. And the major power of
our time used that opportunity to brush aside
international law. Future historians may well
identify the aggression against Yugoslavia as a major
turning point in a new form of imperial reconquest
of the world. And who were the real Chamberlains at
that time may have to be reevaluated. As noted above,
the fact that the United States is not at all
similar to Nazi Germany internally implies less than
what is usually supposed for the fate of the people
on the wrong side of the guns.
Before indicating how I think one should respond to the
apologists for "just" wars, I will discuss a certain
number of arguments frequently used by people who
oppose Western aggressions but that should be avoided
as counterproductive.
(1 of 2 - follows)
(2/2)
Bad arguments for the left
One bad argument used against the war in Afghanistan,
as against the war in Yugoslavia, is that "it
won't work". Indeed, the question is, work for what?
Towards what end? Those that are proclaimed? Or those
that are probably the real ones? Consider first the
latter. We heard warnings that war would only
strengthen Milosevic, or bin Laden, and that the
Taliban would resist for a long time (the so-called
"Afghan trap") and that the war would be too
costly (for "us" of course). It may be too soon to
draw conclusions about Afghanistan, but in
Yugoslavia, the war worked beautifully. It resulted
in a Serbian government in Belgrade that is even
eager to provide NATO with retrospective justifications
for the bombing. What is more, this government was
elected by the Serbs themselves. This was of
course the result of a series of bribes, blackmail, and
deceptions . But who ever did better? Certainly
not the Russians, nor the Germans in World War II,
nor even the British Empire.
Of course, one could try to argue that "it does not
work" in comparison with the proclaimed goals
(defending human rights, peace and stability etc.).
but even that is delicate; any intervention has many
effects and almost always brings some "collateral
benefits" (like the liberation of the Sudetes at
the time of Munich). And, off course, the latter will
be spotlighted by the media to encourage further
interventions. But, I shall explain below, there are
general arguments against interventions that avoid
any detailed discussion of those local and temporary
benefits.
Moreover, portraying the Afghans, the Serbs or the
Iraqis as stronger than they are, allows the
humanitarian warriors to shout "victory" when victory
comes: "see, I told you, it would not be so hard!"
While if we put the issue in realistic terms, and
ask whether the greatest military might of all times
can succeed through months of the most intense bombing
in history in subduing a small, poor and
devastated country, whose level of development is
more or less the one of Europe between the 8th and the
12th century, then the outcome does not look like
such a miracle. It also explains why a large number
of Afghans are ready to collaborate with the United
States: even the Nazis found plenty of collaborators in
all the countries they occupied. So, what is to be
expected when an immensely rich country like the
United States, particularly ready to bribe others,
wishes to install a puppet government in
Afghanistan? Making the victory look like a divine
surprise also encourages the imperial power to go
further: let's now tackle Somalia, Iraq, whatever.
So, this line of argument should be avoided at all
costs.
Another bad argument is to say that the Northern
Alliance is no better than the Talibans, or even
that they are no better in their treatment of Afghan
women. This may be the case, but it is again
irrelevant. What are we to say if they do behave
better? Given the record of the Talibans, that would
not be very hard and, given time, they very well
might. Then, the media will feed us with reports on
how great the situation in Afghanistan is; what will
the left say then?
To understand why all this is irrelevant, just imagine
that the World Trade Center events had occurred in
Bombay and that the Indian government thereupon
decided -- without providing publicly available proofs
and rejecting all negotiations -- that the
responsibility lay with the Afghans, invaded
Afghanistan and toppled the Talibans. How would the
West react? Not hard to guess .
Now, if the condition of Afghan women was the
overriding issue, why not have supported the Soviet
regime (to which many leftists, including myself,
were opposed), the best on that score that the Afghans
ever had? At that time, the overriding issue in the
West was certainly not the condition of women, but
strategic concerns such as the access of the Russians
to warm seas (a dream going back to the Tsars, as
the Western media used to say). But now, the fact
that the United States has obtained new strongholds
both in the Balkans (Albania-Kosovo) and in
Central Asia is totally irrelevant.
Only the fate of women counts.
The real issues: international law and imperialism
Observing (and denouncing) these double standards gets
us closer to the real arguments against the war.
They are of two types. The first one is quite
universal and is simply that nobody has yet found a
better rule to avoid war than respect for
international law. None of the recent wars launched
by the West -- Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan -- were
in accord with international law. The one that came
closest to observing international law was the war
against Iraq. But even there, the equivalent of
the jury -- the Security Council -- was pressured and
coerced by one of the parties, the United States .
In the case of Yugoslavia, there was not even the
pretense of NATO abiding by international law. Finally,
for Afghanistan, one power invoked the right to
respond to aggression. But, even assuming the
existence of a direct link between the events of
September 11 and bin Laden, there was never the sort of
constant assault on the United States
characteristic of a war and thus calling for
self-defense . A spectacular crime was committed
and was used as a pretext to launch a war, period.
Many people will ask, what is so sacred about
international law?
And why respect national sovereignty? After all, most
state boundaries are quite arbitrary and
unnatural. They are the result of previous wars, not
of any rational design. Besides, how can anybody
in his or her right mind stand still while women and
children are murdered or reduced to slavery accross
the border? To answer those questions, we have to think
globally and ask what the alternatives are.
First, let us consider the internal level of political
order. Since the 17th century, the
liberal-democratic reflexion has led to the
conclusion that there are basically three ways to
organize life in society: (1) the war of all against
all, (2) a Hobbesian sovereign that imposes order
through force, or (3) respect for a democratically
decided law as the lesser evil. The Talibans, like
the Soviet communists before them, were playing the
role of a Hobbesian sovereign. The arguments against
that solution are well known. Such a sovereign may
bring temporary benefits (Taliban order compared to
the chaos reigning before and after them in large
parts of Afghanistan -- the war of all against all),
but inevitably acts according to its own interests,
provoking a cycle of rebellion and repression
without end, because its power, being undemocratic,
cannot be accepted by those on which it is imposed.
Now, consider the international order. The sovereign is
the United States and the same arguments apply.
Whatever benefits it may bring to targeted
countries, the United States acts on the basis of
self-interest that inevitably undermines those
benefits. The prime interest in control of world
petroleum and other resources, in investment
opportunities and in strategic positioning clearly
takes precedence over the welfare of populations. In
its striving for world domination, the United States
has promoted drug dealers and Islamic fanatics in
order to destroy the Soviet Union. To control the
Middle East, the United States has unstintingly
backed the transformation of Israel into a garrison
state and relentlessly worked to destroy Iraq. As
liberal theorists should expect, all this eventually
backfires -- an intractable situation in Palestine, and
the World Trade Center attack. Who knows what the
future will bring? Right now, the humanitarian
warriors are celebrating. But perhaps some orphaned
Afghan child will grow up and decide to learn
physics or biology instead of the Koran and inflict
massive nuclear or bacteriological damage to the
United States. Unlikely? Not more than a bin Laden
emerging from the anti-communist maneuvres of the
1980's. No trillion dollar Pentagon budget can
protect the United States from the unforeseeable
backlash of its treatment of countries that today
appear helpless.
The third solution would be to bring more democracy to
the world level, via the United Nations . But that
is exactly what Western liberals, who support ever
greater destruction of a legal international order, in
the name of human rights, oppose. Contemporary
liberals are, by and large, perfectly inconsistent.
They have turned into liberal imperialists: liberal in
the internal order (at least at times and in places
where the powers that be aren't overly challenged),
and autocratic on the international level .
Another line of argument is likely to be more
controversial, but is even more necessary, I think.
In Europe, those of us who criticize U.S. war policy
are often accused of being "anti-American". We might as
well frankly acknowledge that, in some sense, we
are. Not along the lines of the "cultural" critique
adopted by many Europeans who are quick to denounce
the oddities of American society -- its crass
consumerism, its religious backwardness, its
devotion both to the death penalty and to the absence
of gun control, etc.-- while conveniently
forgetting some not-so-pleasant facts about the
material roots (the slave trade, colonial conquest,
etc.) of our own supposedly great civilization. I
mean being anti-American in the sense of good old
anti-imperialism. The United States is now playing
the role that Britain, France or Germany played in
the past, only on a grander scale. What sometimes
causes confusion is that the American empire relies
far more on local collaborators than the old empires,
leaving the countries it dominates nominally
independent. The nature of this "independence" was
illustrated recently when the new anti-Taliban
government of Afghanistan asked the Americans to
stop bombing their country. Too many civilians were
being killed. A naive believer in the right of
self-determination might be excused for thinking
that the Afghans themselves should have a say in such
matters. But the United States flatly said no and,
within 24 hours or so, the "independent" Afghan
government had seen the light and approved the U.S.
bombing. One can easily guess what will happen when
some Afghans try to control a U.S. pipeline going
through their country.
Now, what is the main problem with U.S. imperialism?
First consider all the horror of the U.S. wars:
Indochina, Central America, the Middle East.
Millions of people murdered. Then consider the crimes
of their puppets: Suharto, Mobutu, Pinochet, the
Argentine and Guatemala military dictatorships, the
U.S.-backed rebels in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua,
etc. Another few million people dead. But that only
scratches the surface.
The real problem is, to use a huge understatement, the
loss of opportunity for the Third World. At Porto
Alegre, a new movement has taken up the slogan:
"another world is possible". If that is true, then
probably another world has been possible all
along, but has been beaten back and prevented from
coming into being. Let us try to imagine what it might
have looked like -- it strains the imagination, but
let's try: a world where Congo, Cuba, Vietnam,
Nicaragua, China, Brazil, Iraq, Guatemala, and
countless other places would have been able to
develop themselves without constant Western
interference and sabotage. A world where the 19th
century Arab enlightenment had been able to continue
its modernization of the Middle East, instead of
being crushed by Western-backed obscurantism, and
turned into the besieged hinterland of U.S.-backed
Zionism. A world where apartheid would have been
defeated long ago and where southern Africa would
have been spared both Western-instigated civil wars and
the "debt trap".
What would such a world look like? No closer to
paradise on earth than Europe in the centuries
before it got rich on the Conquest of the Americas,
modernized its agriculture and industrialized.
There might well have been wars and famines and
atrocities. But the condition of the majority of
people would almost surely have been better with
leaders trying, as best they could, to achieve
independence and popular well-being than with
leaders devoted to Western powers and their own
personal enrichment. Compare, in almost every
situation, the indigeneous leaders and movements
with those that the West favored against them: Lumumba
and Mobutu, Somoza and the Sandinistas, Goulart and
the Brazilian generals, Allende and Pinochet,
Mandela and the apartheid regime, Mossadegh and the
Shah, etc.
Nothing is more cynical than the eagerness with which
self-styled humanitarian intellectuals cite Cambodia
under Pol Pot and Rwanda as proof of the need for
Western intervention. In both those cases, enormous
tragedy resulted precisely from massive outside
interventions: from the United States bombing
Cambodia as a "sideshow" to its war against Vietnam,
and from Belgium exploiting and aggravating the
ethnic differences in Rwanda, following the classic
'divide and rule' principle. The most decried
"monsters" of the Third World have not been produced by
those countries on their own but as a response to
the distorting pressures of Western power. It takes
a heavy dose of racism to believe that, without our
constant interventions, Third World peoples could
not find better paths of development than the
present ones. Try to think of the mobilizing effect
that a genuine autonomous but unimpeded development,
undertaken somewhere in the poor countries, could
have had elsewhere. For example, the excellent
public health policies in Cuba would probably be
emulated in the rest of Latin America (even to some
extent in capitalist countries) if mere mention of
Castro's Cuba was not anathema to the United States and
to the elites they direct. If one thinks it through,
one sees that the countless losses of opportunity
suffered by the poor majority of the world translate
into tens and even hundreds of millions of lost
lives. To contemplate this seriously is
heart-rending.
Present day imperalism is even far less justifiable
than its predecessor. Old-fashioned imperialism was
more directly violent in its subjugation of peoples,
but its "civilizing mission", hypocritical and
self-serving as it was, brought some real
advantages. Before the colonial era, the world was
divided between vastly contrasting levels of
development. However indirectly and often
unintentionally, colonialism did make science and even
enlightened ideas available to places where they
had been previously unknown. But the situation is
quite different now. In Asia and the Middle East in
particular, the struggle against Western imperialism
inspired strong movements aimed at appropriating the
most progressive intellectual and political
advantages of the Enlightenment for their own
societies. The post-colonial policies of the
United States have repeatedly aided obscurantist
opposition to such movements. Worst of all, the more
the West presents itself as both the champion of
science and rationality and as a ruthless plunderer
of all the world's resources -- not only natural
resources, but also its cheap labour and even its grey
matter -- and the more it squeezes poor countries
through debt and uneven trade terms, making
genuine development virtually impossible, the more it
gives the Enlightenment a bad name, notably in the
Muslim countries. By its short-sighted egotism, the
West is stifling the very universalism it claims
to promote.
Let me now discuss some rhetorical tricks that are used
to soften opposition to wars and that tend to be
particularly effective within the left.
Fake internationalism
The human rights ideology is often defended within the
left under the guise of "internationalism". We
have, on that basis, to help victims of dictatorial
governments in the Third World (like the Afghan
women), possibly by supporting U.S. and European
interventions. But, again, this is mostly a
delusion. What about child labor in Pakistan? Should we
go to war over that issue? Yet, we can be certain
that, if a major conflict between the West and
Pakistan arises (which seems unlikely), this will
become the issue of the day. Let us also think about
past "issues of the day". Who worries now about the
situation of Indians in Nicaragua? About the drug
trade in Panama? Or human rights in Kosovo? Yet, all
those issues were picked by the powers that be, at a
given time, as the most crucial issue to focus on,
so as to justify their policies. A genuine
internationalist position would at the very least
lead us to think globally and democratically. And to
get in closer touch with mass popular movements in
the Third World (not small sects) and ask them what
they think of the interventions of our governments.
I suspect that a lot could be learned from such
exchanges.
A related issue is the one of "nationalism". The latter
has become very unpopular in leftist circles and it
is thus easy for the mainstream press to discredit
any leader like Milosevic or Saddam Hussein by using
that label. But this overlooks two factors: first,
the extreme emotional reaction to the September 11
events in the US show that nationalism, in its
most primitive and traditional form, is alive and well
in that country. And, since the US is infinitely
more powerful than Iraq or Yugoslavia, it is that
nationalism which is the most dangerous. Moreover, and
more importantly, the strategic orientation of
capitalism today is very much anti-state.
Multinational corporations are often far stronger
economically than Third World states and are quite
happy to see the powers of the state, at least
some of them, be weakened or dismantled. Of course,
nationalism per se is not a leftist value, but any
condemnation of it in a particular instance must be
done while keeping these factors in mind.
The "neither-nor" position
It has become fashionable, in leftists circles,
especially in France, to adopt of position of
"neither-nor" ("ni ni" in French). Neither NATO nor
Milosevic; or neither the Talibans nor the United
States. And, probably tomorrow, neither Saddam
Hussein nor whatever alliance the United States
manages to set up against Iraq. Like all slogans, this
one has some merit, but also serious deficiencies.
Obviously, nobody opposing the war in Afghanistan is
for the Taliban or wishes anybody to live under such
a regime. In that sense, the situation is quite
different from the one at the time of Stalin, for
example, where part of the left did consider his
regime as some kind of ideal (and the long
influence of Stalinism in France may explain why the
"ni ni" attitude is so widespread there). For
reasons explained here, opposing wars of aggression
can be justified quite independently of one's views
about the internal policies of the country being
aggressed.
However, the neither-nor position gives the impression
that there is some kind of symmetry between the two
positions being rejected; but this is simply not
true. It is clear that "Islamic fascism", as the
liberals call it, is a horrible movement (which
harms Muslims most of all). But one cannot equate
such movements to global U.S. imperialism. First of
all, consider the relationship of forces and the
extent of the damage done. The Talibans were an
extremely weak military force whose existence
depended almost entirely on outside support (from
Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, two staunch U.S. allies)
and exhaustion of Afghan society from years of
U.S.-sponsored war. By contrast, the United States is
the greatest military power of all times. The harm
done by the Talibans is direct and visible
(floggings, destruction of artefacts) but not
comparable to the destruction -- much of it
indirect and hidden -- wrought by an imperial power
that has killed millions of people in its
counterrevolutionary wars, and extends its
economic and military power over billions of people.
Moreover, the Talibans, and more generally "Islamic
fascism", must be seen in context as largely a
byproduct of the relentless U.S. opposition to the
unacceptable notion of Arab or other Middle Eastern
nationalists that they might have the right to
control their natural resources.
Most of all, perhaps, is the asymmetry of our own
position: we are not judging the world from some
point situated outside of space and time. We pay
taxes to the United States or to its allies. If we do
military service, it will be in their armed
forces. We vote here. The people we meet and discuss
with are in general totally hostile to the Talibans,
but often support the United States. In that sense,
our primary responsibility is to limit the
violence of our own governments, not to denounce those
of others.
Honest opponents of wars sometimes feel that they have
the duty to denounce the other side to show that
they don't have "double standards". But we need to
keep in mind the actual consequences of what we say,
especially for the victims of the violence of our
states, not simply to show our purity or our
absence of double standards. And whatever we say about
the "enemy" is likely be to used to reinforce
nationalist feelings of self-righteousness and other
war-like sentiments. For example, any denunciation of
Saddam Hussein's policies, done in the Western press
and under present circumstances, even if the
statements made are factually correct, is likely
to have as sole effect to strengthen the resolve of
those who have inflicted and want to continue to
inflict immense suffering on the Iraqi people .
Related to this, is the rhetoric of "supporting X". In
the dominant discourse, particularly in the media,
opponents of wars are always accused of
"supporting" the other side whether the other side is
the German Emperor during WW1, Stalin during the
Cold War, or Milosevic, Saddam or the Talibans
today. This is absurd on two counts: one is that, if
opposing a war against X means that one "supports
X", then even the humanitarian warriors "support"
many X's that do things that they don't really like,
unless they are ready to wage war against Morocco,
Indonesia, Turkey, etc.; indeed, most of the
world, including Israel of course. The second
problem is: how do the warmongers avoid the charge
of supporting the US and his many unsavory proxies?
Well, they simply declare that they don't approve
"all US policies" (usually without saying which ones
they don't like). But they do not give even a hint
of how they would curb the very policies that they
object to; and, given the relationship of forces in the
world, that is indeed a very big open question .
By contrast, if I was to declare (which I am happy
to do) that I don't support "all of Saddam Hussein's
policies", I doubt very much that it would clear
people like me of the charge of "supporting Saddam".
The European illusion
Many leftists nurse the hope that Europe may distance
itself from the United States and become a sort of
counterweight to its global hegemony. But there are
several problems with this hope. To discuss this, we
need to have a clear view of what "Europe " is.
Roughly speaking it is the global imperialist power
of the past, which lost its place to the United
States and would very much like to regain it. Of
course, it wasn't unified in the past, and lost
its dominant role largely because of its internal
divisions. Both its past and its present roles are
justified in the name of unique "European values",
that are often contrasted, in the discourse of the
European elites, with the rudeness and the
commercialism of the Americans. But this, like the
dedication of the United States to human rights,
represents merely the usual ideological framework in
which all powers operate and justify themselves. So,
assuming Europe becomes more unified and more
powerful militarily; what is to be expected? Either it
remains a sort a of vacillating ally of the United
States, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing,
maneuvering to defend its own narrow interests in
the Third World when they differ from those of the
United States. Or else it becomes a more determined
adversary of the United States, and we are back to a
sort of a new Cold War, with Europe playing the role
held by the Soviet Union. Arm races, increased
military spending, the threat of global
destruction, are not exactly what the left should hope
for.
The European political and military buildup should
simply be none of our business. We should combat any
effort to shift budget priorities from social
services to European "defense". Europe is sufficiently
armed already to defend itself against a
hypothetical direct aggression by the United States,
which can best be prevented by political means, by
allying with the rest of the world in favor of
fair commercial arrangements, international law and
measures to counteract the current polarization of
wealth and power. But it would totally foolish for
the left to put its hope in the projection of
European power abroad to play a progressive role.
3. Some Modest Suggestions
Although there are no quick answers to the question of
what is to be done in the present world situation,
one thing should be clear: Western intellectuals
should stop spreading illusions about "our values".
All expanding empires pursue atrocious policies in
the name of "values", either the "white man's
burden" or the "civilizing mission" or various
Christian duties in the past. We should at the very
least lucidly analyze and denounce the hypocrisy of
those discourses.
But, more fundamentally, we need to operate a genuine
cultural revolution in our attitude with respect to
the Third World. Once upon a time, many socialists
and progressives of differing persuasions swallowed the
edifying stories about the "civilizing mission"
and believed that their main business was to educate
the "inferior races". This produced the first
version of liberal imperialism. Later, during the
decolonisation period, many leftist groups projected
their "revolutionary envy", so to speak, on the
Third World, expecting to be saved by distant national
liberation struggles. But if radical social changes
are hard to achieve in the West, they may even be
harder to achieve in the Third World. Dire poverty,
cultural underdevelopment, and the heavy weight of
feudal social relations are not exactly conditions
propitious to the "development of socialism",
whatever socialism may be. But the fact that the
so-called "socialism" in the Third World did not
fulfill the (wild) dreams of many Western leftists
led a number of them to a reaction of burning their
former idols.
Resentful at being let down, they have joined the new
wave of liberal imperialism, brandishing slogans
such as the "right of humanitarian intervention",
justified by the human rights ideology, or by a
perverted "internationalism".
What the world needs now, and what decent citizens of
the West should demand of their governments, is to
put a total end to Western foreign interventions and
even to offer apologies accompanied by massive
reparations for the pillage and exploitation that has
drained the Third World for centuries. Do we feel
altruistic and want to do "humanitarian work"? Let
us cancel debts with no compensation, provide cheap
medicines to cure AIDS in Africa, transfer
technology free of charge, open our borders widely
to refugees and immigrants. All this would do far more
good than all the military interventions that the
liberal imperialists can invent. And to the extent
that we are not so altruistic -- which is human after
all -- we should at least have the honesty to
admit it, try to force our governments to keep
their bloody hands out the affairs of the Third World
and support efforts towards what people sometimes
call a "second independence": after the
decolonisation, elimination of the neo-colonial regimes
that have replaced the old world order.
There are many organizations devoted to "watching"
human rights violations among the former victims
of colonial violence. What is needed, besides and
sometimes against those groups, are organizations
devoted to "watching" interventions and plots by the
imperial powers.
The jingoists a la Bush are making the United States
extremely unpopular in the world. In places with few
or no Muslims, such as Argentina, South Korea or El Salvador,
there are reports of people expressing their sympathies
for bin Laden. This reaction may be shocking, but
not more than, say, the attitude of the crowds in
New York enthusiastically "welcoming the troops"
after the far greater slaughter of the Gulf War. The
gap between North and South is growing and the
admiration for bin Laden reflects this gap. The use
of force by the United States will provoke resistance
(as Hitler and the colonialists did in the past)
and, since there are many weak spots in the West,
one can expect that there will be other events like
September 11. This spiral leads nowhere, or at
least not towards what we would like, but rather
towards more war and more repression. While leftist
intellectuals congratulate themselves about
"victories for human rights", the poverty,
humiliation and despair of much of the world breeds
fanaticism. It is urgent that the Western left build
real bridges with popular organizations in the
Third World; but, to achieve that, we have first to
clarify our views about the real relations of forces
that shape this world, to take into account, in all
our actions, our actual position in it and to expose
the illusions spread by the liberal imperialists.
Jean Bricmont
(end)
Bad arguments for the left
One bad argument used against the war in Afghanistan,
as against the war in Yugoslavia, is that "it
won't work". Indeed, the question is, work for what?
Towards what end? Those that are proclaimed? Or those
that are probably the real ones? Consider first the
latter. We heard warnings that war would only
strengthen Milosevic, or bin Laden, and that the
Taliban would resist for a long time (the so-called
"Afghan trap") and that the war would be too
costly (for "us" of course). It may be too soon to
draw conclusions about Afghanistan, but in
Yugoslavia, the war worked beautifully. It resulted
in a Serbian government in Belgrade that is even
eager to provide NATO with retrospective justifications
for the bombing. What is more, this government was
elected by the Serbs themselves. This was of
course the result of a series of bribes, blackmail, and
deceptions . But who ever did better? Certainly
not the Russians, nor the Germans in World War II,
nor even the British Empire.
Of course, one could try to argue that "it does not
work" in comparison with the proclaimed goals
(defending human rights, peace and stability etc.).
but even that is delicate; any intervention has many
effects and almost always brings some "collateral
benefits" (like the liberation of the Sudetes at
the time of Munich). And, off course, the latter will
be spotlighted by the media to encourage further
interventions. But, I shall explain below, there are
general arguments against interventions that avoid
any detailed discussion of those local and temporary
benefits.
Moreover, portraying the Afghans, the Serbs or the
Iraqis as stronger than they are, allows the
humanitarian warriors to shout "victory" when victory
comes: "see, I told you, it would not be so hard!"
While if we put the issue in realistic terms, and
ask whether the greatest military might of all times
can succeed through months of the most intense bombing
in history in subduing a small, poor and
devastated country, whose level of development is
more or less the one of Europe between the 8th and the
12th century, then the outcome does not look like
such a miracle. It also explains why a large number
of Afghans are ready to collaborate with the United
States: even the Nazis found plenty of collaborators in
all the countries they occupied. So, what is to be
expected when an immensely rich country like the
United States, particularly ready to bribe others,
wishes to install a puppet government in
Afghanistan? Making the victory look like a divine
surprise also encourages the imperial power to go
further: let's now tackle Somalia, Iraq, whatever.
So, this line of argument should be avoided at all
costs.
Another bad argument is to say that the Northern
Alliance is no better than the Talibans, or even
that they are no better in their treatment of Afghan
women. This may be the case, but it is again
irrelevant. What are we to say if they do behave
better? Given the record of the Talibans, that would
not be very hard and, given time, they very well
might. Then, the media will feed us with reports on
how great the situation in Afghanistan is; what will
the left say then?
To understand why all this is irrelevant, just imagine
that the World Trade Center events had occurred in
Bombay and that the Indian government thereupon
decided -- without providing publicly available proofs
and rejecting all negotiations -- that the
responsibility lay with the Afghans, invaded
Afghanistan and toppled the Talibans. How would the
West react? Not hard to guess .
Now, if the condition of Afghan women was the
overriding issue, why not have supported the Soviet
regime (to which many leftists, including myself,
were opposed), the best on that score that the Afghans
ever had? At that time, the overriding issue in the
West was certainly not the condition of women, but
strategic concerns such as the access of the Russians
to warm seas (a dream going back to the Tsars, as
the Western media used to say). But now, the fact
that the United States has obtained new strongholds
both in the Balkans (Albania-Kosovo) and in
Central Asia is totally irrelevant.
Only the fate of women counts.
The real issues: international law and imperialism
Observing (and denouncing) these double standards gets
us closer to the real arguments against the war.
They are of two types. The first one is quite
universal and is simply that nobody has yet found a
better rule to avoid war than respect for
international law. None of the recent wars launched
by the West -- Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan -- were
in accord with international law. The one that came
closest to observing international law was the war
against Iraq. But even there, the equivalent of
the jury -- the Security Council -- was pressured and
coerced by one of the parties, the United States .
In the case of Yugoslavia, there was not even the
pretense of NATO abiding by international law. Finally,
for Afghanistan, one power invoked the right to
respond to aggression. But, even assuming the
existence of a direct link between the events of
September 11 and bin Laden, there was never the sort of
constant assault on the United States
characteristic of a war and thus calling for
self-defense . A spectacular crime was committed
and was used as a pretext to launch a war, period.
Many people will ask, what is so sacred about
international law?
And why respect national sovereignty? After all, most
state boundaries are quite arbitrary and
unnatural. They are the result of previous wars, not
of any rational design. Besides, how can anybody
in his or her right mind stand still while women and
children are murdered or reduced to slavery accross
the border? To answer those questions, we have to think
globally and ask what the alternatives are.
First, let us consider the internal level of political
order. Since the 17th century, the
liberal-democratic reflexion has led to the
conclusion that there are basically three ways to
organize life in society: (1) the war of all against
all, (2) a Hobbesian sovereign that imposes order
through force, or (3) respect for a democratically
decided law as the lesser evil. The Talibans, like
the Soviet communists before them, were playing the
role of a Hobbesian sovereign. The arguments against
that solution are well known. Such a sovereign may
bring temporary benefits (Taliban order compared to
the chaos reigning before and after them in large
parts of Afghanistan -- the war of all against all),
but inevitably acts according to its own interests,
provoking a cycle of rebellion and repression
without end, because its power, being undemocratic,
cannot be accepted by those on which it is imposed.
Now, consider the international order. The sovereign is
the United States and the same arguments apply.
Whatever benefits it may bring to targeted
countries, the United States acts on the basis of
self-interest that inevitably undermines those
benefits. The prime interest in control of world
petroleum and other resources, in investment
opportunities and in strategic positioning clearly
takes precedence over the welfare of populations. In
its striving for world domination, the United States
has promoted drug dealers and Islamic fanatics in
order to destroy the Soviet Union. To control the
Middle East, the United States has unstintingly
backed the transformation of Israel into a garrison
state and relentlessly worked to destroy Iraq. As
liberal theorists should expect, all this eventually
backfires -- an intractable situation in Palestine, and
the World Trade Center attack. Who knows what the
future will bring? Right now, the humanitarian
warriors are celebrating. But perhaps some orphaned
Afghan child will grow up and decide to learn
physics or biology instead of the Koran and inflict
massive nuclear or bacteriological damage to the
United States. Unlikely? Not more than a bin Laden
emerging from the anti-communist maneuvres of the
1980's. No trillion dollar Pentagon budget can
protect the United States from the unforeseeable
backlash of its treatment of countries that today
appear helpless.
The third solution would be to bring more democracy to
the world level, via the United Nations . But that
is exactly what Western liberals, who support ever
greater destruction of a legal international order, in
the name of human rights, oppose. Contemporary
liberals are, by and large, perfectly inconsistent.
They have turned into liberal imperialists: liberal in
the internal order (at least at times and in places
where the powers that be aren't overly challenged),
and autocratic on the international level .
Another line of argument is likely to be more
controversial, but is even more necessary, I think.
In Europe, those of us who criticize U.S. war policy
are often accused of being "anti-American". We might as
well frankly acknowledge that, in some sense, we
are. Not along the lines of the "cultural" critique
adopted by many Europeans who are quick to denounce
the oddities of American society -- its crass
consumerism, its religious backwardness, its
devotion both to the death penalty and to the absence
of gun control, etc.-- while conveniently
forgetting some not-so-pleasant facts about the
material roots (the slave trade, colonial conquest,
etc.) of our own supposedly great civilization. I
mean being anti-American in the sense of good old
anti-imperialism. The United States is now playing
the role that Britain, France or Germany played in
the past, only on a grander scale. What sometimes
causes confusion is that the American empire relies
far more on local collaborators than the old empires,
leaving the countries it dominates nominally
independent. The nature of this "independence" was
illustrated recently when the new anti-Taliban
government of Afghanistan asked the Americans to
stop bombing their country. Too many civilians were
being killed. A naive believer in the right of
self-determination might be excused for thinking
that the Afghans themselves should have a say in such
matters. But the United States flatly said no and,
within 24 hours or so, the "independent" Afghan
government had seen the light and approved the U.S.
bombing. One can easily guess what will happen when
some Afghans try to control a U.S. pipeline going
through their country.
Now, what is the main problem with U.S. imperialism?
First consider all the horror of the U.S. wars:
Indochina, Central America, the Middle East.
Millions of people murdered. Then consider the crimes
of their puppets: Suharto, Mobutu, Pinochet, the
Argentine and Guatemala military dictatorships, the
U.S.-backed rebels in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua,
etc. Another few million people dead. But that only
scratches the surface.
The real problem is, to use a huge understatement, the
loss of opportunity for the Third World. At Porto
Alegre, a new movement has taken up the slogan:
"another world is possible". If that is true, then
probably another world has been possible all
along, but has been beaten back and prevented from
coming into being. Let us try to imagine what it might
have looked like -- it strains the imagination, but
let's try: a world where Congo, Cuba, Vietnam,
Nicaragua, China, Brazil, Iraq, Guatemala, and
countless other places would have been able to
develop themselves without constant Western
interference and sabotage. A world where the 19th
century Arab enlightenment had been able to continue
its modernization of the Middle East, instead of
being crushed by Western-backed obscurantism, and
turned into the besieged hinterland of U.S.-backed
Zionism. A world where apartheid would have been
defeated long ago and where southern Africa would
have been spared both Western-instigated civil wars and
the "debt trap".
What would such a world look like? No closer to
paradise on earth than Europe in the centuries
before it got rich on the Conquest of the Americas,
modernized its agriculture and industrialized.
There might well have been wars and famines and
atrocities. But the condition of the majority of
people would almost surely have been better with
leaders trying, as best they could, to achieve
independence and popular well-being than with
leaders devoted to Western powers and their own
personal enrichment. Compare, in almost every
situation, the indigeneous leaders and movements
with those that the West favored against them: Lumumba
and Mobutu, Somoza and the Sandinistas, Goulart and
the Brazilian generals, Allende and Pinochet,
Mandela and the apartheid regime, Mossadegh and the
Shah, etc.
Nothing is more cynical than the eagerness with which
self-styled humanitarian intellectuals cite Cambodia
under Pol Pot and Rwanda as proof of the need for
Western intervention. In both those cases, enormous
tragedy resulted precisely from massive outside
interventions: from the United States bombing
Cambodia as a "sideshow" to its war against Vietnam,
and from Belgium exploiting and aggravating the
ethnic differences in Rwanda, following the classic
'divide and rule' principle. The most decried
"monsters" of the Third World have not been produced by
those countries on their own but as a response to
the distorting pressures of Western power. It takes
a heavy dose of racism to believe that, without our
constant interventions, Third World peoples could
not find better paths of development than the
present ones. Try to think of the mobilizing effect
that a genuine autonomous but unimpeded development,
undertaken somewhere in the poor countries, could
have had elsewhere. For example, the excellent
public health policies in Cuba would probably be
emulated in the rest of Latin America (even to some
extent in capitalist countries) if mere mention of
Castro's Cuba was not anathema to the United States and
to the elites they direct. If one thinks it through,
one sees that the countless losses of opportunity
suffered by the poor majority of the world translate
into tens and even hundreds of millions of lost
lives. To contemplate this seriously is
heart-rending.
Present day imperalism is even far less justifiable
than its predecessor. Old-fashioned imperialism was
more directly violent in its subjugation of peoples,
but its "civilizing mission", hypocritical and
self-serving as it was, brought some real
advantages. Before the colonial era, the world was
divided between vastly contrasting levels of
development. However indirectly and often
unintentionally, colonialism did make science and even
enlightened ideas available to places where they
had been previously unknown. But the situation is
quite different now. In Asia and the Middle East in
particular, the struggle against Western imperialism
inspired strong movements aimed at appropriating the
most progressive intellectual and political
advantages of the Enlightenment for their own
societies. The post-colonial policies of the
United States have repeatedly aided obscurantist
opposition to such movements. Worst of all, the more
the West presents itself as both the champion of
science and rationality and as a ruthless plunderer
of all the world's resources -- not only natural
resources, but also its cheap labour and even its grey
matter -- and the more it squeezes poor countries
through debt and uneven trade terms, making
genuine development virtually impossible, the more it
gives the Enlightenment a bad name, notably in the
Muslim countries. By its short-sighted egotism, the
West is stifling the very universalism it claims
to promote.
Let me now discuss some rhetorical tricks that are used
to soften opposition to wars and that tend to be
particularly effective within the left.
Fake internationalism
The human rights ideology is often defended within the
left under the guise of "internationalism". We
have, on that basis, to help victims of dictatorial
governments in the Third World (like the Afghan
women), possibly by supporting U.S. and European
interventions. But, again, this is mostly a
delusion. What about child labor in Pakistan? Should we
go to war over that issue? Yet, we can be certain
that, if a major conflict between the West and
Pakistan arises (which seems unlikely), this will
become the issue of the day. Let us also think about
past "issues of the day". Who worries now about the
situation of Indians in Nicaragua? About the drug
trade in Panama? Or human rights in Kosovo? Yet, all
those issues were picked by the powers that be, at a
given time, as the most crucial issue to focus on,
so as to justify their policies. A genuine
internationalist position would at the very least
lead us to think globally and democratically. And to
get in closer touch with mass popular movements in
the Third World (not small sects) and ask them what
they think of the interventions of our governments.
I suspect that a lot could be learned from such
exchanges.
A related issue is the one of "nationalism". The latter
has become very unpopular in leftist circles and it
is thus easy for the mainstream press to discredit
any leader like Milosevic or Saddam Hussein by using
that label. But this overlooks two factors: first,
the extreme emotional reaction to the September 11
events in the US show that nationalism, in its
most primitive and traditional form, is alive and well
in that country. And, since the US is infinitely
more powerful than Iraq or Yugoslavia, it is that
nationalism which is the most dangerous. Moreover, and
more importantly, the strategic orientation of
capitalism today is very much anti-state.
Multinational corporations are often far stronger
economically than Third World states and are quite
happy to see the powers of the state, at least
some of them, be weakened or dismantled. Of course,
nationalism per se is not a leftist value, but any
condemnation of it in a particular instance must be
done while keeping these factors in mind.
The "neither-nor" position
It has become fashionable, in leftists circles,
especially in France, to adopt of position of
"neither-nor" ("ni ni" in French). Neither NATO nor
Milosevic; or neither the Talibans nor the United
States. And, probably tomorrow, neither Saddam
Hussein nor whatever alliance the United States
manages to set up against Iraq. Like all slogans, this
one has some merit, but also serious deficiencies.
Obviously, nobody opposing the war in Afghanistan is
for the Taliban or wishes anybody to live under such
a regime. In that sense, the situation is quite
different from the one at the time of Stalin, for
example, where part of the left did consider his
regime as some kind of ideal (and the long
influence of Stalinism in France may explain why the
"ni ni" attitude is so widespread there). For
reasons explained here, opposing wars of aggression
can be justified quite independently of one's views
about the internal policies of the country being
aggressed.
However, the neither-nor position gives the impression
that there is some kind of symmetry between the two
positions being rejected; but this is simply not
true. It is clear that "Islamic fascism", as the
liberals call it, is a horrible movement (which
harms Muslims most of all). But one cannot equate
such movements to global U.S. imperialism. First of
all, consider the relationship of forces and the
extent of the damage done. The Talibans were an
extremely weak military force whose existence
depended almost entirely on outside support (from
Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, two staunch U.S. allies)
and exhaustion of Afghan society from years of
U.S.-sponsored war. By contrast, the United States is
the greatest military power of all times. The harm
done by the Talibans is direct and visible
(floggings, destruction of artefacts) but not
comparable to the destruction -- much of it
indirect and hidden -- wrought by an imperial power
that has killed millions of people in its
counterrevolutionary wars, and extends its
economic and military power over billions of people.
Moreover, the Talibans, and more generally "Islamic
fascism", must be seen in context as largely a
byproduct of the relentless U.S. opposition to the
unacceptable notion of Arab or other Middle Eastern
nationalists that they might have the right to
control their natural resources.
Most of all, perhaps, is the asymmetry of our own
position: we are not judging the world from some
point situated outside of space and time. We pay
taxes to the United States or to its allies. If we do
military service, it will be in their armed
forces. We vote here. The people we meet and discuss
with are in general totally hostile to the Talibans,
but often support the United States. In that sense,
our primary responsibility is to limit the
violence of our own governments, not to denounce those
of others.
Honest opponents of wars sometimes feel that they have
the duty to denounce the other side to show that
they don't have "double standards". But we need to
keep in mind the actual consequences of what we say,
especially for the victims of the violence of our
states, not simply to show our purity or our
absence of double standards. And whatever we say about
the "enemy" is likely be to used to reinforce
nationalist feelings of self-righteousness and other
war-like sentiments. For example, any denunciation of
Saddam Hussein's policies, done in the Western press
and under present circumstances, even if the
statements made are factually correct, is likely
to have as sole effect to strengthen the resolve of
those who have inflicted and want to continue to
inflict immense suffering on the Iraqi people .
Related to this, is the rhetoric of "supporting X". In
the dominant discourse, particularly in the media,
opponents of wars are always accused of
"supporting" the other side whether the other side is
the German Emperor during WW1, Stalin during the
Cold War, or Milosevic, Saddam or the Talibans
today. This is absurd on two counts: one is that, if
opposing a war against X means that one "supports
X", then even the humanitarian warriors "support"
many X's that do things that they don't really like,
unless they are ready to wage war against Morocco,
Indonesia, Turkey, etc.; indeed, most of the
world, including Israel of course. The second
problem is: how do the warmongers avoid the charge
of supporting the US and his many unsavory proxies?
Well, they simply declare that they don't approve
"all US policies" (usually without saying which ones
they don't like). But they do not give even a hint
of how they would curb the very policies that they
object to; and, given the relationship of forces in the
world, that is indeed a very big open question .
By contrast, if I was to declare (which I am happy
to do) that I don't support "all of Saddam Hussein's
policies", I doubt very much that it would clear
people like me of the charge of "supporting Saddam".
The European illusion
Many leftists nurse the hope that Europe may distance
itself from the United States and become a sort of
counterweight to its global hegemony. But there are
several problems with this hope. To discuss this, we
need to have a clear view of what "Europe " is.
Roughly speaking it is the global imperialist power
of the past, which lost its place to the United
States and would very much like to regain it. Of
course, it wasn't unified in the past, and lost
its dominant role largely because of its internal
divisions. Both its past and its present roles are
justified in the name of unique "European values",
that are often contrasted, in the discourse of the
European elites, with the rudeness and the
commercialism of the Americans. But this, like the
dedication of the United States to human rights,
represents merely the usual ideological framework in
which all powers operate and justify themselves. So,
assuming Europe becomes more unified and more
powerful militarily; what is to be expected? Either it
remains a sort a of vacillating ally of the United
States, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing,
maneuvering to defend its own narrow interests in
the Third World when they differ from those of the
United States. Or else it becomes a more determined
adversary of the United States, and we are back to a
sort of a new Cold War, with Europe playing the role
held by the Soviet Union. Arm races, increased
military spending, the threat of global
destruction, are not exactly what the left should hope
for.
The European political and military buildup should
simply be none of our business. We should combat any
effort to shift budget priorities from social
services to European "defense". Europe is sufficiently
armed already to defend itself against a
hypothetical direct aggression by the United States,
which can best be prevented by political means, by
allying with the rest of the world in favor of
fair commercial arrangements, international law and
measures to counteract the current polarization of
wealth and power. But it would totally foolish for
the left to put its hope in the projection of
European power abroad to play a progressive role.
3. Some Modest Suggestions
Although there are no quick answers to the question of
what is to be done in the present world situation,
one thing should be clear: Western intellectuals
should stop spreading illusions about "our values".
All expanding empires pursue atrocious policies in
the name of "values", either the "white man's
burden" or the "civilizing mission" or various
Christian duties in the past. We should at the very
least lucidly analyze and denounce the hypocrisy of
those discourses.
But, more fundamentally, we need to operate a genuine
cultural revolution in our attitude with respect to
the Third World. Once upon a time, many socialists
and progressives of differing persuasions swallowed the
edifying stories about the "civilizing mission"
and believed that their main business was to educate
the "inferior races". This produced the first
version of liberal imperialism. Later, during the
decolonisation period, many leftist groups projected
their "revolutionary envy", so to speak, on the
Third World, expecting to be saved by distant national
liberation struggles. But if radical social changes
are hard to achieve in the West, they may even be
harder to achieve in the Third World. Dire poverty,
cultural underdevelopment, and the heavy weight of
feudal social relations are not exactly conditions
propitious to the "development of socialism",
whatever socialism may be. But the fact that the
so-called "socialism" in the Third World did not
fulfill the (wild) dreams of many Western leftists
led a number of them to a reaction of burning their
former idols.
Resentful at being let down, they have joined the new
wave of liberal imperialism, brandishing slogans
such as the "right of humanitarian intervention",
justified by the human rights ideology, or by a
perverted "internationalism".
What the world needs now, and what decent citizens of
the West should demand of their governments, is to
put a total end to Western foreign interventions and
even to offer apologies accompanied by massive
reparations for the pillage and exploitation that has
drained the Third World for centuries. Do we feel
altruistic and want to do "humanitarian work"? Let
us cancel debts with no compensation, provide cheap
medicines to cure AIDS in Africa, transfer
technology free of charge, open our borders widely
to refugees and immigrants. All this would do far more
good than all the military interventions that the
liberal imperialists can invent. And to the extent
that we are not so altruistic -- which is human after
all -- we should at least have the honesty to
admit it, try to force our governments to keep
their bloody hands out the affairs of the Third World
and support efforts towards what people sometimes
call a "second independence": after the
decolonisation, elimination of the neo-colonial regimes
that have replaced the old world order.
There are many organizations devoted to "watching"
human rights violations among the former victims
of colonial violence. What is needed, besides and
sometimes against those groups, are organizations
devoted to "watching" interventions and plots by the
imperial powers.
The jingoists a la Bush are making the United States
extremely unpopular in the world. In places with few
or no Muslims, such as Argentina, South Korea or El Salvador,
there are reports of people expressing their sympathies
for bin Laden. This reaction may be shocking, but
not more than, say, the attitude of the crowds in
New York enthusiastically "welcoming the troops"
after the far greater slaughter of the Gulf War. The
gap between North and South is growing and the
admiration for bin Laden reflects this gap. The use
of force by the United States will provoke resistance
(as Hitler and the colonialists did in the past)
and, since there are many weak spots in the West,
one can expect that there will be other events like
September 11. This spiral leads nowhere, or at
least not towards what we would like, but rather
towards more war and more repression. While leftist
intellectuals congratulate themselves about
"victories for human rights", the poverty,
humiliation and despair of much of the world breeds
fanaticism. It is urgent that the Western left build
real bridges with popular organizations in the
Third World; but, to achieve that, we have first to
clarify our views about the real relations of forces
that shape this world, to take into account, in all
our actions, our actual position in it and to expose
the illusions spread by the liberal imperialists.
Jean Bricmont
(end)
LA PARCELLIZZAZIONE ETNICA NON FINISCE MAI
Non soddisfatti del livello di decomposizione raggiunto nei Balcani,
certi ambienti occidentali progettano ulteriore sfascio. Il patriarca
Pavle ha recentemente segnalato la attivita' di una serie di
"Organizzazioni Non Governative" nella zona della Serbia ai confini
della Romania, dove gli abitanti di origine valacca vengono incitati a
differenziarsi, caratterizzandosi in quanto minoranza nel censimento
della popolazione. Questo benche' da molti anni ormai la assimilazione
delle varie componenti nazionali nella zona fosse un fatto acquisito.
+++ Patriarch mahnt "NGOs" in Ostserbien +++
ZAJECAR, 7. April 2002. Der serbische Patriarch Pavle warnte vor
besorgniserregenden Ereignissen in der ostserbischen Region
Timocka Krajina, die die derzeitige Volkszählung begleiten.
Mehrere aus dem Westen finanzierte
"Nichtregierungsorganisationen" verteilen an die wallachische
Bevölkerung Flugblätter, in denen sie aufgerufen wird, sich bei
der Volkszählung zu Rumänen zu erklären. Obwohl es diese
Möglichkeit auch bei den bisherigen Volkszählungen gab, haben die
allermeisten Angehörigen dieser Wallachisch sprechenden und zur
Serbischen Orthodoxen Kirche gehörenden Volksgruppe als
Volkszugehörigkeit immer "serbisch" angegeben, nur etwa ein
Fünftel wollte als "Wallachen" eingetragen werden.
Die Sprache der etwa 100.000 Menschen zählenden wallachischen
Gemeinschaft gehört zur romanischen Gruppe und ist dem
Rumänischen sehr ähnlich. Durch das jahrhundertlange
Zusammmenleben mit den Serben betrachten sich die Wallachen als
einen Teil serbischer Nation.
Der Patriarch rief die Bevölkerung in Timocka Krajina dazu an,
sich so bei der Volkszählung äußern, "wie ihr Herz ihnen es
gebietet".
TIKER / AMSELFELD.COM
Non soddisfatti del livello di decomposizione raggiunto nei Balcani,
certi ambienti occidentali progettano ulteriore sfascio. Il patriarca
Pavle ha recentemente segnalato la attivita' di una serie di
"Organizzazioni Non Governative" nella zona della Serbia ai confini
della Romania, dove gli abitanti di origine valacca vengono incitati a
differenziarsi, caratterizzandosi in quanto minoranza nel censimento
della popolazione. Questo benche' da molti anni ormai la assimilazione
delle varie componenti nazionali nella zona fosse un fatto acquisito.
+++ Patriarch mahnt "NGOs" in Ostserbien +++
ZAJECAR, 7. April 2002. Der serbische Patriarch Pavle warnte vor
besorgniserregenden Ereignissen in der ostserbischen Region
Timocka Krajina, die die derzeitige Volkszählung begleiten.
Mehrere aus dem Westen finanzierte
"Nichtregierungsorganisationen" verteilen an die wallachische
Bevölkerung Flugblätter, in denen sie aufgerufen wird, sich bei
der Volkszählung zu Rumänen zu erklären. Obwohl es diese
Möglichkeit auch bei den bisherigen Volkszählungen gab, haben die
allermeisten Angehörigen dieser Wallachisch sprechenden und zur
Serbischen Orthodoxen Kirche gehörenden Volksgruppe als
Volkszugehörigkeit immer "serbisch" angegeben, nur etwa ein
Fünftel wollte als "Wallachen" eingetragen werden.
Die Sprache der etwa 100.000 Menschen zählenden wallachischen
Gemeinschaft gehört zur romanischen Gruppe und ist dem
Rumänischen sehr ähnlich. Durch das jahrhundertlange
Zusammmenleben mit den Serben betrachten sich die Wallachen als
einen Teil serbischer Nation.
Der Patriarch rief die Bevölkerung in Timocka Krajina dazu an,
sich so bei der Volkszählung äußern, "wie ihr Herz ihnen es
gebietet".
TIKER / AMSELFELD.COM
57 ANNI FA LO SFONDAMENTO DEL LAGER USTASCIA DI JASENOVAC
22 aprile 1945: circa 1700 internati - serbi, antifascisti,
rom ed ebrei - assaltavano le recinzioni in filo spinato
sfidando le raffiche di mitragliatrice dei guardiani del campo
di concentramento di Jasenovac, su di un'ansa del fiume Sava.
"Soltanto 65 di loro riuscivano a scavalcare la porta della
fabbrica della morte. Nella pioggia, vento e tuoni, con le
ultime forze, scegliendo libertà o morte, correvano centinaia
di detenuti. Il fuoco su di loro fù aperto da tutte le parti,
cadevano come fasci di grano, saltando sopra gli amici morti,
ed avanzavano. Gli ammassi dei corpi raggiungevano l'altezza di
un metro.
Nei giorni precedenti all'azione, i suicidi tra i detenuti erano
tantissimi, convinti della impossibilità di uscire vivi, ormai
negli ultimi giorni della guerra. Dopo l'azione, subendo svariati
assedi ed uccisioni, i rimanenti del gruppo giungevano alla città
di Gradiska, il 25 Aprile..."
(D.K. su pck-yugoslavia@..., 30/4/01)
* Alcune fonti su JASENOVAC e lo sterminio attuato dai nazifascisti
in Croazia 1941-1945
* "Witness To Jasenovac's Hell" - a book by Ilija Ivanovic
* First Annual Commemoration of Jasenovac
to be held in NYC, APRIL 21, 2002
(THE JASENOVAC RESEARCH INSTITUTE)
* Documenting a Death Camp in Nazi Croatia
By NEIL A. LEWIS, New York Times, November 14, 2001
* Croatia Faces Up to Nazi Death Camp Past
By Zoran Radosavljevic, Reuters, December 5, 2001
* CROAZIA: OLOCAUSTO, RESTITUITI DOCUMENTI CAMPO JASENOVAC
ANSA, 5 Dicembre 2001
===*===
FONTI / LINKS:
> http://www.beograd.com/jasenovac
MUZEJ ZRTAVA GENOCIDA
> http://www.jasenovac.org/
Jasenovac Research Institute
> http://www.ushmm.com/jasenovac/
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
PRESENTATION ON JASENOVAC
> http://snd-us.com/Liberty/st_jasenovac_revisited.htm
Comments on Holocaust Museum Jasenovac Exhibit
By Dr. Srdja Trifkovic
> http://www.new-ostrog.org/memorial.html
The Serbian Holocaust Memorial
at our Monastery in British Columbia, Canada
===*===
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 20:43:16 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [yugoslaviainfo] IMPORTANT:
The book Witness To Jasenovac's Hell is out
Dear friend,
I am glad to inform you that the book Witness To Jasenovac's Hell
by Mr. Ilija Ivanovic is finally available.
This rare book, translated to English, gives a full view into
Jasenovac's hell, the World War II Nazi Croatian death camp.
Whole families, entire villages from Bosnia and Croatia were sent
to camp Jasenovac. Very few out of hundreds of thousands of people--
Serbs, Jews and Gypsies--survived the camp. The Western world knows
little about Jasenovac.
Mr. Ivanovic was one of the survivors. He was brought to the camp
when he was a young boy, barely 13 years old. The book is his account.
One cannot understand what happened recently in Yugoslavia
without reading this book.
More about the book can be found at:
> http://www.dallaspublishing.com/jasenovac.htm
You can order the book through "Pay Pal" if you follow "Order"
link from the above page or send orders of $22.95 to
Orders@...
You can also order by fax at:
Fax: 903-572-9611
Or send check by ground mail to:
Dallas Publishing Company
P. O. Box 1144
Mt. Pleasant, TX 75456-1144
Please, inform other friends about this important book.
Send this note far and wide.
Best wishes,
Petar Makara
===*===
Subject: First Annual Commemoration of Jasenovac to be held in
NYC, Apr 21, 2002
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 22:16:28 -0400
From: "Jim Yarker"
THE JASENOVAC RESEARCH INSTITUTE
PO BOX 608, MONROE, MI. 48162
Tel. (734) 242-3992 Fax (734) 242-4289
www.jasenovac.org webmaster@...
"Let the truth be known!"
___
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
17 APRIL 2002
FIRST ANNUAL COMMEMORATION OF JASENOVAC
TO BE HELD AT HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL PARK
IN NEW YORK CITY ON 21 APRIL 2002
On Sunday, 21 April 2002, a ceremony to honor the
Victims and Survivors of the Jasenovac Concentration
Camp and the Yugoslav Holocaust will be held from 2 to 3
PM at The Holocaust Memorial Park in Brooklyn, NY. A
ceremony including a wreath laying, religious service
and speeches by Survivors and scholars will accompany
the placing of a plaque with a draft of the inscription
for the stone monument to be unveiled later this year.
The Holocaust Memorial Park, which is located at West
End Avenue between Emmons Ave & Shore Blvd in the
Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, is the only monument
park commemorating the Holocaust in the New York City
area.
April 22nd marks the fifty-seventh anniversary of the
breakout attempt by Jasenovac inmates. The memorial
ceremony has been timed as closely as possible to mark
this anniversary. The Jasenovac Research Institute
intends to initiate an annual practice of holding
commemorative ceremonies on this date. All those who
support justice for and recognition of Yugoslav
Holocaust Victims and Survivors are encouraged to enrich
this ceremony with their participation.
JASENOVAC
Following the Nazi invasion and dismemberment of
Yugoslavia in April 1941, the "Independent State of
Croatia" was established as a pro-Nazi government. It
was dedicated to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced
both by Nazism and extreme Roman Catholic fanaticism. On
coming to power, the Ustashe Party dictatorship in
Croatia quickly commenced on a systematic policy of
racial extermination of all Serbs, Jews and Roma living
within its borders. From August 1941 to April 1945,
hundreds of thousands of Serbs, tens of thousands of
Jews and Roma, as well as anti-fascists of many
nationalities, were murdered at the death camp known as
Jasenovac. Estimates of the total number of men, women
and children killed there have been put at 700,000.
Jasenovac was not the only death camp in
fascist-occupied Yugoslavia, but it was by far the
largest in the entire Balkans region and the one in
which a majority of the some one million victims of the
Yugoslav Holocaust perished.
TRAVEL DIRECTIONS TO THE COMMEMORATION
By Car From Manhattan: Take the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway
(BQE) Westbound to the Belt Parkway. You will travel on the
Belt Eastbound and exit at Exit 8 (Coney island Ave.).
Follow signs for Kingsborough. Be warned that Exit 8 follows
closely upon Exit 7. The exit leaves you on Guilder
Ave. You will take Guilder straight - past Coney Island Ave
- and to its end at East 12th Street. Make a right turn on
East 12th St. Then make an immediate left turn (at the light)
onto Neptune Ave. You will then make another rapid turn
- your first possible right - onto Cass Place (also at a
light). Take Cass Place about 2 blocks past the light. West
End Ave. and the Park are immediately on your left. You can
find parking on the streets adjoining the park. Please follow
posted parking regulations.
By Car From New Jersey: Take any of the 3 or 4 bridges going to
Staten Island and head onto the Verrazano's Narrows Bridge (no toll
out of Staten Island). Exit the bridge onto the Belt Parkway
going East. Now follow the directions from Manhattan.
By Car From Queens or Long Island: Take the Belt Parkway West
to Exit 8 (Coney Island Ave.). At the end of the exit turn right
onto Voorhies Ave. Make another right from Voorhies onto
Sheepshead Bay Road at the first light. Take Sheepshead Bay
Road to the end (2 lights) and make a right turn.
Make your first possible left turn at the second light onto West
End Ave. The Holocaust Memorial Park is on this block on your
left. You may park on any of the adjoining streets. Please follow
posted parking regulations.
By Bus: The B-49 Bus stops within one block of the Holocaust
Park. Any bus connection to the B-49 bus is good.
By Subway: The best lines to take are the D or the Q trains. Both go
to
Sheepshead Bay Station. Remember to get a transfer ticket at the token
booth.
In front of the train station is a bus stop for the B-49 bus.
THE JRI - WHO WE ARE, WHAT WE DO, AND HOW TO SUPPORT OUR WORK
From the memory of those who survived, and from the
passion of those who wish the truth to be known, came
the Jasenovac Research Institute, a nonprofit foundation
dedicated to building public awareness about the
Holocaust in Yugoslavia and the furthering the search
for justice for its Victims and Survivors. JRI promotes
research and activities designed to enlighten the world
to the crimes of genocide committed at Jasenovac and
elsewhere in wartime Yugoslavia and aims to provide
assistance to all groups and individuals who likewise
seek justice for these victims.
JRI is a registered Section 501c3 non-profit
corporation. Donations to JRI for the costs of the
memorial stone, and to finance our other work, are
tax-deductible (IRS reg. no. 38-3410276) and can be sent
to:
Jasenovac Research Institute
PO Box 608
Monroe, MI 48162
USA
Payment accepted by check, money order, Visa, and
Mastercard
Please contact us if you'd like to learn more about our
work and how you can join us.
===*===
New York Times November 14, 2001
Documenting a Death Camp in Nazi Croatia
By NEIL A.LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 - Officials of the United States
Holocaust Museum said today that they had discovered
and preserved a cache of decaying documents and artifacts
from one of the lesser-known but most brutal concentration
camps of World War II. The camp, known as Jasenovac, was
operated in Croatia by the Ustasha, the Nazi puppet government.
The artifacts were found deteriorating in a building in
Banja Luka in the Serbian part of Bosnia last year, officials
said. Peter Black, the museum's chief historian, told reporters
today that Jasenovac was crude in comparison to the industrialized
Nazi extermination camps like Auschwitz. Mr. Black said there
were no gas chambers or crematories, so prisoners were murdered
one by one with axes, guns, knives or prolonged torture. Bodies
were buried or thrown into the adjacent Sava River.
Jasenovac (pronounced ya-SEN- oh-vatz), actually a complex of five
camps about 60 miles from the Croatian capital, Zagreb, has
been little studied in the West, but the history has long
resonated in the modern Balkans, where analysts and historians
have debated about how much of the region's violence
may be traced to historic ethnic enmities.
Mr. Black estimated that nearly 100,000 people had been
killed in Jasenovac, the largest number being Serbs, followed
by Jews and Gypsies. The camp was established by the Republic
of Croatia to eliminate anyone who was not an ethnic Croatian.
Mr. Black said a combination of factors, including the
reluctance of officials to agree on what happened, had led to
its history's remaining largely hidden from scholars until now.
The collection includes 2,000 photographs, many of atrocities;
tens of thousands of papers; and thousands of artifacts, like
inmate crafts. Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust
Museum, said the project to save the documents and artifacts
was especially significant because of the cooperation of the
government of Croatia, whose history is cast in a poor
light, as well as the governments of Serbia and Bosnia.
Ms. Bloomfield said the governments had cooperated despite
"the continuing sensitivity of all sides to this collection."
That sensitivity was on display moments after the
museum's presentation today when a diplomat from Croatia,
Mate Maras, objected to the assertion by museum officials
that more than 300,000 Serbs had died at the hands of the
Ustasha throughout Croatia in World War II.
Mr. Maras complained to Ms. Bloomfield and Mr. Black that
the number was misleading because it included what he said
were combatants throughout Croatia and thus was comparable
to the hundreds of thousands of Croats killed in the war.
Mr. Maras said that while he thought the assertions of
the museum's personnel about Serb casualties were misleading,
he agreed it was "a good day for Croatia to open up these
sad pages of our history."
Copies of the collection have been made and will be
maintained at the Holocaust Museum and in Israel, officials
said. The original collection will be returned to a museum
in Croatia, where it will be put on display at the
site of the Jasenovic complex, officials said.
===*===
>
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011205/wl/croatia_holocaust_dc_1.html
Wednesday December 5 1:24 PM ET
Croatia Faces Up to Nazi Death Camp Past
By Zoran Radosavljevic
JASENOVAC, Croatia (Reuters) - Croatia on Wednesday
reinstalled exhibits and archives from a concentration camp its
pro-Nazi government set up in 1941, in a move to show
it was coming to terms with darker aspects of its history.
The items were returned by the Washington Holocaust Memorial
museum, where they were sent for safekeeping in 2000,
some years after being taken from the site by retreating
Serb forces who occupied the Jasenovac area during Yugoslavia's
bitter collapse.
The Museum commended the reformist Croatian government
for deciding to take back the exhibits recounting the brutality
of pro-German Croatian commanders of the camp, 100km
(60 miles) southeast of Zagreb, toward Jews, Serbs and
Gypsies.
``We commend the Croatian government for its commitment
to honestly confront its terrible past,'' Sara Bloomfield,
museum director, said in a letter read at a ceremony at
the Jasenovac Memorial center attended by a few camp survivors.
Rebel Croatian Serbs who captured the territory around
Jasenovac when Croatia proclaimed independence in 1991, moved
the items across the Sava river to Bosnian Serb areas
in the face of an advance by Zagreb government troops in 1995.
The previous nationalist government of the late President
Franjo Tudjman had tolerated the revival of Ustasha symbols
and Tudjman himself appeared to play down Croatian
responsibility for the Holocaust in one of his books.
He changed those elements in his writings after pressure
from the West and Jewish groups but other nationalists were
accused of downplaying the crimes of the Ustashe and of
trimming the numbers of those who died in Jasenovac.
DEATH TOLL
Some 85,000 inmates -- Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-Fascist
Croats -- are estimated by independent historians to
have perished in the camp, set up and run by Nazi-allied
Ustasha authorities who ruled Croatia in 1941-45.
Many had died of starvation, exhaustion or illness, or
had been gunned, knived or bludgeoned to death.
Slavko Goldstein, a prominent member of Croatia's small
Jewish community and of the Jasenovac museum management,
said the truth about the camp had been ``diminished and
distorted in school books and many other publications in
the last decade.''
``The truth, the whole truth, is the only way for this
terrible tragedy that still burdens our politics to move
to the realm of history and remembrance,'' Goldstein said.
``I am pleased to confirm this site, in all its dignity,
as a place of remembrance but also of warning,'' said Croatian Culture
Minister Antun Vujic who helped organize the return of items.
Jasenovac commander Dinko Sakic -- the last known living
Nazi-era camp commander -- was sentenced to 20 years in
prison in 1999 by a Croatian court for crimes against
humanity after he was extradited from Argentina.
===*===
Chiudiamo riportando questo dispaccio ANSA dello scorso
dicembre. Si noti che l'ANSA, come tutte le altre agenzie
di stampa, omette di menzionare il ruolo svolto dai prelati
cattolici nel regime croato e nello sterminio (a Jasenovac
ad esempio il lager era co-gestito da frati francescani;
si veda in proposito, tra gli altri, "l'Arcivescovo del
genocidio", di M.A. Rivelli, Ed. Kaos). Inoltre, l'ANSA
riporta senza commento le cifre delle vittime secondo
la versione revisionista di Tudjman.
> http://www.ansa.it/balcani/croazia/20011205194732068594.html
CROAZIA: OLOCAUSTO, RESTITUITI DOCUMENTI CAMPO JASENOVAC
(ANSA) - ZAGABRIA, 5 DIC - Decine di casse con documenti, filmati, foto
e oggetti della Seconda guerra mondiale sono state riportate oggi al
memoriale di Jasenovac, nel cui campo di concentramento morirono decine
di migliaia di serbi, ebrei, rom e croati oppositori al regime ustascia
di Ante Pavelic. I documenti presi dai secessionisti serbi della
Krajina durante la guerra (1991-95) furono portati nella zona serba
della Bosnia e consegnati l'anno scorso al Museo dell'Olocausto di
Washington. Oggi a Jasenovac l'ambasciatore americano Lawrence G.
Rossin, in una cerimonia davanti al memoriale, ha consegnato le casse
al ministro di cultura Antun Vujic, alla presenza di Slavko Goldstein
esponente della comunita' ebraica di Zagabria e presidente del
consiglio del memoriale Jasenovac. Secondo il ministero della cultura
risultano mancanti ancora centinaia di documenti, oggetti e fotografie.
Mancano anche 5 mila schede dei prigionieri di Jasenovac. Con una
investimento di 150 mila dollari il Museo dell'Olocausto di Washington
ha realizzato delle copie che saranno mandate agli archivi di Belgrado,
a quelli di Banja Luka, sede di istituzione della Rs (entita' serba
della Bosnia) e allo Yad Vashem, il memoriale di Olocausto di
Gerusalemme. Il ministro dellla cultura croato ha ringraziato gli Stati
Uniti per aver preservato la memoria di Jasenovac e per aver restituito
alla Croazia tutto il materiale. Il numero delle vittime di quello che
fu chiamato l'Auschwitz croato e' ancora oggi controverso. Secondo una
stima del governo nazionalista di Franjo Tudjman le vittime furono 50
mila, secondo le autorita' di Belgrado 700 mila. Secondo uno studio
condotto da Goldstein, i prigionieri uccisi a Jasenovac furono tra 80 e
90 mila. Uno dei comandanti del campo di concentramento, Dinko Sakic,
fu condannato dal Tribunale di Zagabria nel 1999 a 20 anni di prigione.
(ANSA). COR*VD
05/12/2001 19:47
22 aprile 1945: circa 1700 internati - serbi, antifascisti,
rom ed ebrei - assaltavano le recinzioni in filo spinato
sfidando le raffiche di mitragliatrice dei guardiani del campo
di concentramento di Jasenovac, su di un'ansa del fiume Sava.
"Soltanto 65 di loro riuscivano a scavalcare la porta della
fabbrica della morte. Nella pioggia, vento e tuoni, con le
ultime forze, scegliendo libertà o morte, correvano centinaia
di detenuti. Il fuoco su di loro fù aperto da tutte le parti,
cadevano come fasci di grano, saltando sopra gli amici morti,
ed avanzavano. Gli ammassi dei corpi raggiungevano l'altezza di
un metro.
Nei giorni precedenti all'azione, i suicidi tra i detenuti erano
tantissimi, convinti della impossibilità di uscire vivi, ormai
negli ultimi giorni della guerra. Dopo l'azione, subendo svariati
assedi ed uccisioni, i rimanenti del gruppo giungevano alla città
di Gradiska, il 25 Aprile..."
(D.K. su pck-yugoslavia@..., 30/4/01)
* Alcune fonti su JASENOVAC e lo sterminio attuato dai nazifascisti
in Croazia 1941-1945
* "Witness To Jasenovac's Hell" - a book by Ilija Ivanovic
* First Annual Commemoration of Jasenovac
to be held in NYC, APRIL 21, 2002
(THE JASENOVAC RESEARCH INSTITUTE)
* Documenting a Death Camp in Nazi Croatia
By NEIL A. LEWIS, New York Times, November 14, 2001
* Croatia Faces Up to Nazi Death Camp Past
By Zoran Radosavljevic, Reuters, December 5, 2001
* CROAZIA: OLOCAUSTO, RESTITUITI DOCUMENTI CAMPO JASENOVAC
ANSA, 5 Dicembre 2001
===*===
FONTI / LINKS:
> http://www.beograd.com/jasenovac
MUZEJ ZRTAVA GENOCIDA
> http://www.jasenovac.org/
Jasenovac Research Institute
> http://www.ushmm.com/jasenovac/
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
PRESENTATION ON JASENOVAC
> http://snd-us.com/Liberty/st_jasenovac_revisited.htm
Comments on Holocaust Museum Jasenovac Exhibit
By Dr. Srdja Trifkovic
> http://www.new-ostrog.org/memorial.html
The Serbian Holocaust Memorial
at our Monastery in British Columbia, Canada
===*===
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 20:43:16 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [yugoslaviainfo] IMPORTANT:
The book Witness To Jasenovac's Hell is out
Dear friend,
I am glad to inform you that the book Witness To Jasenovac's Hell
by Mr. Ilija Ivanovic is finally available.
This rare book, translated to English, gives a full view into
Jasenovac's hell, the World War II Nazi Croatian death camp.
Whole families, entire villages from Bosnia and Croatia were sent
to camp Jasenovac. Very few out of hundreds of thousands of people--
Serbs, Jews and Gypsies--survived the camp. The Western world knows
little about Jasenovac.
Mr. Ivanovic was one of the survivors. He was brought to the camp
when he was a young boy, barely 13 years old. The book is his account.
One cannot understand what happened recently in Yugoslavia
without reading this book.
More about the book can be found at:
> http://www.dallaspublishing.com/jasenovac.htm
You can order the book through "Pay Pal" if you follow "Order"
link from the above page or send orders of $22.95 to
Orders@...
You can also order by fax at:
Fax: 903-572-9611
Or send check by ground mail to:
Dallas Publishing Company
P. O. Box 1144
Mt. Pleasant, TX 75456-1144
Please, inform other friends about this important book.
Send this note far and wide.
Best wishes,
Petar Makara
===*===
Subject: First Annual Commemoration of Jasenovac to be held in
NYC, Apr 21, 2002
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 22:16:28 -0400
From: "Jim Yarker"
THE JASENOVAC RESEARCH INSTITUTE
PO BOX 608, MONROE, MI. 48162
Tel. (734) 242-3992 Fax (734) 242-4289
www.jasenovac.org webmaster@...
"Let the truth be known!"
___
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
17 APRIL 2002
FIRST ANNUAL COMMEMORATION OF JASENOVAC
TO BE HELD AT HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL PARK
IN NEW YORK CITY ON 21 APRIL 2002
On Sunday, 21 April 2002, a ceremony to honor the
Victims and Survivors of the Jasenovac Concentration
Camp and the Yugoslav Holocaust will be held from 2 to 3
PM at The Holocaust Memorial Park in Brooklyn, NY. A
ceremony including a wreath laying, religious service
and speeches by Survivors and scholars will accompany
the placing of a plaque with a draft of the inscription
for the stone monument to be unveiled later this year.
The Holocaust Memorial Park, which is located at West
End Avenue between Emmons Ave & Shore Blvd in the
Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, is the only monument
park commemorating the Holocaust in the New York City
area.
April 22nd marks the fifty-seventh anniversary of the
breakout attempt by Jasenovac inmates. The memorial
ceremony has been timed as closely as possible to mark
this anniversary. The Jasenovac Research Institute
intends to initiate an annual practice of holding
commemorative ceremonies on this date. All those who
support justice for and recognition of Yugoslav
Holocaust Victims and Survivors are encouraged to enrich
this ceremony with their participation.
JASENOVAC
Following the Nazi invasion and dismemberment of
Yugoslavia in April 1941, the "Independent State of
Croatia" was established as a pro-Nazi government. It
was dedicated to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced
both by Nazism and extreme Roman Catholic fanaticism. On
coming to power, the Ustashe Party dictatorship in
Croatia quickly commenced on a systematic policy of
racial extermination of all Serbs, Jews and Roma living
within its borders. From August 1941 to April 1945,
hundreds of thousands of Serbs, tens of thousands of
Jews and Roma, as well as anti-fascists of many
nationalities, were murdered at the death camp known as
Jasenovac. Estimates of the total number of men, women
and children killed there have been put at 700,000.
Jasenovac was not the only death camp in
fascist-occupied Yugoslavia, but it was by far the
largest in the entire Balkans region and the one in
which a majority of the some one million victims of the
Yugoslav Holocaust perished.
TRAVEL DIRECTIONS TO THE COMMEMORATION
By Car From Manhattan: Take the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway
(BQE) Westbound to the Belt Parkway. You will travel on the
Belt Eastbound and exit at Exit 8 (Coney island Ave.).
Follow signs for Kingsborough. Be warned that Exit 8 follows
closely upon Exit 7. The exit leaves you on Guilder
Ave. You will take Guilder straight - past Coney Island Ave
- and to its end at East 12th Street. Make a right turn on
East 12th St. Then make an immediate left turn (at the light)
onto Neptune Ave. You will then make another rapid turn
- your first possible right - onto Cass Place (also at a
light). Take Cass Place about 2 blocks past the light. West
End Ave. and the Park are immediately on your left. You can
find parking on the streets adjoining the park. Please follow
posted parking regulations.
By Car From New Jersey: Take any of the 3 or 4 bridges going to
Staten Island and head onto the Verrazano's Narrows Bridge (no toll
out of Staten Island). Exit the bridge onto the Belt Parkway
going East. Now follow the directions from Manhattan.
By Car From Queens or Long Island: Take the Belt Parkway West
to Exit 8 (Coney Island Ave.). At the end of the exit turn right
onto Voorhies Ave. Make another right from Voorhies onto
Sheepshead Bay Road at the first light. Take Sheepshead Bay
Road to the end (2 lights) and make a right turn.
Make your first possible left turn at the second light onto West
End Ave. The Holocaust Memorial Park is on this block on your
left. You may park on any of the adjoining streets. Please follow
posted parking regulations.
By Bus: The B-49 Bus stops within one block of the Holocaust
Park. Any bus connection to the B-49 bus is good.
By Subway: The best lines to take are the D or the Q trains. Both go
to
Sheepshead Bay Station. Remember to get a transfer ticket at the token
booth.
In front of the train station is a bus stop for the B-49 bus.
THE JRI - WHO WE ARE, WHAT WE DO, AND HOW TO SUPPORT OUR WORK
From the memory of those who survived, and from the
passion of those who wish the truth to be known, came
the Jasenovac Research Institute, a nonprofit foundation
dedicated to building public awareness about the
Holocaust in Yugoslavia and the furthering the search
for justice for its Victims and Survivors. JRI promotes
research and activities designed to enlighten the world
to the crimes of genocide committed at Jasenovac and
elsewhere in wartime Yugoslavia and aims to provide
assistance to all groups and individuals who likewise
seek justice for these victims.
JRI is a registered Section 501c3 non-profit
corporation. Donations to JRI for the costs of the
memorial stone, and to finance our other work, are
tax-deductible (IRS reg. no. 38-3410276) and can be sent
to:
Jasenovac Research Institute
PO Box 608
Monroe, MI 48162
USA
Payment accepted by check, money order, Visa, and
Mastercard
Please contact us if you'd like to learn more about our
work and how you can join us.
===*===
New York Times November 14, 2001
Documenting a Death Camp in Nazi Croatia
By NEIL A.LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 - Officials of the United States
Holocaust Museum said today that they had discovered
and preserved a cache of decaying documents and artifacts
from one of the lesser-known but most brutal concentration
camps of World War II. The camp, known as Jasenovac, was
operated in Croatia by the Ustasha, the Nazi puppet government.
The artifacts were found deteriorating in a building in
Banja Luka in the Serbian part of Bosnia last year, officials
said. Peter Black, the museum's chief historian, told reporters
today that Jasenovac was crude in comparison to the industrialized
Nazi extermination camps like Auschwitz. Mr. Black said there
were no gas chambers or crematories, so prisoners were murdered
one by one with axes, guns, knives or prolonged torture. Bodies
were buried or thrown into the adjacent Sava River.
Jasenovac (pronounced ya-SEN- oh-vatz), actually a complex of five
camps about 60 miles from the Croatian capital, Zagreb, has
been little studied in the West, but the history has long
resonated in the modern Balkans, where analysts and historians
have debated about how much of the region's violence
may be traced to historic ethnic enmities.
Mr. Black estimated that nearly 100,000 people had been
killed in Jasenovac, the largest number being Serbs, followed
by Jews and Gypsies. The camp was established by the Republic
of Croatia to eliminate anyone who was not an ethnic Croatian.
Mr. Black said a combination of factors, including the
reluctance of officials to agree on what happened, had led to
its history's remaining largely hidden from scholars until now.
The collection includes 2,000 photographs, many of atrocities;
tens of thousands of papers; and thousands of artifacts, like
inmate crafts. Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust
Museum, said the project to save the documents and artifacts
was especially significant because of the cooperation of the
government of Croatia, whose history is cast in a poor
light, as well as the governments of Serbia and Bosnia.
Ms. Bloomfield said the governments had cooperated despite
"the continuing sensitivity of all sides to this collection."
That sensitivity was on display moments after the
museum's presentation today when a diplomat from Croatia,
Mate Maras, objected to the assertion by museum officials
that more than 300,000 Serbs had died at the hands of the
Ustasha throughout Croatia in World War II.
Mr. Maras complained to Ms. Bloomfield and Mr. Black that
the number was misleading because it included what he said
were combatants throughout Croatia and thus was comparable
to the hundreds of thousands of Croats killed in the war.
Mr. Maras said that while he thought the assertions of
the museum's personnel about Serb casualties were misleading,
he agreed it was "a good day for Croatia to open up these
sad pages of our history."
Copies of the collection have been made and will be
maintained at the Holocaust Museum and in Israel, officials
said. The original collection will be returned to a museum
in Croatia, where it will be put on display at the
site of the Jasenovic complex, officials said.
===*===
>
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011205/wl/croatia_holocaust_dc_1.html
Wednesday December 5 1:24 PM ET
Croatia Faces Up to Nazi Death Camp Past
By Zoran Radosavljevic
JASENOVAC, Croatia (Reuters) - Croatia on Wednesday
reinstalled exhibits and archives from a concentration camp its
pro-Nazi government set up in 1941, in a move to show
it was coming to terms with darker aspects of its history.
The items were returned by the Washington Holocaust Memorial
museum, where they were sent for safekeeping in 2000,
some years after being taken from the site by retreating
Serb forces who occupied the Jasenovac area during Yugoslavia's
bitter collapse.
The Museum commended the reformist Croatian government
for deciding to take back the exhibits recounting the brutality
of pro-German Croatian commanders of the camp, 100km
(60 miles) southeast of Zagreb, toward Jews, Serbs and
Gypsies.
``We commend the Croatian government for its commitment
to honestly confront its terrible past,'' Sara Bloomfield,
museum director, said in a letter read at a ceremony at
the Jasenovac Memorial center attended by a few camp survivors.
Rebel Croatian Serbs who captured the territory around
Jasenovac when Croatia proclaimed independence in 1991, moved
the items across the Sava river to Bosnian Serb areas
in the face of an advance by Zagreb government troops in 1995.
The previous nationalist government of the late President
Franjo Tudjman had tolerated the revival of Ustasha symbols
and Tudjman himself appeared to play down Croatian
responsibility for the Holocaust in one of his books.
He changed those elements in his writings after pressure
from the West and Jewish groups but other nationalists were
accused of downplaying the crimes of the Ustashe and of
trimming the numbers of those who died in Jasenovac.
DEATH TOLL
Some 85,000 inmates -- Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-Fascist
Croats -- are estimated by independent historians to
have perished in the camp, set up and run by Nazi-allied
Ustasha authorities who ruled Croatia in 1941-45.
Many had died of starvation, exhaustion or illness, or
had been gunned, knived or bludgeoned to death.
Slavko Goldstein, a prominent member of Croatia's small
Jewish community and of the Jasenovac museum management,
said the truth about the camp had been ``diminished and
distorted in school books and many other publications in
the last decade.''
``The truth, the whole truth, is the only way for this
terrible tragedy that still burdens our politics to move
to the realm of history and remembrance,'' Goldstein said.
``I am pleased to confirm this site, in all its dignity,
as a place of remembrance but also of warning,'' said Croatian Culture
Minister Antun Vujic who helped organize the return of items.
Jasenovac commander Dinko Sakic -- the last known living
Nazi-era camp commander -- was sentenced to 20 years in
prison in 1999 by a Croatian court for crimes against
humanity after he was extradited from Argentina.
===*===
Chiudiamo riportando questo dispaccio ANSA dello scorso
dicembre. Si noti che l'ANSA, come tutte le altre agenzie
di stampa, omette di menzionare il ruolo svolto dai prelati
cattolici nel regime croato e nello sterminio (a Jasenovac
ad esempio il lager era co-gestito da frati francescani;
si veda in proposito, tra gli altri, "l'Arcivescovo del
genocidio", di M.A. Rivelli, Ed. Kaos). Inoltre, l'ANSA
riporta senza commento le cifre delle vittime secondo
la versione revisionista di Tudjman.
> http://www.ansa.it/balcani/croazia/20011205194732068594.html
CROAZIA: OLOCAUSTO, RESTITUITI DOCUMENTI CAMPO JASENOVAC
(ANSA) - ZAGABRIA, 5 DIC - Decine di casse con documenti, filmati, foto
e oggetti della Seconda guerra mondiale sono state riportate oggi al
memoriale di Jasenovac, nel cui campo di concentramento morirono decine
di migliaia di serbi, ebrei, rom e croati oppositori al regime ustascia
di Ante Pavelic. I documenti presi dai secessionisti serbi della
Krajina durante la guerra (1991-95) furono portati nella zona serba
della Bosnia e consegnati l'anno scorso al Museo dell'Olocausto di
Washington. Oggi a Jasenovac l'ambasciatore americano Lawrence G.
Rossin, in una cerimonia davanti al memoriale, ha consegnato le casse
al ministro di cultura Antun Vujic, alla presenza di Slavko Goldstein
esponente della comunita' ebraica di Zagabria e presidente del
consiglio del memoriale Jasenovac. Secondo il ministero della cultura
risultano mancanti ancora centinaia di documenti, oggetti e fotografie.
Mancano anche 5 mila schede dei prigionieri di Jasenovac. Con una
investimento di 150 mila dollari il Museo dell'Olocausto di Washington
ha realizzato delle copie che saranno mandate agli archivi di Belgrado,
a quelli di Banja Luka, sede di istituzione della Rs (entita' serba
della Bosnia) e allo Yad Vashem, il memoriale di Olocausto di
Gerusalemme. Il ministro dellla cultura croato ha ringraziato gli Stati
Uniti per aver preservato la memoria di Jasenovac e per aver restituito
alla Croazia tutto il materiale. Il numero delle vittime di quello che
fu chiamato l'Auschwitz croato e' ancora oggi controverso. Secondo una
stima del governo nazionalista di Franjo Tudjman le vittime furono 50
mila, secondo le autorita' di Belgrado 700 mila. Secondo uno studio
condotto da Goldstein, i prigionieri uccisi a Jasenovac furono tra 80 e
90 mila. Uno dei comandanti del campo di concentramento, Dinko Sakic,
fu condannato dal Tribunale di Zagabria nel 1999 a 20 anni di prigione.
(ANSA). COR*VD
05/12/2001 19:47
