http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=10731
ZMAG (USA)
Ethnic Cleansing: Constructive, Benign, and Nefarious
(Kafka Era Studies, No. 1)
by Edward S. Herman; August 09, 2006
Some years ago Noam Chomsky and I found it useful to distinguish
between three categories of terrorism--constructive, benign and
nefarious--the classification based strictly on the utility of the
terrorism to U.S. interests as perceived by the ruling political
elite [1]
Thus, when terrorism is seen by U.S. officials as highly advantageous
to U.S. interests, it is treated by those officials, and hence by the
media, as a positive development and hence "constructive." This was
the case with the vast massacres by Suharto and colleagues in
Indonesia in 1965-1966, that wiped out the base of a communist party
and cleared the ground for an open door to foreign investment and a
realignment of Indonesian foreign policy in favor of the West. In
this instance not only was there no moral indignation expressed at
the mass murder of many hundreds of thousands of civilians, it was
treated as a "dividend" from our policy of military aid to the
Indonesian army (Robert McNamara), and a "a gleam of light" in Asia
(James Reston). [2]
When the terrorism is not especially helpful to U.S. interests but is
carried out by an ally or client that U.S. officials want to placate
or protect, the killing of large numbers of civilians is treated as
of little interest and no evident moral concern-it is "benign"--as in
the case of Indonesia's invasion-occupation of East Timor in 1975 and
after, which resulted in the death of a third of the East Timorese
population, but which was aided and diplomatically protected by the
U. S. government, based on the perceived merits of the Suharto
dictatorship and kleptocracy. [3]
On the other hand, a terrorism carried out by a communist or any
other designated enemy state is given great attention, arouses great
moral fervor, and is treated as "nefarious." This was the case with
the killings by Pol Pot in Cambodia, the NLF in Vietnam, and Saddam
Hussein in Iraq--except during the period in the 1980s when Saddam
was serving U.S. interests by killing Iranians. This classification
system was and remains useful, and is notable in its successful
tracking not only official designations but media treatment as well.
For the first two kinds of terrorism, the media are reliably very
quiet, with little coverage, antiseptic and sometimes apologetic
treatment of murderous behavior where it is mentioned at all, [4] and
with no indignation. With nefarious terror, on the other hand,
coverage is intense, detailed, includes many personal stories of
suffering, and elicits great indignation. [5]
Over the past two decades, during which ethnic cleansing has
frequently been featured by Western officials, pundits and human
rights activists, a closely parallel system of official treatment and
media follow-on is also evident. As with terrorism, in the official
view ethnic cleansing can be constructive, benign, or nefarious, and
the media recognize this and adjust with almost clockwork precision
to the demands of state policy in treating its different manifestations.
Constructive Ethnic Cleansing: Croatia and the Krajina Serbs
As a model instance of constructive ethnic cleansing, we may take the
case of the Croat ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina region
of Croatia in August 1995. Long before that date the Clinton
administration had aligned itself with the Croats and Bosnian Muslims
in the externally stoked civil war that engulfed the region from 1991
onward: it had supported sanctions on the Serbs alone, sponsored and
used the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) as an anti-Serb political-PR-judicial instrument, [6]
encouraged the Bosnian Muslims to withdraw from the Lisbon agreement
in March 1992--an agreement that would have settled the conflict and
prevented the further large-scale blood-letting--helped organize an
alliance between the Muslims and Croats to help them better fight the
Serbs, and supported the import of arms and mujahadeen to help the
Muslims fight and kill more effectively, among other matters.
To further weaken the bargaining position of the Serbs, the Clinton
administration actively supported the Croatian army's attacks on the
Serb communities in Croatia in Operation Flash in May 1995 and then
in the massive ethnic cleansing of Krajina Serbs in Operation Storm
in August 1995. Richard Holbrooke visited Zagreb two days before the
beginning of Operation Storm, and clearly did not exercise any
restraining influence on the imminent cleansing operation. Active
U.S. support came in the form of military aid, the provision of
military "advisers" closely affiliated with the U.S. armed forces,
direct participation in the military operations via intelligence
provision and even selective bombing missions, and a refusal to
cooperate with the ICTY in providing information on possible war
crimes committed by the Croatian armed forces. [7]
Another form of U.S. support was an intense and indignant focus on
the Srebrenica massacre, [8] which took place during the month before
Operation Storm and helped justify and distract attention from the
Croatian ethnic cleansing and massacre. Operation Storm involved the
removal of some 200,000 to 250,000 Krajina Serbs, in contrast with
perhaps one-tenth that number of Bosnian Muslims removed from
Srebrenica. [9] Operation Storm may also have involved the killing of
more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the
Srebrenica area in July: virtually all of the Bosnian Muslim victims
were fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian Serbs bused the
Srebrenica women and children to safety. The Croats made no such
provision and hundreds of women, children and old people were
slaughtered in Krajina. [10] The ruthlessness of the Croats was
impressive: Tim Ripley notes that "UN troops watched horrified as
Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the road
outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from the
AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks
of a tank." [11]
Media treatment of the Srebrenica and Krajina cases followed the
familiar pattern of fixing victim worthiness and unworthiness in
accord with a political agenda. With the Serbs their government's
target, and their government actively aiding the massive Croat ethnic
cleansing program in Krajina, the media gave huge and indignant
treatment to the first, with invidious language, calls for action,
and little context. On the other hand, with Krajina, attention was
slight and passing, detailed reporting on the condition of the
victims was minimal, descriptive language was neutral, indignation
was absent, and the slight context offered made the cleansing and
killings acceptable.
The contrast in language is notable: the attack on Srebrenica
"chilling," "murderous," "savagery," "cold-blooded killing,"
"genocidal," "aggression," and of course "ethnic cleansing." With
Krajina, the media used no such strong language-even ethnic cleansing
was too much for them, even though this was an obvious, carefully
planned, and major case. The Croat assault was merely a big
"upheaval" that is "softening up the enemy," "a lightning offensive,"
explained away as a "response to Srebrenica" and a result of Serb
leaders "overplaying their hand." The Washington Post even cited U.S.
Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith saying the "the Serb exodus was
not 'ethnic cleansing'." [12] The paper did not allow a challenge to
that judgment. In fact, however, the Croat operations in Krajina left
Croatia the most ethnically purified of all the former components of
the former Yugoslavia, although the NATO occupation of Kosovo allowed
an Albanian ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Roma and others that rivalled
that of Croatia in ethnic purification. [13]
Although in recent years there has been a trickle of expelled Serbs
returning to Croatian Krajina, in neither the Krajina nor Kosovo
cases has there been any effort by the NATO powers to organize the
return of the ethnically-cleansed Serbs to their homes from which
they were removed by force. Civilian victims associated with a
Western target are unworthy. Based on no substantive differences
whatever, their killers and ethnic cleansers are allowed to be
retaliating and taking revenge, rather than pursuing ethnic cleansing
for more sinister motives (racial hatred, land hunger), and these
unworthy victims have no right of return.
In the case of Kosovo, the UN is actually planning for 40,000
additional Serb refugees in case of an expected granting of full
independence to Kosovo and Kosovo Albanian control. [14] Thus, not
only are unworthy victims not treated with sympathy or allowed any
right of return, the international community will even plan to
collaborate in a further round of ethnic cleansing by a Western ally
or client, and the media won't complain or even notice.
Benign Ethnic Cleansing: Israel's Removal of the Palestinians to
"Redeem the Land"
As an illustration of benign ethnic cleansing, the case of Israel's
long-term expropriation and removal of Palestinians in Israel proper,
on the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and Gaza is clear and very
important, morally and politically. It is "benign," because the
United States does not benefit from this process, which has a
negative feedback effect on Arab and many other peoples' view of the
United States; this is a case of the tail wagging the dog, with the
dog injuring itself as it spins around in service to its tail.
Its importance rests on several other considerations: This has been a
very obvious--even model--case of ethnic cleansing, in which one
ethnic group has used its military power and aid from the West
(mainly the United States) to evict another ethnic group that stands
in its way. This fundamental fact has been acknowledged by a long
line of Israeli officials and intellectual defenders of Israel, who
have admitted, sometimes regretfully, that to "redeem the land"
occupied by Palestinians in favor of the "chosen people" would
require systematic expropriation and associated killing and forced
transfer.
Back in 1948, David Ben-Gurion was clear that "We must use terror,
assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of
all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Fifty
years later, in 1998, Ariel Sharon made the same point about the
centrality of ethnic cleansing in Israeli policy: "It is the duty of
Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and
courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with
time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization
or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the
expropriation of their lands." On May 24, 2006, Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert told a joint session of congress that "I
believed and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and
historic right to this entire land."
Despite these and numerous other statements along the same line, [15]
the Western elites pretend that Israel's expropriations and ethnic
cleansing are not the basic (and profoundly immoral) causal force in
the struggle over Palestine, and in a Kafkaesque mode it is the
Palestinian resistance to their ethnic cleansing that is to be
condemned.
It should be noted that Israel's "eternal and historic right" to
Olmert's "entire land" may well underlie the current and renewed
Israeli aggression in Lebanon and huge ethnic cleansing and refugee
generation in southern Lebanon. Officially, Israel's ground invasion
of Lebanon is an act of self-defense against Hezbollah's threat,
aimed at creating a security buffer zone until the arrival of a
"multinational force with an enforcement capability." But
increasingly, as the initial goal of a narrow strip of only a few
kilometers has now been extended up to the Litani River deep in
Lebanon, the real motives behind Israel's invasion are becoming
crystal clear.
Back in the 1940s Ben Gurion declared that Israel's "natural borders"
extended to the Litani in the north and the Jordan to the east--
coincidentally the two sources of snow fed water in the region. Even
in their current announced plan to evacuate the West Bank the
Israelis intend to hold the Jordan "for security reasons." The Litani
is next. The Golan is also valued for its water. Thus, while
officially, Israel's ground invasion of Lebanon is claimed to be an
act of self-defense against Hezbollah's threat, aimed at creating a
security buffer zone until the arrival of a "multinational force with
an enforcement capability," the initial goal of a narrow strip of
southern Lebanon "has now been extended up to the Litani River deep
in Lebanon, [and] the real motives behind Israel's invasion are
becoming crystal-clear…. This is a war to annex a major chunk of
Lebanese territory without necessarily saying so, under the pretext
of security buffer and deterrence against future attacks on
Israel." [16]
This drive to "redeem the land," requiring the takeover of land in
the possession of others by force, also constitutes a model case of
a quest for a "Greater" entity--here a Greater Israel-a drive which
in the case of Milosevic's and the Serbs' alleged drive for a
"Greater Serbia" was presented as a prime element of illegal
activity in the ICTY indictment of Milosevic (see below under
Nefarious). In no case has this drive for a Greater Israel been
pointed to by U.S. officials or the U.S. mainstream media as an
immoral and illegal program that should call for international
intervention and prosecution in the mode of the Serb prosecution,
although the Israeli program has been explicitly designed to
ethnically cleanse a sizable civilian population.
This model case of ethnic cleansing also represents a clear instance
of applied racism, in which the militarily stronger and ethnic
cleansing state--its leaders, armed forces, and a major part of its
media, intellectuals and citizenry, who would be called "willing
executioners" if residing in a Western targeted state--in both words
and actions treat the population in process of removal as inferiors
(untermenschen in the Nazi mode). These inferiors are not merely
discriminated against but freely abused with beatings, harsh
treatment at checkpoints, home demolitions and expropriations in
accord with Israeli desires, theft of land and water, and killings
without penalty. As the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem states,
"Israel has established in the occupied Territories a separation cum
discrimination regime, in which it maintains two systems of laws, and
a person's rights are based on his or her national origin. This
regime is the only of its kind in the world, and brings to mind dark
regimes of the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa."
High Israeli officials have for years described the Palestinians as
"cockroaches," "lice," "grasshoppers," "animals," "two-legged
beasts," a "cancer," along with other epithets of dehumanization, and
they have repeatedly devalued Palestinian life as compared with that
of Jews (most recently, Olmert's statement that "the lives and well-
being of Sderot's residents are more important than those of Gaza
residents"; more dramatically, Rabbi Yaacov Perin's "One million
Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail"). Palestinian numbers
represent what in Israel is called a "demographic threat," and
Israeli academic and human rights activist Jeff Halper states that
"schemes of 'transfer' have become an acceptable part of Israeli
political discourse...[as Israel] actively pursues policies of
displacement: exile and deportation, the revoking of residency
rights, economic impoverishment, land expropriations, house
demolitions, and other means of making life so unbearable as to
induce 'voluntary' Palestinian emigration." [17]
Hundreds of checkpoints make Palestinian movement difficult and
insecure, even between local neighborhoods, and they are closed on
Jewish holidays, paralyzing Palestinian economic and social life. As
of two years ago 79 Palestinians had died as a result of delays at
checkpoints and dozens of women had given childbirth (along with many
still-borns) at or near obstructed checkpoints. [18] There have been
over 11,000 Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes since 1967,
fewer than 600 belonging to people accused of terrorist activities
or their families (the latter a form of collective punishment that is
a war crime). One Israeli cabinet minister, Yosef Lapid, a holocaust
survivor, caused an uproar at one weekly cabinet meeting, at which
the demolition of homes in the Rafah refugee camp was being
discussed, when he said that a picture of an old Palestinian women on
the rubble of her home reminded him "of my grandmother in the
Holocaust," adding that there "is no forgiveness for people who treat
an old woman this way." [19] His remarks, unreported in the New York
Times, had no influence on Israeli policy.
The demolitions are almost all to clear the ground for homes or roads
or "security zones" for the ubermenschen, with minimal notice and
zero indignation from the Western establishment. In Jerusalem,
"Jewish-Israeli homes are never demolished, although 80% of the
building violations take place on the Western side of the city." [20]
When the settlers were removed from Gaza, they had long notice and
received between $140,000 and $400,000 per family for this
dislocation. Palestinians whose houses are demolished rarely receive
even token compensation and, as Amnesty International notes, "the
family may only have 15 minutes to take out what belongings they have
before the furniture is thrown into the street and their home
bulldozed" [21] This racist double standard, as well as the
associated racist language and perspectives, has been normalized and
has caused no negative reaction toward the racist state in the West.
Israel's Western-approved ethnic cleansing program has been massive,
proceeding both in spurts of larger-scale cleansing and in continual
lower-intensity expropriations and removal for almost 60 years
(1947-2006). Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in
1947-48, several hundred thousand were removed during and immediately
after the 1967 war, and an exodus, partially "voluntary," based on
Israeli violence, threats, fear, and impoverishment has been
continuous at other times up to the present day. The apartheid wall
under construction within the boundaries of the West Bank has
involved the removal of thousands, with larger numbers in prospect,
plus damage to a great many whose lands have been partly expropriated
or divided by the wall (which carefully avoids disturbing Jewish
settlements, but not Palestinian settlements or property). Large
numbers of Palestinians have simply moved out of their homeland,
adding a 2.4 million non-refugee diaspora to a refugee diaspora of
2.5 million (the total Palestinian population worldwide is estimated
to be 9.7 million).
It is an important fact that this durable and massive ethnic
cleansing process has taken place in daily violation of international
law, from which the ethnic cleansing state is exempt by virtue of
long-standing primary U.S. support, a lesser but real support by the
other great powers, and the weakness and compromised character of the
Arab and other members of the international community. Israel has
simply ignored dozens of Security Council and other UN rulings, the
Geneva Conventions applicable to an occupying power, and decisions of
the International Court. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention
stipulates that "the occupying power shall not transfer parts of its
own civilian population into the territory it occupies," a clear ban
on settlements, ignored along with numerous other provisions of
international law (which illegalize the theft of water, the
checkpoints and abusive treatment, and the numerous other
restrictions on movement).
Israel's huge wall, built almost entirely within Palestinian
territory, inflicting serious damage on several hundred thousand
Palestinians and blatantly in violation of the Geneva Conventions,
was found illegal by the International Court on July 9, 2004, the
court requesting the international community "not to render any aid
or assistance to the wall and associated regime." But Israel has
simply ignored this legal ruling, with the crucial support of the
United States and de facto support of the international community,
the latter (including the World Bank), continuing to do normal
business with the outlaw and thus colluding in its law violations and
ethnic cleansing program. [22]
Israel has been able to violate international law and continue its
ethnic cleansing project without obstruction or any sort of penalty
to this day. The United States vetoed a demand for international
monitors during the second intifada in 2002, and has also prevented
any international intervention in the serial and brutal Israeli armed
attacks on Palestinian refugee camps and cities (e.g., Jenin, Nablus,
Ramallah in 2002) and currently Gaza and Lebanon once again.
Obviously, no tribunals have been established to deal with these
blatant and large-scale war crimes and massive ethnic cleansing.
This is benign ethnic cleansing.
The rationalizations for this systematic ethnic cleansing have been
extremely crude and question-begging, but effective in the West.
Israel is always allowed to be "retaliating" to terror, although
there is invariably a sequence of tit-for-tat violence that the
Western establishment regularly cuts off at the point of a
Palestinian action, ignoring the prior Israeli provocations. [23]
That the Israelis keep seizing large and small blocs of Palestinian-
occupied land in response to "terror" and for Israeli "security" is
laughable, and of course flies in the face of the long-standing
Israeli admission of plans for "redeeming the land," but the
Israelis have been allowed to get away with this laughable basis for
land theft and expulsions. Palestinian resistance to their removal is
allowed to be "terrorism" and not retaliation for Israeli violence,
which is never terrorism or causal.
The Palestinians are in a lose-lose situation: if they don't resist
removal they will be removed and the West will not help them; if they
resist without violence, as in the first intifada, the West will not
help them and they will continue to be removed; and if they resist
with their puny force, they will be "terrorists" and the West will
condemn their "violence" as it collaborates further in their ethnic
cleansing!
Arabs and Third World peoples more generally can see that despite the
preachings of the West on the enlightenment values of equality, the
value of each individual, tolerance, and the importance of the rule
of law, all of these values have been suspended in the conflict
between the Israelis and Palestinians, with the West providing
unstinting and hypocritical support to Israel's brutal ethnic
cleansing and applied racism. This has fed the anger of the Islamic
world and beyond by providing an ongoing and exceedingly clear
illustrative case of Western racism and discrimination, a case where
the West is engaged in a wholly unprovoked war of aggression and
colonial aggrandizement against a non-Western people. .
Nefarious Ethnic Cleansing: The Case of the Serbs in Kosovo
The best known case in which the West has denounced and fought
against ethnic cleansing has been that of the Serbs fighting in
Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. In fact the term really came into its own
in application to this case. The Serbs were also accused of genocide
in Bosnia and Kosovo, although there was the difficulty that after
the Kosovo bombing war was over in June 1999 and intensive forensic
searches yielded only some 4,000 bodies from all sides, the
hysterical claims of U.S. officials (which at a peak hit 500,000
Kosovo Albanian victims) were shown to be wild propaganda
exaggerations. Thus, to establish a charge of genocide against
Milosevic the ICTY had to extend his villainy to Bosnia and,
accordingly, he was belatedly made part of a "joint criminal
conspiracy" along with Bosnian Serb officials. [24]
There is no question but that there was ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in
the years 1991-1995, and that the Bosnian Serbs were implicated in
the ethnic cleansing operations of those years. But they were not
alone-the Croats and Bosnian Muslims were very active participants,
with substantial armed forces, imported mujahadeen fighters, and
growing aid from the United States and other external allies
(including Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) that produced an
eventual military stalemate and threatened defeat for the Bosnian
Serbs. [25] And as noted earlier, the largest single ethnic cleansing
of the Yugoslavia wars was in Operation Storm, carried out by the
Croats against the Krajina Serbs, with active U.S. assistance. In
Bosnia the ethnic cleansing resulted from a struggle for land control
by three ethnic groups or "nations" in a civil conflict unleashed by
the unmediated breakup of Yugoslavia. None of the three was
powerless, and all suffered casualties, the Bosnian Muslims the most,
the Croats the least. [26]
One important difference from the case of Israel in Palestine is that
all three ethnic groups in Bosnia were seeking to improve their
strategic position, whereas in the Israel-Palestine case, only one
side has been seeking to take land from the other contestant. A
second difference is that in Bosnia and Croatia all three parties in
the struggle were well armed, and in the end the Bosnian Serbs were
even overbalanced by their military opponents, [27] whereas in the
Israel-Palestine case the contestants are one of the world's
strongest military powers (Israel), backed by a superpower, versus a
virtually defenseless population that doesn't even have the support
of several of its important local Arab neighbors. A third difference,
following plausibly from the second, is that whereas the ratio of
Muslim to Serb civilian deaths in Bosnia was perhaps two to one, the
ratio of Palestinian to Israeli civilian deaths was for many years
something like 25 to1, dropping in the second intifada to 3 or 4 to 1
(with a higher injury ratio). [28]
In Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) became very active in
1998 and the Yugoslav army responded with a crackdown that produced a
large number of internal refugees. NATO threats and an accord in
October 1998 forced the Serbs to accept a large body of OSCE
monitors and to withdraw Yugoslav army forces from Kosovo. The KLA
was not subject to any restraints by NATO and took advantage of the
new arrangements to occupy more Kosovo space, and they engaged in
numerous provocations to entice the Yugoslav police to crackdowns
that would help precipitate NATO intervention. The Racak "massacre"
of January 15, 1999, almost surely not a genuine massacre but an
incident in which KLA battle deaths were converted into a civilian
massacre by KLA-OSCE-ICTY and media cooperation, [29] helped
precipitate a NATO war on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians. The war
produced a flood of refugees fleeing the Yugoslav army, the KLA, and
the NATO bombs.
Was any of this "ethnic cleansing"? Before the NATO bombing war began
there had been many refugees created by Yugoslav army actions in
pursuit of the KLA and treating Albanian villagers sometimes very
harshly. There were, however, no cases reported of slaughters by the
Serbs comparable to the U.S. massacre at Haditha, nothing remotely
like the U.S. destruction of Falluja, and pre-bombing war civilian
casualties in Kosovo were only a very small fraction of those
produced by the U.S. forces in Iraq. [30] The Kosovo Albanians who
became refugees in that period were victims of a civil war within a
part of Serbia, whereas West Bank victims were in occupied territory
outside of Israel. Most relevant to the issue of ethnic cleansing,
Kosovo Albanians were not being pushed out to make way for Serb
settlers, as Palestinians were displaced by Jewish settlers in the
true case of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank. The German Foreign
office stated explicitly that the turmoil and refugee generation in
Kosovo before the bombing war was not a case of ethnic cleansing,
[31] and British officials even acknowledged that in the runup to the
bombing war the KLA killed more people in Kosovo, including Albanian
"traitors" as well as Serb police and civilians, than did the
Yugoslav army and police. [32]
Albanians who fled during the bombing war were war refugees, not
victims of ethnic cleansing, and Serbs in Kosovo fled with even
greater frequency than the Albanians. Nevertheless, in a remarkable
propaganda coup, the war propagandists made and actually got away
with the claim that the war was necessary to allow the return of
Albanians whose exit was a result of the war itself.
A number of consequences followed from the fact that the Serbs were
the targets of the United States and its allies. Flowing strictly
from this political alignment, Serb treatment of their antagonists in
the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo was nefarious, and from 1991
onward the Serbs were the focus of attention and vilification and
subject to inflated claims, sanctions and legal (ICTY) attacks from
which others doing much the same thing were free. As regards ethnic
cleansing, the term was applied to them freely, not only in Bosnia
but in Kosovo, where it was not applicable. As noted earlier, ethnic
cleansing was extremely applicable to the removal of Serbs from
Croatian Krajina, but as this was done under U.S. auspices the term
was not applied there, nor was it applied to Israel on the West Bank
where ethnic cleansing was crystal clear.
In the three year period 1998 through 2000, the New York Times,
Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time and Newsweek used the phrase
"ethnic cleansing" some 1,200 times in discussing Kosovo, in about
four-fifths of the cases in reference to Serb policy, whereas during
the entire decade of the 1990s they used the phrase only 14 times in
discussing Israel, and only five times referring to Israeli policy.
This reflects massive internalized bias.
Another consequence of the Serbs being U.S. targets was that they
were allegedly guilty of striving for a "Greater Serbia," an
important feature of the ICTY case against Milosevic. But this
accusation was silly and effectively fell apart during the Milosevic
trial when the prosecutor Geoffrey Nice admitted to the court that
Milosevic wasn't striving to enlarge Serb claims but merely to keep
all Serbs under one flag as Yugoslavia disintegrated-and there was a
great deal of evidence that Milosevic wasn't trying very hard even to
keep Serbs in one state. [33] The contrast here with Israel in
Palestine is dramatic-Israel has been openly trying to enlarge
Israeli territory at the expense of another people. But as noted
earlier, this is not something the U.S.-dominated international
community interferes with, and this model case of ethnic cleansing
isn't even worth discussing in the West. This is benign, not
nefarious ethnic cleansing.
In the case of Kosovo, the West was so upset at the effects of the
struggle there and victimization of the Kosovo Albanians that the
Serbs were warned that force might be employed against them if they
didn't restrain themselves, and the Serbs were compelled to accept a
large number of OSCE monitors, although as noted earlier no
restrictions were place by the OSCE on the KLA. Again the contrast
with the West Bank case is dramatic: there, where there was real
ethnic cleansing by Israel on behalf of settlers taking over
Palestinian property, and with massive Israeli operations in
violation of the Third and Fourth Geneva Convention, no monitors were
allowed, because the United States wouldn't support this, so ethnic
cleansing could proceed unhindered.
Then, with the excuse of Racak, the United States could go to war and
devastate Serbia and Kosovo, to protect those victims of Serbia in
Kosovo in a great moral crusade against "ethnic cleansing"! Racak
was not a massacre of civilians, the Serbs were not ethnically
cleansing in Kosovo, and the Serbs were not violating international
law in their civil war struggle in Kosovo as the Israelis were doing
on the West Bank, but the United States has been able to get away
with the active support of ethnic cleansing in the one case and
illegal war against a non-existent ethnic cleansing on the other
hand, with the support of the international community.
Conclusion
In the age of Kafka, ethnic cleansing is clearly acceptable when it
is serviceable to the United States or carried out by one of its
allies or clients, but it is assailed with great energy and
indignation and opposed by force when engaged in (or asserted to be
engaged in) by a U.S. target. In the former cases, the United States
and its allies may actively aid the ethnic cleansing state, and,
except for occasional nominal actions that the international
community does not attempt to enforce, and its occasional whimpers
calling for restraint, ethnic cleansing can proceed for decades in
violation of both international law and the moral rules supposedly
guiding the enlightened West. This of course requires great
discipline by the intellectual class and media, who must keep the
bulk of relevant facts out of sight and allow the ethnic cleansing
state to expropriate and remove its unwanted ethnic target population
under cover of a combination of silence and its alleged necessary
response to "terror" and inability to locate a "negotiating partner."
On the other hand, ethnic cleansing and claims of ethnic cleansing by
a target country like the former Yugoslavia is treated with an
intense focus of attention, great moral indignation, and aggressive
"humanitarian intervention," in keeping with Western enlightenment
values. In this case, sanctions may be imposed and international
monitors may be forced upon the delinquent country to constrain its
misbehavior, and an incident such as the killing of 40 Kosovo
Albanians by Yugoslav police can bring about a bombing war and
occupation of part of the villain's national territory. In this case
also an international tribunal can be organized to bring the ethnic
cleansing state's leaders and military commanders to justice.
Nefarious ethnic cleansing can be treated harshly.
In 1996 Israel could kill 104 Lebanese civilians, 86 of them
children, in a bombing raid on a UN refugee facility, and in July
2006 kill another 36 children in a UN facility along with killing 4
UN observers in July 2006, and lie about their knowledge of the
nature of the targets in all three cases, and receive no reprimand
from its U.S. sponsor and hence no serious response from the
"international community." In fact, Boutros-Boutros Ghali's taking
the 1996 killings a bit too seriously for Clinton administration
tastes may have hastened his replacement as UN leader. [34] This was
the same Clinton administration that found the 40 killed at Racak
(none children, one woman, all but the woman almost surely KLA
fighters) a really terrible event worthy of a violent international
response!
The hypocrisy involved in this applied double standard is breath-
taking. As noted earlier, whereas both the Croat leadership in
cleansing Serbs from Krajina and the Israeli leadership in removing
Palestinians were very clearly doing this to get rid of an unwanted
population to replace it with a competing ethnic group, the Yugoslav
actions in Kosovo were features of a civil war. Whereas the Israeli
leadership was and still is quite explicitly seeking a "Greater
Israel" by land theft and people expulsion, Milosevic was trying to
keep the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia within a single remnant
political entity and not trying to enlarge Serb territory at the
expense of some other ethnic group (as Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice
acknowledged during the Milosevic trial). Whereas the Israeli
leadership has for years described the Palestinians in extremely
derogatory and racist language, no such derogation of Kosovo
Albanians (or other nationalities) has ever been attributed to
Milosevic, and Albanians in Belgrade have never been subjected to
discrimination such as Arabs undergo in Israel (not to speak of the
occupied territories). In sum, the differential treatment of
Milosevic and Sharon, the one prosecuted--after a failed
assassination attempt-[35] and the other honored as a Free World
leader and "man of peace," was not only not based on the realities of
ethnic cleansing or any honest application of the law, it reflects
pure power and structured injustice in the age of Kafka.
-------------------------------------------
Endnotes:
1. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and
Third World Fascism (Boston; South End Press, 1979).
2. Ibid., chapter 4, sec. 4.1.
3. Ibid., chapter 3, section 3.4.4.
4. In a classic case, when Indonesian violence in East Timor reached
its peak in 1977-1978, New York Times coverage fell to zero; see
ibid.; see also Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing
Consent (New York: Pantheon, 1988, 2002), chapter 2, "Worthy and
Unworthy Victims.".
5. See Washington Connection, chap. 5, sec. 5.2; Noam Chomsky and
Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm (Boston: South End Press,
1979), esp. chap. 6.
6. See Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (London:
Pluto, 2005), chaps. 4-6.
7. Raymond Bonner, "War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops 'Cleansed'
the Serbs," New York Times, March 21, 1999.
8. See Edward Herman, "<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?
SectionID=74&ItemID=8244> The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre,"
ZNet, July 7, 2005..
9. On August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright cried out to the Security
Council that "as many as 13,000 men, women and children were driven
from their homes" in Srebrenica.. (<The">http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/
UNDOC/PRO/N95/858/
26/PDF/N9585826.pdf?OpenElement>The Situation in the Republic of
Bosnia and Herzegovina (<S/PV.3564">http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/
PRO/N95/858/26/PDF/N9585826.pdf?OpenElement>S/PV.3564), UN Security
Council, August 10, 1995, 5.30 p.m., pp. 6-7). Needless to say,
Albright did not cry out about the 200,000+ Karajina Serbs being
driven out of their homes in the same time frame as she wept for the
13,000.
10. The Krajina Serb human rights organization Veritas estimated that
1,205 civilians were killed in Operation Storm, including 358 women
and 10 children. See "Croatian Serb Exodus Commemorated," Agence
France Press, Aug. 4, 2004; also, Veritas at
www.veritas.org.yu'">http://www.veritas.org.yu/>www.veritas.org.yu'.
In the graves around Srebrenica exhumed through 2000, only one of
the 1,883 bodies was identified as female.
11. Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force (Lancaster, UK: CDISS,
1999), p. 192.
12. "U.N. Report: Bosnian Serbs Massacred Srebrenica Muslims,"
Washington Post, Aug. 12, 1995. For illustrative language, see also
John Pomfret, "Investigators Begin Exhuming Group of Mass Graves in
Bosnia," Washington Post, July 8, 1996. "Upheaval" is in "Softening
Up The Enemy," Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1995.
13. Jan Oberg, "Misleading UN Report on Kosovo (Part A)," TFF
PressInfo 77, Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research,
Lund, Sweden, October 3, 1999, <http://www.transnational.org/pressinf/
pf77.html
14. "Europe Prepares to Evacuate 40,000 Kosovo Serbs," Focus News
Agency (Bulgaria), April 18, 2006.
15. For several dozen Israeli leaders' statements of racist
denigration and indication that ethnic cleansing is a necessary and
proper course, see "<Quotes">http://www.monabaker.com/
quotes.htm>Quotes," < The">The">http://www.monabaker.com/quotes.htm>
The Middle East Conflict (Personal Website of Mona Baker);
"<Israel's">http://www.just-international.org/article.cfm?
newsid=20001494>Israel's Barbaric and Primitive Action: Examples of
Hate Speech," International Movement for a Just World, 2005. Olmert's
speech can be found at http://www.pmo.gov.il/PMOEng/Communication/
PMSpeaks/speechcong240506.htm
16. Kaveh L Afrasiabi , "It's about annexation, stupid!": <">http://
www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HH05Ak01.html>
; see also. Paul Larudee, "The Clearing of South Lebanon: The
Lebanese Nakba and Israeli Ambitiions": http://www.counterpunch.org/
larudee08082006.html
17. Jeff Halper, Obstacles to Peace: A Re-Framing of the Palestinian-
Israeli Conflict (Carrboro, NC: The Israeli Committee Against House
Demolitions, 2004), p. 17.
18. Ibid, p. 18.
19. A.P., "Official Compares Israeli Action to Nazi's," Guardian, May
21, 2004.
20. Halper, Obstacles to Peace, p. 34.
21. AI, "Israel: Home Demolitions," Dec. 8, 1999.
22. See "Free Markets: Imprisoned People," in "Against 'Sustainable'
Apartheid & Occupation," www.stopthewall.org'">http://
www.stopthewall.org/>www.stopthewall.org'
23. This is dramatically evident in the cases of the recent Israeli
invasions of Gaza and Lebanon, where the U.S. mainstream media have
simply taken the captures of a few Israeli soldiers as the
precipitating events, neglecting both any prior Israeli actions and
the evidence of Israeli plans for these actions that were simply
waiting for the proper moment to execute.
24. For a discussion of "joint criminal enterprise," along with
other relevant matters, see Edward Herman and David Peterson,
"<Milosevic's">Milosevic's">http://www.electricpolitics.com/2006/05/
milosevics_death_in_the_propag.html>Milosevic's Death in the
Propaganda System," <ElectricPolitics.com">ElectricPolitics.com">
http://www.electricpolitics.com/index.html>
ElectricPolitics.com, May 14, 2006.
25. This military stalemate is discussed in Tim Fenton's "The
Military Context," in Edward S. Herman, ed., The Srebrenica Massacre:
Evidence, Context, Politics (forthcoming).
26. Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, "War-related Deaths in the 1992-1995
Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous
Estimates and Recent Results," European Journal of Population, Vol.
21, No. 2-3, June, 2005, pp. 187-215; Mirsad Tokaca of the Sarajevo-
based Research and Documentation Center, as quoted in "Bosnian war
'claimed 100,000 lives'," Deutsche Presse-Agentur, November 21, 2005;
in Nedim Dervisbegovic, "Research halves Bosnia war death toll to
100,000," Reuters, November 23, 2005.
27. See note 25 above.
28. Ibid.; James Bennett, "MIDEAST TURMOIL: NEWS ANALYSIS; Mideast
Balance Sheet," New York Times, March 12, 2002 .
29. See Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, pp. 72-80; Edward
Herman, "Propaganda System Number 1," Z Magazine, July-Aug. 2001
30. The total killings in Kosovo in the year before the NATO bombing
war was estimated at some 2,000, with less than half of those
allocable to the Yugoslav army (see note 30). As the U.S. killings in
Iraq are surely greater than 50,000, we are talking about a ratio of
better than 50 to 1 in favor of the United States as killer.
31. Both the German foreign office, German courts, and British
intelligence denied that Serb actions in Kosovo before the war were
linked to ethnicity: see Noam Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the
Line [London: Verso, 2000], pp. 112-3.
32. British Minister of Defense George Robertson told the House of
Commons on March 24, 1999 that until mid-January 1999 "the KLA were
responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities
had been." (Cited in ibid., p. 106.)
33. See Herman and Peterson, "Death of Milosevic in the Propaganda
System."
34. In Ran HaCohen's "The UN from Qana to Jenin: Why the Secretary
General's Report Cannot Be Trusted," Letter From Israel, Aug. 14,
2002, HaCohen describes how back in 1996 then Secretary General
Boutros-Ghali had insisted on publishing a report on Israel's killing
of over a 100 civilians in Qana, over U.S. protests. The result was
that a week later, on May 13, 1996, U.S. Secretary of State Warren
Christopher informed Boutros-Ghali that the United States would veto
his re-election. Writing in 2002 HaCohen was explaining how the more
pliable Kofi Annan, in dealing with Jenin, "without visiting the
sceneŠissued a shameful report, echoing Israeli propaganda, ignoring
even 'embarrassing' material published in the Israeli press."
35. A U.S. missile attack targeted Milosevic's residence in Belgrade
on April 22, 1999, but failed to assassinate him.
ZMAG (USA)
Ethnic Cleansing: Constructive, Benign, and Nefarious
(Kafka Era Studies, No. 1)
by Edward S. Herman; August 09, 2006
Some years ago Noam Chomsky and I found it useful to distinguish
between three categories of terrorism--constructive, benign and
nefarious--the classification based strictly on the utility of the
terrorism to U.S. interests as perceived by the ruling political
elite [1]
Thus, when terrorism is seen by U.S. officials as highly advantageous
to U.S. interests, it is treated by those officials, and hence by the
media, as a positive development and hence "constructive." This was
the case with the vast massacres by Suharto and colleagues in
Indonesia in 1965-1966, that wiped out the base of a communist party
and cleared the ground for an open door to foreign investment and a
realignment of Indonesian foreign policy in favor of the West. In
this instance not only was there no moral indignation expressed at
the mass murder of many hundreds of thousands of civilians, it was
treated as a "dividend" from our policy of military aid to the
Indonesian army (Robert McNamara), and a "a gleam of light" in Asia
(James Reston). [2]
When the terrorism is not especially helpful to U.S. interests but is
carried out by an ally or client that U.S. officials want to placate
or protect, the killing of large numbers of civilians is treated as
of little interest and no evident moral concern-it is "benign"--as in
the case of Indonesia's invasion-occupation of East Timor in 1975 and
after, which resulted in the death of a third of the East Timorese
population, but which was aided and diplomatically protected by the
U. S. government, based on the perceived merits of the Suharto
dictatorship and kleptocracy. [3]
On the other hand, a terrorism carried out by a communist or any
other designated enemy state is given great attention, arouses great
moral fervor, and is treated as "nefarious." This was the case with
the killings by Pol Pot in Cambodia, the NLF in Vietnam, and Saddam
Hussein in Iraq--except during the period in the 1980s when Saddam
was serving U.S. interests by killing Iranians. This classification
system was and remains useful, and is notable in its successful
tracking not only official designations but media treatment as well.
For the first two kinds of terrorism, the media are reliably very
quiet, with little coverage, antiseptic and sometimes apologetic
treatment of murderous behavior where it is mentioned at all, [4] and
with no indignation. With nefarious terror, on the other hand,
coverage is intense, detailed, includes many personal stories of
suffering, and elicits great indignation. [5]
Over the past two decades, during which ethnic cleansing has
frequently been featured by Western officials, pundits and human
rights activists, a closely parallel system of official treatment and
media follow-on is also evident. As with terrorism, in the official
view ethnic cleansing can be constructive, benign, or nefarious, and
the media recognize this and adjust with almost clockwork precision
to the demands of state policy in treating its different manifestations.
Constructive Ethnic Cleansing: Croatia and the Krajina Serbs
As a model instance of constructive ethnic cleansing, we may take the
case of the Croat ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina region
of Croatia in August 1995. Long before that date the Clinton
administration had aligned itself with the Croats and Bosnian Muslims
in the externally stoked civil war that engulfed the region from 1991
onward: it had supported sanctions on the Serbs alone, sponsored and
used the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) as an anti-Serb political-PR-judicial instrument, [6]
encouraged the Bosnian Muslims to withdraw from the Lisbon agreement
in March 1992--an agreement that would have settled the conflict and
prevented the further large-scale blood-letting--helped organize an
alliance between the Muslims and Croats to help them better fight the
Serbs, and supported the import of arms and mujahadeen to help the
Muslims fight and kill more effectively, among other matters.
To further weaken the bargaining position of the Serbs, the Clinton
administration actively supported the Croatian army's attacks on the
Serb communities in Croatia in Operation Flash in May 1995 and then
in the massive ethnic cleansing of Krajina Serbs in Operation Storm
in August 1995. Richard Holbrooke visited Zagreb two days before the
beginning of Operation Storm, and clearly did not exercise any
restraining influence on the imminent cleansing operation. Active
U.S. support came in the form of military aid, the provision of
military "advisers" closely affiliated with the U.S. armed forces,
direct participation in the military operations via intelligence
provision and even selective bombing missions, and a refusal to
cooperate with the ICTY in providing information on possible war
crimes committed by the Croatian armed forces. [7]
Another form of U.S. support was an intense and indignant focus on
the Srebrenica massacre, [8] which took place during the month before
Operation Storm and helped justify and distract attention from the
Croatian ethnic cleansing and massacre. Operation Storm involved the
removal of some 200,000 to 250,000 Krajina Serbs, in contrast with
perhaps one-tenth that number of Bosnian Muslims removed from
Srebrenica. [9] Operation Storm may also have involved the killing of
more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the
Srebrenica area in July: virtually all of the Bosnian Muslim victims
were fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian Serbs bused the
Srebrenica women and children to safety. The Croats made no such
provision and hundreds of women, children and old people were
slaughtered in Krajina. [10] The ruthlessness of the Croats was
impressive: Tim Ripley notes that "UN troops watched horrified as
Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the road
outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from the
AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks
of a tank." [11]
Media treatment of the Srebrenica and Krajina cases followed the
familiar pattern of fixing victim worthiness and unworthiness in
accord with a political agenda. With the Serbs their government's
target, and their government actively aiding the massive Croat ethnic
cleansing program in Krajina, the media gave huge and indignant
treatment to the first, with invidious language, calls for action,
and little context. On the other hand, with Krajina, attention was
slight and passing, detailed reporting on the condition of the
victims was minimal, descriptive language was neutral, indignation
was absent, and the slight context offered made the cleansing and
killings acceptable.
The contrast in language is notable: the attack on Srebrenica
"chilling," "murderous," "savagery," "cold-blooded killing,"
"genocidal," "aggression," and of course "ethnic cleansing." With
Krajina, the media used no such strong language-even ethnic cleansing
was too much for them, even though this was an obvious, carefully
planned, and major case. The Croat assault was merely a big
"upheaval" that is "softening up the enemy," "a lightning offensive,"
explained away as a "response to Srebrenica" and a result of Serb
leaders "overplaying their hand." The Washington Post even cited U.S.
Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith saying the "the Serb exodus was
not 'ethnic cleansing'." [12] The paper did not allow a challenge to
that judgment. In fact, however, the Croat operations in Krajina left
Croatia the most ethnically purified of all the former components of
the former Yugoslavia, although the NATO occupation of Kosovo allowed
an Albanian ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Roma and others that rivalled
that of Croatia in ethnic purification. [13]
Although in recent years there has been a trickle of expelled Serbs
returning to Croatian Krajina, in neither the Krajina nor Kosovo
cases has there been any effort by the NATO powers to organize the
return of the ethnically-cleansed Serbs to their homes from which
they were removed by force. Civilian victims associated with a
Western target are unworthy. Based on no substantive differences
whatever, their killers and ethnic cleansers are allowed to be
retaliating and taking revenge, rather than pursuing ethnic cleansing
for more sinister motives (racial hatred, land hunger), and these
unworthy victims have no right of return.
In the case of Kosovo, the UN is actually planning for 40,000
additional Serb refugees in case of an expected granting of full
independence to Kosovo and Kosovo Albanian control. [14] Thus, not
only are unworthy victims not treated with sympathy or allowed any
right of return, the international community will even plan to
collaborate in a further round of ethnic cleansing by a Western ally
or client, and the media won't complain or even notice.
Benign Ethnic Cleansing: Israel's Removal of the Palestinians to
"Redeem the Land"
As an illustration of benign ethnic cleansing, the case of Israel's
long-term expropriation and removal of Palestinians in Israel proper,
on the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and Gaza is clear and very
important, morally and politically. It is "benign," because the
United States does not benefit from this process, which has a
negative feedback effect on Arab and many other peoples' view of the
United States; this is a case of the tail wagging the dog, with the
dog injuring itself as it spins around in service to its tail.
Its importance rests on several other considerations: This has been a
very obvious--even model--case of ethnic cleansing, in which one
ethnic group has used its military power and aid from the West
(mainly the United States) to evict another ethnic group that stands
in its way. This fundamental fact has been acknowledged by a long
line of Israeli officials and intellectual defenders of Israel, who
have admitted, sometimes regretfully, that to "redeem the land"
occupied by Palestinians in favor of the "chosen people" would
require systematic expropriation and associated killing and forced
transfer.
Back in 1948, David Ben-Gurion was clear that "We must use terror,
assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of
all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Fifty
years later, in 1998, Ariel Sharon made the same point about the
centrality of ethnic cleansing in Israeli policy: "It is the duty of
Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and
courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with
time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization
or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the
expropriation of their lands." On May 24, 2006, Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert told a joint session of congress that "I
believed and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and
historic right to this entire land."
Despite these and numerous other statements along the same line, [15]
the Western elites pretend that Israel's expropriations and ethnic
cleansing are not the basic (and profoundly immoral) causal force in
the struggle over Palestine, and in a Kafkaesque mode it is the
Palestinian resistance to their ethnic cleansing that is to be
condemned.
It should be noted that Israel's "eternal and historic right" to
Olmert's "entire land" may well underlie the current and renewed
Israeli aggression in Lebanon and huge ethnic cleansing and refugee
generation in southern Lebanon. Officially, Israel's ground invasion
of Lebanon is an act of self-defense against Hezbollah's threat,
aimed at creating a security buffer zone until the arrival of a
"multinational force with an enforcement capability." But
increasingly, as the initial goal of a narrow strip of only a few
kilometers has now been extended up to the Litani River deep in
Lebanon, the real motives behind Israel's invasion are becoming
crystal clear.
Back in the 1940s Ben Gurion declared that Israel's "natural borders"
extended to the Litani in the north and the Jordan to the east--
coincidentally the two sources of snow fed water in the region. Even
in their current announced plan to evacuate the West Bank the
Israelis intend to hold the Jordan "for security reasons." The Litani
is next. The Golan is also valued for its water. Thus, while
officially, Israel's ground invasion of Lebanon is claimed to be an
act of self-defense against Hezbollah's threat, aimed at creating a
security buffer zone until the arrival of a "multinational force with
an enforcement capability," the initial goal of a narrow strip of
southern Lebanon "has now been extended up to the Litani River deep
in Lebanon, [and] the real motives behind Israel's invasion are
becoming crystal-clear…. This is a war to annex a major chunk of
Lebanese territory without necessarily saying so, under the pretext
of security buffer and deterrence against future attacks on
Israel." [16]
This drive to "redeem the land," requiring the takeover of land in
the possession of others by force, also constitutes a model case of
a quest for a "Greater" entity--here a Greater Israel-a drive which
in the case of Milosevic's and the Serbs' alleged drive for a
"Greater Serbia" was presented as a prime element of illegal
activity in the ICTY indictment of Milosevic (see below under
Nefarious). In no case has this drive for a Greater Israel been
pointed to by U.S. officials or the U.S. mainstream media as an
immoral and illegal program that should call for international
intervention and prosecution in the mode of the Serb prosecution,
although the Israeli program has been explicitly designed to
ethnically cleanse a sizable civilian population.
This model case of ethnic cleansing also represents a clear instance
of applied racism, in which the militarily stronger and ethnic
cleansing state--its leaders, armed forces, and a major part of its
media, intellectuals and citizenry, who would be called "willing
executioners" if residing in a Western targeted state--in both words
and actions treat the population in process of removal as inferiors
(untermenschen in the Nazi mode). These inferiors are not merely
discriminated against but freely abused with beatings, harsh
treatment at checkpoints, home demolitions and expropriations in
accord with Israeli desires, theft of land and water, and killings
without penalty. As the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem states,
"Israel has established in the occupied Territories a separation cum
discrimination regime, in which it maintains two systems of laws, and
a person's rights are based on his or her national origin. This
regime is the only of its kind in the world, and brings to mind dark
regimes of the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa."
High Israeli officials have for years described the Palestinians as
"cockroaches," "lice," "grasshoppers," "animals," "two-legged
beasts," a "cancer," along with other epithets of dehumanization, and
they have repeatedly devalued Palestinian life as compared with that
of Jews (most recently, Olmert's statement that "the lives and well-
being of Sderot's residents are more important than those of Gaza
residents"; more dramatically, Rabbi Yaacov Perin's "One million
Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail"). Palestinian numbers
represent what in Israel is called a "demographic threat," and
Israeli academic and human rights activist Jeff Halper states that
"schemes of 'transfer' have become an acceptable part of Israeli
political discourse...[as Israel] actively pursues policies of
displacement: exile and deportation, the revoking of residency
rights, economic impoverishment, land expropriations, house
demolitions, and other means of making life so unbearable as to
induce 'voluntary' Palestinian emigration." [17]
Hundreds of checkpoints make Palestinian movement difficult and
insecure, even between local neighborhoods, and they are closed on
Jewish holidays, paralyzing Palestinian economic and social life. As
of two years ago 79 Palestinians had died as a result of delays at
checkpoints and dozens of women had given childbirth (along with many
still-borns) at or near obstructed checkpoints. [18] There have been
over 11,000 Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes since 1967,
fewer than 600 belonging to people accused of terrorist activities
or their families (the latter a form of collective punishment that is
a war crime). One Israeli cabinet minister, Yosef Lapid, a holocaust
survivor, caused an uproar at one weekly cabinet meeting, at which
the demolition of homes in the Rafah refugee camp was being
discussed, when he said that a picture of an old Palestinian women on
the rubble of her home reminded him "of my grandmother in the
Holocaust," adding that there "is no forgiveness for people who treat
an old woman this way." [19] His remarks, unreported in the New York
Times, had no influence on Israeli policy.
The demolitions are almost all to clear the ground for homes or roads
or "security zones" for the ubermenschen, with minimal notice and
zero indignation from the Western establishment. In Jerusalem,
"Jewish-Israeli homes are never demolished, although 80% of the
building violations take place on the Western side of the city." [20]
When the settlers were removed from Gaza, they had long notice and
received between $140,000 and $400,000 per family for this
dislocation. Palestinians whose houses are demolished rarely receive
even token compensation and, as Amnesty International notes, "the
family may only have 15 minutes to take out what belongings they have
before the furniture is thrown into the street and their home
bulldozed" [21] This racist double standard, as well as the
associated racist language and perspectives, has been normalized and
has caused no negative reaction toward the racist state in the West.
Israel's Western-approved ethnic cleansing program has been massive,
proceeding both in spurts of larger-scale cleansing and in continual
lower-intensity expropriations and removal for almost 60 years
(1947-2006). Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in
1947-48, several hundred thousand were removed during and immediately
after the 1967 war, and an exodus, partially "voluntary," based on
Israeli violence, threats, fear, and impoverishment has been
continuous at other times up to the present day. The apartheid wall
under construction within the boundaries of the West Bank has
involved the removal of thousands, with larger numbers in prospect,
plus damage to a great many whose lands have been partly expropriated
or divided by the wall (which carefully avoids disturbing Jewish
settlements, but not Palestinian settlements or property). Large
numbers of Palestinians have simply moved out of their homeland,
adding a 2.4 million non-refugee diaspora to a refugee diaspora of
2.5 million (the total Palestinian population worldwide is estimated
to be 9.7 million).
It is an important fact that this durable and massive ethnic
cleansing process has taken place in daily violation of international
law, from which the ethnic cleansing state is exempt by virtue of
long-standing primary U.S. support, a lesser but real support by the
other great powers, and the weakness and compromised character of the
Arab and other members of the international community. Israel has
simply ignored dozens of Security Council and other UN rulings, the
Geneva Conventions applicable to an occupying power, and decisions of
the International Court. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention
stipulates that "the occupying power shall not transfer parts of its
own civilian population into the territory it occupies," a clear ban
on settlements, ignored along with numerous other provisions of
international law (which illegalize the theft of water, the
checkpoints and abusive treatment, and the numerous other
restrictions on movement).
Israel's huge wall, built almost entirely within Palestinian
territory, inflicting serious damage on several hundred thousand
Palestinians and blatantly in violation of the Geneva Conventions,
was found illegal by the International Court on July 9, 2004, the
court requesting the international community "not to render any aid
or assistance to the wall and associated regime." But Israel has
simply ignored this legal ruling, with the crucial support of the
United States and de facto support of the international community,
the latter (including the World Bank), continuing to do normal
business with the outlaw and thus colluding in its law violations and
ethnic cleansing program. [22]
Israel has been able to violate international law and continue its
ethnic cleansing project without obstruction or any sort of penalty
to this day. The United States vetoed a demand for international
monitors during the second intifada in 2002, and has also prevented
any international intervention in the serial and brutal Israeli armed
attacks on Palestinian refugee camps and cities (e.g., Jenin, Nablus,
Ramallah in 2002) and currently Gaza and Lebanon once again.
Obviously, no tribunals have been established to deal with these
blatant and large-scale war crimes and massive ethnic cleansing.
This is benign ethnic cleansing.
The rationalizations for this systematic ethnic cleansing have been
extremely crude and question-begging, but effective in the West.
Israel is always allowed to be "retaliating" to terror, although
there is invariably a sequence of tit-for-tat violence that the
Western establishment regularly cuts off at the point of a
Palestinian action, ignoring the prior Israeli provocations. [23]
That the Israelis keep seizing large and small blocs of Palestinian-
occupied land in response to "terror" and for Israeli "security" is
laughable, and of course flies in the face of the long-standing
Israeli admission of plans for "redeeming the land," but the
Israelis have been allowed to get away with this laughable basis for
land theft and expulsions. Palestinian resistance to their removal is
allowed to be "terrorism" and not retaliation for Israeli violence,
which is never terrorism or causal.
The Palestinians are in a lose-lose situation: if they don't resist
removal they will be removed and the West will not help them; if they
resist without violence, as in the first intifada, the West will not
help them and they will continue to be removed; and if they resist
with their puny force, they will be "terrorists" and the West will
condemn their "violence" as it collaborates further in their ethnic
cleansing!
Arabs and Third World peoples more generally can see that despite the
preachings of the West on the enlightenment values of equality, the
value of each individual, tolerance, and the importance of the rule
of law, all of these values have been suspended in the conflict
between the Israelis and Palestinians, with the West providing
unstinting and hypocritical support to Israel's brutal ethnic
cleansing and applied racism. This has fed the anger of the Islamic
world and beyond by providing an ongoing and exceedingly clear
illustrative case of Western racism and discrimination, a case where
the West is engaged in a wholly unprovoked war of aggression and
colonial aggrandizement against a non-Western people. .
Nefarious Ethnic Cleansing: The Case of the Serbs in Kosovo
The best known case in which the West has denounced and fought
against ethnic cleansing has been that of the Serbs fighting in
Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. In fact the term really came into its own
in application to this case. The Serbs were also accused of genocide
in Bosnia and Kosovo, although there was the difficulty that after
the Kosovo bombing war was over in June 1999 and intensive forensic
searches yielded only some 4,000 bodies from all sides, the
hysterical claims of U.S. officials (which at a peak hit 500,000
Kosovo Albanian victims) were shown to be wild propaganda
exaggerations. Thus, to establish a charge of genocide against
Milosevic the ICTY had to extend his villainy to Bosnia and,
accordingly, he was belatedly made part of a "joint criminal
conspiracy" along with Bosnian Serb officials. [24]
There is no question but that there was ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in
the years 1991-1995, and that the Bosnian Serbs were implicated in
the ethnic cleansing operations of those years. But they were not
alone-the Croats and Bosnian Muslims were very active participants,
with substantial armed forces, imported mujahadeen fighters, and
growing aid from the United States and other external allies
(including Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) that produced an
eventual military stalemate and threatened defeat for the Bosnian
Serbs. [25] And as noted earlier, the largest single ethnic cleansing
of the Yugoslavia wars was in Operation Storm, carried out by the
Croats against the Krajina Serbs, with active U.S. assistance. In
Bosnia the ethnic cleansing resulted from a struggle for land control
by three ethnic groups or "nations" in a civil conflict unleashed by
the unmediated breakup of Yugoslavia. None of the three was
powerless, and all suffered casualties, the Bosnian Muslims the most,
the Croats the least. [26]
One important difference from the case of Israel in Palestine is that
all three ethnic groups in Bosnia were seeking to improve their
strategic position, whereas in the Israel-Palestine case, only one
side has been seeking to take land from the other contestant. A
second difference is that in Bosnia and Croatia all three parties in
the struggle were well armed, and in the end the Bosnian Serbs were
even overbalanced by their military opponents, [27] whereas in the
Israel-Palestine case the contestants are one of the world's
strongest military powers (Israel), backed by a superpower, versus a
virtually defenseless population that doesn't even have the support
of several of its important local Arab neighbors. A third difference,
following plausibly from the second, is that whereas the ratio of
Muslim to Serb civilian deaths in Bosnia was perhaps two to one, the
ratio of Palestinian to Israeli civilian deaths was for many years
something like 25 to1, dropping in the second intifada to 3 or 4 to 1
(with a higher injury ratio). [28]
In Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) became very active in
1998 and the Yugoslav army responded with a crackdown that produced a
large number of internal refugees. NATO threats and an accord in
October 1998 forced the Serbs to accept a large body of OSCE
monitors and to withdraw Yugoslav army forces from Kosovo. The KLA
was not subject to any restraints by NATO and took advantage of the
new arrangements to occupy more Kosovo space, and they engaged in
numerous provocations to entice the Yugoslav police to crackdowns
that would help precipitate NATO intervention. The Racak "massacre"
of January 15, 1999, almost surely not a genuine massacre but an
incident in which KLA battle deaths were converted into a civilian
massacre by KLA-OSCE-ICTY and media cooperation, [29] helped
precipitate a NATO war on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians. The war
produced a flood of refugees fleeing the Yugoslav army, the KLA, and
the NATO bombs.
Was any of this "ethnic cleansing"? Before the NATO bombing war began
there had been many refugees created by Yugoslav army actions in
pursuit of the KLA and treating Albanian villagers sometimes very
harshly. There were, however, no cases reported of slaughters by the
Serbs comparable to the U.S. massacre at Haditha, nothing remotely
like the U.S. destruction of Falluja, and pre-bombing war civilian
casualties in Kosovo were only a very small fraction of those
produced by the U.S. forces in Iraq. [30] The Kosovo Albanians who
became refugees in that period were victims of a civil war within a
part of Serbia, whereas West Bank victims were in occupied territory
outside of Israel. Most relevant to the issue of ethnic cleansing,
Kosovo Albanians were not being pushed out to make way for Serb
settlers, as Palestinians were displaced by Jewish settlers in the
true case of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank. The German Foreign
office stated explicitly that the turmoil and refugee generation in
Kosovo before the bombing war was not a case of ethnic cleansing,
[31] and British officials even acknowledged that in the runup to the
bombing war the KLA killed more people in Kosovo, including Albanian
"traitors" as well as Serb police and civilians, than did the
Yugoslav army and police. [32]
Albanians who fled during the bombing war were war refugees, not
victims of ethnic cleansing, and Serbs in Kosovo fled with even
greater frequency than the Albanians. Nevertheless, in a remarkable
propaganda coup, the war propagandists made and actually got away
with the claim that the war was necessary to allow the return of
Albanians whose exit was a result of the war itself.
A number of consequences followed from the fact that the Serbs were
the targets of the United States and its allies. Flowing strictly
from this political alignment, Serb treatment of their antagonists in
the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo was nefarious, and from 1991
onward the Serbs were the focus of attention and vilification and
subject to inflated claims, sanctions and legal (ICTY) attacks from
which others doing much the same thing were free. As regards ethnic
cleansing, the term was applied to them freely, not only in Bosnia
but in Kosovo, where it was not applicable. As noted earlier, ethnic
cleansing was extremely applicable to the removal of Serbs from
Croatian Krajina, but as this was done under U.S. auspices the term
was not applied there, nor was it applied to Israel on the West Bank
where ethnic cleansing was crystal clear.
In the three year period 1998 through 2000, the New York Times,
Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time and Newsweek used the phrase
"ethnic cleansing" some 1,200 times in discussing Kosovo, in about
four-fifths of the cases in reference to Serb policy, whereas during
the entire decade of the 1990s they used the phrase only 14 times in
discussing Israel, and only five times referring to Israeli policy.
This reflects massive internalized bias.
Another consequence of the Serbs being U.S. targets was that they
were allegedly guilty of striving for a "Greater Serbia," an
important feature of the ICTY case against Milosevic. But this
accusation was silly and effectively fell apart during the Milosevic
trial when the prosecutor Geoffrey Nice admitted to the court that
Milosevic wasn't striving to enlarge Serb claims but merely to keep
all Serbs under one flag as Yugoslavia disintegrated-and there was a
great deal of evidence that Milosevic wasn't trying very hard even to
keep Serbs in one state. [33] The contrast here with Israel in
Palestine is dramatic-Israel has been openly trying to enlarge
Israeli territory at the expense of another people. But as noted
earlier, this is not something the U.S.-dominated international
community interferes with, and this model case of ethnic cleansing
isn't even worth discussing in the West. This is benign, not
nefarious ethnic cleansing.
In the case of Kosovo, the West was so upset at the effects of the
struggle there and victimization of the Kosovo Albanians that the
Serbs were warned that force might be employed against them if they
didn't restrain themselves, and the Serbs were compelled to accept a
large number of OSCE monitors, although as noted earlier no
restrictions were place by the OSCE on the KLA. Again the contrast
with the West Bank case is dramatic: there, where there was real
ethnic cleansing by Israel on behalf of settlers taking over
Palestinian property, and with massive Israeli operations in
violation of the Third and Fourth Geneva Convention, no monitors were
allowed, because the United States wouldn't support this, so ethnic
cleansing could proceed unhindered.
Then, with the excuse of Racak, the United States could go to war and
devastate Serbia and Kosovo, to protect those victims of Serbia in
Kosovo in a great moral crusade against "ethnic cleansing"! Racak
was not a massacre of civilians, the Serbs were not ethnically
cleansing in Kosovo, and the Serbs were not violating international
law in their civil war struggle in Kosovo as the Israelis were doing
on the West Bank, but the United States has been able to get away
with the active support of ethnic cleansing in the one case and
illegal war against a non-existent ethnic cleansing on the other
hand, with the support of the international community.
Conclusion
In the age of Kafka, ethnic cleansing is clearly acceptable when it
is serviceable to the United States or carried out by one of its
allies or clients, but it is assailed with great energy and
indignation and opposed by force when engaged in (or asserted to be
engaged in) by a U.S. target. In the former cases, the United States
and its allies may actively aid the ethnic cleansing state, and,
except for occasional nominal actions that the international
community does not attempt to enforce, and its occasional whimpers
calling for restraint, ethnic cleansing can proceed for decades in
violation of both international law and the moral rules supposedly
guiding the enlightened West. This of course requires great
discipline by the intellectual class and media, who must keep the
bulk of relevant facts out of sight and allow the ethnic cleansing
state to expropriate and remove its unwanted ethnic target population
under cover of a combination of silence and its alleged necessary
response to "terror" and inability to locate a "negotiating partner."
On the other hand, ethnic cleansing and claims of ethnic cleansing by
a target country like the former Yugoslavia is treated with an
intense focus of attention, great moral indignation, and aggressive
"humanitarian intervention," in keeping with Western enlightenment
values. In this case, sanctions may be imposed and international
monitors may be forced upon the delinquent country to constrain its
misbehavior, and an incident such as the killing of 40 Kosovo
Albanians by Yugoslav police can bring about a bombing war and
occupation of part of the villain's national territory. In this case
also an international tribunal can be organized to bring the ethnic
cleansing state's leaders and military commanders to justice.
Nefarious ethnic cleansing can be treated harshly.
In 1996 Israel could kill 104 Lebanese civilians, 86 of them
children, in a bombing raid on a UN refugee facility, and in July
2006 kill another 36 children in a UN facility along with killing 4
UN observers in July 2006, and lie about their knowledge of the
nature of the targets in all three cases, and receive no reprimand
from its U.S. sponsor and hence no serious response from the
"international community." In fact, Boutros-Boutros Ghali's taking
the 1996 killings a bit too seriously for Clinton administration
tastes may have hastened his replacement as UN leader. [34] This was
the same Clinton administration that found the 40 killed at Racak
(none children, one woman, all but the woman almost surely KLA
fighters) a really terrible event worthy of a violent international
response!
The hypocrisy involved in this applied double standard is breath-
taking. As noted earlier, whereas both the Croat leadership in
cleansing Serbs from Krajina and the Israeli leadership in removing
Palestinians were very clearly doing this to get rid of an unwanted
population to replace it with a competing ethnic group, the Yugoslav
actions in Kosovo were features of a civil war. Whereas the Israeli
leadership was and still is quite explicitly seeking a "Greater
Israel" by land theft and people expulsion, Milosevic was trying to
keep the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia within a single remnant
political entity and not trying to enlarge Serb territory at the
expense of some other ethnic group (as Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice
acknowledged during the Milosevic trial). Whereas the Israeli
leadership has for years described the Palestinians in extremely
derogatory and racist language, no such derogation of Kosovo
Albanians (or other nationalities) has ever been attributed to
Milosevic, and Albanians in Belgrade have never been subjected to
discrimination such as Arabs undergo in Israel (not to speak of the
occupied territories). In sum, the differential treatment of
Milosevic and Sharon, the one prosecuted--after a failed
assassination attempt-[35] and the other honored as a Free World
leader and "man of peace," was not only not based on the realities of
ethnic cleansing or any honest application of the law, it reflects
pure power and structured injustice in the age of Kafka.
-------------------------------------------
Endnotes:
1. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and
Third World Fascism (Boston; South End Press, 1979).
2. Ibid., chapter 4, sec. 4.1.
3. Ibid., chapter 3, section 3.4.4.
4. In a classic case, when Indonesian violence in East Timor reached
its peak in 1977-1978, New York Times coverage fell to zero; see
ibid.; see also Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing
Consent (New York: Pantheon, 1988, 2002), chapter 2, "Worthy and
Unworthy Victims.".
5. See Washington Connection, chap. 5, sec. 5.2; Noam Chomsky and
Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm (Boston: South End Press,
1979), esp. chap. 6.
6. See Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (London:
Pluto, 2005), chaps. 4-6.
7. Raymond Bonner, "War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops 'Cleansed'
the Serbs," New York Times, March 21, 1999.
8. See Edward Herman, "<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?
SectionID=74&ItemID=8244> The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre,"
ZNet, July 7, 2005..
9. On August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright cried out to the Security
Council that "as many as 13,000 men, women and children were driven
from their homes" in Srebrenica.. (<The">http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/
UNDOC/PRO/N95/858/
26/PDF/N9585826.pdf?OpenElement>The Situation in the Republic of
Bosnia and Herzegovina (<S/PV.3564">http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/
PRO/N95/858/26/PDF/N9585826.pdf?OpenElement>S/PV.3564), UN Security
Council, August 10, 1995, 5.30 p.m., pp. 6-7). Needless to say,
Albright did not cry out about the 200,000+ Karajina Serbs being
driven out of their homes in the same time frame as she wept for the
13,000.
10. The Krajina Serb human rights organization Veritas estimated that
1,205 civilians were killed in Operation Storm, including 358 women
and 10 children. See "Croatian Serb Exodus Commemorated," Agence
France Press, Aug. 4, 2004; also, Veritas at
www.veritas.org.yu'">http://www.veritas.org.yu/>www.veritas.org.yu'.
In the graves around Srebrenica exhumed through 2000, only one of
the 1,883 bodies was identified as female.
11. Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force (Lancaster, UK: CDISS,
1999), p. 192.
12. "U.N. Report: Bosnian Serbs Massacred Srebrenica Muslims,"
Washington Post, Aug. 12, 1995. For illustrative language, see also
John Pomfret, "Investigators Begin Exhuming Group of Mass Graves in
Bosnia," Washington Post, July 8, 1996. "Upheaval" is in "Softening
Up The Enemy," Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1995.
13. Jan Oberg, "Misleading UN Report on Kosovo (Part A)," TFF
PressInfo 77, Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research,
Lund, Sweden, October 3, 1999, <http://www.transnational.org/pressinf/
pf77.html
14. "Europe Prepares to Evacuate 40,000 Kosovo Serbs," Focus News
Agency (Bulgaria), April 18, 2006.
15. For several dozen Israeli leaders' statements of racist
denigration and indication that ethnic cleansing is a necessary and
proper course, see "<Quotes">http://www.monabaker.com/
quotes.htm>Quotes," < The">The">http://www.monabaker.com/quotes.htm>
The Middle East Conflict (Personal Website of Mona Baker);
"<Israel's">http://www.just-international.org/article.cfm?
newsid=20001494>Israel's Barbaric and Primitive Action: Examples of
Hate Speech," International Movement for a Just World, 2005. Olmert's
speech can be found at http://www.pmo.gov.il/PMOEng/Communication/
PMSpeaks/speechcong240506.htm
16. Kaveh L Afrasiabi , "It's about annexation, stupid!": <">http://
www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HH05Ak01.html>
; see also. Paul Larudee, "The Clearing of South Lebanon: The
Lebanese Nakba and Israeli Ambitiions": http://www.counterpunch.org/
larudee08082006.html
17. Jeff Halper, Obstacles to Peace: A Re-Framing of the Palestinian-
Israeli Conflict (Carrboro, NC: The Israeli Committee Against House
Demolitions, 2004), p. 17.
18. Ibid, p. 18.
19. A.P., "Official Compares Israeli Action to Nazi's," Guardian, May
21, 2004.
20. Halper, Obstacles to Peace, p. 34.
21. AI, "Israel: Home Demolitions," Dec. 8, 1999.
22. See "Free Markets: Imprisoned People," in "Against 'Sustainable'
Apartheid & Occupation," www.stopthewall.org'">http://
www.stopthewall.org/>www.stopthewall.org'
23. This is dramatically evident in the cases of the recent Israeli
invasions of Gaza and Lebanon, where the U.S. mainstream media have
simply taken the captures of a few Israeli soldiers as the
precipitating events, neglecting both any prior Israeli actions and
the evidence of Israeli plans for these actions that were simply
waiting for the proper moment to execute.
24. For a discussion of "joint criminal enterprise," along with
other relevant matters, see Edward Herman and David Peterson,
"<Milosevic's">Milosevic's">http://www.electricpolitics.com/2006/05/
milosevics_death_in_the_propag.html>Milosevic's Death in the
Propaganda System," <ElectricPolitics.com">ElectricPolitics.com">
http://www.electricpolitics.com/index.html>
ElectricPolitics.com, May 14, 2006.
25. This military stalemate is discussed in Tim Fenton's "The
Military Context," in Edward S. Herman, ed., The Srebrenica Massacre:
Evidence, Context, Politics (forthcoming).
26. Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, "War-related Deaths in the 1992-1995
Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous
Estimates and Recent Results," European Journal of Population, Vol.
21, No. 2-3, June, 2005, pp. 187-215; Mirsad Tokaca of the Sarajevo-
based Research and Documentation Center, as quoted in "Bosnian war
'claimed 100,000 lives'," Deutsche Presse-Agentur, November 21, 2005;
in Nedim Dervisbegovic, "Research halves Bosnia war death toll to
100,000," Reuters, November 23, 2005.
27. See note 25 above.
28. Ibid.; James Bennett, "MIDEAST TURMOIL: NEWS ANALYSIS; Mideast
Balance Sheet," New York Times, March 12, 2002 .
29. See Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, pp. 72-80; Edward
Herman, "Propaganda System Number 1," Z Magazine, July-Aug. 2001
30. The total killings in Kosovo in the year before the NATO bombing
war was estimated at some 2,000, with less than half of those
allocable to the Yugoslav army (see note 30). As the U.S. killings in
Iraq are surely greater than 50,000, we are talking about a ratio of
better than 50 to 1 in favor of the United States as killer.
31. Both the German foreign office, German courts, and British
intelligence denied that Serb actions in Kosovo before the war were
linked to ethnicity: see Noam Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the
Line [London: Verso, 2000], pp. 112-3.
32. British Minister of Defense George Robertson told the House of
Commons on March 24, 1999 that until mid-January 1999 "the KLA were
responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities
had been." (Cited in ibid., p. 106.)
33. See Herman and Peterson, "Death of Milosevic in the Propaganda
System."
34. In Ran HaCohen's "The UN from Qana to Jenin: Why the Secretary
General's Report Cannot Be Trusted," Letter From Israel, Aug. 14,
2002, HaCohen describes how back in 1996 then Secretary General
Boutros-Ghali had insisted on publishing a report on Israel's killing
of over a 100 civilians in Qana, over U.S. protests. The result was
that a week later, on May 13, 1996, U.S. Secretary of State Warren
Christopher informed Boutros-Ghali that the United States would veto
his re-election. Writing in 2002 HaCohen was explaining how the more
pliable Kofi Annan, in dealing with Jenin, "without visiting the
sceneŠissued a shameful report, echoing Israeli propaganda, ignoring
even 'embarrassing' material published in the Israeli press."
35. A U.S. missile attack targeted Milosevic's residence in Belgrade
on April 22, 1999, but failed to assassinate him.