Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two

‘Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two’, a collection of essays edited by Sabrina P. Ramet and Ola Listhaug, was published this autumn by Palgrave MacMillan. It examines the World War II history of Serbia and the Serbs from different perspectives. My own chapter examines the relationship between the Partisan movement and the Serbs.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction by Ramet:

‘War has a way of etching itself into the long-term memory of a nation, leaving permanent scars that serve to remind members of the nation of their past wounds, their past defeats, their past victories, and some- times of missed opportunities. World War Two, as the bloodiest war in European history, has left scars in every nation it touched – some deeper, some more painful, but everywhere scars, which affect not only those who lived through it, but also their children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren. One of the reasons why these scars won’t go away is that, six-and-a-half decades after the end of the war, there continue to be debates in many European countries concerning the war. Leaving aside John Charmley’s pointed criticism of Winston Churchill and praise for Neville Chamberlain – which go against con- ventional wisdom about the comparative merits of these two British prime ministers – the debates have been the most lively in those states in which Axis-collaborationist regimes functioned during the war years. Whether one thinks of Norway or France or Croatia or Hungary5 or Romania, one can find debates about the role played by the local ‘quisling’, the incarceration and extermination of Jews (and, in the Croatian case, also of Serbs), the role played by the Churches (especially the leading religious institution in each country), and the question as to whether the Axis satellite may be considered to have been an authentic national state or not and, if not, whether it should be understood as a betrayal of the national tradition.

These same debates continue in Serbia today, but with an intensity which surpasses what one can find elsewhere in Europe. In Serbia, a law was passed in 2004 declaring that the Chetniks of Draža Mihailovic, who had collaborated with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during World War Two, were nonetheless ‘anti-fascists’, and granting state pensions to surviving Chetnik veterans. Again in Serbia, there has been talk of rehabilitating Milan Nedic, who headed the Axis-collaborationist regime in Serbia during World War Two, culminating in a formal petition filed with the District Court in Belgrade in 2008. Again, in Serbia, one finds history textbooks in use in the schools which present Nedic and Mihailovic in a favourable light. And further, Serbia, as Dubravka Stojanovic recounts in her contribution to this volume, was the only European country not to send a representative to the commemoration in 2005 of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and sent only a low-level delegation to the main commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day in Moscow that same year.

This nationalist-inspired historical revisionism has both divided and confused Serbs, as shown, for example, in the fact that, in a survey conducted in early 2009, 34.44 per cent of respondents were in favour of annulling the 1946 verdict against Draža Mihailovic (in which he was found to have been a traitor and Axis collaborator), 15.92 per cent were opposed, and 49.64 per cent said that they did not know what to think.

But such revisionism is not innocent; it is an example of what Jean- Paul Sartre called bad faith. As Sartre wrote in his 1943 classic, Being and Nothingness:

“Bad faith does not hold the norms and criteria of truth as they are accepted by the critical thought of good faith. What it decides first, in fact, is the nature of truth. With bad faith a truth appears, a method of thinking, a type of being which is like that of objects; the ontological characteristic of the world of bad faith with which the subject suddenly surrounds himself is this: that here being is what it is not, and is not what it is. Consequently, a peculiar type of evidence appears – non-persuasive evidence. Bad faith apprehends evidence but it is resigned in advance to not being fulfilled by this evidence, to not being persuaded and transformed into good faith … Thus bad faith … stands forth in the form [of a] resolution not to demand too much, to count itself satisfied when it is barely persuaded, to force itself in decisions to adhere to uncertain truths.”

In the case of Serbia, bad faith about World War Two means praising Nedic ́ for having allegedly saved Serbian lives by collaborating with the Germans, while, at the same time, praising Mihailovic ́ for having allegedly fought against the Germans – thus adopting a position that Serbs were on the right side, regardless of which side they were on! Bad faith, in the Serbian case, also involves discounting evidence of Chetnik collaboration with the Germans and likewise of the Nedic ́ regime’s complicity in crimes against Jews and other persons. But bad faith is not without its consequences. As Sartre warned, although bad faith ‘does not believe itself [to be] in bad faith’, by the same virtue it ‘does not believe itself [to be] in good faith’. A person or regime which is in bad faith, thus, occupies a treacherous promontory from which the danger of falling is ever-present, and from which the plunge threatens to take one deep into trauma.

Already in the Miloševic era (1987–2000), there were elements of revisionism about the Second World War. But the big push for the rehabilitation of Axis collaborators, and with that the opening of a debate about World War Two, came only after the fall of Miloševic in October 2000. In Serbia today, the interpretation of World War Two and of Axis collaboration and the facts themselves are under debate, with certain political parties and groupings having a vested interest in the outcome of this debate. In this sense, one may say that, in Serbia, World War Two has not yet ended.’

Introduction; S.P.Ramet
PART I: OCCUPIED SERBIA AND VOJVODINA
The Collaborationist Regime of Milan Nedić;  S.P.Ramet & S.Lazić
Employment of Labor in Wartime Serbia: Social History and the Politics of Amnesia; S.Rutar
Vojvodina Under Hungarian Rule; K.Ungváry
PART II: THE TREATMENT OF JEWS & THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
Delusion and Amnesia: Ideology and Culture in Nedić’s Serbia; O.Manojlović-Pintar
The Collaborationist Administration and the Treatment of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Serbia; J.Byford
Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović: ‘Lackey of the Germans’ or a ‘victim of Fascism’?; J.Byford
PART III: CHETNIKS AND PARTISANS
Allies or Foes? Mihailović’s Chetniks during the Second World War; M.Jareb
Relations between the Chetniks and the Authorities of the Independent State of Croatia, 1942—1945; N.Barić
The Partisans and the Serbs; M.A.Hoare
PART IV: CONTEMPORARY DEBATES
The Serbian-Croatian Controversy over Jasenovac; P.Kolstø
Revisions of Second World War History in Contemporary Serbia; D.Stojanović
The Reevaluation of Milan Nedić and Draža Mihailović in Serbia; S.Lazić
CONCLUSION
Conclusion; O.Listhaug

Anders Behring Breivik, the Balkans and the new European far-right

The Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik appears very interested in the Balkans. A lot of space in his ponderous 1,518-page ‘manifesto’ is devoted to discussing Balkan themes. This is not limited merely to praising Radovan Karadzic (‘for his efforts to rid Serbia of Islam he will always be remembered as an honourable Crusader and a European war hero’), supporting the past Serb ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Albanians, condemning Kosovo’s independence and demanding that all Bosniaks and Muslim Albanians be deported from Europe (while the Muslim Turkish populations of Cyprus and western Anatolia are to be deported to central Anatolia). It involves also lengthy ruminations on hundreds of years of Ottoman and Turkish history, in which Breivik demonises all aspects of the Ottoman heritage.

Some commentators have argued that this psychopathic mass-murderer represents such an exceptional case that his actual beliefs are irrelevant to understanding his actions. According to Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, ‘The Norwegian tragedy is just that, a tragedy. It does not signify anything and should not be forced to do so. A man so insane he can see nothing wrong in shooting dead 68 young people in cold blood is so exceptional as to be of interest to criminology and brain science, but not to politics.’ As a rule, Jenkins is absolutely wrong about everything, and this is no exception. Breivik represents the exemplar of an extremely dangerous trend in Western and European politics, and his interest in the Balkans – or rather, in his own mythologised narrative of Balkan history – flows naturally from this.

Breivik’s actions are exceptional, but his views are not. His views on Islam and on immigration are in some important respects typical of the right-wing Islamophobic current, some of whose prominent members and groups he cites or sympathises with in his manifesto: Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Melanie Phillips, Srdja Trifkovic, Mark Steyn, the English Defence League (EDL) and others. He sees immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, coupled with liberal multiculturalism and political correctness, as a mortal threat to European or Western society. Such views are often justified by their holders as being ‘pro-Western’, whereby ‘the West’ is counterposed to ‘Islam’, as if the two were binary opposites. In reality, the very opposite is true: modern European civilisation was built upon foundations that were Islamic as well as Christian, Jewish, pagan and others. The Enlightenment gave rise to a Europe in which the sectarian religious animosities that characterised the pre-Enlightenment age could be transcended; modern Western liberal and secular values are founded upon the principle of religious toleration.

Far from being ‘pro-Western’; our contemporary right-wing Islamophobes, in seeking to rekindle the religious divide between Christians and Muslims that characterised pre-Enlightenment Europe, reject Western values in favour of pre-Western values. During their successful Vienna War of 1683-1699 against the Ottoman Empire, Austrian Habsburg forces slaughtered, plundered, expelled or forcibly converted to Christianity the Muslim population of the Hungarian and Croatian territories they reconquered, which were forcibly de-Islamised; the Austrians burned the Ottoman Bosnian city of Sarajevo to the ground. The subsequent Ottoman Bosnian victory over Habsburg forces in the Battle of Banja Luka of 1737 saved the Bosnian Muslims from their destruction as a people that an Austrian conquest of Bosnia would have involved. Yet when the Austrian Habsburgs did finally succeed in occupying Sarajevo and Bosnia in 1878, they protected the Muslim population and respected the Islamic religion. Europe, in the interval, had experienced the Enlightenment. It is the pre-Enlightenment Europe to which today’s right-wing Islamophobes look back nostalgically; something symbolised in the name of the anti-Islamic hate-blog, ‘Gates of Vienna’, named after the Ottoman siege of Vienna of 1683 and cited approvingly by Breivik. Hence Breivik’s own obsessive demonising of the Ottoman ‘other’ and its history, all the way back to the Middle Ages.

The right-wing Islamophobes are the mirror-image of the Islamists they claim to oppose. Nineteenth-century opponents of liberal secular values frequently became anti-Semites, seeing the Jews, as they did, as the beneficiaries of these values, to which the Jews owed their emancipation. Today’s Muslim opponents of the Enlightenment have inherited Christian anti-Semitism, whereas the Christian reactionaries have transferred their animosity to a different – Muslim – minority. Apologists blame individuals like Breivik and groups like the EDL and British National Party (BNP) on supposedly ‘objective’ problems of aggressive Islam and immigration that mainstream politicians are supposedly failing to tackle. Just as apologists for Islamism blame it on supposed ‘root causes’ to be found in US imperialism or the behaviour of Israel. Just as earlier apologists for anti-Semitism blamed anti-Semitism on the Jews. The Islamophobes point to Muslim support for Islamic extremism as their anti-Semitic predecessors once pointed to Jewish support for communism. As their Islamist counterparts point to Jewish support for Zionism. And so on.

Such chauvinistic ideologies are not caused by the minority or foreign groups that they target. Undeniably, popular anti-Semitism before World War II tended to be strongest in countries with large, visible Jewish populations, like Poland and Romania, just as popular Islamophobia today is often strongest in West European cities that have experienced large-scale Muslim immigration, but this does not mean that the victims of the bigotry are to blame. Muslim immigration does not automatically give rise to Islamophobia, any more than Zionism automatically gives rise to Muslim anti-Semitism, or ‘US imperialism’ gives rise to Islamist terrorism. Right-wing Islamophobia, Islamism, anti-immigrant racism and modern anti-Semitism are all, in their different ways, expressions of a more general reaction against, and rejection of, modernity and what it implies.

Interestingly, Breivik, who apparently never had a proper girlfriend and lived with his mother until he was thirty, shares Islamism’s extreme misogyny and gender insecurity. His manifesto rails against the ‘feminisation of European culture’ and the supposed emasculation of the contemporary European male, complaining that Muslim immigrants are systematically raping white European women, but that ‘As a Western man, I would be tempted to say that Western women have to some extent brought this upon themselves. They have been waging an ideological, psychological and economic war against European men for several generations now, believing that this would make you “free”… Western women have been subjected to systematic Marxist indoctrination meant to turn you into a weapon of mass destruction against your own civilisation, a strategy that has been remarkably successful.’ But of course, not all Islamophobes are straightforwardly conservative; some oppose Muslims and Islam on the grounds that the latter are sexist and homophobic. Such syntheses of liberalism and illiberalism are nothing new; European fascism and its sympathisers of the 1920s, 30s and 40s had their liberal roots and tendencies too, however paradoxical that might sound (readers are recommended to read Julian Jackson’s excellent France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944, that describes the synthesis of liberal, conservative Catholic and radical right-wing currents that found expression in the 1940s Vichy regime in France).

What our contemporary Islamophobes share – conservatives and ‘liberals’ alike – is conformism, xenophobia, fear of change, hostility to diversity, paranoia about minorities and a longing for the order and certainties of a lost, idealised ‘golden age’ that, in some cases, may not even be very long ago. In the Nordic countries, home of the Jante Law, where an apparently model liberalism frequently masks extreme conformism and insularity, where foreign guests and immigrants usually find it very difficult to fit in (in a way that they don’t in London or New York, for example), and where virulent anti-immigration parties such as the Danish People’s Party and Sweden Democrats have enjoyed success at the polls, this takes its own particular form. Far from needing to be shielded from greater diversity, my feeling is that the Nordic world would benefit from more of it; that even if Norway has no pressing economic reason to join the EU, immersion and participation in the common European project would benefit it culturally and spiritually. But for all that, the sickness that created Breivik is a European and global sickness, not just a Nordic sickness.

This brings us back to the Balkans, a region that resembles the Nordic world in the extent of its often stultifying insularity. For all that Serbia appeared to pursue its own sonderweg during the late 1980s and 1990s, at another level, the Serbian nationalist right and anti-democratic left were exemplars and pioneers of what became an all-European anti-immigrant and Islamophobic trend. Serbian nationalist and Communist hardliners railed against the restrictions supposedly placed on Serbia by membership of a multinational community – the Yugoslav federation. They railed against high Muslim and Albanian birth-rates that were resulting in the Serbs being ‘out-bred’, while lamenting the lower birth-rate among Serbs as symptomatic of national decline. They railed against the supposed mass immigration of ethnic Albanians from Albania into Kosovo; against the supposed Kosovo Albanian cultural ‘otherness’ and refusal to assimilate; against Kosovo Albanians allegedly raping Serb women while the authorities stood idly by. They lamented the supposed corruption and decline of their national culture while indulging in medievalist escapism. All these themes have now been taken up by nationalists in other European countries. For example, in Breivik’s words, ‘The Muslims in Bosnian Serbia; the so called Bosniaks and Albanians had waged deliberate demographic warfare (indirect genocide) against Serbs for decades. This type of warfare is one of the most destructive forms of Jihad and is quite similar to what we are experiencing now in Western Europe.’

Andrew Gilligan, writing in the Telegraph, has claimed that the danger posed by far-right (i.e. white, Christian) terrorists like Breivik is simply not on the same order of magnitude as that posed by al-Qaeda: ‘Over the last 10 years, nationalist terrorists, even counting Breivik, have killed about 200 Westerners; al-Qaeda has killed about 4,000… The white Right should not be ignored by the security authorities – but it would be dangerous to divert our attention from the real threat.’ But this is wrong: tens of thousands of Muslims were killed by white Christians in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya in the 1990s. Breivik has praised the killers, both Radovan Karadzic and Vladimir Putin; the numbers of their victims in Europe dwarf those of al Qaeda.

The danger is that Breivik is the harbinger of a trend. Extremism and chauvinism among the majority will always ultimately be more dangerous than extremism and chauvinism among minorities. Right-wing populists such as Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen may not themselves incite violence, and cannot be equated with a killer like Breivik. But the climate of intolerance they are promoting threatens to give rise to many more Breiviks. The Islamophobic, anti-immigration far-right is the no. 1 internal threat in Western Europe to European society and Western values today.

This article was published today on the website of the Henry Jackson Society.

Anti-Serbian racism on US television

On 20 June, commenting on Amy Winehouse’s recent flop performance at a concert in Belgrade, the hosts of the US programme Chelsea Lately - Chelsea Handler, Chris Franjola and Greg Proops – made a series of crude and sneering racist remarks about Serbia and its people. After Handler expressed disbelief that Winehouse was allowed to perform while heavily intoxicated, Franjola commented ‘Well it was Serbia, they haven’t got a lot of rules over there’, to which Handler replied ‘I can’t believe they even allow Serbians to go to concerts’. Commenting on the fact that people in Serbia were describing the concert as a ‘disaster’, Proops remarked ironically ‘This is a place that had ethnic cleansing and genocide, and her concert was a bigger bummer than that’. After quoting Serbian defence minister Dragan Sutanovac, who wrote on his Facebook page that ‘Amy’s concert was a shame and a huge disappointment’, Handler quipped ‘Well so is your country’, which elicited a lot of cheering from the audience. After Franjola asked of Dragan Sutanovac ‘Wasn’t that the guy who beat up Rocky ?’, Handler commented ‘Dragan is a very popular Bolshevik name’.

[Unfortunately, the only remaining undubbed version of the clip that I can find on YouTube is accompanied by misogynistic insults directed against Handler that preclude it from being re-posted here, but readers are free to follow the link.]

Readers are urged to sign the petition calling upon the E! television channel to require Handler to apologise to the Serbian people. Proops has already apologised, though somewhat cursorily.

I had never previously heard of this television programme or any of its hosts, but judging by the clip about Winehouse and Serbia, it is a deeply unpleasant high-school-level sneer-fest. Indeed, the comments about Winehouse were just as petty, spiteful and unfunny as the comments about Serbia. An exemplar of the sort of gratuitous viciousness that passes for popular entertainment today. And sustained petty sneering of this kind will almost inevitably involve racism, sooner or later…

Justice in Bosnia after Mladic

This is a guest post by David Pettigrew

The arrest of General Ratko Mladić is a profoundly important step on the long path to justice for the victims and the survivors of the genocide against Bosnia’s Muslims (Bošniaks) that was perpetrated from 1992 to 1995 by Serbian and Bosnian Serb forces. However, the expectation that Mladić’s arrest will “close a chapter” –as stated by Serbian President Tadić– on the war of aggression, or open a “new chapter” for Serbia, fails to recognize that Mladić’s genocidal legacy lives on in the form of the political entity known as Republika Srpska.

Between 1991 and 1992 Radovan Karadžić’s nationalistic Serbian Democratic Party brought about the creation of Republika Srpska in response to the fact that Bosnia and Herzegovina was preparing a referendum on independence as a multicultural nation. The name Republika Srpska literally means a Republic of or for Serbs. Unfortunately, the area in which this “Republic for Serbs” was declared was within the borders of Bosnia and included eastern Bosnia where the Bošniaks constituted, in most locations, the majority of the inhabitants. The creation of Republika Srpska was to entail the forcible displacement of the Bošniaks from within its self-declared territory through terror, rape, and murder, which in some cases included wanton mass murder. In July 1995 alone, over 8,000 men and boys were murdered at Srebrenica in an act that has been declared genocide by two international courts.

Srebrenica was not the only place where Bošniaks were targeted as such and murdered en masse. Additional atrocities and murders occurred throughout eastern Bosnia, between 1992 and 1995 in towns such as Višegrad. On two separate occasions in June of 1992 (on Pionirska Street and in the Bikavac neighborhood) women and children were forced into houses that were set on fire. They perished in the flames.  Further, an estimated 3,000 were murdered on and around the Ottoman bridge in Višegrad and thrown into the Drina River.  In August of 2010 I accompanied the Bosnian government’s exhumation team to Višegrad. Work on a nearby dam caused the river level to drop and it was finally possible to exhume the bones of the victims from the riverbed. We found the remains of many of the victims and identification is in progress.

In addition, hundreds of villages in eastern Bosnia were destroyed as part of the Bosnian Serb strategy, making return and repopulation by the Bošniaks virtually impossible. Approximately 1,000 mosques were destroyed in Republika Srpska, and in some cases, Serbian Orthodox churches were constructed directly upon the ruins. In one case, a Serbian Orthodox church was constructed on a Bošniak woman’s land without her permission and it still remains to this day. More than 350 mass graves that hold the remains of the Bošniak victims have been discovered within Republika Srpska.  The perpetrators tried to hide their crimes by moving the remains to new locations. In the process, the bodies were dismembered, making the process of exhumation and identification tragically difficult.

Indisputably, the entity Republika Srpska was founded upon a genocidal ideology, maintained through the barbarity of genocidal acts and ultimately legitimized by the Dayton Peace Accords 1995.  The surviving founding members of Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadžić, Biljana Plavšić, and Momčilo Krajišnik, are either on trial –having been charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws and customs of war– or have already been convicted and sentenced for their role in the war crimes. However, the current President of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik denies the genocide at Srebrenica and speaks openly of secession from Bosnia.  In other words, in spite of the arrest of Mladić, Republika Srpska continues to be, for Bosnia’s Muslims, a dehumanizing zone of exclusion. Mladić’s legacy –Republika Srpska– remains intact.

One of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s greatest regrets, as the architect of the Dayton Peace Accords, was the recognition and the naming of Republika Srpska. He feared throughout the process that such recognition and such a name would legitimize –if not reward– their genocidal aggression.  Hence, to do justice to victims of the genocide against the Bošniak civilians (Bosnian Muslims), the arrest of Mladić must serve as a reminder to the European and international diplomatic community that it is time to reunify Bosnia through constitutional reform. It is indeed unseemly for President Tadić to reduce Mladić’s arrest to the final step in Serbia’s strategy for its entrance to the European Union. The Copenhagen Criteria of 1993 call for those seeking membership in the European Union to respect human rights and the rule of law not only in their own countries but also in association with others. Serbia must now be called upon to denounce President Dodik’s rhetoric of genocide denial and secession and to fully support the reunification of Bosnia.

David Pettigrew, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at Southern CT State University in New Haven, CT. His report on the exhumations in Višegrad can be found on his website.

The trial of Ratko Mladic will not mean that justice has been served

The start of Ratko Mladic’s trial today means that the most important Bosnian Serb war-criminal, alongside Radovan Karadzic, is now facing justice. This trial will be crucially important for two reasons.

Firstly, its proceedings may shed some light on the role of Serbia and its military in the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995. At the time of the massacre, Serbia was in a federal union with Montenegro, and the joint state went by the name of the ‘Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’ (Savezna Republika Jugoslavija – SRJ). Its army, the ‘Army of Yugoslavia’, provided logistical support for the Bosnian Serb army – the ‘Army of the Serb Republic’ – and its Croatian Serb counterpart, though these were formally independent of it. The minutes of the SRJ’s Supreme Defence Council (which comprised the presidents of ‘Yugoslavia’, Serbia and Montenegro) were recently used by the prosecution of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)  in its case against former Yugoslav army Chief of Staff Momcilo Perisic. They reveal that Perisic regularly appealed to the Supreme Defence Council to provide such logistical support to the Bosnian Serb military, and that these appeals continued up until the eve of the Srebrenica massacre. Hopefully, the trial of Mladic, alongside that of Perisic, will provide more information on the role of the Army of Yugoslavia during the Srebrenica massacre. Indeed, it is likely that Mladic’s ability to provide such information was one of the reasons that Serbia’s military shielded him from arrest for so long. This is, however, an optimistic hope, as Mladic is more likely to continue denying responsibility for the massacre and to shield his former protectors than he is to spill the beans.

The second, and more important reason why Mladic’s trial is important, is that it provides the best chance yet to prove that genocide occurred not only at Srebrenica in 1995, but in other places and at other times in Bosnia-Hercegovina as well. The judicial record on this question so far is ambiguous. Germany’s courts have convicted Bosnian Serb perpetrators for offences relating to genocide carried out in parts of Bosnia outside of Srebrenica. One of these, the paramilitary leader Nikola Jorgic, was convicted of genocide in the north Bosnian region of Doboj in 1992, but appealed his conviction all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. The latter upheld Jorgic’s conviction for genocide, ruling that the German courts’ definition of genocide was consistent with the international legal definition. The German and ECHR rulings on Jorgic corroborate the view that genocide occurred across Bosnia from 1992, not merely at Srebrenica in 1995. On the other hand, the International Court of Justice, in the case for genocide brought by Bosnia against Serbia, acquitted Serbia of all genocide-related charges apart from failure to prevent and punish genocide. The ICJ specifically stated that genocide in Bosnia occurred only at Srebrenica in 1992, not in other places or at other times. Mladic, however, stands accused by the ICTY prosecution of systematic genocide across both western and eastern Bosnia from May 1992. If Mladic is found guilty on all charges, the judicial record for a genocide in Bosnia that occurred across the country from 1992 to 1995 will be greatly strengthened.

Be this as it may, the significance of this trial, and of Mladic personally, should not be overstated. News reports have suggested that Mladic was, along with Serbia’s wartime president Slobodan Milosevic and the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, one of the three principal perpetrators of Serb war-crimes in Bosnia. In fact, the singling out of these three individuals, to the exclusion of all others, betrays a false understanding of the nature of the Great Serbian killing campaign and of how it was organised. In reality, the Serb military aggression against Bosnia and programme of mass killing of its non-Serb inhabitants was planned and organised by the regime in Belgrade; not merely by Milosevic the despot, but by a much wider circle of top political, military and police officials. This war followed on seamlessly from the prior war waged by Serbia against Croatia in 1991-1992.

Mladic, on the other hand, was merely a run-of-the-mill officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) until well after the war in Croatia had begun. He served as chief of the Department for Instruction of the JNA’s 3rd Military District based in Skopje in Macedonia until January 1991, then as assistant to the commander of the Pristina Corps in Kosovo until July 1991, when he was transferred – still as a mere colonel – to Knin, which was the self-proclaimed capital of the Serb rebels in Croatia. He was appointed chief of staff of the 9th (Knin) Corps at the end of July, and played a central role in ethnic cleansing operations against Croatia. In October, after Serbia together with Montenegro had carried out a coup d’etat to establish exclusive control of the federal organs of rump Yugoslavia, including of the JNA, Mladic was promoted to major-general. From late November or early December 1991, as they were preparing to wind down the war in Croatia and to shift it to Bosnia, the Milosevic regime and the leadership of the JNA set about organising a Bosnian Serb military within the framework of the JNA, something that involved concentrating all Bosnian Serb soldiers and officers in the JNA on Bosnian territory. On 30 December, the rump Yugoslav presidency (i.e. the representatives of Serbia and Montenegro) established a new military district – the ’2nd Military District’ – based in Sarajevo, that had jurisdiction over Mladic’s Knin Corps. At the same time, Mladic was promoted to commander of the Knin Corps.

Thus, when the JNA launched a full-scale war against Bosnia in March and April 1992, Mladic was not even based in Bosnia, but was still in the relatively junior position of commander of the Knin Corps, based in Serb-occupied Croatia. He nevertheless participated in the start of the aggression against Bosnia; his forces captured the town of Kupres in south-west Bosnia from its predominantly Bosnian Croat defenders on 8 April 1992 and helped to organise the future Bosnian Serb army in that region of the country, after which he returned to the Knin region for further operations against the Croatian Army.

On 27 April 1992, Milosevic’s regime proclaimed the new ‘Yugoslavia’ – i.e., the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRJ), consisting only of Serbia and Montenegro. The Bosnian Serb rebel entity, subsequently known as the ‘Republika Srpska’, had already proclaimed independence a month before. By establishing the SRJ and the Bosnian Serb republic as formally separate states, the Milosevic regime aimed to pretend to the world that it was not involved in the war in Bosnia, and that this war was really just a ‘civil war’. This necessitated a formally independent Bosnian Serb army, separate from the Yugoslav army, and Mladic was handpicked by Belgrade to be its commander. On 30 April, Milosevic and other top officials of Serbia, Montenegro and the JNA met with the Bosnian Serb leaders under Radovan Karadzic to arrange the formation of a Bosnian Serb army, and it was agreed that Mladic – who had been promoted to lieutenant general only a few days before – would serve as its commander. In early May, JNA Chief of Staff and acting Yugoslav defence minister Blagoje Adzic summoned Mladic to Belgrade to inform him that he was to be promoted to both commander and chief of staff of the JNA’s 2nd Military District, based in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. At about the same time, the acting president of the Yugoslav presidency, Branko Kostic, ordered the previous JNA incumbent of the post to surrender his duties to Mladic, whose appointment as commander of the 2nd Military District was reported by Belgrade TV on 9 May.

Mladic subsequently recalled that ‘When I took up duty in the 2^nd Military District I immediately assigned myself the task of assembling men and forming a command and General Staff, partly from the remnants of the 2^nd Military District and partly from the men who had come with me from Knin and from other areas, who were born in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We immediately began the formation of a General Staff of the [Bosnian] Serb Army.’ On 12 May, the self-declared Bosnian Serb parliament voted to establish a Bosnian Serb army incorporating all JNA units on Bosnian territory, and to appoint Mladic as its commander. Yet the law was not promulgated by the presidency of the self-declared Bosnian Serb republic until 19 May. Until that time, Mladic was still formally subordinate, along with all Serb forces on Bosnian territory, to the Yugoslav military command and Yugoslav presidency in Belgrade. Only on 19 May did the the JNA formally split into two separate armies: the ‘Army of Yugoslavia’, made up of troops from Serbia and Montenegro, which formally withdrew from Bosnia on the same date; and the ‘Army of the Serb Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina’, subsequently simply the ‘Army of the Serb Republic’, headed by Mladic and now formally independent.

In other words, although Mladic played a prominent and significant role in the Serb military assault on Bosnia that began full-scale in the spring of 1992, he was far from being its chief instigator or organiser. The latter was the political and military leadership of Serbia, Montenegro and the Yugoslav People’s Army, which handpicked and groomed Mladic for the role. Attributing excessive importance to Mladic as organiser of the war in Bosnia downplays the party that was actually responsible: the regime of Slobodan Milosevic.

War crimes investigators at the ICTY were aware of how the war and mass killing in Bosnia were organised. According to the amended indictment of Milosevic for war crimes in Bosnia:

‘Slobodan MILOSEVIC participated in the joint criminal enterprise as set out below. The purpose of this joint criminal enterprise was the forcible and permanent removal of the majority of non-Serbs, principally Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, from large areas of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereinafter referred to as “Bosnia and Herzegovina”), through the commission of crimes which are in violation of Articles 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the Statute of the Tribunal. The joint criminal enterprise was in existence by 1 August 1991 and continued until at least 31 December 1995. The individuals participating in this joint criminal enterprise included Slobodan MILOSEVIC, Radovan KARADZIC, Momcilo KRAJISNIK, Biljana PLAVSIC, General Ratko MLADIC, Borisav JOVIC, Branko KOSTIC, Veljko KADIJEVIC, Blagoje ADZIC, Milan MARTIC, Jovica STANISIC, Franko SIMATOVIC, also known as “Frenki,” Radovan STOJICIC, also known as “Badza,” Vojislav SESELJ, Zeljko RAZNATOVIC, also known as “Arkan,” and other known and unknown participants.’

However, at the time of writing, not a single official of Serbia, Montenegro or the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – i.e. of the regime that organised the war – nor any officer of the JNA (excluding officers of the Bosnian Serb army who had previously served in the JNA) has been convicted by the ICTY of war crimes in Bosnia. The weight of ICTY punishment has, so far, fallen exclusively on the Bosnian Serbs, while the regime of Milosevic in Belgrade and the leadership of the JNA have been mostly let off the hook. Only six such officials were ever indicted: Milosevic, Stanisic, Simatovic, Perisic, Arkan and Seselj. Arkan was assassinated before he could be arrested, while Milosevic died while his trial was in progress. This leaves a maximum of four representatives of the regime who could, if the prosecution is wholly successful, receive punishment for organising the worst case of aggression and mass killing in Europe since World War II. None of these belonged to the top rank of officials responsible for organising the war in Bosnia, with the exception of Stanisic, who was head of Serbia’s State Security Service.

Of the other representatives of the ‘joint criminal enterprise’ from Serbia, Montenegro and the JNA high command who were listed in the Milosevic indictment, Stojicic was assassinated in Belgrade before the indictment was issued. Adzic and Kadijevic, the two top figures in the JNA during the war in Croatia and (in Adzic’s case) during the first stage of the war in Bosnia, were never indicted. Neither were Jovic and Kostic, the Yugoslav presidency members for Serbia and Montenegro respectively, and therefore (along with their counterparts for Vojvodina and Kosovo) the individuals in ultimate formal command of all Serb forces in Croatia and Bosnia up until 19 May 1992. Other top officials of Serbia, Montenegro and the JNA also escaped indictment over Bosnia or Croatia – such as Montenegro’s wartime president Momir Bulatovic, and acting Yugoslav army chief of staff Zivota Panic (who died in 2003).

Some relatively minor JNA figures were indicted for war-crimes in Croatia, in relation to Vukovar and Dubrovnik, but over Croatia, as over Bosnia, the weight of the ICTY’s punishment has fallen on the Croatian Serb agents of Belgrade – such as Milan Martic and Milan Babic (and potentially also the still unarrested Goran Hadzic) – while the officials of the former Milosevic regime have escaped extremely lightly.

This extraordinary failure of international justice over Bosnia – the failure of the ICTY to indict more than a handful of the officials of the regime and army responsible for the planning and launching the war, and so far to convict a single one of them – reflects both the inability of its prosecutors to understand the war properly, as well as their poor strategy in issuing indictments. As I have indicated elsewhere, a preliminary draft of a war-crimes indictment for the leadership of the SRJ (Serbia and Montenegro) drawn up in 2001 by investigators – including the present author – aimed to indict Milosevic and other members of his regime together, including Jovic, Kostic and Adzic. But by a decision of Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte, the policy was then dropped in favour of an indictment of Milosevic alone. Apart from allowing his chief collaborators to escape justice, this had the unfortunate effect – as Geoffrey Nice, who led the prosecution of Milosevic, himself noted – that when Milosevic died in 2006, his trial came to an end, and with it, the trial of his regime. This contrasts with the sensible indictment strategy pursued over Serbian war-crimes in Kosovo by del Ponte’s predecessor, Louise Arbour, who indicted five top members of the regime together, including Milosevic.

In her published memoirs, del Ponte’s failure to understand the planning and organising of the war in Bosnia is apparent; it is a failure that found expression in her misguided indictment strategy. She describes Milosevic and Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman as the two figures primarily responsible for the break up of Yugoslavia – as if their respective roles in the process were equal, and as if none of the other leading members of Milosevic’s Belgrade regime was of similar importance. But this is false.

The break up of Yugoslavia and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia all formed part of a single process, planned by the regime in Belgrade under Milosevic’s leadership from at least the spring of 1990, with the goal of creating a Great Serbia (masquerading as a ‘new Yugoslavia’). So far as Bosnia was concerned, this ’joint criminal enterprise’ aimed to destroy the country and kill or expel most of the Muslim or Bosniak population. Most of Bosnia, as well as large parts of Croatia, were to be annexed by Serbia, and rump Croatia was to receive some Bosnian territory as well, with the Muslims or Bosniaks, at best, being confined to an Indian reservation in between. Tudjman was an eager collaborator in this programme of genocide and aggression, whose other leading members were, in particular, the aforementioned Jovic, Kostic, Kadijevic, Adzic, Stanisic, Panic and Bulatovic. None of these has yet been punished, and most of them certainly never will be.

As for Mladic, he was merely a middle-ranking agent in the planning and launching of this enterprise – more than a pawn, but not more than a knight or a bishop. So while his arrest and trial should be celebrated, and while we have much to expect from it, let us not pretend that justice is being served.

Serbian prosecutors issue international arrest warrant for Mother Teresa

Serbian war-crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic announced at a news conference today that Serbia has issued an international warrant for the arrest of the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta, an ethnic Albanian accused of atrocities against Yugoslav soldiers and civilians during the conflict in Kosovo of 1998-1999.

According to one Serbian source, ‘Mother Teresa was a leading member of the global jihad; an Islamist terrorist fighting for a Greater Albania, who also traded in the kidneys and other organs of prisoners captured by her forces. She met with Osama bin Laden in Albania in 1998 and planned with him the launching of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s uprising.’ The source dismissed objections that Mother Teresa was a Catholic nun, therefore unlikely to have participated in an Islamic jihad: ‘It is an indisputable and universally acknowledged fact that the Vatican first promoted the break up of Yugoslavia, then supported the jihad in Bosnia and Kosovo with the aim of destroying the Serbian nation.’ As for Mother Teresa having already been dead at the time the crimes in question were alleged to have occurred: ‘Our enemies have always exaggerated their casualties, with the aim of demonising the Serbs so as to pave the way for military intervention against us. It is common knowledge that most of the 8,000 Bosnian Muslims allegedly killed in the so-called “massacre” at Srebrenica later turned up alive and well in the Muslim-held town of Tuzla.’

Mr Vukcevic rejected criticism that the case against Mother Teresa was politically motivated, insisting that the allegations against her were valid: ‘I believe there is a sufficient level of reasonable doubt for an investigation to be carried out regarding these crimes’ he told the news conference.

The issuing of the international warrant means that Mother Teresa is in danger of being arrested, should she travel outside India, the country whose citizenship she held and where she lived until her death in 1997.

Greater Surbiton News Service

Just fancy that !

‘Muscat – Foreign minister Vuk Jeremic announced in Oman that he greatly appreciates the policy of the Sultanate and expressed his gratitude to that country for supporting Belgrade over the question of Kosovo and Metohija.’

- B92 News, 16 March 2010

‘Pristina – Oman is the 75th state to have recognised Kosovo, deputy minister of foreign affairs Vlora Citaku announced in Pristina. Vlora Citaku stated at a press conference that the note recognising Kosovo was handed to the Kosovar ambassador in Great Britain Muhamet Hamiti.’

- B92 News, 4 February 2011

Hat tip: Andrey

Kosovo gets the Israel treatment

The ‘Israel of the Balkans’ was how journalist Michael J. Totten once described Kosovo. Well, Kosovo is certainly receiving the Israel treatment now: real or alleged crimes of its political and military leaders are being loudly trumpeted by the very states that would like to see it wiped off the map. The Putin regime in Russia, which for the past two years has blocked Kosovo’s full international recognition as a ploy to divide Serbia from the West and derail the Euro-Atlantic integration of the Western Balkans, has led demands for an international probe into allegations of organ trafficking on the part of Kosovar officials. This is the same Russia that ranks 154th out of 178 countries on Transparency International‘s corruption index – 44 places lower than Kosovo, at 110th place, and 63 places lower than Albania, at 87th place. Serbia’s President Boris Tadic has likewise been prominent in demanding an international probe. He has lambasted the role of organised crime in the Balkans, claiming that ‘It subverts politics. It corrupts economies’ and ‘it kills to steal parts of people’s bodies’, an unsubtle allusion suggesting that his statement had less actually to do with opposition to organised crime, and more with the ongoing Serbian campaign to undermine Kosovo’s independence.

Both Kosovo and its enemies are, however, agreed that an international investigation must take place. Both Prime Minister Sali Berisha of Albania and Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo – himself the most prominent Kosovar accused by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s report into organ trafficking – have called for an independent international investigation into the allegations. Such an investigation is indeed essential. If Thaci and other accused Kosovars are guilty, then they must be brought to justice. If they are innocent, they must be exonerated. Either way, it is in the interest of Kosovo and its people that the matter be resolved. Thaci was re-elected prime minister of Kosovo in December, and it would be a monstrous injustice to Kosovar democracy for a freely elected prime minister to carry the stigma of crimes of which he is innocent; equally, a democratic Kosovo founded on the rule of law requires that any war-criminals or other criminals from among its ranks be brought to justice, no matter how high-ranking they be. If Kosovo is the Israel of the Balkans, it is worth remembering that it is a tribute to the Israeli justice system that Israel’s former president Moshe Katsav was recently convicted of rape and sexual harassment by an Israeli court.

Since Thaci has accepted the need for a full and independent international investigation into the organ-trafficking charges and is not attempting to obstruct the course of justice, he is entitled to the degree of respect due to the democratically elected leader of a national government, and should be assumed innocent until proven guilty. Other high-ranking officials of former-Yugoslav states have been prosecuted for war-crimes but found not to be guilty – including Serbia’s former president Milan Milutinovic and Bosnia’s former chief of staff of the army, Sefer Halilovic. Earlier investigations having failed to uncover any evidence that members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were involved in trafficking the organs of their captives. There is therefore reason to give Thaci and his fellow accusees the benefit of the doubt – so long as they continue to cooperate with international investigations.

Were Marty’s report merely the result of an impartial investigation into allegations of war-crimes, it would be something that all Kosovars and all friends of Kosovo could welcome unequivocally. After all, the prosecutions of Serb and Croat accused war-criminals by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) were welcomed by all Serb and Croat democrats, and opposed only by nationalists. Indeed, a previous sitting Kosovar prime minister, Ramush Haradinaj, was indicted and prosecuted by the ICTY, and though acquitted, is now in the process of being re-tried.

What makes Marty’s accusations problematic is not the idea that a high-ranking official of Kosovo should be accused of war-crimes, but that they are linked to an anti-Kosovar political agenda. Marty was a sworn opponent of Kosovo’s independence, and chose to publish his report immediately after its principal target, Thaci, was victorious in Kosovo’s general election. The report is not limited to specific criminal allegations against individual Kosovars – such as might be found in an ICTY indictment – but also constitutes a critique of Western policy. Marty’s report pointedly states: ‘The NATO intervention had essentially taken the form of an aerial campaign, with bombing in Kosovo and in Serbia – operations thought by some to have infringed international law, as they were not authorised by the UN Security Council – while on the ground NATO’s de facto ally was the KLA.’ The strong implication is that the ‘some’ include Marty himself. The language used in the report, including the use of terms such as ‘frightful’, ‘horrendous’, ‘wicked’, ‘insane’, and references to Marty himself in the first person, including a reference to his own – ‘sense of moral outrage’ – suggest above all a personalised statement of opinion and value-judgement.

As Marty’s report presents it, international intervention in Kosovo has been unduly biased in favour of the Kosovo Albanians and against Serbia: ‘The appalling crimes committed by Serbian forces, which stirred up very strong feelings worldwide, gave rise to a mood reflected as well in the attitude of certain international agencies, according to which it was invariably one side that were regarded as the perpetrators of crimes and the other side as the victims, thus necessarily innocent. The reality is less clear-cut and more complex.’ And again: ‘All the indications are that efforts to establish the facts of the Kosovo conflict and punish the attendant war crimes had primarily been concentrated in one direction, based on an implicit presumption that one side were the victims and the other side the perpetrators. As we shall see, the reality seems to have been more complex.’ And again: ‘what emerged in parallel [to the crimes being carried out by Milosevic's Serbia] was a climate and a tendency according to which led to all these events and acts were viewed through a lens that depicted everything as rather too clear-cut: on one side the Serbs, who were seen as the evil oppressors, and on the other side the Kosovar Albanians, who were seen as the innocent victims.’ Consequently, ‘The international actors chose to turn a blind eye to the war crimes of the KLA, placing a premium instead on achieving some degree of short-term stability.’; ’International officials told us… that the approach of the international community could be aptly encapsulated in the notion of “stability and peace at any cost”. Obviously such an approach implied not falling out with the local actors in power.’ Marty’s unconcealed agenda is to correct this perceived pro-Albanian imbalance in international policy.

On another occasion, Marty said ‘Most of the facts mentioned were known … and there is a silencing of facts… Those things were known to intelligence services of several countries. They were known to police services, to many people who told us in private, “Oh yes, we know this,” but chose to remain silent for reasons of political opportunity.’ This represents an indictment of the international community as much as of members of the KLA. But it is not a fair one: the ICTY indicted sixteen individuals for war-crimes in Kosovo, of whom seven were Albanians and nine were Serbian officials. Albanians, responsible for less than a fifth of the killing during the Kosovo War, made up two-fifths of the ICTY’s indictees for war-crimes in Kosovo. A sitting Kosovar prime minister was, as noted above, himself indicted. Marty’s claim that only one side has been treated as guilty and the other as innocent by international bodies is therefore false.

Marty’s report complains that ‘the ICTY carried out an exploratory mission to the site of the notorious “Yellow House”, though proceeding in a fairly superficial way and with a standard of professionalism that prompts some bewilderment.’ He has not so much sought to complement and build upon the work of existing mechanisms for international justice, but to dismiss them in the service of his own political narrative, critical of the supposedly pro-Albanian policy of the international community. Rather then let his allegations against members of the KLA speak for themselves, Marty himself tells us what the conclusion should be: ‘The evidence we have uncovered is perhaps most significant in that it often contradicts the much-touted image of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, as a guerrilla army that fought valiantly to defend the right of its people to inhabit the territory of Kosovo.’

None of this means that Marty’s allegations against Thaci and other Kosovars are necessarily untrue. But it does mean that they are not the accusations of an impartial investigator, but of someone with an unhidden political agenda. Marty is a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and as Denis MacShane writes, ‘the Council of Europe is not some disinterested gathering of Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch parliamentarians but a deeply conflicted politicised body where states mobilise to promote support for their current Weltanschauing.’ MacShane links Marty’s accusations to Russian machinations in the Council of Europe. In these circumstances, there should be no automatic assumption that Marty is right and that Thaci and his fellows are guilty. On the contrary, the onus should very much be on Marty and his collaborators to provide the evidence to substantiate their very serious allegations against the democratically elected prime-minister of a European state.

From Serbia’s Karadjordje Petrovic to Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk and beyond, leaders of national-liberation struggles have carried out massive atrocities but continued to be revered by subsequent generations of their respective nations, and often by outsiders as well. Today, we expect a higher standard of respect for human rights and human life from contemporary statesmen, and are ready to prosecute members of a national-liberation struggle guilty of war-crimes. Yet the crimes of Karadjordje and Ataturk do not invalidate the independence and statehood of Serbia or Turkey; nor do the crimes of Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman invalidate Croatia’s independence and statehood; nor does the Deir Yassin massacre invalidate Israel’s independence and statehood. Whatever the truth of Marty’s allegations, Kosovo’s struggle for freedom and independence from Serbian colonial rule was legitimate and just. Now, more than ever, the democratic world should rally round Europe’s newest democracy, and make clear that independent Kosovo will never, ever be wiped off the map.

This article was posted today on the website of the Henry Jackson Society.

First Check Their Sources 3: The myth that ‘Germany encouraged Croatia to secede from Yugoslavia’

Those who are sufficiently ideologically driven will readily and tenaciously believe a myth that upholds their own ideology, no matter how completely the myth has been exposed and discredited. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been used by anti-Semites from the Nazis to today’s Islamists, despite the fact that they were exposed as a forgery a century ago. German anti-Semites sought to explain away Germany’s defeat in World War I in 1918 by a supposed ‘stab in the back’ by the Jews, shifting the ignominy for the murderous Imperial German regime’s military collapse onto an innocent third party. In much the same way, apologists for the former regime of Slobodan Milosevic have for twenty years tried to blame the ignominious break-up of Yugoslavia – which the Milosevic regime deliberately engineered – on democratic Germany’s supposed ‘encouragement of Croatian secessionism’. They have done this despite a complete failure to uncover any evidence to support their thesis.

David N. Gibbs in First do no Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2009) is the latest author to attempt to breathe life into the corpse of this myth, arguing that ‘Croatian leaders were assured, well in advance, that Germany, the dominant power in Europe, would support their efforts to establish an independent state and to secede from Yugoslavia’ (p. 78) and ‘the key EC state of Germany was clearly in favour of breaking up Yugoslavia, and was actively encouraging secession’ (p. 91). Rarely have I seen such cynical misuse of sources.

1) For example, Gibbs quotes the memoirs of the former German foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher as follows:

‘Genscher himself was openly sympathetic toward the secessionists. In his memoirs, he stated: “It was important for us to establish that the Yugoslav peoples alone had the right to freely determine the future of their nation” – with the implication that the Yugoslav central government could not veto this right. Genscher also affirmed “an individual nation’s ‘right to secede’ from the larger [Yugoslav] polity.’ (Gibbs, p. 79)

Yet here are some statements from Genscher’s memoirs that Gibbs omitted to quote:

‘When it came to recognising Croatia and Slovenia, the Vatican displayed extreme reluctance. During my visit in [sic] the Vatican on November 29, 1991, this attempt to remain aloof was particularly apparent. I understood that attitude; the accusation that on this issue the Vatican and West Germany formed a “conspiracy” is therefore very wide of the mark. No one outside of Yugoslavia was interested in the least in the dissolution of Yugoslavia; it was only the pan-Serbian strife [sic] for hegemony that set the country’s dissolution in motion‘ (Hans Dietrich Genscher, Rebuilding a House Divided, Broadway Books, New York, p. 91)

‘On Wednesday, March 20, [1991,] I received Slovenia’s president Milan Kucan and Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel; they also spoke of their concerns and of Slovenia’s increasing move to independence. I urged them to proceed slowly and above all to take no unilateral steps but to be alert to opportunities to hold the confederation together in some other constitutional form. Especially in view of our delicate, historically burdened relationship with the region, two aspects were of particular importance to German foreign policy: one, not to encourage centrifugal tendencies, and two, to make no unilateral changes in our policy toward Yugoslavia.’ (Genscher, p. 491)

‘To return to the situation in mid-1991: From June 19 to 20 the first conference of the CSCE Council of Foreign Ministers was held in Berlin. As the host nation, Germany chaired the meeting. Before the conference, I received a few foreign ministers for bilateral talks. Among them was Yugoslavia’s foreign minister, Budomir [sic] Loncar, because I wanted to discuss with him first of all the question of how to deal with the issue of Yugoslavia – as might be expected, one of the core topics of the conference. Once again we were impelled to emphasise our interest in maintaining a unified but democratic and federated nation; the conference must remain true to the principles established by the Paris Charter a few months earlier.’ (Genscher, pp. 492-493)

So a source quoted selectively and tendentiously by Gibbs to try and squeeze out something approaching ‘evidence’ for his thesis that Germany encouraged Croatia’s secession actually provides rather more evidence that Germany supported a unified Yugoslavia at the time Croatia declared independence in June 1991 [NB since Gibbs falsely accuses me of being unable to read German, I should make clear that I am quoting the English translation of Genscher's memoirs because Gibbs himself relies on the translation, and does not use the German original].

2) Likewise, Gibbs quotes the study of Germany’s policy toward Croatia in 1991 written by former German diplomat Michael Libal (Limits of Persuasion: Germany and the Yugoslav Crisis, 1991, 1992, Praeger, Westport and London, 1997): ‘on 18 July the decision was made in Belgrade to completely withdraw the JNA from Slovenia;… in Germany a sense of euphoria prevailed.’ (Gibbs, p. 94).

Yet Libal’s book in fact demolishes the view that Germany encouraged Croatia to secede; in Libal’s words, ‘No German official advocated the encouragement of separatist tendencies within the Yugoslav republics.’ Libal describes the ‘good, if not excellent relations between Bonn and Belgrade, which Genscher had been building up since the early 1970s… It was almost a special relationship: Germany acted as Yugoslavia’s advocate in the European Community (EC) and was instrumental in bringing about closer cooperation between the two.’ Consequently, ‘Given this excellent state of relations and the strong position Germany enjoyed throughout the whole of Yugoslavia, any idea of destabilising that country and encouraging its breakup would have been lunacy. Yugoslavia as a unitary state was a perfect partner for Germany, as no smaller, more troubled and more difficult partner, or possibly even client state, could ever be expected to be.’ (Libal, p. 5) Gibbs simply ignores the copious testimony and documentation provided by Libal that runs counter to Gibbs’s thesis, treating it as though it does not exist.

3) And again, although he includes in his bibliography the book by Richard Caplan, Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005), Gibbs does not bother to inform his readers of what Caplan wrote, which is that

‘Until fighting erupted at the end of June, Germany had, along with the rest of the EC, supported the continued unity of Yugoslavia. As late as 19 June 1991, Germany voted in favour of a statement by the Conference of Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) expressing support for the “unity and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia”; in fact, it was Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister, who supplied the text of the statement. Even after Slovenia’s and Croatia’s declarations of independence, Germany supported the West European Union (WEU) declaration of 27 June that expressed regret at “the recent unilateral decisions” of the two republics, and urged all political authorities in Yugoslavia to “resume the dialogue with a view to securing the unity of the state”.’ (Caplan, p. 18).

Gibbs does not attempt to tackle this evidence.

4) Or another example of misrepresentation: Gibbs cites an anonymous source in the New Yorker, allegedly a US diplomat who was claiming that Genscher ‘was encouraging the Croats to leave the federation and declare independence.’ Gibbs admits: ‘It is difficult to fully assess this allegation, given the anonymity of the source. However, the New Yorker allegation is supported by the memoirs of US ambassador Warren Zimmermann, which note “Genscher’s tenacious decision to rush the independence of Slovenia and Croatia” [Gibbs's emphasis].’ Gibbs then claims in the endnote to this sentence: ‘Note that Zimmermann does not say that Genscher rushed the international recognition of Slovenia’s and Croatia’s independence; he makes the much more provocative statement that Genscher rushed independence.’ (p. 249)

Yet this is simply untrue, as Zimmermann in his memoirs nowhere accuses the Germans of encouraging Croatia’s secession, but does criticise them for supporting Croatia’s recognition; the idea that when Zimmermann referred to Genscher having ‘rushed independence’ he really meant ‘rushed secession’ is sheer wishful thinking on Gibbs’s part.

5) Yet perhaps the most egregious example of Gibbs’s distortion of sources is his claim that ‘German support for secession and for breaking up Yugoslavia is also noted by former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett and by Croatian nationalist Stjepan Mesic’ (p. 79). Bissett is frequently cited by Gibbs, who fails to inform his readers that he is a Srebrenica genocide denier and defender of Milosevic, therefore not an entirely reliable source, and that Bissett’s supposed ‘noting’ of German support for Croatian secession is merely an unsubstantiated allegation.

As for Mesic, it turns out in Gibbs’s endnote that he does not in fact ‘note’ German support for Croatia’s secession at all. Gibbs’s supposed evidence for his claim is an extract from Milosevic’s trial, in which Milosevic is questioning prosecution witness Milan Kucan about what Mesic said on a TV programme in which they (Mesic and Kucan) appeared together. Milosevic states ‘Mesic declared that the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of German Hans-Dietrich Genscher and the Pope John Paul II, by the direct agreement and support designed to break up the former Yugoslavia had practically contributed most to that actually happening’, and Kucan replied ‘Those were the stance of Mr Mesic’.

The supposed ‘noting’ by Mesic of Genscher’s support for Croatia’s secession thus turns out to be actually testimony not from Mesic but from Kucan, who appears to be confirming what Milosevic said. Gibbs considers the extract from the trial to be sufficiently significant that he reproduces the sentence by Milosevic, and puts Kucan’s reply in emphasis: ‘Those were the stance of Mr Mesic’ (Gibbs, p. 250).

What Gibbs does not tell his readers, is that in the following lines of the transcript, not only does Kucan state clearly that he cannot remember what Mesic said, but Milosevic makes clear that the reference is to Genscher’s support for Croatian independence after it was declared, not before.

This is what Milosevic said:

‘Let us just specify something else, please. Do you remember that at the time Mesic said that he came to Belgrade, to the highest position in the federation in order to, through the mediation of the Yugoslav diplomacy at the time, to get in touch with the most influential factors and to persuade them that the survival of Yugoslavia was nonsense? And I have a quotation: “I wanted to convey that the idea of the break-up of Yugoslavia to those who had the greatest influence on its fate, to Genscher and the Pope. In fact, I had three meetings with Genscher. He enabled a contact with the Holy See. The Pope and Genscher agreed with the total break-up of SFRY.” Was that what he said?‘

The ‘highest position in the federation’, i.e. the presidency, was a position Mesic assumed only at the end of June 1991, after Croatia had already seceded.

This is what Kucan replied:

‘Your Honours, this programme which I participated together with Mr. Mesic, I can confirm that. But to be able to confirm each and every word, I’d need either a transcript or a video in order to be able to confirm it. These are very weighty words, and to testify like this wouldn’t — just wouldn’t do.’

So Mesic was not ‘noting’ that Genscher had supported Croatia’s secession. And Milosevic was not alleging that Mesic had ‘noted’ this. And Kucan was not confirming that what Milosevic said was true. Gibbs has simply falsified the source yet again.

7) In his endnotes, Gibbs writes, ‘In memoirs, the Slovene defense minister Janez Jansa downplays the role of foreign support, but he concedes that by July 1, “Genscher strongly supported our cause”.’ (Gibbs, p. 249). Of course, this citation merely suggests that Germany supported Slovenia’s cause after independence had already been declared, not that Germany actually encouraged secession.

What Gibbs does not tell his readers is that, according to Jansa, Germany actually discouraged Slovenia from declaring independence. Jansa writes ‘Even the German parliament in its debate in February 1991 did not support our dissociation from Yugoslavia’ (Janez Jansa, ‘The Making of the Slovenian State 1988-1992: The Collapse of Yugoslavia’, Zalozba Mladinska knjiga, Lljubljana, 1994, p. 91)

8 ) Gibbs cites the opinion of journalist David Halberstam: ‘According to David Halberstam: “The Slovenians were already aware [by February 1990] that the Germans… favoured their independence.”‘ The opinion of a journalist with no expertise on the former Yugoslavia does not count for much; particularly so in this case, as in February 1990, the pro-independence nationalists had not even taken power in Slovenia, which was still ruled by Communists formally committed to Yugoslav unity !

9) Gibbs’s last remaining ‘source’ that Germany encouraged Croatia to secede is a statement by the State Department official John Bolton, but this turns out to be another case of misrepresentation. Gibbs writes ‘State Department official John Bolton later stated that Germany “induced the Slovenes and the Croats to jump ship,” that is, to leave the federation.’ (Gibbs, p. 79)

Yet when the quote is given in full, there is no suggestion that Bolton was accusing Germany of having induced Croatia and Slovenia to secede before they did so; merely that he accused Germany of having induced the EU states to recognise their independence after they had done so:

‘Initially, Germany, based largely on its historical interests in the region, insisted that EU members recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia. While this precipitous change alone was not enough to cause the ensuing carnage and ethnic cleansing in the region, Bosnia-Herzegovina unquestionably saw a declaration of independence as the only way to extricate itself from Serbia’s grasp, hoping thereby to find security in a united European front against Serbian force. Having thus induced the Slovenes and Croats to jump ship, and having pushed the Bosnians, Germany then concluded that it was constitutionally barred from undertaking any military activities that might actually stop the Serbian (or Croat) war machine.’

Thus, none of Gibbs’s sources turns out to support his contention that Germany encouraged Croatia or Slovenia to secede from Yugoslavia, and some actually refute it.

10) Gibbs also claims that ‘French Air Force general Pierre M. Gallois asserts that Germany began supplying arms to Croatia, including antitank and antiaircraft rockets, in early 1991 – before the war began.’ (Gibbs, p. 78) He neglects to tell his readers that Gallois was – like his favourite source James Bissett – another Milosevic supporter, who actually wrote a preface to a book comprising a dialogue between Milosevic and one of his other supporters, and to which Milosevic also contributed the foreword, entitled ‘The trial of Milosevic or the indictment of the Serb people’. In this book, Gallois praises Milosevic for his ‘intelligence’ and his ‘honour’. The value of his assertion that Germany had been arming Croatia from early 1991 should be assessed with this allegiance in mind.

11) There remains Gibbs’s claim that Germany was involved in building up Croatia’s intelligence services prior to Croatia’s declaration of independence:

‘Germany’s covert intervention began in 1990, while Yugoslavia was still an integral state. In that year, German officials from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BFV), a subdivision of the Interior Ministry, assisted in building up Croatia’s intelligence service, the National Security Office (UNS). In the course of this activity, German officials would openly collaborate with extreme nationalists in Franjo Tudjman’s HDZ party. This early German intervention, though little known, is nevertheless well documented.’ (Gibbs, p. 77)

Since, as Gibbs has pointedly informed us in his reply to my first post about him, he is a ‘tenured full professor’, it is surprising to learn what he considers the definition of ‘well documented’ to be: in this case, two short articles, neither of which provides any evidence or even references to back up its assertions, which do not even support Gibbs’s assertions, which contradict each other, and one of which is the work of a Srebrenica-genocide-denying outfit of extreme-right-wing Islamophobic crackpots.

The first of these articles, ‘Croatia’s intelligence services’ by Marko Milivojevic, published in Jane’s Intelligence Review on 1 September 1994, has this to say: ‘Dating back to as early as 1990, when Croatia was still a constituent republic of an internationally recognised state, German involvement with Croatia’s intelligence services began with the UNS whose name was a direct copy of Germany’s BfV (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.’ Milivojevic does not provide any evidence to back up his claim. Be this as it may, he merely speaks vaguely of Germany’s ‘involvement’ with Croatia’s UNS at this stage; he does not claim what Gibbs claims, that German intelligence began ‘building up’ Croatia’s UNS already in 1990. His article covers the period up to 1994; he writes that ‘As regards the type of assistance provided by Germany to Croatia’s intelligence services, staff training has reportedly been the most important input.’ Gibbs has turned this unsourced ‘reportedly’ into ‘well documented’, and simply assumed it refers to as far back as 1990.

Milivojevic does not give any sources, but he appears to have simply regurgitated a lot of the allegations made in Gibbs’s other source, which Gibbs cites second in his book but which was actually published first: Gregory Copley, ‘FRG helps develop Croatian security’, Defense and Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, February-March 1994. This article claims that ‘The Croatian leadership decided, at the beginning of 1991, to organise its own intelligence and security services.’ It thereby contradicts the claim made by Milivojevic, that these intelligence services already existed in 1990, and Gibbs’s claim, that Germany was already ‘building up’ Croatia’s intelligence services in 1990. This article claims that ‘German intelligence officers provided significant support and training at all stages, both in Croatia and in Germany.’ It does, therefore, agree with Gibbs that the support and training began, if not in 1990, then at least at the start of 1991, prior to Croatia’s declaration of independence. It does not, however, provide any evidence to back up its allegations.

The value of Copley, president of the ‘International Strategic Studies Association‘ as an authority on the war in the former Yugoslavia may be gleaned by the fact that he has made statements such as the following: ‘the Clinton Administration had, during the war, facilitated the Islamist terrorist activities because of the Clinton Administration’s need to demonize the Serbs in order to provide a casus belli for US-led military actions in the area to distract from domestic US political problems’. Copley condemned the possibility of ‘an admission of guilt of Serbs for killing thousands of Muslims who, in fact, were not known to have been killed. Several hundred bodies have been found as a result of the fighting in and around Srebrenica, but the Islamists and their supporters have claimed figures which grow higher with each telling, with figures now claiming some 15,000 alleged deaths.’ Furthermore, according to Copley, ‘the Islamist propaganda [regarding Srebrenica], supported by Ashdown — who has long been disavowed in the UK by his former colleagues in the Royal Marines because of his unequivocal acceptance of Islamist propaganda — is accepted as fact by the R[epublika] S[rpska] Government, thereby admitting guilt for crimes never committed.’

Indeed, Copley is a member of a body of Srebrenica deniers who went on record in September 2003 to claim that ‘the official alleged casualty number of 7,000 victims’ is ‘vastly inflated and unsupported by evidence.’

That, then, is the sort of source that Gibbs relies on to ‘prove’ that Germany encouraged the secession of Croatia.

With thanks to DW and JG

See also:

The Bizarre World of Genocide Denial

First Check their Sources 1

First Check their Sources 2

Update: Gibbs has admitted his inability to respond: ’I will make no pretense that I answer all of Hoare’s allegations, which I find impossible, given the huge quantity of his charges.’ Anyone who has followed this exchange will draw the appropriate conclusions, though the sort of bone-headed left-wing fundamentalists who read his book and subscribe to his thesis won’t be put off by any refutation, however crushing. For who cares about the truth when you uphold the righteous ideology of ‘anti-imperialism’, right ?

I posted the following conclusion about Gibbs at Americans for Bosnia:

‘Quite apart from Gibbs’s deficiencies as a scholar, the reason why he and similar revisionists fail so badly is that – as I mentioned in my initial post about him – they don’t treat the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a serious subject of scholarly enquiry, but merely as another battlefield for their ideological campaign against “Western imperialism”.

Any attempt at open-minded research would force them to examine carefully then abandon as worthless the Serb-nationalist or “anti-imperialist” myths about the wars, and to develop more objective interpretations. But since their priority is to uphold the myths, not to carry out open-minded research, they are stuck supporting the ridiculous.

In trying to write a book on that basis, Gibbs failed as soon as he began.’

First Check Their Sources 2: The myth that ‘most of Bosnia was owned by the Serbs before the war’

The myth that Slobodan Milosevic’s regime in Serbia and Radovan Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb rebels were victims of hostile Western intervention, indeed of a veritable Western imperialist conspiracy, is a bit like the idea that God exists – it really does rest on faith over reason. Ageing Western left-wing extremists who spent their entire lives believing that the Communist dictatorships of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc. represented some sort of advance on liberal capitalism, were unwilling to jettison this shibboleth just because Communism collapsed ignominiously across Eastern Europe from 1989. They emotionally needed to believe that even the decaying remnant of this ancien regime represented by Milosevic’s dictatorship must have been the object of Western imperialist hostility in the 1990s, and their tribal loyalties moved them to solidarise with it in the face of all the evidence of its murderous nature. The solidarity was then perversely extended to Karadzic’s ideologically right-wing, anti-Communist Bosnian Serb rebels.

One of the clearest pieces of evidence that the Western alliance was not hostile to Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb rebels, however, was the fact that three and a half years of Western intervention in the Bosnian war culminated in a peace settlement that was remarkably favourable to them: not only were they granted a virtual state, through the recognition of their self-proclaimed ‘Republika Srpska’, with its own government, parliament, army, etc., but they were awarded 49% of Bosnia’s territory, despite the fact that Serbs constituted only 31% of Bosnia’s population at the time the war began in 1992. Meanwhile, the supposed ‘imperialist clients’, the Bosniaks or Bosnian Muslims, had their Bosnian republic virtually dissolved and broken into two entities, with the Muslims and Croats, who comprised 60% of Bosnia’s population in 1992, receiving only 51% of the territory.

Can you imagine the US treating one of its real allies this way ? Granting 49% of Israel to the Palestinians or 49% of Colombia to FARC ?

The percentages are problematic not only for the myth of Western hostility to Karadzic’s Serb nationalists, but also to those believing in the justice of the Serb nationalist cause in Bosnia. To square this circle, the latter have traditionally claimed that the Serb-nationalist conquest of so much Bosnian land is not really a conquest at all, since Bosnian Serbs ‘already owned’ 65% (or 60%, or 56%, or whatever) of Bosnian private land.

The first problem with this argument is that private ownership of land is not the same as state ownership of territory, nor should it be. In a hypothetical country whose population was made up 90% of poor black peasants and 10% of rich white landowners, but in which the white minority owned 99% of the privately owned land and the black majority only 1%, nobody would seriously argue that the whites had the right to their own state comprising 99% of the country’s territory.

Nor is the area of a country’s territory the same as the area of its privately owned land, since part of the land of any country – particularly a Communist-ruled country like Bosnia – will be owned communally or by the state.

Nor does private ownership imply military control; if in another hypothetical country the native population owned 100% of the privately owned land but the country was heavily occupied by a colonial power, it would not follow that the native population ‘controlled’ the land.

The second problem with the argument that the majority of Bosnia’s land was owned by Serbs is that the figure itself is a myth – whether it is given as 65%, or 60%, or 56% or whatever. No evidence was ever produced to show that Serbs really did own more than half of Bosnia’s land.

David N. Gibbs, in First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2009) has this to say on the matter:

‘It is clear that Serb forces were on the offensive during much of the war, and they conquered large areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the extent of Serb aggression was once again exaggerated. Newspaper articles repeatedly noted that Serbs controlled some 70 percent of Bosnia’s territory, despite the fact that they constituted only 31% the [sic] total population… There was an insinuation that the Serbs must have conquered most of the 70 percent. Why, the reader might wonder, should the Serbs control so much land if they account for less than one-third of the population ? What such reports omitted was that the Serbs had always occupied most of Bosnia’s land area, owing to their demographic dominance in rural regions. The Dutch government’s investigation estimates that ethnic Serbs controlled 56 percent of Bosnia’s land prior to the war. During the 1992-1995 period, Serbs extended their control of Bosnia’s land area by approximately 14 percent above the amount of land that Serbs had held before the war. Clearly this 14 percent was gained through military conquest – but the extent of this conquest was nowhere near the levels implied in press reports. Such distortions appeared not only in newspaper articles, but also in US government reports.‘ (p. 124)

This argument allows Gibbs to claim that the various Western peace plans which awarded over 40% of Bosnian territory to the Serb rebels, even though Serbs comprised only 31% of Bosnia’s pre-war population, were actually unfavourable to the Serbs:

‘In fact, the Vance-Owen Plan was not especially favourable toward the Serbs, and for the most part it did not reward ethnic cleansing. The 43% that the Serbs were to receive under the plan was considerably less than the land area controlled by Serbs prior to the onset of the fighting. Critics of the plan ignored the fact that the Serbs had always controlled most of the land in Bosnia – since they were disproportionately agricultural – even before the war. When the war began in 1992, the Serbs owned or controlled some 56% of the total land, a proportion above what they were allocated by the Vance-Owen Plan.’ (p. 144)

Gibbs’s claim is already meaningless, since he doesn’t appear to know whether he is referring to ‘ownership’ or to ‘control’ of land by the Serbs – and as we have seen, the two are not the same and cannot be conflated.

Be that as it may, his source for the assertion that ‘the Serbs owned or controlled some 56% of the total land’ in Bosnia before the war is the 2002 report on the Srebrenica massacre of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), commissioned by the Dutch government. In Gibbs’s words, ‘The report states: “Prior to the 1992 conflict, 56% of Bosnian territory was in Serb hands.”.’ (First Do No Harm, p. 269)

It is certainly true that the NIOD report claims the following:

‘Prior to the 1992 conflict, 56 per cent of Bosnian territory was in Serb hands, although they constituted no more than 31 per cent of the population‘ (Part I, Chapter 3, Section, 2, p. 189).

Unfortunately, however, the NIOD report is, as regards historical background, a sloppy, unscholarly source. The NIOD report’s source for this claim is the book by Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention (M.E. Sharp, New York and London, 1999, p. 28). Yet the NIOD report has cited Burg and Shoup falsely. What they actually claimed was the following:

‘If the cadastral opstina [municipality] was used as the unit to measure population distribution, about 56 percent of the area of Bosnia-Herzegovina could be said to have been inhabited by Serbs before the conflict began – a figure that should not be confused with the claim of the Bosnian Serbs that they “owned” 64% of the land. (This claim, even if true, can only refer to privately owned land.’

The claim by Burg and Shoup that 56% of Bosnia was ‘inhabited by Serbs’ is vague (what does it mean that 56% of Bosnia was ‘inhabited’ by Serbs ? Is a municipality in which Serbs comprise a small minority still considered to be ‘inhabited’ by Serbs, or must they constitute a majority ? How many Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs also inhabited the 56% of the territory that was ‘inhabited by Serbs’ ? And how is ’56% of Bosnia’ defined ? Does it mean that municipalities with a Serb majority comprised 56% of Bosnian territory ? Was the city of Sarajevo, with its large Serb population but larger Muslim population, defined as ‘inhabited by Serbs’ ? Are uninhabited mountains located within Serb-majority municipalities included in the 56% or in the 44% ? etc. etc.).

Leaving that aside, Burg and Shoup specifically state that ‘inhabited by’ does not mean ‘ownership of’; nor do they claim that it meant ‘controlled by’. The NIOD report has changed the meaning of Shoup’s and Burg’s statement from ’56% of Bosnia’s territory was inhabited by Serbs’ to ’56% of Bosnia’s territory was in Serb hands’. Not bothering to check NIOD’s source, Gibbs has then used the NIOD report to claim that ’56% of Bosnian land was owned or controlled by the Serbs’.

In other words, Gibbs’s confused and meaningless claim is based upon the NIOD report’s miscitation of Shoup’s and Burg’s already unclear claim – even though the original claim, however unclear it might be, very specifically does not mean what Gibbs claims it means. And he uses this essentially manufactured ‘fact’ to claim that successive Western peace-plans were unfavourable to the Serbs, since they awarded them less than the 56% of Bosnia they had supposedly originally ‘owned or controlled’ !

But are there any real figures concerning Bosnian land that can help us establish the truth ? One source whose reliability, we hope, will not be called into question, is the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia, whose second edition was published in Yugoslavia during the 1980s. The entry for Bosnia-Hercegovina, which we cite here in the English edition of its published offprint (The Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina, Jugoslavenski leksikografski zavod, Zagreb, 1983), has this to say:

‘The total area of B-H [Bosnia-Hercegovina] is 5,113,000 ha, which is 20% of the total area of Yugoslavia. Agricultural areas include 2,573,000 ha, that is more than a half of the area of B-H (50.3%), or less than 1/5 (17.9%) of all the agricultural area of Yugoslavia.’ (p. 137). Furthermore, ‘private holdings even now occupy almost all of the arable land (94.9%)’… (p. 139).

So according to this official source, private agricultural land holdings in Bosnia comprised just under half the total territory of Bosnia, and agricultural land as a whole comprised barely more than half.

Furthermore, according to a book published by the Republican Office of Statistics of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1976, the majority of the rural population of Bosnia-Hercegovina at the time was non-Serb. Specifically, in 1971, the village population of Bosnia-Hercegovina was 45.5% Serb and 53.7% Muslim and Croat (Ejub Sijercic, Migracije stanovnistva Bosne i Hercegovine, Republicki zavod za statistiku SRBiH, Sarajevo, 1976, p. 52).

Gibbs’s claim that ‘Serbs had always occupied most of Bosnia’s land area, owing to their demographic dominance in rural regions’ and that ‘the Serbs had always controlled most of the land in Bosnia – since they were disproportionately rural’ is therefore false. His deduction, based on this falsehood, that Western peace-plans that awarded over 40% of Bosnia to the Serb rebels were actually unfavourable to them, can therefore be exposed as an attempt to fabricate Serb victimhood at Western hands.

I shall be adding to this critique of Gibbs in future.

See also:

The Bizarre World of Genocide Denial

First Check Their Sources 1

First Check Their Sources 3

Update: See Srebrenica Genocide Blog on Radovan Karadzic’s use of a misleading ‘ethnic map’ of Bosnia.