[ Diana Johnstone is the author of
(english) Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions
(francais) LA CROISADE DES FOUS. Yougoslavie, première guerre de la
mondialisation
(srpskohrvatski) Suludi krstasi
More information and links under:
https://www.cnj.it/documentazione/bibliografia.htm ]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1648470,00.html

The Bosnian war was brutal, but it wasn't a Holocaust

I do not deny atrocities, but unlike others I give them a proper
political context, says Diana Johnstone

Wednesday November 23, 2005
The Guardian

In apologising to Noam Chomsky (Corrections and clarifications,
November 17), the Guardian's readers' editor also had the decency to
correct some errors concerning me in Emma Brockes's interview with
Chomsky (G2, October 31). Despite this welcome retraction, the
impression might linger from Ms Brockes's confused account that my
work on the Balkans consists in denying atrocities.

My book, Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato and Western Delusions, which
was published in late 2002 by Pluto Press, is a documented analysis of
the historical background and the political context of the wars of
Yugoslavian disintegration. It includes considerable information about
such relatively overlooked matters as German policies towards
minorities, Slovenian politics, the divisions between Bosnian Muslim
politicians, and the troubled history of Kosovo.

My book does not attempt to recount what happened at Srebrenica, but
to point to the political symbolism of such events, marked by the
media tendency to dwell on some and not on others, to repeat the
highest of casualty estimates when there is no scientifically
established number, and above all to simplify and dramatise an
unfamiliar and complex reality by resorting to analogy with Hitler and
the Holocaust.

The analytical approach seems to be intolerable to a certain number of
writers and journalists who, for one reason or another, insist on
portraying the Yugoslavian conflicts in highly emotional terms as a
Manichaean struggle between evil and innocence. They reduce my book,
as they reduce the Balkan conflict itself, to a certain number of
notorious atrocities, and stigmatise whatever deviates from their own
dualistic interpretation.

I believe that this intense attachment to a Manichaean view of the
Yugoslavian conflicts stems in part from the disarray of the left in
the 1990s. What did it even mean any more to be "on the left"? Eastern
Europe, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, provided the answer:
the new threat was "nationalism". It was a short step to being
convinced that the worst of all evils was Serbian nationalism, and
that the proof of being on the left was the degree of indignation
expressed in its condemnation.

This attitude, as well as emotional involvement on behalf of the
Bosnian Muslims, led numerous writers to minimise the role of other
nationalisms in Yugoslavia, notably Croatian and Albanian nationalism,
and to overlook the harmful effects of German and United States
interference. This interference culminated in the 1999 Nato war, which
was justified by a series of extravagant analogies (Bosnia likened to
the Holocaust, Kosovo likened to Bosnia). It set the precedent for the
United States to wage war in violation of the national sovereignty of
weaker countries as a method of achieving political change.

This is a much greater threat to the world than Bosnian Serb
nationalists, however brutal their behaviour in the mid-1990s. I
believe that this is our primary political responsibility as citizens
of the United States and of Britain.

· Diana Johnstone is the author of The Politics of Euromissiles:
Europe in America's World.