Da: ICDSM Italia
Data: Sab 29 Mag 2004 19:47:39 Europe/Rome
A: icdsm-italia @ yahoogroups.com
Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] E.S. Herman on Stancy Sullivan, Milosevic and
genocide
[ Con una analisi dettagliata e "scientifica", Edward S. Herman -
saggista, collaboratore della nota rivista della sinistra statunitense
ZNet alla quale collabora anche Chomsky - smonta pezzo per pezzo la
squallida disinformazione di Stancy Sullivan sulla guerra in Jugoslavia
e sul processo-farsa contro Milosevic.
Stancy Sullivan e' una delle "firme" piu' ricorrenti nella propaganda
occidentale sulla Jugoslavia, essendo tra i collaboratori
dell'Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), la nota agenzia di
disinformazione finanziata dai governi occidentali e da fondazioni come
quella di Soros.
Una simile, "spietata", documentatissima disamina della disinformazione
strategica sul "processo" a Milosevic e' stata scritta da Herman
insieme a D. Peterson, sul caso di Marlise Simons, altra
"professionista della propaganda". Vedi:
Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia Tribunal: A Study in Total Propaganda
Service
http://www.zmag.org/simonsyugo.htm ]
---
See also:
Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia Tribunal: A Study in Total Propaganda
Service
http://www.zmag.org/simonsyugo.htm
Vanessa Stojilkovic & Michel Collon, The Damned of Kosovo, film, 78',
2002.
Available in PAL-Europe at michel.collon @ skynet.be
Available in NTSC (USA, Canada...) at zoranstar @ yahoo.com
Michel Collon, Liars' Poker, New York, 2002
and Monopoly, Nato conquerring the world, New York, 2004
---
Source: Foreign Policy in Focus
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405ssgenocide.html
"Milosevic was not indicted along with Mladic and Karadzic in 1995 for
the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in prior years, so the belated attempt
in The Hague in 2002 to make him responsible for those killings
suggests that UN war crimes tribunal chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte
did this because she saw that the killings in Kosovo fell far short of
anything she could pass off as "genocide." "
"There is now substantial literature that makes a strong case that the
Tribunal is not only a crudely political arm of NATO, but that it is a
"rogue court." As a political arm, it regularly cleared the ground for
NATO military actions and since that victory the Tribunal has worked
hard to prove that the NATO war was just. "
Stacy Sullivan on Milosevic and Genocide
By Edward S. Herman | May 28, 2004
Liberals and much of the left have been badly bamboozled on recent
Yugoslav history and the role of the International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia, with former Serbian President Slobodan
Milosevic having been hyper-demonized and the history of the Balkans
rewritten to fit what Lenard Cohen calls the "paradise lost/loathsome
leaders" paradigm. But numerous serious scholars have rejected this
history and regard the U.S. and other NATO powers as heavily
responsible for the disasters since 1990. Lord David Owen's Balkan
Odyssey, and his testimony before the Tribunal, make it very clear that
Milosevic was eager for a settlement of the Bosnian wars well before
the Dayton agreement in 1995, and that he regularly had major conflicts
of interest with the Bosnian Serbs. It is clear from Owens, as well as
from other experts that the U.S. government played a key role in the
failure of the 1991 Vance plan, the 1992 Cutileiro plan, and the
1993-94 Vance-Owen and Owen Stoltenberg plans, as the Clinton
administration armed the Bosnian Muslims, and later the KLA in Kosovo,
while encouraging them both to hope (and work) for U.S.-NATO military
intervention on their behalf.
Milosevic was not indicted along with Mladic and Karadzic in 1995 for
the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in prior years, so the belated attempt
in The Hague in 2002 to make him responsible for those killings
suggests that UN war crimes tribunal chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte
did this because she saw that the killings in Kosovo fell far short of
anything she could pass off as "genocide." Even establishment
spokespersons like retired U.S. Air Force General Charles Boyd and UN
official Cedric Thornberry have stressed that the Bosnian killings in
the years 1991-1995 were by no means confined to those by Bosnian
Serbs: the Croatians and Bosnian Muslims, the latter supplemented by
thousands of imported mujahideen, slaughtered many thousands of their
ethnic enemies in the area. But the Tribunal, organized, funded, and
essentially controlled by the U.S. and Britain, was only interested in
pursuing NATO targets, and t! hese were almost exclusively Serbs.
There is now substantial literature that makes a strong case that the
Tribunal is not only a crudely political arm of NATO, but that it is a
"rogue court." As a political arm, it regularly cleared the ground for
NATO military actions and since that victory the Tribunal has worked
hard to prove that the NATO war was just.
The Milosevic trial is the main vehicle for proving NATO's virtue,
though it has been a major flop in proving its case and maintaining an
image of fairness and justice. The latter problem was nicely
illustrated in the Tribunal's recent privileged treatment of the U.S.
government and Wesley Clark. Thus, the U.S. government was given the
right to demand a closed session of the court and to redact testimony;
Clark was allowed to communicate with outsiders and obtain and insert
into the record a truth testimonial from Bill Clinton, in
straightforward violation of Judge May's trial rules. Readers of the
New York Times (or In These Times and The Nation) will also never know
that with William Walker on the stand, Judge May's deference to the
"Ambassador" was laughable: during direct examination by the
prosecutors there was not one interruption, while during Milosevic's
cross-examination he interrupted 70 times, and wouldn't allow him to
ask Walker, the man who grieved so over deaths at Racak, about his
earlier crude apologetics for the killing of the six Jesuit leaders and
others in El Salvador.
A recent example of the kind of analysis that repeats the canards
common to the liberal "conventional wisdom" is FPIF's commentary by
Stacy Sullivan, of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), on
"Milosevic and Genocide: Has the Prosecution Made Its Case?"
(http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402milosevic.html). IWPR is
funded by the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for
Democracy, the Open Society Institute, and half a dozen other Western
governments, and it has long served as a de facto propaganda arm of
NATO. Sullivan is most noted for her New Republic classic of hardline
pro-war and vengeance propaganda, "Milosevic's Willing Executioners"
(May 9, 1999). Sullivan's FPIF article is in the same mode, taking it
as a given that the Tribunal is an apolitical instrument of justice and
that we have an honest and not a show trial.
An Annotated Response to Sullivan
Her first sentence says that the prosecutors announced right off that
they would "prove" Milosevic guilty of genocide. She fails to mention
that the Bosnia charges were added belatedly, that Milosevic had not
been charged with them at the time of the actual killings, and that
while Del Ponte said she would "prove" this guilt she admittedly didn't
yet have the evidence. Indict, publicly and flamboyantly charge, and
then look for the evidence, has long been the Tribunal's modus operandi.
Sullivan's second sentence mentions that there were "300 witnesses,"
"some high level insiders who have turned on their former master,"
"thousands of pages of documents," etc. We are supposed to be impressed
with this sheer volume of smoke that must show a genocidal fire. She
doesn't mention that Canadian law professor Michael Mandel gave Del
Ponte "thousands of pages" of documents in April 1999 showing NATO war
crimes, which of course Del Ponte ignored, and that thousands of pages
have been published and innumerable witnesses could have been supplied
as witnesses for the many thousands of Serb victims in Bosnia. It is
extremely easy to find victimized people in civil wars who will testify
to maltreatment if given the opportunity and even paid for their
trouble, and some and perhaps most will even be telling the painful
truth. But only a propagandist will mention the 300 witnesses as if
this alone is a serio! us consideration in proving "genocide."
As regards the "high level insiders," in fact the prosecution came up
with few that were high level and fewer still who were cooperative. One
of their prime witnesses, Ratomir Tanic, appears to have been a conman,
who was so "inside" that he couldn't even describe the location of the
president's office. Genuine insiders like former Yugoslav president
Zoran Lilic and member of the Yugoslav presidency Borislav Jovic
confirmed Milosevic on almost all key points. Rade Markovic, the former
head of Yugoslav security, who had everything to gain from denouncing
his old boss, also defended Milosevic on all key points while
renouncing a statement he claimed had been extracted from him by
threats and torture during a 17 month stint in prison. Sullivan
predictably doesn't mention that many "insiders" and others were bribed
and threatened with heavy sentences unless they acquiesced to
plea-bargains.
Sullivan claims that many legal experts are doubtful about a successful
genocide charge because the Tribunal "has set the bar for doing so
extremely high." They might have to prove that Milosevic "orchestrated
the breakup of Yugoslavia with the specific intent to destroy Bosnian
Muslims as a people...[with] unequivocal evidence of genocidal
intent...calling for the liquidation of all of the Bosnian Muslims..."
The idea that Milosevic wanted the breakup of Yugoslavia is ideology
run wild and contradicts the usual formula that he attacked Slovenia
and Croatia in an attempt to prevent their exit from Yugoslavia (for a
summary of an alternative view of the Balkan wars, see Edward S.
Herman, "Diana Johnstone on the Balkan Wars,"
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0203herman.htm, as well as a recen! t
piece by George Szamuely for FPIF, "The Yugoslavian Fairytale,"
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405fairytale.html).
As there was a lot of back-and-forth ethnic cleansing and killing in
Bosnia, and the celebrated Srebrenica killings were comprised entirely
of military-aged men, many killed in fighting, and after the Bosnian
Serbs had admittedly separated out the women and children and moved
them to safe refuge, intent and plan (as well as the still elusive
Milosevic control of the Bosnian Serb forces) would seem rather
essential to proving that Milosevic was guilty of genocide in any
sense. Besides, Del Ponte said she was definitely going to "prove"
genocide. What concept did she have in mind?
What constitutes genocide?
Sullivan doesn't have a clue on the level of Tribunal "bars" for
charges of genocide. These have proved to be wonderfully flexible, and
her claim of a too-high bar has no basis in any Tribunal actions but is
rather a form of pressure to get the bar low enough to assure the show
trial's proper result. In Bosnian Serb General Krstic's case, the
Tribunal found Krstic guilty of genocide by making it virtually the
same thing as ethnic cleansing, and extending the concept to killing
only armed men in a single small town!
Assuming that this was a valid case of genocide, Sullivan alleges that
an "acquittal would have serious consequences for attempts to prosecute
genocide in the future." If it isn't a valid case of genocide it
wouldn't interfere with future efforts at all. However, if it is a
corrupt case brought by an alliance that actually carried out the
"supreme crime" of aggression in violation of the UN Charter in
attacking Yugoslavia, using the Tribunal first as a war-facilitating
instrument and then as a means of justifying the aggression, losing the
case would be a plus for the international rule of law. This is not
likely to happen, given the fact that the Tribunal is an arm of the
NATO powers, although the case made by the prosecution has been so weak
that it is not inconceivable that Milosevic might only be found guilty
of "crimes against humanity."
Great Powers and Genocide
What might really interfere with efforts to pursue genocide would be if
the United States or another major power engaged in genocide or gave it
support, as there are no mechanisms to prevent or punish acts such as
these in the New World Order, and major powers are essentially exempt.
Thus, the "sanctions of mass destruction" imposed by the U.S. and
Britain on Iraq from 1991-2002 killed four or five times as many
civilians as died from all causes in the Balkans wars of the 1990s, and
as Thomas Nagy and Joy Gordon have shown, these deaths were brought
about deliberately; and Suharto's and his successors' operations in
Indonesia and East Timor were big-time genocidal, but under Western,
and notably U.S. and British, protection. The problem of this exemption
does not occur to Sullivan.
Sullivan argues that "by far the most serious consequences of an
acquittal on genocide charges...would be for Bosnia's victims,"
ignoring the Croat and Serbian victims, of which there were many
thousands. (The largest single ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars
was of Serbs driven out of the Krajina in August 1995, by the Croats,
with U.S. assistance; the largest proportionate ethnic cleansing in
those wars was of Serbs and other minorities, including Roma, driven
out of Kosovo by the KLA under NATO auspices after June 1999.) But even
in her own narrow terms of reference, how concerned are Bosnian victims
over this issue? How does Sullivan know about the victims' feelings? A
poll taken in Bosnia several years ago indicated that no more than six
percent of Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, or Croats considered the bringing of
war criminals to justice as important (Charles Boyd, "Making Bosnia
Work," Foreign Affairs, January ! 1998).
Furthermore, why would Bosnian victims need a successful "genocide"
charge and not be satisfied with guilt for "crimes against humanity?"
However, if the function of the trial is to prove the NATO war just, we
must have "genocide." Best, however, to pretend that it is concern over
the victims rather than NATO-establishment priorities that make the
charge of genocide so important.
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
(Ed Herman is an economist and media analyst. He has a regular "Fog
Watch" column in Z magazine. With Philip Hammond, he co-edited Degraded
Capability: the Media and the Kosovo Crisis (Pluto: 2000).)
Additional References
Thomas Nagy, "The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S.
Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply," The Progressive,
(September 2001)
http://www.progressive.org/0901/nagy0901.html
Joy Gordon, "Economic Sanctions as Weapons of Mass Destruction,"
Harpers, (November 2002)
http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html
Contact the IRC's webmaster with inquiries regarding the functionality
of this website.
Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the
Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at
www.irc-online.org) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS,
online at www.ips-dc.org). ©2004. All rights reserved.
Recommended citation:
Edward S. Herman, "Stacy Sullivan on Milosevic and Genocide," (Silver
City, NM & Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, May 28, 2004).
Web location:
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405ssgenocide.html
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
c/o GAMADI, Via L. Da Vinci 27
00043 Ciampino (Roma)
tel/fax +39-06-4828957
email: icdsm-italia@...
Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006
intestato ad Adolfo Amoroso, ROMA
causale: DIFESA MILOSEVIC
sito internet:
http://www.pasti.org/linkmilo.htm
Data: Sab 29 Mag 2004 19:47:39 Europe/Rome
A: icdsm-italia @ yahoogroups.com
Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] E.S. Herman on Stancy Sullivan, Milosevic and
genocide
[ Con una analisi dettagliata e "scientifica", Edward S. Herman -
saggista, collaboratore della nota rivista della sinistra statunitense
ZNet alla quale collabora anche Chomsky - smonta pezzo per pezzo la
squallida disinformazione di Stancy Sullivan sulla guerra in Jugoslavia
e sul processo-farsa contro Milosevic.
Stancy Sullivan e' una delle "firme" piu' ricorrenti nella propaganda
occidentale sulla Jugoslavia, essendo tra i collaboratori
dell'Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), la nota agenzia di
disinformazione finanziata dai governi occidentali e da fondazioni come
quella di Soros.
Una simile, "spietata", documentatissima disamina della disinformazione
strategica sul "processo" a Milosevic e' stata scritta da Herman
insieme a D. Peterson, sul caso di Marlise Simons, altra
"professionista della propaganda". Vedi:
Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia Tribunal: A Study in Total Propaganda
Service
http://www.zmag.org/simonsyugo.htm ]
---
See also:
Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia Tribunal: A Study in Total Propaganda
Service
http://www.zmag.org/simonsyugo.htm
Vanessa Stojilkovic & Michel Collon, The Damned of Kosovo, film, 78',
2002.
Available in PAL-Europe at michel.collon @ skynet.be
Available in NTSC (USA, Canada...) at zoranstar @ yahoo.com
Michel Collon, Liars' Poker, New York, 2002
and Monopoly, Nato conquerring the world, New York, 2004
---
Source: Foreign Policy in Focus
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405ssgenocide.html
"Milosevic was not indicted along with Mladic and Karadzic in 1995 for
the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in prior years, so the belated attempt
in The Hague in 2002 to make him responsible for those killings
suggests that UN war crimes tribunal chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte
did this because she saw that the killings in Kosovo fell far short of
anything she could pass off as "genocide." "
"There is now substantial literature that makes a strong case that the
Tribunal is not only a crudely political arm of NATO, but that it is a
"rogue court." As a political arm, it regularly cleared the ground for
NATO military actions and since that victory the Tribunal has worked
hard to prove that the NATO war was just. "
Stacy Sullivan on Milosevic and Genocide
By Edward S. Herman | May 28, 2004
Liberals and much of the left have been badly bamboozled on recent
Yugoslav history and the role of the International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia, with former Serbian President Slobodan
Milosevic having been hyper-demonized and the history of the Balkans
rewritten to fit what Lenard Cohen calls the "paradise lost/loathsome
leaders" paradigm. But numerous serious scholars have rejected this
history and regard the U.S. and other NATO powers as heavily
responsible for the disasters since 1990. Lord David Owen's Balkan
Odyssey, and his testimony before the Tribunal, make it very clear that
Milosevic was eager for a settlement of the Bosnian wars well before
the Dayton agreement in 1995, and that he regularly had major conflicts
of interest with the Bosnian Serbs. It is clear from Owens, as well as
from other experts that the U.S. government played a key role in the
failure of the 1991 Vance plan, the 1992 Cutileiro plan, and the
1993-94 Vance-Owen and Owen Stoltenberg plans, as the Clinton
administration armed the Bosnian Muslims, and later the KLA in Kosovo,
while encouraging them both to hope (and work) for U.S.-NATO military
intervention on their behalf.
Milosevic was not indicted along with Mladic and Karadzic in 1995 for
the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in prior years, so the belated attempt
in The Hague in 2002 to make him responsible for those killings
suggests that UN war crimes tribunal chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte
did this because she saw that the killings in Kosovo fell far short of
anything she could pass off as "genocide." Even establishment
spokespersons like retired U.S. Air Force General Charles Boyd and UN
official Cedric Thornberry have stressed that the Bosnian killings in
the years 1991-1995 were by no means confined to those by Bosnian
Serbs: the Croatians and Bosnian Muslims, the latter supplemented by
thousands of imported mujahideen, slaughtered many thousands of their
ethnic enemies in the area. But the Tribunal, organized, funded, and
essentially controlled by the U.S. and Britain, was only interested in
pursuing NATO targets, and t! hese were almost exclusively Serbs.
There is now substantial literature that makes a strong case that the
Tribunal is not only a crudely political arm of NATO, but that it is a
"rogue court." As a political arm, it regularly cleared the ground for
NATO military actions and since that victory the Tribunal has worked
hard to prove that the NATO war was just.
The Milosevic trial is the main vehicle for proving NATO's virtue,
though it has been a major flop in proving its case and maintaining an
image of fairness and justice. The latter problem was nicely
illustrated in the Tribunal's recent privileged treatment of the U.S.
government and Wesley Clark. Thus, the U.S. government was given the
right to demand a closed session of the court and to redact testimony;
Clark was allowed to communicate with outsiders and obtain and insert
into the record a truth testimonial from Bill Clinton, in
straightforward violation of Judge May's trial rules. Readers of the
New York Times (or In These Times and The Nation) will also never know
that with William Walker on the stand, Judge May's deference to the
"Ambassador" was laughable: during direct examination by the
prosecutors there was not one interruption, while during Milosevic's
cross-examination he interrupted 70 times, and wouldn't allow him to
ask Walker, the man who grieved so over deaths at Racak, about his
earlier crude apologetics for the killing of the six Jesuit leaders and
others in El Salvador.
A recent example of the kind of analysis that repeats the canards
common to the liberal "conventional wisdom" is FPIF's commentary by
Stacy Sullivan, of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), on
"Milosevic and Genocide: Has the Prosecution Made Its Case?"
(http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402milosevic.html). IWPR is
funded by the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for
Democracy, the Open Society Institute, and half a dozen other Western
governments, and it has long served as a de facto propaganda arm of
NATO. Sullivan is most noted for her New Republic classic of hardline
pro-war and vengeance propaganda, "Milosevic's Willing Executioners"
(May 9, 1999). Sullivan's FPIF article is in the same mode, taking it
as a given that the Tribunal is an apolitical instrument of justice and
that we have an honest and not a show trial.
An Annotated Response to Sullivan
Her first sentence says that the prosecutors announced right off that
they would "prove" Milosevic guilty of genocide. She fails to mention
that the Bosnia charges were added belatedly, that Milosevic had not
been charged with them at the time of the actual killings, and that
while Del Ponte said she would "prove" this guilt she admittedly didn't
yet have the evidence. Indict, publicly and flamboyantly charge, and
then look for the evidence, has long been the Tribunal's modus operandi.
Sullivan's second sentence mentions that there were "300 witnesses,"
"some high level insiders who have turned on their former master,"
"thousands of pages of documents," etc. We are supposed to be impressed
with this sheer volume of smoke that must show a genocidal fire. She
doesn't mention that Canadian law professor Michael Mandel gave Del
Ponte "thousands of pages" of documents in April 1999 showing NATO war
crimes, which of course Del Ponte ignored, and that thousands of pages
have been published and innumerable witnesses could have been supplied
as witnesses for the many thousands of Serb victims in Bosnia. It is
extremely easy to find victimized people in civil wars who will testify
to maltreatment if given the opportunity and even paid for their
trouble, and some and perhaps most will even be telling the painful
truth. But only a propagandist will mention the 300 witnesses as if
this alone is a serio! us consideration in proving "genocide."
As regards the "high level insiders," in fact the prosecution came up
with few that were high level and fewer still who were cooperative. One
of their prime witnesses, Ratomir Tanic, appears to have been a conman,
who was so "inside" that he couldn't even describe the location of the
president's office. Genuine insiders like former Yugoslav president
Zoran Lilic and member of the Yugoslav presidency Borislav Jovic
confirmed Milosevic on almost all key points. Rade Markovic, the former
head of Yugoslav security, who had everything to gain from denouncing
his old boss, also defended Milosevic on all key points while
renouncing a statement he claimed had been extracted from him by
threats and torture during a 17 month stint in prison. Sullivan
predictably doesn't mention that many "insiders" and others were bribed
and threatened with heavy sentences unless they acquiesced to
plea-bargains.
Sullivan claims that many legal experts are doubtful about a successful
genocide charge because the Tribunal "has set the bar for doing so
extremely high." They might have to prove that Milosevic "orchestrated
the breakup of Yugoslavia with the specific intent to destroy Bosnian
Muslims as a people...[with] unequivocal evidence of genocidal
intent...calling for the liquidation of all of the Bosnian Muslims..."
The idea that Milosevic wanted the breakup of Yugoslavia is ideology
run wild and contradicts the usual formula that he attacked Slovenia
and Croatia in an attempt to prevent their exit from Yugoslavia (for a
summary of an alternative view of the Balkan wars, see Edward S.
Herman, "Diana Johnstone on the Balkan Wars,"
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0203herman.htm, as well as a recen! t
piece by George Szamuely for FPIF, "The Yugoslavian Fairytale,"
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405fairytale.html).
As there was a lot of back-and-forth ethnic cleansing and killing in
Bosnia, and the celebrated Srebrenica killings were comprised entirely
of military-aged men, many killed in fighting, and after the Bosnian
Serbs had admittedly separated out the women and children and moved
them to safe refuge, intent and plan (as well as the still elusive
Milosevic control of the Bosnian Serb forces) would seem rather
essential to proving that Milosevic was guilty of genocide in any
sense. Besides, Del Ponte said she was definitely going to "prove"
genocide. What concept did she have in mind?
What constitutes genocide?
Sullivan doesn't have a clue on the level of Tribunal "bars" for
charges of genocide. These have proved to be wonderfully flexible, and
her claim of a too-high bar has no basis in any Tribunal actions but is
rather a form of pressure to get the bar low enough to assure the show
trial's proper result. In Bosnian Serb General Krstic's case, the
Tribunal found Krstic guilty of genocide by making it virtually the
same thing as ethnic cleansing, and extending the concept to killing
only armed men in a single small town!
Assuming that this was a valid case of genocide, Sullivan alleges that
an "acquittal would have serious consequences for attempts to prosecute
genocide in the future." If it isn't a valid case of genocide it
wouldn't interfere with future efforts at all. However, if it is a
corrupt case brought by an alliance that actually carried out the
"supreme crime" of aggression in violation of the UN Charter in
attacking Yugoslavia, using the Tribunal first as a war-facilitating
instrument and then as a means of justifying the aggression, losing the
case would be a plus for the international rule of law. This is not
likely to happen, given the fact that the Tribunal is an arm of the
NATO powers, although the case made by the prosecution has been so weak
that it is not inconceivable that Milosevic might only be found guilty
of "crimes against humanity."
Great Powers and Genocide
What might really interfere with efforts to pursue genocide would be if
the United States or another major power engaged in genocide or gave it
support, as there are no mechanisms to prevent or punish acts such as
these in the New World Order, and major powers are essentially exempt.
Thus, the "sanctions of mass destruction" imposed by the U.S. and
Britain on Iraq from 1991-2002 killed four or five times as many
civilians as died from all causes in the Balkans wars of the 1990s, and
as Thomas Nagy and Joy Gordon have shown, these deaths were brought
about deliberately; and Suharto's and his successors' operations in
Indonesia and East Timor were big-time genocidal, but under Western,
and notably U.S. and British, protection. The problem of this exemption
does not occur to Sullivan.
Sullivan argues that "by far the most serious consequences of an
acquittal on genocide charges...would be for Bosnia's victims,"
ignoring the Croat and Serbian victims, of which there were many
thousands. (The largest single ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars
was of Serbs driven out of the Krajina in August 1995, by the Croats,
with U.S. assistance; the largest proportionate ethnic cleansing in
those wars was of Serbs and other minorities, including Roma, driven
out of Kosovo by the KLA under NATO auspices after June 1999.) But even
in her own narrow terms of reference, how concerned are Bosnian victims
over this issue? How does Sullivan know about the victims' feelings? A
poll taken in Bosnia several years ago indicated that no more than six
percent of Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, or Croats considered the bringing of
war criminals to justice as important (Charles Boyd, "Making Bosnia
Work," Foreign Affairs, January ! 1998).
Furthermore, why would Bosnian victims need a successful "genocide"
charge and not be satisfied with guilt for "crimes against humanity?"
However, if the function of the trial is to prove the NATO war just, we
must have "genocide." Best, however, to pretend that it is concern over
the victims rather than NATO-establishment priorities that make the
charge of genocide so important.
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
(Ed Herman is an economist and media analyst. He has a regular "Fog
Watch" column in Z magazine. With Philip Hammond, he co-edited Degraded
Capability: the Media and the Kosovo Crisis (Pluto: 2000).)
Additional References
Thomas Nagy, "The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S.
Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply," The Progressive,
(September 2001)
http://www.progressive.org/0901/nagy0901.html
Joy Gordon, "Economic Sanctions as Weapons of Mass Destruction,"
Harpers, (November 2002)
http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html
Contact the IRC's webmaster with inquiries regarding the functionality
of this website.
Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the
Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at
www.irc-online.org) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS,
online at www.ips-dc.org). ©2004. All rights reserved.
Recommended citation:
Edward S. Herman, "Stacy Sullivan on Milosevic and Genocide," (Silver
City, NM & Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, May 28, 2004).
Web location:
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405ssgenocide.html
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