This is a guest post by Martin Niemoeller
First they came for the Macedonians,
and I did not speak out, because I was not a Macedonian.
Then they came for Oliver Stone,
and I did not speak out, because I was not a Hollywood film director.
Now they’ve come for the lesbians…
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A blog devoted to political commentary and analysis with a particular - but far from exclusive - focus on South East Europe. I come from a traditional left-wing background, but believe that the recent failure of most of the left to oppose fascism, genocide and tyranny in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in the Middle East and elsewhere, has definitely discredited left-wing politics in its traditional form. This blog will therefore, among other things, be discussing what a new progressive politics might mean in the twenty-first century.
I have been studying the history of the former Yugoslavia since 1993, and am intimately acquainted with, and emotionally attached to, the lands and peoples of Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia. In the summer of 1995, I acted as translator for the aid convoy to the Bosnian town of Tuzla, organised by Workers Aid, a movement of solidarity in support of the Bosnian people. In 1998-2001 I lived and worked in Belgrade, Serbia, and was resident there during the Kosovo War of 1999. As a journalist, I covered the fall of Milosevic in 2000. I worked as a Research Officer for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, and participated in the drafting of the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic. I was a member of the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge from 2001-2006, and am currently a Senior Research Fellow at Kingston University, London. I am Section Director for the European Neighbourhood of the Henry Jackson Society, a Cambridge-based think-tank that promotes democratic geopolitics. I live in Surbiton in the UK.
I am the author of three books, The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London, Saqi, 2007), Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943 (London, Oxford University Press, 2006) and How Bosnia Armed (London, Saqi, 2004). I am currently working on a history of modern Serbia.
I have been variously accused of being a neoconservative, Trotskyite and Croat nationalist and a supporter of Islamism and Western imperialism. Depending on how you define these terms, some or all of this may be accurate.
Click here for an archive of my articles on other websites.
markohoare AT hotmail DOT com
