Subject: Neil Clark: Review of a book on Milosevic
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 19:25:11 +0100
From: "Vladimir Krsljanin" <vlada@...>
Milosevic: a biography
Adam LeBor Bloomsbury, 386pp, £20
ISBN 0747560900
"the most revealing aspect of LeBor's "authoritative" account
is what he fails to reveal"
Reviewed by Neil Clark
Slobodan Milosevic. What are the first images that come to your
mind on hearing this name? Burning villages? Detention camps?
Mass graves? If so, you are yet another victim of one of the most
brilliant and successful demonisation campaigns of modern times,
a campaign continued by Adam LeBor in his new biography of
the former Yugoslav leader.
The LeBor thesis is simple, and it is one we have all heard many
times before. Milosevic, an "archetypal Communist Party official",
rose to power by whipping up dormant Serb nationalism in the
late 1980s. Through his desire to create a "Greater Serbia", he
provoked the break-up of his own country and the "decade of war
and misery" that followed. After the benign (though belated)
intervention of the western powers, Slobo is now in his rightful
place, a 9ft by 15ft prison cell in an old Nazi jail near The Hague.
Despite fascinating details such as how Milosevic's son Marko
liked to have his swimming pool heated to 38C, the most revealing
aspect of LeBor's "authoritative" account is what he fails to
reveal. Any evidence that contradicts his central thesis is either
omitted or sketched over in the most cursory fashion.
There is just one oblique reference in the entire book to the
meeting at The Hague in October 1991 when, on being summoned
to the negotiating table by the European Community
"arbitrators"- Lord Carrington, Jacques Delors and Hans Van
den Broek - the leaders of the constituent Yugoslav republics
were presented with a paper, "The End of Yugoslavia from the
International Scene". This document provided for the existing
republic boundaries to become the new international ones.
In effect the death certificate of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, it was accepted by all the delegates except the Serbs,
with Milosevic returning to Belgrade in disgust. "Yugoslavia was
not created by the consensus of six men and cannot be dissolved
by the consensus of six men", pleaded the man LeBor wants us to
believe was responsible for the break-up and the carnage that
followed.
On tracing Yugoslavia's tragic descent into war, LeBor's
omissions become more frequent. He quotes Warren Zimmerman
several times in the book, but fails to inform readers of how the
US ambassador to Belgrade intervened personally to persuade the
Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic to renege on the February 1992
Lisbon Agreement which provided for the peaceful reshaping of
Bosnia.
No mention, either, of the way the US State Department
sabotaged the efforts at peacemaking by Cyrus Vance and David
Owen when they neared success in order to justify military action
and the establishment of a de facto Nato colony in Bosnia.
Milosevic's support for the anti-separatist Bosnian politician Adil
Zulfikarpasic is recorded only as a footnote; while the malevolent
interventions of the German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher are accorded just five lines. While Slobo is quite clearly
LeBor's villain of the piece, the leaders of the secessionist
republics receive rather more favourable appraisal. Milan Kucan,
the leader of Slovenia, the first republic to break away, is regarded
as "sensible"; Izetbegovic (a man who once wrote "there can be no
peace or co-existence between Islamic and non-Islamic
institutions") is "well-meaning"; while the Macedonian Vasil
Tuporkovski is described as "American-educated" and
"pro-western" - LeBor shorthand for someone of whom he
thinks we should approve.
In Chapter 22, LeBor moves on to the Kosovo crisis, but once
again tells only one half of the story. He talks of the way the
"Albanian diaspora" provided funds for the up-and-coming KLA,
but neglects to mention the enormous role western security forces
played in the funding, arming and training of a terrorist group
incontrovertibly linked to al-Qaeda. Predictably, LeBor blames
Milosevic's "obduracy" for not accepting the Rambouillet peace
plan in 1999, but does not mention appendix B to chapter 7 of the
document which provided for the "free and unrestricted passage
and unimpeded access throughout Yugoslavia, including
associated airspace and territorial waters" for all Nato personnel.
Silly old Slobo for not signing up for military occupation.
For all the fly-leaf boasts that LeBor had "unrivalled access to
those closest to Milosevic", time and time again he falls back on
the same discredited sources, either those with a personal axe to
grind against Milosevic, or more often than not the testimony of a
"senior US official". LeBor spends a whole page discussing the
dastardly RAM plan, "the geographical outline for the future
Greater Serbia", allegedly drawn out by Milosevic and
high-ranking officers in the Yugoslav army, but concedes in his
footnotes that "no copy of the plan as yet has been produced as
evidence". He does, though, quote Louis Sell, the US diplomat,
who remembers being shown a "covertly obtained document that
revealed contingency plans by the military" that "may have been
the RAM plan or something similar". The ubiquitous Sell is also
quoted as saying that throughout the Srebrenica crisis Milosevic
was "in direct personal contact with [Ratko] Mladic", despite the
official and exhaustive Dutch government report into the
massacre finding no evidence of political or military liaison with
Belgrade concerning the killings.
In the chapter "Toppling Milosevic from Budapest", LeBor at
least reveals how the US poured $70m into the Serb opposition
coffers in their attempt to oust Slobo. But he fails to explain why
the most powerful nation on earth believed a change of
government in Belgrade was so important.
With Slobo now under lock and key and a "reform" government
installed in Belgrade, western hegemony in the Balkans is
complete. Lord Ashdown, who testified against Milosevic at The
Hague, holds court as the new King of Bosnia; while in Kosovo,
Camp Bondsteel, the US's biggest "from scratch" military base
since the Vietnam war, protects the route of the $1.3bn
trans-Balkan AMBO pipeline, guaranteeing western control of
Caspian Sea oil supplies. What John Pilger calls the west's
"strategic concept" - the destruction of Yugoslavia and its
replacement with a series of weak and divided protectorates - has
been achieved in little more than a decade.
It was all, says Pilger, "based on a marriage of lies, thanks largely
to those journalists who acted as the handmaidens of great and
murderous power". In his one-sided account of the break-up of
Yugoslavia and his unjust vilification of the man who tried his
best to hold his country together, LeBor fails to challenge those
journalists.
=
This review first appeared in the New Statesman.
To join or help this struggle, visit:
http://www.sps.org.yu/ (official SPS website)
http://www.belgrade-forum.org/ (forum for the world of equals)
http://www.icdsm.org/ (the international committee to defend
Slobodan Milosevic)
icdsm temporary address:
http://emperor.vwh.net/icdsm/index.htm
for your donations:
http://emperor.vwh.net/icdsm/donations.htm
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 19:25:11 +0100
From: "Vladimir Krsljanin" <vlada@...>
Milosevic: a biography
Adam LeBor Bloomsbury, 386pp, £20
ISBN 0747560900
"the most revealing aspect of LeBor's "authoritative" account
is what he fails to reveal"
Reviewed by Neil Clark
Slobodan Milosevic. What are the first images that come to your
mind on hearing this name? Burning villages? Detention camps?
Mass graves? If so, you are yet another victim of one of the most
brilliant and successful demonisation campaigns of modern times,
a campaign continued by Adam LeBor in his new biography of
the former Yugoslav leader.
The LeBor thesis is simple, and it is one we have all heard many
times before. Milosevic, an "archetypal Communist Party official",
rose to power by whipping up dormant Serb nationalism in the
late 1980s. Through his desire to create a "Greater Serbia", he
provoked the break-up of his own country and the "decade of war
and misery" that followed. After the benign (though belated)
intervention of the western powers, Slobo is now in his rightful
place, a 9ft by 15ft prison cell in an old Nazi jail near The Hague.
Despite fascinating details such as how Milosevic's son Marko
liked to have his swimming pool heated to 38C, the most revealing
aspect of LeBor's "authoritative" account is what he fails to
reveal. Any evidence that contradicts his central thesis is either
omitted or sketched over in the most cursory fashion.
There is just one oblique reference in the entire book to the
meeting at The Hague in October 1991 when, on being summoned
to the negotiating table by the European Community
"arbitrators"- Lord Carrington, Jacques Delors and Hans Van
den Broek - the leaders of the constituent Yugoslav republics
were presented with a paper, "The End of Yugoslavia from the
International Scene". This document provided for the existing
republic boundaries to become the new international ones.
In effect the death certificate of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, it was accepted by all the delegates except the Serbs,
with Milosevic returning to Belgrade in disgust. "Yugoslavia was
not created by the consensus of six men and cannot be dissolved
by the consensus of six men", pleaded the man LeBor wants us to
believe was responsible for the break-up and the carnage that
followed.
On tracing Yugoslavia's tragic descent into war, LeBor's
omissions become more frequent. He quotes Warren Zimmerman
several times in the book, but fails to inform readers of how the
US ambassador to Belgrade intervened personally to persuade the
Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic to renege on the February 1992
Lisbon Agreement which provided for the peaceful reshaping of
Bosnia.
No mention, either, of the way the US State Department
sabotaged the efforts at peacemaking by Cyrus Vance and David
Owen when they neared success in order to justify military action
and the establishment of a de facto Nato colony in Bosnia.
Milosevic's support for the anti-separatist Bosnian politician Adil
Zulfikarpasic is recorded only as a footnote; while the malevolent
interventions of the German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher are accorded just five lines. While Slobo is quite clearly
LeBor's villain of the piece, the leaders of the secessionist
republics receive rather more favourable appraisal. Milan Kucan,
the leader of Slovenia, the first republic to break away, is regarded
as "sensible"; Izetbegovic (a man who once wrote "there can be no
peace or co-existence between Islamic and non-Islamic
institutions") is "well-meaning"; while the Macedonian Vasil
Tuporkovski is described as "American-educated" and
"pro-western" - LeBor shorthand for someone of whom he
thinks we should approve.
In Chapter 22, LeBor moves on to the Kosovo crisis, but once
again tells only one half of the story. He talks of the way the
"Albanian diaspora" provided funds for the up-and-coming KLA,
but neglects to mention the enormous role western security forces
played in the funding, arming and training of a terrorist group
incontrovertibly linked to al-Qaeda. Predictably, LeBor blames
Milosevic's "obduracy" for not accepting the Rambouillet peace
plan in 1999, but does not mention appendix B to chapter 7 of the
document which provided for the "free and unrestricted passage
and unimpeded access throughout Yugoslavia, including
associated airspace and territorial waters" for all Nato personnel.
Silly old Slobo for not signing up for military occupation.
For all the fly-leaf boasts that LeBor had "unrivalled access to
those closest to Milosevic", time and time again he falls back on
the same discredited sources, either those with a personal axe to
grind against Milosevic, or more often than not the testimony of a
"senior US official". LeBor spends a whole page discussing the
dastardly RAM plan, "the geographical outline for the future
Greater Serbia", allegedly drawn out by Milosevic and
high-ranking officers in the Yugoslav army, but concedes in his
footnotes that "no copy of the plan as yet has been produced as
evidence". He does, though, quote Louis Sell, the US diplomat,
who remembers being shown a "covertly obtained document that
revealed contingency plans by the military" that "may have been
the RAM plan or something similar". The ubiquitous Sell is also
quoted as saying that throughout the Srebrenica crisis Milosevic
was "in direct personal contact with [Ratko] Mladic", despite the
official and exhaustive Dutch government report into the
massacre finding no evidence of political or military liaison with
Belgrade concerning the killings.
In the chapter "Toppling Milosevic from Budapest", LeBor at
least reveals how the US poured $70m into the Serb opposition
coffers in their attempt to oust Slobo. But he fails to explain why
the most powerful nation on earth believed a change of
government in Belgrade was so important.
With Slobo now under lock and key and a "reform" government
installed in Belgrade, western hegemony in the Balkans is
complete. Lord Ashdown, who testified against Milosevic at The
Hague, holds court as the new King of Bosnia; while in Kosovo,
Camp Bondsteel, the US's biggest "from scratch" military base
since the Vietnam war, protects the route of the $1.3bn
trans-Balkan AMBO pipeline, guaranteeing western control of
Caspian Sea oil supplies. What John Pilger calls the west's
"strategic concept" - the destruction of Yugoslavia and its
replacement with a series of weak and divided protectorates - has
been achieved in little more than a decade.
It was all, says Pilger, "based on a marriage of lies, thanks largely
to those journalists who acted as the handmaidens of great and
murderous power". In his one-sided account of the break-up of
Yugoslavia and his unjust vilification of the man who tried his
best to hold his country together, LeBor fails to challenge those
journalists.
=
This review first appeared in the New Statesman.
To join or help this struggle, visit:
http://www.sps.org.yu/ (official SPS website)
http://www.belgrade-forum.org/ (forum for the world of equals)
http://www.icdsm.org/ (the international committee to defend
Slobodan Milosevic)
icdsm temporary address:
http://emperor.vwh.net/icdsm/index.htm
for your donations:
http://emperor.vwh.net/icdsm/donations.htm