Commenting on Sunday’s referendum victory in Croatia in favour of joining the EU, the veteran Guardian journalist Ian Traynor, a man with a long experience of covering former-Yugoslav affairs, has this to say:

Croatia has voted to join the EU by a sweeping majority, delivering a greater than expected yes vote in a referendum watched nervously in Brussels for fear of a backlash… The endorsement means that Croatia, barring any last-minute hiccups, will become the EU’s 28th member country in July next year, symbolising its break with the Balkans and former Yugoslavia and anchoring it strongly in the European mainstream as well as Nato.

How exactly does Traynor think that Croatia’s entry into the EU will ‘symbolise its break with the Balkans and former Yugoslavia’ ? Three Balkan states (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania) and one former-Yugoslav state (Slovenia) are already members of the EU, and the others are seeking to join. The likelihood is that most, if not all, will eventually succeed, and that EU membership will therefore unite Croatia firmly will the rest of the former Yugoslavia and the wider Balkans. Far from ‘symbolising its break with the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia’, Croatia’s entry into the EU will reaffirm its close relations and common destiny with them.

Traynor’s lazy sentence hints at a perceived dichotomy between ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’, whereby the former represents things like law, democracy, progress and human rights and the latter represents things like primitivism, nationalism, authoritarianism and looking backwards. Joining ‘Europe’ would therefore mean abandoning the ‘Balkan’ world of primitivism, nationalism, authoritarianism and looking backwards. Traynor’s sentence hints that the nationalism and wars in the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s were a product of the region’s ‘Balkanness’; of traits inherent to it as a Balkan rather than a European region. In reality, Western and Central Europe have had, if anything, worse records of extreme nationalism, imperialism and genocide than have the Balkans.

Ian Traynor should know better.

As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said, ‘The more closely the democratic system of state approximates to complete freedom of secession, the rarer and weaker will the striving for secession be in practice’. If you want to keep a multinational union together, the best way to do it is to grant maximum freedom to its constituent nations, which will then have no reason to secede. The benefits of full sovereignty for individual nations can be enjoyed alongside the benefits of a larger union; we can have our cake and eat it too. The Yugoslav union could have been saved if only Serbia’s political classes had been ready to accept its evolution into an eight-member confederation, with its constituent republics and autonomous provinces enjoying complete self-rule. Unfortunately, Serbia’s politicians and intellectuals preferred no union at all to a confederal union. The European Union, for its part, though still a confederation, has already integrated too far, to the point where the sovereignty and democratic rights of its constituent nations are being violated; the British government is rightly resisting further unwanted integration. For multinational unions, less is usually more:

And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

These are factors worth pondering as we witness the British coalition government’s clumsy attempt to dictate to the Scottish people how their referendum on independence should be framed and organised. The government has rejected the idea of a three-question referendum, as favoured by Alex Salmond (Scottish National Party leader and First Minister of Scotland), in which the Scots would be permitted to vote not only in favour of independence or of the status quo, but also of a third option – ‘devolution-max’, or full sovereignty over domestic affairs but with continued membership of the United Kingdom, and a continued common foreign policy and defence. The government is instead insisting on an ‘all or nothing’ referendum, in which Scots would be forced to choose between full independence or the status quo, and on a deadline by which the referendum would be held.

At this rate, the British government might as well simply declare the United Kingdom dissolved. There is no surer way of persuading a constituent nation to secede from a union than by trying to bully its elected representatives in this manner, and restrict its citizens’ right to vote as freely as possible. David Cameron and his ministers will have only themselves to blame if Scotland’s voters, angry at being denied the right to vote freely without interference from London, react by turning in favour of independence. If they want to save the union, Westminster’s politicians should recognise the right of Scotland’s elected representatives to choose when to hold their referendum and on what basis it should be held. With the majority of Scots opposed to independence, there is every reason to believe that granting them the right to devo-max would be the best way to save the union.

I support devo-max for Scotland. I support the right of the Scottish people to have all the sovereign rights that other nations in Europe enjoy. If they want to be fully independent, I respect their right to be. However, I hope they will opt instead for having their cake and eating it. There is no reason why left-wing Scotland should be forced to endure government by right-wing Westminster; a sovereign Scotland will in all likelihood have more enlightened domestic government than the one the UK has at present.

On the other hand, the UK has, since 1997, been a major positive force in world affairs; first under Tony Blair, then under Gordon Brown and now under David Cameron. However regrettable his domestic policies, Cameron’s foreign policy has been almost impeccable; where Blair was a pioneer of progressive foreign policy, Cameron adopted his model and, if anything, improved upon it. It would be a loss for the world if the UK were to be diminished by Scotland’s secession. By contrast, Salmond’s peacenik, anti-nuclear record suggests that an independent Scotland led by him would be likely to obstruct rather than support progressive moves on the global stage by Britain and the West.

Over and above such cold calculations remains the fact that the majority of Scots, like the majority of English and Welsh, continue to identify, at least at some level, with Britain as a whole. Devo-max would best reconcile the self-identification of Scots as Scots with their self-identification  - and the self-identification of the English and Welsh – as Brits.

Some fear that Scottish sovereignty would leave the Conservatives too overwhelmingly dominant in the rump UK. This might not be so straightforward. Comfortable dominance over Labour in a rump UK, and in an English parliament, might lead the English Conservatives to splinter, and see the re-emergence of a gentler, one-nation current of Conservatism in opposition to the currently dominant Thatcherites. At the very least, the establishment of an English parliament would help the English to understand and articulate their own national identity better, as the Scots already do. The Welsh may opt to retain a closer union with England than the other parts of the UK will, but that again is up to them.

PS I have purposely omitted discussing Northern Ireland in this article, as that is a whole different kettle of fish…

I cannot remember any year of my life being so exciting, in terms of global political developments, as 2011. In a positive way, too: although many of the great events of last year have been far from unambiguous triumphs for human progress and emancipation, they have nevertheless demonstrated that many of the chains that bind humanity are not as immovable as they previously seemed. Though many of the battles remain to be fought and some will be lost, that they are being fought at all is reason for optimism. I haven’t remotely been able to provide adequate comment at this blog, but here is my personal list of the most inspiring events of 2011 – not necessarily in order of importance.

1. The Arab (and Russian !) Spring.

Cynics regret the fall of the Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi regimes, and the likely fall of the Saleh regime, in the belief that these acted as Hobbesian leviathans keeping lids on political Islam. They fail to appreciate that these dictatorships, through preventing the emergence of healthy political pluralism and through opportunistic collaboration with Islamism, acted as the incubators of the very Islamist movements they claimed to keep in check. It is pluralism – more so than democracy – that is ultimately the cure for the evil represented by Islamism. The Arab Spring may end badly in some or all of the countries in question, but hats off to the brave Syrians, Yemenis, Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans, Bahrainis and others who have redeemed the honour of the Arab world through their heroic struggle against tyranny, showing that change is possible. The Arab fighters against tyranny may not win, or they may succumb to a new tyranny, but they are fighting a struggle that needs to be fought. And hats off too to the brave Russians who are raising the banner of freedom in the heart of Europe’s worst police state.

2. International intervention in Libya and Ivory Coast and the fall of Muammar Gaddafi and Laurent Gbagbo.

For all that I supported the US-led intervention to overthrow the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, events have proven it was an intervention too far: carried out without any form of mandate from world opinion or support in the country in question and attempting a too-radical overthrow of the existing order, it brought democratic change and emancipated the Shia majority and Kurdish minority, but only at great human cost and immense damage to the West’s reputation and to the political standing of the Western governments that participated. By contrast, the intervention in Libya was everything the intervention in Iraq was not: carried out in support of a genuine popular uprising and at the request of Libyans themselves, with a genuine international mandate, it brought down a dictatorship without any foreign troops setting foot in the country or losing their lives. There has been some whining among wishy-washy moderates that regime-change was carried out under cover of a UN mandate to prevent massacre, and that consequently Western leaders have made it more difficult to obtain international support for humanitarian intervention in future. Nonsense: even the propaganda catastrophe of Iraq did not prevent the intervention in Libya, so the successful intervention in Libya will be far from discouraging future interventions. In fact, like the Kosova intervention before it, Libya shows how humanitarian intervention can work, as did the international intervention that helped bring about the fall of Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast, followed by his arrest and deportation to the International Criminal Court where, we hope, more of his fellow tyrants will end up.

3. The rise in the West of protests at the abuses of capitalism.

For much of the past fifteen years or so of my life, I felt I was gradually becoming more right-wing (from an admittedly extreme-left-wing starting-point), to the point where, at the last British general election, I adopted a bi-partisan standpoint vis-a-vis Labour and the Conservatives. I have seen, and continue to see myself, as a centrist rather than a leftist. Well, the events in the UK, the rest of Europe and the US have certainly served as a wake-up call to me, as the mainstream political right and the super-rich – not to put too fine a point on it – are simply taking the piss. Here in the UK, public services are being massacred while those in the corporate and financial sectors pay themselves vast and unearned bonuses, and the authorities turn a blind eye to their blatant tax-evasion. We’re supposed to believe that cutting the incomes of ordinary working- and middle-class people is necessary in the name of deficit-reduction, while cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations is necessary in the name of economic stimulus ! Well, you can’t have it both ways. In the US, the Republicans have gone so far to the right in their support of selfish and irresponsible tax-cuts for the rich that they’ve gone completely off the rails, seriously jeopardising their government’s ability to navigate the economic crisis. With mainstream centre-left leaders like Barack Obama and Ed Miliband failing to show any backbone over this, it is left to grass-roots activist movements to do so. So three cheers for Los Indignados, Occupy Wall Street, 38 Degrees, UK Uncut and all such movements, for doing what our elected representatives are failing to do. I never thought I’d say that, but there it is.

4. The fall of Silvio Berlusconi and popular protests in Greece.

The fall of the corrupt sleazeball is a bittersweet triumph, given that it occurred in the context of the EU’s imposition of brutal austerity programmes across the Eurozone, accompanied by creeping integration that violates both the national sovereignty and democratic will of member states. The cause of deeper EU integration has revealed itself to be a deeply undemocratic, anti-people cause. I have been very critical of the Greek political classes for their criminal regional policies, vis-a-vis Milosevic, Macedonia, etc.; the Greek people, by contrast, in the ferocious fight they are putting up against the EU-imposed austerity measures, have set an example to us all. Let the costs of the economic crisis be born by the bankers and politicians who caused it, not by ordinary people and future generations.

5. The phone-hacking scandal in the UK.

All my life in the UK, I have lived in the belief that the tabloid newspapers and particularly the Murdoch media empire are a great incubus on British politics and society, encouraging everything that is worst in our country: xenophobia, small-mindedness, vulgarity, philistinism, voyeurism and sleaze. So how refreshing and liberating it is, to see them being taken down a peg or two. There is no reason why people’s private lives and feelings should be constantly violated, and intimate personal details splashed all over newspapers, by hack reporters pandering to the worst public instincts; it is time that the UK passed some serious privacy laws, to put an end to the permanent national scandal and embarrassment of our tabloid press. However uninspiring Ed Miliband may be as Labour Party leader, he deserves credit for bravely taking on the Murdoch empire. Let’s hope the Daily Mail goes the way of the News of the World - that would go a long way toward solving our supposed ‘immigration crisis’ !

6. Independence for South Sudan.

What a sad day it is for democracy, when a genocidal dictatorship accomplishes what various flawed democracies seem unable to do, and negotiates the independence from it of an oppressed region. In July, South Sudan formally became an independent state and joined the UN. Congratulations to its people, who have shown that even the most brutal struggle for freedom can have a happy ending ! Meanwhile, Turkey is escalating its terror and repression of its Kurdish population; Serbia continues to block and disrupt Kosova’s independence, with Serb extremists creating chaos in northern Kosova and undermining Serbia’s EU aspirations; and Israel continues to obstruct peace with the Palestinians through its settlement-building programme and Apartheid-style occupation regime in the West Bank – to which its apologists turn a blind eye, while they try to blame the Palestinians for wanting to join the UN and UNESCO ! Shame on the democratic world.

7. Macedonia’s victory over Greece at the International Court of Justice and Palestinian membership of UNESCO. 

Were the democratic world to apply liberal and democratic principles fairly and consistently, it would be extremely easy to bring about solutions to the Macedonian-Greek and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, that would respect and safeguard the rights of all four nations in question. Unfortunately, the EU over Greece and Macedonia and the US over Israel and Palestine, far from acting as honest brokers in negotiations to end these conflicts, are simply supporting the hardline nationalist agendas of the stronger sides. They hypocritically talk of ‘negotiated settlements’ while ensuring that pressure is only put on the weaker sides, never on the stronger. When they say they want both sides to negotiate, what they really mean is that they want one side to surrender. The Macedonians would have to be stark, raving mad if they followed advice over what’s in their national interest from EU apparatchiks, just as the Palestinians would have to be stark, raving mad if they followed advice from craven US officials. Do they really want their countries to end up like Bosnia, whose leaders in the 1990s were unwise enough to follow ‘advice’ of this kind ?? So what an inspiring example these nations are setting when they refuse to follow the advice of hypocrites, and pursue justice in a dignified, civilised manner through international institutions. Palestine’s admission to UNESCO in October followed by Macedonia’s victory over Greece at the ICJ in December are two blows struck for democracy and human rights that Western leaders seem unable to uphold.

8. The fall of Dominique Strauss-Khan and the acquittal of Amanda Knox.

At one level, the collapse of the sexual assault case in New York against Dominique Strauss-Khan suggests that even in the US, it may be legal for a rich sexually to assault a hotel maid, provided the maid in question has a personal history that’s marginally less unblemished by sin than that of the Virgin Mary, and has done something satanically evil like telling a lie during her asylum application. As has long been said, in rape cases it’s often the victim rather than the rapist who is on trial. For all that, Nafissatou Diallo’s accusation against Strauss-Khan did succeed in ending the political career of a violent misogynist with a history of attacking women, forcing his resignation as IMF chief and wrecking his French presidential bid. And in encouraging other female victims of sexual assault, at the hands of him and of others, to come forward. Another spectacular victory over misogyny was won in October, when Amanda Knox was acquitted by an Italian court on appeal of murdering her flatmate, having been originally convicted in something resembling a medieval witch-trial. Again, she was convicted not on the basis of the evidence against her, since there wasn’t any, but because she was good looking and sexually active, pursued what was in conservative Italian eyes an unorthodox lifestyle, and did not behave like a tearful female stereotype after her flatmate’s murder. Soon after, an apparently respectable boy-next-door, Vincent Tabak, was convicted of murdering his neighbour, Joanna Yeates. Initially overlooked by police until he incriminated himself, he turned out to have a secret fixation with strangling women. So there you have it.

9. The killing of Osama bin Laden and the arrest of Ratko Mladic.

Justice finally caught up in 2011 with two mass-murderers whose long evasion of justice made them symbols of ‘resistance’ for the worst kind of extremists. Mladic turned out not to be as brave as he had been when he was directing the genocidal massacre of defenceless Bosniak civilians at Srebrenica, and surrendered quietly to the Serbian police. Bin Laden was, by contrast, whacked in Pakistan by US special forces, as was his follower Anwar al-Awlaki by a US drone attack in Yemen later in the year, in both cases prompting much hand-wringing by wishy-washy liberal types of the Yasmin Alibhai-Brown variety, who seem to be under the impression that it’s possible for the US peacefully to arrest terrorists based in countries like Pakistan and Yemen, in the middle of an ongoing armed conflict with those terrorists, as if the latter were pickpockets in New York. They would do well to remember the Allied assassination of Holocaust-architect Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, and of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbour, the following year – we certainly didn’t try to arrest them ! And of course, based on what happened to former Republika Srpska vice-president Biljana Plavsic, an international court might have just sentenced bin Laden to a few years in prison, then let him out early.

10. The referendum defeat for the ‘Alternative Vote’ in the UK.

Not as significant as the above events, but it made me happy anyway.

Happy New Year !

I have personal experience with Albanian Airlines, and I can confirm that it is a cowboy outfit, pure and simple. I am an experienced flier, and have taken several flights a year for most of my adult life, but my experience with Albanian Airlines stands out as the worst airline experience I have ever had. In June 2010, my girlfriend and I had a ten-day holiday in Albania, which neither of us had previously visited. Our experience of Albania and the Albanian people was almost entirely positive, but the holiday was almost torpedoed before it began: although our ticket had been booked nearly three months in advance, Albanian Airlines cancelled our flight without informing us or refunding our money. When we arrived at Stansted Airport on the day of the flight and discovered this, we phoned Albanian Airlines to demand that they arrange an alternative flight for us, which they failed to do, forcing us to buy a wholly new and expensive one-way ticket from Alitalia, for a flight that departed from a different airport.

Following our return to the UK, I complained to Albanian Airlines: its representatives gave me no apology and refunded less than what I had paid for the tickets, while refusing to reimburse me for any of the considerable expenses I had incurred as a result of their incompetence. I would take the airline to court, but its ‘sales office’ in London turned out to be a rented unit in a shared office building somewhere in the suburbs, with a dead phone line. As I write this, I can no longer find any trace of this supposed sales office on any page on the internet.

This sort of behaviour by an airline is not characteristic of the region; I have flown many times with Croatia Airlines and with Serbia’s JAT, and my own experiences with them have always been broadly positive (although last year my mother and father had a bottle of whiskey ‘confiscated’ from them by security staff at Zagreb airport as they were transferring to a flight to Split; the staff were operating a shakedown to divest passengers of goods bought legitimately at departure lounge duty free shops). Albanian Airlines, on the other hand, apparently behaves like this regularly, judging by the online reviews that it receives. According to a Judith Evans from the UK, ‘We booked to travel with this airline from Stansted to Tirana. We booked the flight on line in February and then two weeks before we were supposed to fly they emailed us to say the route had been suspended- no explanation just a one line email. We have been emailing them since to get a refund – nearly 4 weeks now and still have had no reply. I would never book with them again as their communication is non existant.’

According to an Arthur Selman from Australia, ‘Just like your earlier report from Judith Evans, I booked for 2 people a Frankfurt-Tirana leg in mid July. We also received an email telling us “This flight has been cancelled” no other info, no alternative, no anything! This leaves me trying to find alternative arrangements at this late stage – Not Funny! I still do not know the reason for the cancellation. Hardly the way the way to run an airline. ‘ And according to a Martin Clarke from the UK, ‘I was due to fly from London Stansted-Tirana with Albanian Airlines. I received an email informing me that my flights had been cancelled, again with no explanation. Fortunately, I had booked through ebookers who will ensure I get my money back, but it is a massive pain. This seems to be a common feature of Albanian Airlines, reading other reviews. My advice would be to avoid, its not worth the risk/hassle.’

As far as Albanian Airlines’ current woes are concerned, the revocation of its licence is to be welcomed, but I am shocked that it has managed to avoid EU blacklisting. Shocked but not surprised. Cowboy airlines of this kind are only able to operate in the EU because their behaviour is tolerated by the enforcement bodies in the EU member states. In the UK, the Regulatory Policy Group of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), and its precursor, the Air Transport Users’ Council (AUC), to which I complained about Albanian Airlines, proved less than useless. Over a period of more than a year, the CAA/AUC sent a total of three one-sentence emails to Albanian Airlines, asking them to refund my expenses. When the latter naturally ignored all three emails, the CAA/AUC simply informed me that there was nothing further it could do for me, and that I was on my own. The CAA/AUC’s supposed complaints procedure had served only to delay any legal action I might have taken by over a year. Doubtlessly, many aggrieved air passengers have gone through this fig-leaf ‘complaints procedure’, only to find that, a year later, they are no closer to receiving restitution but have lost any appetite for further pursuit of their claims. Under EU Regulation 261/2004, passengers are legally entitled to a set compensation from airlines for cancelled or delayed flights of this kind. Based on my own experience, I believe that the CAA is required to appear to be upholding this regulation, but has no interest in actually doing so, and that cowboy outfits such as Albanian Airlines operate in the UK because the CAA allows them to do so; indeed, acts as a buffer that shields them from passengers’ anger.

How good it is to know that, while Britain’s public services are being slaughtered in the name of deficit reduction, taxpayers’ money can still be found to support Potemkin-village bureaucracies of this kind.

‘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

The evident domination of Islamist elements in post-Gaddafi Libya, symbolised by the announcement of National Transitional Council chairman Mustafa Abdul-Jalil that Sharia would form the basis for legislation in the new Libya and that the law against polygamy was to be relaxed, raises the question of whether the West was wrong to intervene against Gaddafi. And the answer is that no, we were not.

When the uprising broke out in February against Gaddafi’s dictatorship, it was clear that the latter had to go, just as it is clear today that Assad’s dictatorship in Syria has to go. The only question over Libya then, as over Syria now, was how long-drawn-out, bloody and destructive the transition to a new order would be. Those of us who backed intervention in Libya did not do so in the belief that, if the revolution there were to succeed, Libya would turn overnight into Denmark or Holland. We did so in the belief that the alternative, of allowing Gaddafi a free hand against the rebels, was by far the greater evil. At the time of writing, over 3,500 Syrians have been killed by Assad’s security forces, and we have no way of knowing how many more are going to die, and how much destruction the country will suffer, before the Baathist regime is overthrown and Syria can reach the point where Libya is today. The more protracted, bloody and destructive the Syrian transition is, the more difficult it will be to build a healthy new order in Syria afterward. The ultimate danger is not a Libya or a Syria in which some form of political Islam is strong or in power, but an Afghan or Somali scenario in which the state is destroyed by civil war and collapses, creating a void that organisations such as al-Qaeda can fill. Only slightly less unpalatable is a Yemeni scenario, in which a discredited dictator holds onto power but loses full control of his county, allowing al Qaeda to gain a foothold. Yemen is the principal centre for operations of ‘Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’, despite Ali Abdullah Saleh’s pro-Western orientation.

As Bolshevik and Stalinist tyranny were the child of Tsarist tyranny, so the Islamist elements that have risen to the fore in Libya since Gaddafi’s fall are the children of Gaddafi’s system, which prevented any healthy, pluralistic system from developing and acted as an incubator for radical Islamism. Anyone who thought that Gaddafi’s regime acted as a Hobbesian Leviathan keeping Islamist elements in check was wrong: Gaddafi’s Libya sent more fighters per capita to join the Islamist insurgency in Iraq than any other country, including Saudi Arabia. Despite being in power for forty-two years and wielding absolute control over his country, Gaddafi never got round actually to abolishing polygamy; he merely restricted it. The foreign media has rightly highlighted the disgraceful treatment of David Gerbi, the Libyan Jew who joined the rebellion against Gaddafi, but was then driven out of the country after trying to re-open a synagogue; yet it was Gaddafi who banned the return of Jews to Libya, confiscated all Jewish property in the country and drove out the few Jews who remained, thereby establishing a Libya that was Judenrein. In 1972, in order to pursue his megalomaniacal regional adventures, Gaddafi established the ‘Islamic Legion‘ as an international paramilitary force with an ideology blending Islamism and Arab-supremacist, anti-black racism; it fathered the Janjaweed, with which the Islamist regime in Sudan carried out the Darfur genocide. Given this legacy, it would have been a miracle if a post-Gaddafi Libyan regime were not tainted with Islamism.

We in the West had a humanitarian duty in February and March of this year to protect the Libyan people from massacre at Gaddafi’s hands, and once we had embarked on that intervention, we could only ensure its ultimate success by bringing down the murderous regime. As John McCain said in April after visiting a hospital in Benghazi and seeing the dead and dying victims of the war, ‘It argues for us to help them and to get this thing over with and Gaddafi out.’ But now that we have helped the Libyan people to do what they could not do by themselves, saving their citizens from massacre and freeing them from a dictatorship, it is up to them to do what they have to do for themselves: build a healthy, functioning, pluralistic new order.

Western military intervention has helped maximise the chances of such an order emerging, but it cannot guarantee that it will. We cannot force Libyans or other Arabs to vote for secular parties, much as we would like them to do so. The struggle for a democratic Arab world will be slow and painful; it will be marked by setbacks and defeats, and Arab countries will not always make the choices that we might want. That, after all, is in the nature of democracy. Realistically, democracy in the Arab world will have to accommodate political Islam in some form, but there is a whole range of phenomena that that term embraces, from Turkey’s Justice and Development Party through the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda, and we should not see Armaggedon coming just because of the NTC chairman’s deplorable comments regarding Sharia law and polygamy – we are a long way from an al-Qaeda caliphate in Libya or Tunisia. Expressions of moderation by Mustafa Abdul-Jalil and by Libyan Islamists such as Abdel Hakim Belhadj and Ali al-Sallabi should be taken with a pinch of salt, but even insincere expressions of moderation indicate that Islamists are aware they do not have a blank slate, and that their agenda for the country is far from uncontested.

The battle for the new order in Libya is only just beginning. We cannot predict or determine the outcome, but we should not regret that we helped to give the Libyan people the chance to fight it.

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

The spoilt teenager is fed up with suffering under his parents’ oppressive rules and restrictions while continuing to eat their food and avoid responsibility for himself. He is thinking of walking out on them to make his own way in the world. If he does, he will find it hard going; he may have to sleep rough and work menial jobs for a while. But in the end, he will grow up to be a man. Let us not forget that, however selfish and irresponsible his behaviour may have been, the real blame lies with the parents who brought him up so badly, pampering him while pushing him into a role that merely pandered to their own fancies. It is they, as much as he, who need to be taken down a peg or two.

‘The people’ in Greece (or anywhere else) should not be idolised, as many idealistic lefties do, as a supposedly noble body that could turn the world into Paradise if only it could overthrow its ruling class. Nor should the Greek people be viewed through racist spectacles, as condemned to economic failure by a supposed inherent fecklessness arising from their national character.* Many ordinary Greeks may have contributed to their country’s economic crisis through tax evasion, or by taking ridiculously early retirement, or by receiving salaries for non-jobs in the bureaucracy. Other ordinary Greeks work hard at honest jobs and pay their taxes. Nations are collections of individuals who do not share a collective guilt. Yet the guilty and innocent alike will suffer the effects of the savage austerity measures being forced upon the nation by the EU. Young Greeks who are only now reaching adulthood and who really are not to blame for the errors of their parents’ generation will suffer in particular.

Responsibility for the crisis lies, of course, with the Greek political and economic elites. But it lies also with the political and economic elites of the EU, which subsidised and indulged their Greek clients. For all that Greece undermined European peace and stability over Milosevic, Macedonia, Kosova and Cyprus; for all that it abused the human rights of its ethnic Turkish and Macedonian minorities; for all that its public discourse was infected with virulent anti-Western sentiment, the EU elites continued to give it a blank cheque. Now, to save their own ill-thought-out Euro project and minimise the losses for their own banks and investors, they are forcing austerity measures on Greece; measures that penalise those who are not responsible for the crisis in order to protect the interests of those who are.

There are, of course, economic arguments both for and against a Greek acceptance of the EU bailout package. Yet the question is not merely an economic one, but concerns issues of democracy, justice and the political shape of the future EU.

In Greece as elsewhere in Europe, spending cuts and austerity measures are undoubtedly necessary, yet it is in the interest of ordinary people to fight them tooth and nail – not in order to torpedo them altogether, but to ensure that as much of the burden as possible is shifted to the richer sections of society, and in the case of Greece to the rest of the EU. Here in the UK, Conservatives tell us that cutting taxes for the rich will stimulate growth, while cutting incomes and benefits for the rest of us is necessary to reduce the deficit – a form of reasoning that does not inspire confidence. In Greece, the austerity measures look set to depress the Greek economy further and severely hurt people’s living standards without actually ending the debt crisis. Essentially, Greeks are being asked to sacrifice their own living standards, not for the sake of their own long-term future wellbeing, but for money that will largely go straight through them to their creditors. My sympathies, therefore, are very much with the ordinary Greeks striking and protesting against the austerity measures; I would prefer them to suffer less, and rich tax-dodgers and European banks and investors to suffer more. If the Greek electorate rejects this bailout deal, they may simply receive a better one. Let them fight for a skinhead’s haircut.

On the other hand, the success of any bailout deal will merely prop up the corrupt, unhealthy relationship of dependency between Greece and the EU that created the mess in the first place. There is therefore some reason for thinking that a complete collapse in European efforts to ‘rescue’ Greece, although painful for all concerned in the short term, might prove beneficial in the long run. It would restore to the Greek nation control over, and responsibility for, its own destiny, and necessitate a much-needed radical restructuring of Greek economic and political life. And its repercussions might likewise force a change in direction for the EU, away from misguided moves toward greater integration at the expense of democracy and accountability, toward a looser and more flexible union; one in which member states have more control over and responsibility for their own respective destinies, and are more responsive to the wishes of their citizens.

Four years ago, I warned that the Hellenic tail must not wag the European dog. The consequences for allowing this to happen turned out to be much more serious than even a strong critic of Greek behaviour such as myself could have imagined. Now, however, I am beginning to wonder if a bit of wagging of the European dog by the Hellenic tail might not be such a bad thing.

* For a true pearl of anti-Greek, anti-Balkan chauvinism, here’s the Daily Mail: ‘Greece has always had a siege mentality. It is very different from the rest of the EU. It was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries before it became an independent country in the early 19th century, and psychologically is as much a part of Turkey and the Middle East as it is of Europe. It has few shared traditions with Western Europe.’

Palestine is set to seek formal recognition of its independence at the UN this month. A just and lasting end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must involve full sovereignty, independence and security for both nation-states, Israel and Palestine. Both the Israeli and the Palestinian nations have the right to self-determination and national existence within fair borders, which means an Israel within its recognised, pre-1967 borders and a Palestine comprising the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem – any departure from this should only be on the basis of wholly equitable land swaps. After Israeli independence, Palestinian independence will comprise the second pillar of the future settlement. That is why all of us who support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should support Palestine’s bid for independence. It would strike a blow against the rejectionists on both sides: the Palestinian extremists who still dream of wiping Israel off the map and driving the Jews into the sea, and the Israeli extremists who seek a Greater Israel through the racist, colonialist settlement-building programme in the West Bank.

Some argue that Palestine’s independence should only come with a final, negotiated settlement, and that trying to establish it now would constitute a unilateral move. Yet Israel’s independence has, quite rightly, been established and internationally recognised ‘unilaterally’, in the absence of a comprehensive peace settlement, and there is no reason why Palestine should be treated differently. Borders and the status of refugees can be the subject of negotiations, but a nation’s right to sovereignty and independence is an absolute and cannot be. Others argue that a unilateral Palestinian bid for independence would mark a blow against the negotiated peace process. On the contrary, as things stand, the interminable, moribund peace process is going nowhere, and could only benefit from the establishment of a proper Palestinian partner. For you can channel Palestinian activity and aspirations through the medium of legitimate national statehood, or push them into the arms of Hamas and other extremists; that is the choice faced by the international community. Middle Eastern peace has, in fact, benefited from past ‘unilateral’ steps, such as the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, both of which were taken in the absence of a general settlement. Every time any country ‘unilaterally’ recognises either Israel or Palestine, we are a step closer to normalisation.

The notion that we in the West should oppose Palestinian independence out of solidarity with Israel should also be rejected. Our friendship and solidarity should rightfully go to the state and people of Israel, not to the current Israeli government, whose continued settlement-building activity reveals it to be an obstacle to peace unworthy of any solidarity, and which has further disgraced itself by its support for the Mubarak dictatorship earlier this year. In fact, recognition of Palestinian independence is in the national interest of Israel, since Israel can have no ultimate peace and security without freedom and justice for the Palestinians. Israeli and Palestinian national interests are complementary, not contradictory.

Readers are urged to sign the international petition in favour of Palestinian independence.

Nebojsa Malic, the Srebrenica genocide denier and clown who comments on former-Yugoslav affairs for the website Antiwar.com, earlier this summer wrote the following:

‘Right after the pontiff’s visit, Zagreb announced that it will hold a Gay Pride Parade on June 18. The motto of the event is “Tomorrow belongs to us.” If that sounds familiar, here’s why.’

The link, which Malic provides, is to the famous scene in the 1972 film ‘Cabaret’, set in Germany in the early 1930s, in which a young Nazi stirs a crowd by singing the song ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’. Malic thereby links the organisers of the Croatian gay pride march to the Nazis.

However, as Malic later admitted in the comments below his post, the motto of the Croatian gay pride event was actually ‘I buducnost je nasa’. This translates as ‘And the future is ours’. By no stretch of the imagination does it translate as ‘Tomorrow belongs to us’. The word ‘buducnost’ means ‘future’. The Croatian (or Serbian) word for ‘tomorrow’ is ‘sutra’. The Serbo-Croat for ‘Tomorrow belongs to us’ would be ‘Sutra pripada nama’. In fact, real members of the Croatian far-right who have wanted to use the slogan from Cabaret have had no trouble translating it correctly.

The only possible reason I can think of, to explain how Malic could have made such a mistake, is that even though he is a native speaker of Serbo-Croat, a Bosnian born and bred, he doesn’t actually speak his own language very well.

What other explanation could there possibly be ? It’s an absolute mystery.

Mujo joins the Bosniak Academy of Sciences and Arts, which immediately sends him as a delegate to a UN conference on ethnic stereotypes. Upon arrival at the conference venue, he spies an attractive woman – tall, long blonde hair, large breasts, curvaceous figure, etc. – whom he takes to be a receptionist, so he approaches her to ask where the cafeteria is.

‘I’m not a receptionist’, said the woman, ‘I’m a professor of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and I’m giving a presentation to this conference.’

‘No way ?!’, said Mujo, surprised.

‘Indeed’, said the woman, ‘My presentation is on sexual stereotypes of ethnic groups.’

‘Interesting’, said Mujo, stroking his chin.

‘It certainly is’, said the woman, ‘For example, it is widely believed that the French are the best lovers, whereas in reality, it isn’t the French, but the Greeks. And many people think that black men are the most handsomely endowed, but in fact, it is the Native Americans who are the largest in that department.’

‘But I’m being very impolite,’ said the woman, ‘talking on like this about myself and my work. And you are…?’

‘Geronimo’, said Mujo, prepared; ‘Geronimo Papadopoulos. Pleased to meet you.’