U.S. JEWS AND THE BALKAN SITUATION

Alvin Dorfman and Heather Cottin

Jewish Currents, April 1996

There is at present widespread support in American public opinion for
the policies of the U.S. government in the Balkans. It is a striking
and dark paradox that Jewish opinion has played an important role in
helping to mobilize that support.

U.S. policy in the Balkans has now carried the United States into
direct intervention in two civil wars, one between Croatian Serbs and
the new proto-fascist state of Croatia, and one between the Bosnian
Serbs and a Bosnian Muslim government which has become increasingly
fundamentalist. In the first case, the U.S. helped the new Croatia to
plan, organize and carry out the invasion of the Krajina region in
Croatia, which led to the uprooting of more than a quarter of a million
Serbs and the slaughter of thousands who tried to remain in their
ancestral homes there. In the second case, the U.S. used NATO, against
the advice of many of its allies, to destroy the military
infrastructure of the Bosnian Serb army and to shift the balance of
power in favor of a minority Muslim government in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
This, too, has led to the flight of well over 100,000 Bosnian Serbs.

In intervening in this manner, the U.S. has not just taken sides in an
internal European war; it has allied itself with the most reactionary
elements in Europe, including a newly expansionist, racist and
increasingly militaristic German government. Worse still, the U.S., in
order to create what it thinks will be a more favorable atmosphere for
the re-election of Pres. Bill Clinton, is now seeking to impose an
unworkable overall peace "settlement" in Yugoslavia and to enforce it
with a 60,000-man NATO task force, which will include some 25,000 U.S.
troops. Even Richard Holbrooke, the Assistant Secretary of State for
European Affairs, admits that this could well lead to another Vietnam.

To anyone who lived through World War II and who still understand the
meaning of Nazism - and this applies especially to Jews - all of this
should be not just astonishing, but repulsive. The United States, in
alliance with the German government, is now pursuing policies very
similar to those pursued by the Nazis who wished to splinter the
Balkans in order to dominate the area. It was the Nazis who unleashed
clerical fascism in Yugoslavia during World War II. And it was the
Nazis who displayed a pathological hatred of the Serbs, as well as of
Jews and Gypsies.

It is difficult to understand how U.S. policy toward the Balkans could
have taken such a turn in any reasonably democratic country.
Unfortunately, a large part of the explanation is that public opinion
in this matter has been driven into something like a frenzy by what
seems to be an officially inspired and large-scale campaign of
propaganda. No foreign policy can succeed without public support. And
U.S. policy in the Balkans is clear testimony to that fact. Although as
recently as four years ago, the American public did not even know the
location of the regions known as Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia,
the Krajina and Montenegro - and perhaps many Americans still don't -
key individuals and groups in this country were targeted for a
propaganda barrage designed to demonize the Serbs, to hide the reality
of Croatian fascism and to canonize the Bosnian Muslims.

Several groups received special treatment by the government and the
media in the course of this propaganda campaign. Since they, like many
other Americans, were for the most part ignorant of the history of the
region, they were relatively easy to convince. The groups which were
singled out were liberals, women and Jews. And government spokesmen
and the media have been hammering at them for years now.

To take but one example: in Washington the public relations firm of
Ruder/Finn mounted a campaign to get American Jews to associate the
civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the Holocaust. This campaign,
according to Justice Department documents, was paid for by the
governments of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, although the head of
Ruder/Finn later explained these governments had not paid for all the
costs of the campaign. What other governments were passing money to
Ruder/Finn?

Was the C.I.A. helping to subsidize the campaign through traditional
means, the usual kinds of "front" companies, or "proprietaries," as
insiders like to call them?

Every effort was made by Ruder/Finn to reach the leading Jewish
organizations in the United States at an early stage. Facts were
distorted. Lies were reiterated so many times that they became "facts."
In an interview with the well- known French TV journalist Jacques
Merlino, James Harff, director of Ruder/Finn Global Affairs, boasted
that the achievement he was most proud of was "to have put Jewish
opinion on our side." He said, "We out witted three Jewish
organizations - the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish
Committee and the American Jewish Congress..." Harff called getting
these organizations to publish a pro-Bosnian Muslim ad in the N.Y.
Times, and to organize demonstrations outside the United Nations "a
tremendous coup." He crowed, "By a single move we were able to present
a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play
itself...We won by targeting the Jewish audience..." He explained, "Our
work is not to verify information, our work is to accelerate the
circulation of information favorable to us. We are not paid to be
moral."*

It should be remembered that Jews have also been singled out as targets
of official propaganda in the not-too-distant past. When the Reagan
administration was secretly trying to overthrow the Sandinistas
government in Nicaragua, it used the same techniques that Ruder/Finn
used in demonizing the Serbs. And some Jewish leaders allowed
themselves to be used to discredit the Nicaraguan government. They
helped to promote the idea that the Sandinistas were anti-Semetic.
There was not a grain of truth to the claim. But some Jewish leaders
signed a full-page ad in The N.Y. Times, The Washington Post and The
L.A. Times which referred to the Contras as the moral equivalent of
American revolutionaries and as "freedom fighters."

Today American Jewish organizations are being used in a similar way.
It is important to contrast what has happened in America with what has
happened in Israel. The Israeli public has proved much harder to
deceive than the American public.

Jews are people of the Book, and very aware of their place in history.
Israelis are, not surprisingly, much more aware of history in general
than American Jews, and especially of European history. Israeli
Yugoslav Jews were therefore more immune to media manipulation during
the world-wide campaign against the Serbs. American Jews jumped on the
anti-Serb bandwagon rolling through the American media. In Israel,
Yugoslav Jews knew very well that the Serbs had been their strongest
allies during the Holocaust, carried out in Yugoslavia primarily by
Croatian fascists. They remembered that the Croatian Ustashi had
murdered hundreds of thousands at the Jasenovac death camp. They
remembered that the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, had declared
that "only 1,000,000 Jews had died in the Nazi Holocaust." They knew
that Tudjman had proclaimed proudly that his wife "was neither a Serb
nor a Jew."

Israel may have recognized Croatia - under pressure. But it is no
secret that Israeli arms have ended up in Serb hands. Israel has still
not recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina. It would be a near-suicidal step
for any Israeli government to support a Bosnian Muslim regime whose
president (Izetbegovic) has written that "There can be no peace or
coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies..."

In the United States, the process of rehabilitating Croatia has been
incredibly successful. Croatian fascists, who still provide the model
of ideal nationalism for the Croatian government today, killed 60,000
Jews in World War II. They recently destroyed Jewish synagogues as
well as Serbian churches. If one can ignore such things, it is hardly
surprising that there was little international protest in August, 1995
when 250,000 Serbs living in the Krajina region of Croatia were driven
off the land on which their families have lived for 300 years. How
could such "ethnic cleansing" have been carried out without
international opprobrium? The Croatian campaign in the Krajina was the
largest and most violent attack on European soil since the end of World
War II. And much of it, because the Croatian Serb Army was quickly
shattered, was directed at unarmed civilians. The international media
called the Serbs "rebels" even though this region was recognized as
Serb by the Croatian government during World War II. No CNN horror
films catalogued the Croatian air force strafing of Serb refugees, the
destruction of their churches, the cold-blooded assassination of old
people, the burning of more than 16,000 homes and other properties. No
American refugee organization concerned themselves with the hundreds of
thousands of Serbs, from Croatia and Western Bosnia, streaming into
Yugoslavia. And since, by the summer of 1995, American Jews had been
properly brainwashed and made anti-Serb, no Jews spoke out about a
horror which should been chillingly familiar. Somehow the fact that
Croatia expelled more than 40,000 Serbs when it declared its
independence in 1991 has been ignored. Somehow the fact that Croatia
has denied its population basic human rights such as freedom of speech
and freedom of the press and that it operates a repressive police state
has been hidden. In fear of their lives and livelihoods, some Croatian
Jews extol the virtues of the Croatian government. When Croatian
fascists commit atrocities, people seem to respond with the familiar
refrain, "We didn't know."

Things have not been very different with respect to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In the U.S. media and among senior American officials, Bosnian Muslim
spokesmen are taken at their word where Serbs are not. Jewish leaders
have been trotted out to make condemnatory anti-Serb pronouncements.
Even when UNPROFOR (UN Protection Force) spokespersons denied or raised
doubts about stories of questionable veracity, the Bosnian Muslim
position or claim has been taken as truth.

Feminists in the U.S. were treated to a propaganda blitz about rapes
allegedly carried out by Serbs. It had an electrifying effect. In the
end, the radical group "Madre," which previously supported Central
American women, launched an emotional campaign to save thousands of
Bosnian Muslim women allegedly raped by Bosnian Serb soldiers. Gloria
Steinem lent the story respectability in Ms. Magazine. The N.Y. Times
wrote that 20,000 to 50,000 Bosnian women had been raped, despite the
fact that there was no substantiation for such numbers - except, of
course, from the Bosnian Muslim "Ministry of Information." Despite
doubts expressed by Helsinki Watch, Human Rights Watch and respected
individuals such as Simone Weil, the president of the European
Parliament, the American media relied on the Bosnian War Crimes
Commission and Caritas, the Catholic charity connected to the Croatian
government, for verification of these outrageous claims. The German
media promoted the rape hysteria for their own reasons, which British
historian Nora Beloff ascribed to the German need "to Satanize the
Serbs in order to cover their own responsibility for pitching
Yugoslavia into war."

In the U.S., from the beginning of the conflict, there was never any
attempt to see the civil wars in Yugoslavia from a position of
neutrality. Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were simply "new states"
welcomed into the brotherhood of nations, with seats quickly obtained
for them at the UN. They were never pictured, as any briefing on
history and politics would demand, as the fruits of the most extreme,
exclusivist nationalism, the kind of nationalism which turned Central
Europe upside down in the 1930s and led to World War II. But Yugoslav
Jews in Israel, understanding what was really happening in the Balkans,
actively opposed any government support of Croatians or Muslims,
despite Croatian public relations efforts directed at Israel. Jews in
Israel knew that Hamas members trained in Bosnia. They remembered that
the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem organized two Bosnian Muslim divisions for
Hitler's army during World War II.

It is distinctly peculiar that so many Americans, and more curious
still that so many American Jews, should have taken the side of the
Bosnian Muslim government. Of course, the USA has backed Muslim
fundamentalism before, in Afghanistan, for instance, where it was a
useful tool for ending Russian aid to the Afghan government. But these
are European Muslim fundamentalists. That is perhaps why the
theocratic ideas of Mr. Izetbegovic and his colleagues have received so
little attention here. Jews might wince if they learned that the
Bosnian president has said, "The struggle for Islamic order and the
fundamental reconstruction of Muslim society can be successfully waged
only by battle-tested and hardened individuals...The Islamic order
should take power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong
enough not only to overthrow non-Islamic rule but to develop new
Islamic rule." Are these the heroes of the West? It is strange that
Americans and American Jews, as a people who believe in multicultural
diversity and freedom of religion, have embraced the Bosnian Muslim's
struggle as their own.

The Horror of the last four years was brought upon the Balkans
primarily by Germany and the United States for geopolitical reasons.
Yugoslavia might already in 1991 or 1992 have begun to break up as a
result of internal disagreements. But, in the absence of German and
U.S. interventions, it is unlikely that there would have been civil
wars there. By the end of 1992, however, Germany, throwing its weight
around as an economic power, was able to force the international
community to recognize Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as
independent states. It was quietly but effectively assisted by the
Bush administration, which, almost immediately after the Yelstin
takeover of 1991 in the Soviet Union, publicly abandoned its support
for the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia. By their joint
maneuvering the two great powers created a situation which reduced the
stature of more than two million Serbs outside Serbia and Montenegro to
that of "ethnic minorities" in hostile states.

When Croatia denied Serbs all political standing, the Krajina Serbs
declared their independence from Croatia - with as much right as the
Croatians had in declaring their independence from Yugoslavia. In
Bosnia, where under Izetbegovic Serbs were denied all political and
economic rights, the Bosnian Serbs also embarked on a struggle for
self-determination. They had no wish to be dominated by a repressive
fundamentalist regime.

But Germany and the U.S. were determined to succeed in their efforts to
break up Yugoslavia. Germany poured millions of deutschemarks into the
Croatian military, and it trained and armed Bosnian Muslims, with help
from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and other Islamic governments.
Weapons, money and men poured into Bosnia for the jihad. And the
Muslim government opposed every peace agreement that would have given
anything of value to the Bosnian Serbs. The U.S. has provided finance,
political support and covert military assistance to both the Bosnian
Muslims and the Croatians.

Thus, there had to be a battle to win the hearts and minds of the
American people. Their support was needed if these policies were to
succeed. The support of American Jews became a key to moving public
opinion. Their major organizations carried weight, both in terms of
resources and in terms of moral leadership. Jewish support underwrote
the morality of the German-American policies in the Balkans.

It also followed that a great deal had to be hidden. Germany's pursuit
of divisive and expansionist policies in the Balkans for the third time
in the century had to be hidden. The fundamentalist values of
government leaders in Bosnia had to be kept hidden. And the role of
Germany and the U.S. in building up extremist nationalist movements so
that Yugoslavia could be torn apart had to be hidden: Widespread
information about any of these would have made it very difficult to win
the prize of Jewish opinion.

The time has come to question our position on this issue. Progressives
in the country, and Jews especially, have been inundated by a tidal
wave of poisonous falsehoods. We must ask ourselves, "Since when were
aggressive, anti-democratic foreign policies worthy of support?" We
need to establish why Yugoslavia broke up. We need to understand the
meaning of the U.S. German alliance after the Cold War. And we need to
question why we have deserted the Serbs, our only friends in
Yugoslavia, the only people who stood with us against the Nazis and who
died with us at the death camp Jasenovac. Serbs in Belgrade, to whom we
have spoken by phone, are appalled by what American Jewish
organizations have done. Jews of Yugoslav origin in Israel are
mortified. One has only to read the Israeli press to realize that. We
must see our shame. If it comes from not knowing, or being misled, we
need to atone for it. Jews have nothing to gain and everything that we
morally stand for to lose by continuing to turn our backs on the
Serbian people.

Reproduced with the permission of the authors.

Alvin Dorfman is a contributor to Jewish Currents and as had a long
association with the magazine.

Heather Cottin is a new contributor. She is a public high school
social studies teacher.

END

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