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Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic
War Propaganda and the Criminalization of Justice:
The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic
by Michael Parenti
www.michaelParenti.org , December 2003
www.globalresearch.ca 17 December 2003
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PAR312A.html
U.S. leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five
decades, democratically elected governments---guilty of introducing
redistributive economic programs or otherwise pursuing independent
courses that do not properly fit into the U.S.-sponsored global free
market system---have found themselves targeted by the U.S. national
security state. Thus democratic governments in Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Guatemala,
Guyana, Haiti, Syria, Uruguay, and numerous other nations were
overthrown by their respective military forces, funded and advised by
the United States. The newly installed military rulers then rolled back
the egalitarian reforms and opened their countries all the wider to
foreign corporate investors.
The U.S. national security state also has participated in destabilizing
covert actions, proxy mercenary wars, or direct military attacks
against revolutionary or nationalist governments in Afghanistan (in the
1980s), Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, East Timor, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Fiji
Islands, Grenada, Haiti, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Iran, Jamaica,
Lebanon, Libya, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Syria,
South Yemen, Venezuela (under Hugo Chavez), Western Sahara, and Iraq
(under the CIA-sponsored autocratic Saddam Hussein, after he emerged as
an economic nationalist and tried to cut a better deal on oil prices).
The propaganda method used to discredit many of these governments is
not particularly original, indeed by now it is quite transparently
predictable. Their leaders are denounced as bombastic, hostile, and
psychologically flawed. They are labeled power hungry demagogues,
mercurial strongmen, and the worst sort of dictators likened to Hitler
himself. The countries in question are designated as "terrorist" or
"rogue" states, guilty of being "anti-American" and "anti-West." Some
choice few are even condemned as members of an "evil axis." When
targeting a country and demonizing its leadership, U.S. leaders are
assisted by ideologically attuned publicists, pundits, academics, and
former government officials. Together they create a climate of opinion
that enables Washington to do whatever is necessary to inflict serious
damage upon the designated nation's infrastructure and population, all
in the name of human rights, anti-terrorism, and national security.
There is no better example of this than the tireless demonization of
democratically-elected President Slobodan Milosevic and the
U.S.-supported wars against Yugoslavia. Louis Sell, a former U.S.
Foreign Service officer, has authored a book (Slobodan Milosevic and
the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Duke University Press, 2002) that is a
hit piece on Milosevic, loaded with all the usual prefabricated images
and policy presumptions of the U.S. national security state. Sell's
Milosevic is a caricature, a cunning power seeker and maddened fool,
who turns on trusted comrades and plays upon divisions within the party.
This Milosevic is both an "orthodox socialist" and an "opportunistic
Serbian nationalist," a demagogic power-hungry "second Tito" who
simultaneously wants dictatorial power over all of Yugoslavia while
eagerly pursuing polices that "destroy the state that Tito created."
The author does not demonstrate by reference to specific policies and
programs that Milosevic is responsible for the dismemberment of
Yugoslavia, he just tells us so again and again. One would think that
the Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, Macedonian, and Kosovo
Albanian secessionists and U.S./NATO interventionists might have had
something to do with it.
In my opinion, Milosevic's real sin was that he resisted the
dismemberment of Yugoslavia and opposed a U.S. imposed hegemony. He
also attempted to spare Yugoslavia the worst of the merciless
privatizations and rollbacks that have afflicted other former communist
countries. Yugoslavia was the only nation in Europe that did not apply
for entry into the European Union or NATO or OSCE.
For some left intellectuals, the former Yugoslavia did not qualify as a
socialist state because it had allowed too much penetration by private
corporations and the IMF. But U.S. policymakers are notorious for not
seeing the world the way purist left intellectuals do. For them
Yugoslavia was socialist enough with its developed human services
sector and an economy that was over 75 percent publicly owned. Sell
makes it clear that Yugoslavia's public ownership and Milosevic's
defense of that economy were a central consideration in Washington's
war against Yugoslavia. Milosevic, Sell complains, had a "commitment to
orthodox socialism." He "portrayed public ownership of the means of
production and a continued emphasis on [state] commodity production as
the best guarantees for prosperity." He had to go.
To make his case against Milosevic, Sell repeatedly falls back on the
usual ad hominem labeling. Thus we read that in his childhood Milosevic
was "something of a prig" and of course "by nature a loner," a weird
kind of kid because he was "uninterested in sports or other physical
activities," and he "spurned childhood pranks in favor of his books."
The author quotes an anonymous former classmate who reports that
Slobodan's mother "dressed him funny and kept him soft." Worse still,
Slobodan would never join in when other boys stole from orchards---no
doubt a sure sign of childhood pathology.
Sell further describes Milosevic as "moody," "reclusive," and given to
"mulish fatalism." But Sell's own data---when he pauses in his negative
labeling and gets down to specifics---contradicts the maladjusted
"moody loner" stereotype. He acknowledges that young Slobodan worked
well with other youth when it came to political activities. Far from
being unable to form close relations, Slobodan met a girl, his future
wife, and they enjoyed an enduring lifelong attachment. In his early
career when heading the Beogradska Banka, Milosevic was reportedly
"communicative, caring about people at the bank, and popular with his
staff." Other friends describe him as getting on well with people,
"communal and relaxed," a faithful husband to his wife, and a proud and
devoted father to his children. And Sell allows that Milosevic was at
times "confident," "outgoing," and "charismatic." But the negative
stereotype is so firmly established by repetitious pronouncement (and
by years of propagation by Western media and officialdom) that Sell can
simply slide over contradictory evidence---even when such evidence is
provided by himself.
Sell refers to anonymous "U.S. psychiatrists, who have studied
Milosevic closely." By "closely" he must mean from afar, since no U.S.
psychiatrist has ever treated or even interviewed Milosevic. These
uncited and unnamed psychiatrists supposedly diagnosed the Yugoslav
leader as a "malignant narcissistic" personality. Sell tells us that
such malignant narcissism fills Milosevic with self-deception and
leaves him with a "chore personality" that is a "sham." "People with
Milosevic's type of personality frequently either cannot or will not
recognize the reality of facts that diverge from their own perception
of the way the world is or should be." How does Dr. Sigmund Sell know
all this? He seems to find proof in the fact that Milosevic dared to
have charted a course that differed from the one emanating from
Washington. Surely only personal pathology can explain such "anti-West"
obstinacy. Furthermore, we are told that Milosevic suffered from a
"blind spot" in that he was never comfortable with the notion of
private property. If this isn't evidence of malignant narcissism, what
is? Sell never considers the possibility that he himself, and the
global interventionists who think like him, cannot or will not
"recognize the reality of facts that diverge from their own perception
of the way the world is or should be."
Milosevic, we are repeatedly told, fell under the growing influence of
his wife, Mirjana Markovic, "the real power behind the throne." Sell
actually calls her "Lady Macbeth" on one occasion. He portrays Markovic
as a complete wacko, given to uncontrollable anger; her eyes "vibrated
like a scared animal"; "she suffers from severe schizophrenia" with "a
tenuous grasp on reality," and is a hopeless "hypochondriac." In
addition, she has a "mousy" appearance and a "dreamy" and "traumatized"
personality. And like her husband, with whom she shares a "very
abnormal relationship," she has "an autistic relation with the world."
Worse still, she holds "hardline marxist views." We are left to wonder
how the autistic dysfunctional Markovic was able to work as a popular
university professor, organize and lead a new political party, and play
an active role in the popular resistance against Western
interventionism.
In this book, whenever Milosevic or others in his camp are quoted as
saying something, they "snarl," "gush," "hiss," and "crow." In
contrast, political players who win Sell's approval, "observe,"
"state," "note," and "conclude." When one of Milosevic's superiors
voices his discomfort about "noisy Kosovo Serbs" (as Sell calls them)
who were demonstrating against the mistreatment they suffered at the
hands of Kosovo Albanian secessionists, Milosevic "hisses," "Why are
you so afraid of the street and the people?" Some of us might think
this is a pretty good question to hiss at a government leader, but Sell
treats it as proof of Milosevic's demagoguery.
Whenever Milosevic did anything that aided the common citizenry, as
when he taxed the interest earned on foreign currency accounts---a
policy that was unpopular with Serbian elites but appreciated by the
poorer strata---he is dismissed as manipulatively currying popular
favor. Thus we must accept Sell's word that Milosevic never wanted the
power to prevent hunger but only hungered for power. The author
operates from a nonfalsefiable paradigm. If the targeted leader is
unresponsive to the people, this is proof of his dictatorial
proclivity. If he is responsive to them, this demonstrates his
demagogic opportunism.
In keeping with U.S. officialdom's view of the world, Sell labels
"Milosevic and his minions" as "hardliners," "conservatives," and
"ideologues"; they are "anti-West," and bound up in "socialist dogma."
In contrast, Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovo Albanian secessionists who
worked hard to dismember Yugoslavia and deliver their respective
republics to the tender mercies of neoliberal rollback are identified
as "economic reformers," "the liberal leadership," and "pro-West"
(read, pro-transnational corporate capitalist). Sell treats
"Western-style democracy" and "a modern market economy" as necessary
correlates. He has nothing to say about the dismal plight of the
Eastern European countries that abandoned their deficient but endurable
planned economies for the merciless exactions of laissez-faire
capitalism.
Sell's sensitivity to demagoguery does not extend to Franco Tudjman,
the crypto-fascist anti-Semite Croat who had nice things to say about
Hitler, and who imposed his harsh autocratic rule on the newly
independent Croatia. Tudjman dismissed the Holocaust as an
exaggeration, and openly hailed the Croatian Ustashe Nazi collaborators
of World War II. He even employed a few aging Ustashe leaders in his
government. Sell says not a word about all this, and treats Tudjman as
just a good old Croatian nationalist. Likewise, he has not a critical
word about the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic. He comments
laconically that Izetbegovic "was sentenced to three years imprisonment
in 1946 for belonging to a group called the Young Muslims." One is left
with the impression that the Yugoslav communist government had
suppressed a devout Muslim. What Sell leaves unmentioned is that the
Young Muslims actively recruited Muslim units for the Nazi SS during
World War II; these units perpetrated horrid atrocities against the
resistance movement and the Jewish population in Yugoslavia.
Izetbegovic got off rather lightly with a three-year sentence.
Little is made in this book of the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against
the Serbs by U.S.-supported leaders like Tudjman and Izetbegovic during
and after the U.S.-sponsored wars. Conversely, no mention is made of
the ethnic tolerance and diversity that existed in President
Milosevic's Yugoslavia. By 1999, all that was left of Yugoslavia was
Montenegro and Serbia. Readers are never told that this rump nation was
the only remaining multi-ethnic society among the various former
Yugoslav republics, the only place where Serbs, Albanians, Croats,
Gorani, Jews, Egyptians, Hungarians, Roma, and numerous other ethnic
groups could live together with some measure of security and tolerance.
The relentless demonization of Milosevic spills over onto the Serbian
people in general. In Sell's book, the Serbs are aggrandizing
nationalists. Kosovo Serbs demonstrating against mistreatment by
Albanian nationalists are described as having their "bloodlust up." And
Serb workers demonstrating to defend their rights and hard won gains
are dismissed by Sell as "the lowest instruments of the mob." The Serbs
who had lived in Krajina and other parts of Croatia for centuries are
dismissed as colonial occupiers. In contrast, the Slovenian, Croatian,
and Bosnian Muslim nationalist secessionists, and Kosovo Albanian
irredentists are simply seeking "independence," "self-determination,"
and "cultural distinctiveness and sovereignty." In this book, the
Albanian KLA gunmen are not big-time drug dealers, terrorists, and
ethnic cleansers, but guerrilla fighters and patriots.
Military actions allegedly taken by the Serbs, described in the vaguest
terms, are repeatedly labeled "brutal," while assaults and atrocities
delivered upon the Serbs by other national groups are more usually
accepted as retaliatory and defensive, or are dismissed by Sell as
"untrue," "highly exaggerated," and "hyperventilated." Milosevic, Sell
says, disseminated "vicious propaganda" against the Croats, but he does
not give us any specifics. Sell does provide one or two instances of
how Serb villages were pillaged and their inhabitants raped and
murdered by Albanian secessionists. From this he grudgingly allows that
"some of the Serb charges . . . had a core of truth." But he makes
nothing more of it.
The well-timed, well-engineered story about a Serbian massacre of
unarmed Albanians in the village of Racak, hyped by U.S. diplomat and
veteran disinformationist William Walker, is wholeheartedly embraced by
Sell, who ignores all the contrary evidence. An Associated Press TV
crew had actually filmed the battle that took place in Racak the
previous day in which Serbian police killed a number of KLA fighters. A
French journalist who went through Racak later that day found evidence
of a battle but no evidence of a massacre of unarmed civilians, nor did
Walker's own Kosovo Verification Mission monitors. All the forensic
reports reveal that almost all of the forty-four persons killed had
previously been using fire arms, and all had perished in combat. Sell
simply ignores this evidence.
The media-hyped story of how the Serbs allegedly killed 7,000 Muslims
in Srebrenica is uncritically accepted by Sell, even though the most
thorough investigations have uncovered not more than 2,000 bodies of
undetermined nationality. The earlier massacres carried out by Muslims,
their razing of some fifty Serbian villages around Srebrenica, as
reported by two British correspondents and others, are ignored. The
complete failure of Western forensic teams to locate the 250,000 or
100,000 or 50,000 or 10,000 bodies (the numbers kept changing) of
Albanians supposedly murdered by the Serbs in Kosovo also goes
unnoticed.
Sell's rendition of what happened at Rambouillet leaves much to be
desired. Under Rambouillet, Kosovo would have been turned into a NATO
colony. Milosevic might have reluctantly agreed to that, so desperate
was he to avoid a full-scale NATO onslaught on the rest of Yugoslavia.
To be certain that war could not be avoided, however, the U.S.
delegation added a remarkable stipulation, demanding that NATO forces
and personnel were to have unrestrained access to all of Yugoslavia,
unfettered use of its airports, rails, ports, telecommunication
services, and airwaves, all free of cost and immune from any
jurisdiction by Yugoslav authorities. NATO would also have the option
to modify for its own use all of Yugoslavia's infrastructure including
roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and utility systems. In effect, not
just Kosovo but all of Yugoslavia was to be subjected to an
extraterritoriality tantamount to outright colonial occupation.
Sell does not mention these particulars. Instead he assures us that the
request for NATO's unimpeded access to Yugoslavia was just a pro forma
protocol inserted "largely for legal reasons." A similar though less
sweeping agreement was part of the Dayton package, he says. Indeed, and
the Dayton agreement reduced Bosnia to a Western colony. But if there
was nothing wrong with the Rambouillet ultimatum, why then did
Milosevic reject it? Sell ascribes Milosevic's resistance to his
perverse "bunker mentality" and his need to defy the world.
There is not a descriptive word in this book of the 78 days of
around-the-clock massive NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, no mention of how
it caused the loss of thousands of lives, injured and maimed thousands
more, contaminated much of the land and water with depleted uranium,
and destroyed much of the country's public sector industries and
infrastructure-while leaving all the private Western corporate
structures perfectly intact.
The sources that Sell relies on share U.S. officialdom's view of the
Balkans struggle. Observers who offer a more independently critical
perspective, such as Sean Gervassi, Diana Johnstone, Gregory Elich,
Nicholas Stavrous, Michel Collon, Raju Thomas, and Michel Chossudovsky
are left untouched and uncited. Important Western sources I reference
in my book on Yugoslavia offer evidence, testimony, and documentation
that do not fit Sell's conclusions, including sources from within the
European Union, the European Community's Commission on Women's Rights,
the OSCE and its Kosovo Verification Mission, the UN War Crimes
Commission, and various other UN commissions, various State Department
reports, the German Foreign Office and German Defense Ministry reports,
and the International Red Cross. Sell does not touch these sources.
Also ignored by him are the testimonies and statements of members of
the U.S. Congress who visited the Balkans, a former State Department
official under the Bush administration, a former deputy commander of
the U.S. European command, several UN and NATO generals and
international negotiators, Spanish air force pilots, forensic teams
from various countries, and UN monitors who offer revelations that
contradict the picture drawn by Sell and other apologists of U.S.
officialdom.
In sum, Sell's book is packed with discombobulated insider details,
unsupported charges, unexamined presumptions, and ideologically loaded
labeling. As mainstream disinformation goes, it is a job well done.
The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca
grants permission to cross-post original CRG articles in their
entirety, or any portions thereof, on community internet sites, as long
as the text and title of the article are not modified. The source must
be acknowledged as follows: Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
at www.globalresearch.ca . The active URL hyperlink address of the
original CRG article and the author's copyright note must be clearly
displayed. (For articles from other news sources, check with the
original copyright holder, where applicable.) For publication of CRG
articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites,
contact: editor@... .
Michael Parenti's recent books are To Kill a Nation: The Attack on
Yugoslavia (Verso), and The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond
(City Lights). His latest work, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A
People's History of Ancient Rome has been nominated for a Pulitzer
Prize. © Copyright M Parenti 2003 For fair use only/ pour usage
équitable seulement.
==========================
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Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic
War Propaganda and the Criminalization of Justice:
The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic
by Michael Parenti
www.michaelParenti.org , December 2003
www.globalresearch.ca 17 December 2003
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PAR312A.html
U.S. leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five
decades, democratically elected governments---guilty of introducing
redistributive economic programs or otherwise pursuing independent
courses that do not properly fit into the U.S.-sponsored global free
market system---have found themselves targeted by the U.S. national
security state. Thus democratic governments in Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Guatemala,
Guyana, Haiti, Syria, Uruguay, and numerous other nations were
overthrown by their respective military forces, funded and advised by
the United States. The newly installed military rulers then rolled back
the egalitarian reforms and opened their countries all the wider to
foreign corporate investors.
The U.S. national security state also has participated in destabilizing
covert actions, proxy mercenary wars, or direct military attacks
against revolutionary or nationalist governments in Afghanistan (in the
1980s), Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, East Timor, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Fiji
Islands, Grenada, Haiti, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Iran, Jamaica,
Lebanon, Libya, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Syria,
South Yemen, Venezuela (under Hugo Chavez), Western Sahara, and Iraq
(under the CIA-sponsored autocratic Saddam Hussein, after he emerged as
an economic nationalist and tried to cut a better deal on oil prices).
The propaganda method used to discredit many of these governments is
not particularly original, indeed by now it is quite transparently
predictable. Their leaders are denounced as bombastic, hostile, and
psychologically flawed. They are labeled power hungry demagogues,
mercurial strongmen, and the worst sort of dictators likened to Hitler
himself. The countries in question are designated as "terrorist" or
"rogue" states, guilty of being "anti-American" and "anti-West." Some
choice few are even condemned as members of an "evil axis." When
targeting a country and demonizing its leadership, U.S. leaders are
assisted by ideologically attuned publicists, pundits, academics, and
former government officials. Together they create a climate of opinion
that enables Washington to do whatever is necessary to inflict serious
damage upon the designated nation's infrastructure and population, all
in the name of human rights, anti-terrorism, and national security.
There is no better example of this than the tireless demonization of
democratically-elected President Slobodan Milosevic and the
U.S.-supported wars against Yugoslavia. Louis Sell, a former U.S.
Foreign Service officer, has authored a book (Slobodan Milosevic and
the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Duke University Press, 2002) that is a
hit piece on Milosevic, loaded with all the usual prefabricated images
and policy presumptions of the U.S. national security state. Sell's
Milosevic is a caricature, a cunning power seeker and maddened fool,
who turns on trusted comrades and plays upon divisions within the party.
This Milosevic is both an "orthodox socialist" and an "opportunistic
Serbian nationalist," a demagogic power-hungry "second Tito" who
simultaneously wants dictatorial power over all of Yugoslavia while
eagerly pursuing polices that "destroy the state that Tito created."
The author does not demonstrate by reference to specific policies and
programs that Milosevic is responsible for the dismemberment of
Yugoslavia, he just tells us so again and again. One would think that
the Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, Macedonian, and Kosovo
Albanian secessionists and U.S./NATO interventionists might have had
something to do with it.
In my opinion, Milosevic's real sin was that he resisted the
dismemberment of Yugoslavia and opposed a U.S. imposed hegemony. He
also attempted to spare Yugoslavia the worst of the merciless
privatizations and rollbacks that have afflicted other former communist
countries. Yugoslavia was the only nation in Europe that did not apply
for entry into the European Union or NATO or OSCE.
For some left intellectuals, the former Yugoslavia did not qualify as a
socialist state because it had allowed too much penetration by private
corporations and the IMF. But U.S. policymakers are notorious for not
seeing the world the way purist left intellectuals do. For them
Yugoslavia was socialist enough with its developed human services
sector and an economy that was over 75 percent publicly owned. Sell
makes it clear that Yugoslavia's public ownership and Milosevic's
defense of that economy were a central consideration in Washington's
war against Yugoslavia. Milosevic, Sell complains, had a "commitment to
orthodox socialism." He "portrayed public ownership of the means of
production and a continued emphasis on [state] commodity production as
the best guarantees for prosperity." He had to go.
To make his case against Milosevic, Sell repeatedly falls back on the
usual ad hominem labeling. Thus we read that in his childhood Milosevic
was "something of a prig" and of course "by nature a loner," a weird
kind of kid because he was "uninterested in sports or other physical
activities," and he "spurned childhood pranks in favor of his books."
The author quotes an anonymous former classmate who reports that
Slobodan's mother "dressed him funny and kept him soft." Worse still,
Slobodan would never join in when other boys stole from orchards---no
doubt a sure sign of childhood pathology.
Sell further describes Milosevic as "moody," "reclusive," and given to
"mulish fatalism." But Sell's own data---when he pauses in his negative
labeling and gets down to specifics---contradicts the maladjusted
"moody loner" stereotype. He acknowledges that young Slobodan worked
well with other youth when it came to political activities. Far from
being unable to form close relations, Slobodan met a girl, his future
wife, and they enjoyed an enduring lifelong attachment. In his early
career when heading the Beogradska Banka, Milosevic was reportedly
"communicative, caring about people at the bank, and popular with his
staff." Other friends describe him as getting on well with people,
"communal and relaxed," a faithful husband to his wife, and a proud and
devoted father to his children. And Sell allows that Milosevic was at
times "confident," "outgoing," and "charismatic." But the negative
stereotype is so firmly established by repetitious pronouncement (and
by years of propagation by Western media and officialdom) that Sell can
simply slide over contradictory evidence---even when such evidence is
provided by himself.
Sell refers to anonymous "U.S. psychiatrists, who have studied
Milosevic closely." By "closely" he must mean from afar, since no U.S.
psychiatrist has ever treated or even interviewed Milosevic. These
uncited and unnamed psychiatrists supposedly diagnosed the Yugoslav
leader as a "malignant narcissistic" personality. Sell tells us that
such malignant narcissism fills Milosevic with self-deception and
leaves him with a "chore personality" that is a "sham." "People with
Milosevic's type of personality frequently either cannot or will not
recognize the reality of facts that diverge from their own perception
of the way the world is or should be." How does Dr. Sigmund Sell know
all this? He seems to find proof in the fact that Milosevic dared to
have charted a course that differed from the one emanating from
Washington. Surely only personal pathology can explain such "anti-West"
obstinacy. Furthermore, we are told that Milosevic suffered from a
"blind spot" in that he was never comfortable with the notion of
private property. If this isn't evidence of malignant narcissism, what
is? Sell never considers the possibility that he himself, and the
global interventionists who think like him, cannot or will not
"recognize the reality of facts that diverge from their own perception
of the way the world is or should be."
Milosevic, we are repeatedly told, fell under the growing influence of
his wife, Mirjana Markovic, "the real power behind the throne." Sell
actually calls her "Lady Macbeth" on one occasion. He portrays Markovic
as a complete wacko, given to uncontrollable anger; her eyes "vibrated
like a scared animal"; "she suffers from severe schizophrenia" with "a
tenuous grasp on reality," and is a hopeless "hypochondriac." In
addition, she has a "mousy" appearance and a "dreamy" and "traumatized"
personality. And like her husband, with whom she shares a "very
abnormal relationship," she has "an autistic relation with the world."
Worse still, she holds "hardline marxist views." We are left to wonder
how the autistic dysfunctional Markovic was able to work as a popular
university professor, organize and lead a new political party, and play
an active role in the popular resistance against Western
interventionism.
In this book, whenever Milosevic or others in his camp are quoted as
saying something, they "snarl," "gush," "hiss," and "crow." In
contrast, political players who win Sell's approval, "observe,"
"state," "note," and "conclude." When one of Milosevic's superiors
voices his discomfort about "noisy Kosovo Serbs" (as Sell calls them)
who were demonstrating against the mistreatment they suffered at the
hands of Kosovo Albanian secessionists, Milosevic "hisses," "Why are
you so afraid of the street and the people?" Some of us might think
this is a pretty good question to hiss at a government leader, but Sell
treats it as proof of Milosevic's demagoguery.
Whenever Milosevic did anything that aided the common citizenry, as
when he taxed the interest earned on foreign currency accounts---a
policy that was unpopular with Serbian elites but appreciated by the
poorer strata---he is dismissed as manipulatively currying popular
favor. Thus we must accept Sell's word that Milosevic never wanted the
power to prevent hunger but only hungered for power. The author
operates from a nonfalsefiable paradigm. If the targeted leader is
unresponsive to the people, this is proof of his dictatorial
proclivity. If he is responsive to them, this demonstrates his
demagogic opportunism.
In keeping with U.S. officialdom's view of the world, Sell labels
"Milosevic and his minions" as "hardliners," "conservatives," and
"ideologues"; they are "anti-West," and bound up in "socialist dogma."
In contrast, Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovo Albanian secessionists who
worked hard to dismember Yugoslavia and deliver their respective
republics to the tender mercies of neoliberal rollback are identified
as "economic reformers," "the liberal leadership," and "pro-West"
(read, pro-transnational corporate capitalist). Sell treats
"Western-style democracy" and "a modern market economy" as necessary
correlates. He has nothing to say about the dismal plight of the
Eastern European countries that abandoned their deficient but endurable
planned economies for the merciless exactions of laissez-faire
capitalism.
Sell's sensitivity to demagoguery does not extend to Franco Tudjman,
the crypto-fascist anti-Semite Croat who had nice things to say about
Hitler, and who imposed his harsh autocratic rule on the newly
independent Croatia. Tudjman dismissed the Holocaust as an
exaggeration, and openly hailed the Croatian Ustashe Nazi collaborators
of World War II. He even employed a few aging Ustashe leaders in his
government. Sell says not a word about all this, and treats Tudjman as
just a good old Croatian nationalist. Likewise, he has not a critical
word about the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic. He comments
laconically that Izetbegovic "was sentenced to three years imprisonment
in 1946 for belonging to a group called the Young Muslims." One is left
with the impression that the Yugoslav communist government had
suppressed a devout Muslim. What Sell leaves unmentioned is that the
Young Muslims actively recruited Muslim units for the Nazi SS during
World War II; these units perpetrated horrid atrocities against the
resistance movement and the Jewish population in Yugoslavia.
Izetbegovic got off rather lightly with a three-year sentence.
Little is made in this book of the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against
the Serbs by U.S.-supported leaders like Tudjman and Izetbegovic during
and after the U.S.-sponsored wars. Conversely, no mention is made of
the ethnic tolerance and diversity that existed in President
Milosevic's Yugoslavia. By 1999, all that was left of Yugoslavia was
Montenegro and Serbia. Readers are never told that this rump nation was
the only remaining multi-ethnic society among the various former
Yugoslav republics, the only place where Serbs, Albanians, Croats,
Gorani, Jews, Egyptians, Hungarians, Roma, and numerous other ethnic
groups could live together with some measure of security and tolerance.
The relentless demonization of Milosevic spills over onto the Serbian
people in general. In Sell's book, the Serbs are aggrandizing
nationalists. Kosovo Serbs demonstrating against mistreatment by
Albanian nationalists are described as having their "bloodlust up." And
Serb workers demonstrating to defend their rights and hard won gains
are dismissed by Sell as "the lowest instruments of the mob." The Serbs
who had lived in Krajina and other parts of Croatia for centuries are
dismissed as colonial occupiers. In contrast, the Slovenian, Croatian,
and Bosnian Muslim nationalist secessionists, and Kosovo Albanian
irredentists are simply seeking "independence," "self-determination,"
and "cultural distinctiveness and sovereignty." In this book, the
Albanian KLA gunmen are not big-time drug dealers, terrorists, and
ethnic cleansers, but guerrilla fighters and patriots.
Military actions allegedly taken by the Serbs, described in the vaguest
terms, are repeatedly labeled "brutal," while assaults and atrocities
delivered upon the Serbs by other national groups are more usually
accepted as retaliatory and defensive, or are dismissed by Sell as
"untrue," "highly exaggerated," and "hyperventilated." Milosevic, Sell
says, disseminated "vicious propaganda" against the Croats, but he does
not give us any specifics. Sell does provide one or two instances of
how Serb villages were pillaged and their inhabitants raped and
murdered by Albanian secessionists. From this he grudgingly allows that
"some of the Serb charges . . . had a core of truth." But he makes
nothing more of it.
The well-timed, well-engineered story about a Serbian massacre of
unarmed Albanians in the village of Racak, hyped by U.S. diplomat and
veteran disinformationist William Walker, is wholeheartedly embraced by
Sell, who ignores all the contrary evidence. An Associated Press TV
crew had actually filmed the battle that took place in Racak the
previous day in which Serbian police killed a number of KLA fighters. A
French journalist who went through Racak later that day found evidence
of a battle but no evidence of a massacre of unarmed civilians, nor did
Walker's own Kosovo Verification Mission monitors. All the forensic
reports reveal that almost all of the forty-four persons killed had
previously been using fire arms, and all had perished in combat. Sell
simply ignores this evidence.
The media-hyped story of how the Serbs allegedly killed 7,000 Muslims
in Srebrenica is uncritically accepted by Sell, even though the most
thorough investigations have uncovered not more than 2,000 bodies of
undetermined nationality. The earlier massacres carried out by Muslims,
their razing of some fifty Serbian villages around Srebrenica, as
reported by two British correspondents and others, are ignored. The
complete failure of Western forensic teams to locate the 250,000 or
100,000 or 50,000 or 10,000 bodies (the numbers kept changing) of
Albanians supposedly murdered by the Serbs in Kosovo also goes
unnoticed.
Sell's rendition of what happened at Rambouillet leaves much to be
desired. Under Rambouillet, Kosovo would have been turned into a NATO
colony. Milosevic might have reluctantly agreed to that, so desperate
was he to avoid a full-scale NATO onslaught on the rest of Yugoslavia.
To be certain that war could not be avoided, however, the U.S.
delegation added a remarkable stipulation, demanding that NATO forces
and personnel were to have unrestrained access to all of Yugoslavia,
unfettered use of its airports, rails, ports, telecommunication
services, and airwaves, all free of cost and immune from any
jurisdiction by Yugoslav authorities. NATO would also have the option
to modify for its own use all of Yugoslavia's infrastructure including
roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and utility systems. In effect, not
just Kosovo but all of Yugoslavia was to be subjected to an
extraterritoriality tantamount to outright colonial occupation.
Sell does not mention these particulars. Instead he assures us that the
request for NATO's unimpeded access to Yugoslavia was just a pro forma
protocol inserted "largely for legal reasons." A similar though less
sweeping agreement was part of the Dayton package, he says. Indeed, and
the Dayton agreement reduced Bosnia to a Western colony. But if there
was nothing wrong with the Rambouillet ultimatum, why then did
Milosevic reject it? Sell ascribes Milosevic's resistance to his
perverse "bunker mentality" and his need to defy the world.
There is not a descriptive word in this book of the 78 days of
around-the-clock massive NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, no mention of how
it caused the loss of thousands of lives, injured and maimed thousands
more, contaminated much of the land and water with depleted uranium,
and destroyed much of the country's public sector industries and
infrastructure-while leaving all the private Western corporate
structures perfectly intact.
The sources that Sell relies on share U.S. officialdom's view of the
Balkans struggle. Observers who offer a more independently critical
perspective, such as Sean Gervassi, Diana Johnstone, Gregory Elich,
Nicholas Stavrous, Michel Collon, Raju Thomas, and Michel Chossudovsky
are left untouched and uncited. Important Western sources I reference
in my book on Yugoslavia offer evidence, testimony, and documentation
that do not fit Sell's conclusions, including sources from within the
European Union, the European Community's Commission on Women's Rights,
the OSCE and its Kosovo Verification Mission, the UN War Crimes
Commission, and various other UN commissions, various State Department
reports, the German Foreign Office and German Defense Ministry reports,
and the International Red Cross. Sell does not touch these sources.
Also ignored by him are the testimonies and statements of members of
the U.S. Congress who visited the Balkans, a former State Department
official under the Bush administration, a former deputy commander of
the U.S. European command, several UN and NATO generals and
international negotiators, Spanish air force pilots, forensic teams
from various countries, and UN monitors who offer revelations that
contradict the picture drawn by Sell and other apologists of U.S.
officialdom.
In sum, Sell's book is packed with discombobulated insider details,
unsupported charges, unexamined presumptions, and ideologically loaded
labeling. As mainstream disinformation goes, it is a job well done.
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Michael Parenti's recent books are To Kill a Nation: The Attack on
Yugoslavia (Verso), and The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond
(City Lights). His latest work, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A
People's History of Ancient Rome has been nominated for a Pulitzer
Prize. © Copyright M Parenti 2003 For fair use only/ pour usage
équitable seulement.
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