According to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, this is the largest refugee population in the world. By 1994 figures, there are over 3.7 million war refugees in the former Yugoslavia. The war has taken its toll on all participants in the struggle. Of the refugees, 44% are Muslim, 36% are Serbs and 20% are Croatian. The enormous human suffering represented in these cold statistics cannot be calculated.
The very names Bosnia and Serbia are now associated with "ethnic cleansing," mass rape, atrocities and age-old national hatreds.
U.S. involvement, UN troops and NATO forces are depicted as peacekeepers or neutral forces that are carrying out humanitarian or diplomatic missions. When UN officials, NATO generals, and U.S., British, French or German diplomats meet it’s to discuss the newest peace plan. Every measure is always described as being based on deep concern over how to end the fighting.
Is the civil war raging in Yugoslavia a case of spontaneous combustion caused by "ancient ethnic hatreds" burning out of control? Is the U.S. government an innocent bystander? Is the real problem presidential indecision about how to defend a small, oppressed Bosnian Moslem government targeted by the new fascists of the 1990s—the Serbs?
Age-old ethnic hatred among small nationalities didn’t just explode into modern-day barbarism. Rather, war exists in the region as a result of the intervention of outside powers. In this process the U.S. has been neither an innocent bystander nor a neutral party.
A closer examination of the root causes of the incredibly destructive civil war raging in the region yields a completely different picture.
The reality is that the U.S. government lit the fire in the Balkans. At every stage Washington has acted as an arsonist pouring gasoline on the flames.
The greatest responsibility for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the resulting civil war lies with the U.S. government. It was not an accident or an oversight. It was a policy decision.
Each step the U.S. has taken has widened the war and increased divisions in the region.
Origins of the breakup—a U.S. law
A year before the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, on Nov. 5, 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 101-513. This bill was a signed death warrant. One provision in particular was so lethal that even a CIA report described three weeks later in the Nov. 27, 1990, New York Times predicted it would lead to a bloody civil war.
A section of Law 101-513 suddenly and without previous warning cut off all aid, trade, credits and loans from the U.S. to Yugoslavia within six months. It also ordered separate elections in each of the six republics that make up Yugoslavia, requiring State Department approval of election procedures and results before aid to the separate republics would be resumed. The legislation further required U.S. personnel in all international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to enforce this cut-off policy for all credits and loans.
There was one final provision. Only forces that the U.S. State Department defined as "democratic forces" would receive funding. This meant an influx of funds to small right-wing nationalist parties in a financially strangled region suddenly thrown into crisis by the overall funding cut-off.
The impact was, as expected, devastating.
This law threw the Yugoslav federal government into crisis. It was unable to pay the enormous interest on its foreign debt or even to arrange the purchase of raw materials for industry. Credit collapsed and recriminations broke out on all sides.
At the time there was no civil war. No republic had seceded. The U.S. was not engaged in a public dispute with Yugoslavia. The region was not even in the news. World attention was focused on the international coalition the Bush administration was assembling to destroy Iraq—a war that reshaped the Middle East at a cost of half a million Iraqi lives.
What was behind the sweeping legislation directed at Yugoslavia, especially when U.S. policy makers themselves predicted that the sudden unraveling of the region would lead to civil war?
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. big business was embarking on an aggressive march to reshape all of Europe. Nonaligned Yugoslavia was no longer needed as a buffer state between NATOand the Warsaw Pact. A strong, united Europe was hardly desirable. Washington policy makers considered both to be relics of the Cold War.
Control of the purse strings
This one piece of legislation—Law 101-513—demonstrates the U.S. government’s enormous power. It was one part of annual legislation that defines in detail policies to be pursued in every region of the globe. The Foreign Operations Act implements U.S. corporate control through major funding to international financial institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank, Asian Development Fund, the African Development Fund, and through direct assistance to individual countries.
The deadly restrictions on Yugoslavia took a mere 23 lines. Compare this to the more than nine pages that detail sanctions to be imposed on Iraq. As of January 1995, the U.S.-UN sanctions on Iraq had killed more than half a million children. This projection is from Thomas Ekfal, the United Nations Children’s Fund representative in Baghdad. (New York Newsday, Dec. 19, 1994)
The 1990 foreign appropriations law also prescribed various forms of economic strangulation for several other countries deemed enemies, including Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Korea (DPRK) and Vietnam. On the other hand countries moving hastily toward a capitalist market economy in 1990, such as Poland, were to receive special funding.
In all the expressions of concern and sympathy for refugees and displaced people in countries all over the globe, but especially in the former Yugoslavia, no U.S. official ever mentions the terrible suffering caused by U.S. economic strangulation.
Of course, financial strings were hardly new to Yugoslavia in 1990. Yugoslavia had become utterly dependent on loans from Western banks. The increasingly onerous conditions had dislocated the economy. A year earlier, the price of continued U.S. loans and credits was a brutal austerity program that devalued the currency, froze wages, cut subsidies, closed many state industries deemed unprofitable for capitalist investors and increased unemployment to 20 percent. The result was strikes, walkouts, a sharp increase in political and economic tension, and, above all, an upsurge in national antagonisms on all sides.
Once the U.S. acted so decisively toward Yugoslavia in 1990, the European powers were hardly willing to be bystanders to the enforced break-up of a country in their own backyard. The U.S. Foreign Appropriations Bill sent a clear message to the European powers that Yugoslavia and the whole Balkan region of Europe were again up for grabs. On their own they might never have dared to act. Now they dared not be out of the action.
Europoean Intervention
By February 1991 the Council of Europe followed the U.S. measure with its own political demands and explicit economic intervention in the internal affairs of the Yugoslav Federation. Their demand was similar: that Yugoslavia hold multi-party elections or face economic blockade.
Right-wing and fascist organizations not seen in 45 years—since the defeat of the Nazi occupation by the anti-fascist partisan movement—were suddenly revived and began receiving covert support. These fascist organizations had been maintained in exile in the U.S., Canada, Germany and Austria. Now they became the main conduit for funds and arms.
By March 1991, Croatian fascists were organizing attacks and demonstrations calling for the overturn of the socialist federation and the expulsion of all Serbs from Croatia.
On May 5, 1991, the date of the six-month deadline imposed by U.S. Foreign Operations Law 101-513, Croatian separatists staged violent demonstrations and besieged a military base in Gospic. The Yugoslav Federal Government, under attack, ordered the army to intervene. The civil war had begun. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on June 25, 1991.
In Croatia the right-wing party, the Ustashi, came to power using fascist symbols and slogans from the era of Nazi occupation. Its program guaranteed a return to capitalist property relations and denied citizenship, jobs, pensions, passports or land ownership to all other nationalities, but especially targeted the large Serbian minority. In the face of armed expropriations and mass expulsions, the Serbs in Croatia began to arm themselves. The experience of World War II—when almost a million people, primarily Serbs, but also Jews, Romani and tens of thousands of others died in Ustashi death camps—fueled the mobilization.
As the largest nationality and the one that opposed the breakup of the Yugoslav Federation, the Serbs became the target and the excuse for Western intervention. History was turned on its head as the media portrayed the Serbs as fascists. In 1991, right-wing nationalist parties swept the elections in Slovenia and Croatia. However, in Serbia and in Montenegro the mass mood was overwhelmingly for the federation and also against further privatization or other capitalist inroads. This was an unexpected resistance to the political collapse sweeping Eastern Europe at the time.
The tactic of targeting the Serbs with UN resolutions, imposing brutal sanctions, and freezing all credit and trade also serves as a veiled threat against Russia. The breakup and dismemberment of the Soviet Union has been encouraged by the same forces that encouraged the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Reunited Germany moved aggressively into the region to consolidate its position. It was the first to openly grant diplomatic recognition to the break-away republics.
The U.S. State Department’s position after Croatia and Slovenia seceded was official support for a continued federation. But this flew in the face of the demands and the process set in motion by the U.S. Foreign Operations Law passed in 1990 before the Yugoslav civil war began.
Rewriting history
The rationale behind Western intervention in Yugoslavia is based on rewriting history.
Every debate about drawing and redrawing the map of Bosnia assumes the right of the Western powers as outside "neutral" forces to carve up and decide the fate of the region in the interests of "peace." The implied justification is that the small, barbaric nations of the Balkans are so torn by ethnic hatred that they are incapable of deciding anything themselves.
There is a bloody history in the Balkans—but it’s not the one that’s being connected to the present-day struggle. It’s much more to the point. That’s the history of the major imperialist powers battling for control and domination of this strategic crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.
The history of modern Europe sometimes seems to revolve around carving and recarving the Balkans. It is a history of continually redrawing borders and defining regions of influence, of arming mercenary bands and holding international conferences in Paris, in Berlin, in London and at the Hague to confer about which power would be in control of what region. All this was always without any consultation with the many small nationalities whose fate hung in the balance.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Turkey, Czarist Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Italy have all considered the Balkans their rightful "sphere of influence." World War I began in Sarajevo. Although the competition and rivalry for markets extended globally—far beyond the Balkans—this small region has always been a tinderbox for the big powers.
In World War II the resistance movement to Nazi German occupation led by Marshal Tito and the League of Yugoslav Communists united the small nations of the Balkans into an explosive political force. From scattered bands of guerrillas it grew into the largest partisan movement in Europe, more than a million strong. Forty-three German divisions could not destroy the movement. This experience shaped Yugoslavia’s history and laid the basis for the socialist federation. It remains a powerful heritage today.
Today, while the capitalist media speak endlessly of "ancient ethnic hatreds," this revolutionary partisan movement and the long tradition of struggles to unite the South Slav peoples against outside domination is never mentioned. For 45 years the Yugoslav Federation—six republics and two autonomous regions—was able to hold the Western powers at bay. It was able to develop industry in an impoverished, underdeveloped area and raise the standard of living. The fact that the IMF and U.S. banks were able to again strangle and dismember it does not negate its historical accomplishment.
Casting the Serbs as fascists
How did the Serbs come to be viewed as fascists in this developing conflict? This characterization has now become an accepted fact, an issue beyond debate. It makes U.S. motives seem unimpeachable and on the side of good against evil.
An April 1993 interview by Jacques Merlino, associate director of French TV 2, with James Harff, director of Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs, a Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm, explains the role of the corporate media in shaping a political issue.
Harff bragged of his services to his clients, the Republic of Croatia, the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the parliamentary opposition in Kosovo, an autonomous region of Serbia. Merlino described how Harff uses a file of several hundred journalists, politicians, representatives of humanitarian associations, and academics to create public opinion. Harff explained: "Speed is vital ... it is the first assertion that really counts. All denials are entirely ineffective."
In the interview, Merlino asked Harff what his proudest public relations endeavor was. Harff responded:
"To have managed to put Jewish opinion on our side. This was a sensitive matter, as the dossier was dangerous looked at from this angle. President Tudjman was very careless in his book, ‘Wastelands of Historical Reality.’ Reading his writings one could accuse him of anti-Semitism. [Tudjman claimed the Holocaust never happened—S.F.] In Bosnia the situation was no better: President Izetbegovic strongly supported the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state in his book, ‘The Islamic Declaration.’
"Besides, the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by real and cruel anti-Semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps, so there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to be hostile toward the Croats and the Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this attitude and we succeeded masterfully.
"At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations—the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, The American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress. In August, we suggested that they publish an advertisement in the New York Times and organize demonstrations outside the United Nations.
"That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia. The great majority of Americans were probably asking themselves in which African country Bosnia was situated.
"By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc., which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. No one could go against it without being accused of revisionism. We really batted a thousand in full."
Merlino: "But between 2 and 5 Aug. 1992 when you did this you had no proof that what you said was true. All you had were two Newsday articles."
Harff: "Our work is not to verify information. We are not equipped for that. Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favorable to us, to aim at judiciously chosen targets. We did not confirm the existence of death camps in Bosnia, we just made it widely known that Newsday affirmed it. ... We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to moralize."
The rape charge
One charge against the Serbs has aroused the anger and shaped the view of millions of people who previously had little interest or involvement in the Balkans. The charge is rape—rape as a systematic weapon of war, a planned deliberate strategy. The media asserts that rapes were a conscious policy and the responsibility of the Bos nian Serb leadership.
Between the fall of 1992 and spring of 1993 sensational news reports claimed that at least 20,000 and up to 100,000 Muslim women were raped by units of the Bosnian Serb Army. This crystallized the view that the Serbs were the aggressors and the Muslims the victims.
Women are the first victims in every war. Rape and the degrading abuse of women are all too often carried out as a stamp of conquest by invading armies imbued with patriarchal possessive attitudes. But the charge of rape has many times been consciously used as an essential prop of war propaganda. The purported defense of women is used to mobilize armies and galvanize blind hatred.
The sensational charges of rape were used to a cynical extent by the major corporate media, especially in the U.S., with no attempt to examine the sources. The foreign minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silajdzic, first raised the charge at peace talks in Geneva that 30,000 women and girls had been raped. Ms. magazine ran a cover story that accused Bosnian Serb forces of raping for the purpose of producing pornographic films. No such films were ever found and the charges were not supported by the findings of Helsinki Watch or Human Rights Watch.
In January 1993 the Warburton Report, authorized by the European Community, estimated 20,000 Muslim women had been raped as part of a Serb strategy of conquest. This report was widely cited as an independent, authoritative source. No coverage was given to a dissenting member of the investigative team, Simone Veil, a former French minister and president of the European Parliament. She revealed that the estimate of 20,000 victims was based on actual interviews with only four victims—two women and two men.
According to the New York Times of Oct. 19, 1993, the Croatian Ministry of Health in Zagreb was the main single source upon which the Warburton Report based its figure of 20,000.
The Jan. 4, 1993, issue of Newsweek reported that up to 50,000 Muslim women had been raped in Bosnia. Tom Post, a contributor to the article, explained that the estimate of 50,000 rapes was based on interviews with 28 women.
This estimate was the result of an extrapolation—multiplying each charge of rape by a certain factor because historically rape has been and continues to be an under-reported crime.
French television reporter Jerome Bony explained the problem. "When I was 50 kilometers from Tuxla, I was told: `Go to the Tuxla high school grounds. There are 4,000 raped women.’ At 20 kilometers this figure dropped to 400. At 10 kilometers only 40 were left. Once at the site, I found only four women willing to testify."
The Jan. 15, 1993, New York Times, carried a photo story with the caption: "A two-month-old baby girl born to a teen-age Muslim woman after she was raped in a Serbian detention camp." USA Today of Jan. 13, 1993, told the story of a five-month-old baby, presumably the product of systematic Serbian rape. At that time, the war was not yet nine months old.
Women’s organizations understandably outraged by these lurid reports demanded that the U.S. and the European powers take action. However, many of these same women ought to be aware that U.S. troops do not protect women. In every U.S. military operation an entire sex industry is created and tens of thousands of women are forced into sexual slavery and prostitution. Consider Even U.S. women in the military experience rape and sexual abuse, then cover-ups and denial, as the Tailhook scandal so graphically demonstrated.
Control through division in Bosnia
The divisive U.S. role in Bosnia, the most multi-ethnic of the regions, raises other questions. Does the U.S. seek, through the breakup of Yugoslavia, not only to position itself in the region but to advance a more complex, hidden agenda? Certainly U.S. conduct has involved many maneuvers that have prolonged the war and increased the rivalry among Britain, France and Germany. Turkey, Greece and Italy have also historically been involved in the region and are again maneuvering.
On March 18, 1992, a negotiated agreement for a unified state brokered by the European Community was reached in Lisbon among the Bosnian Muslim, Croatian and Serb forces. This agreement of all three parties would have prevented the disastrous civil war that began that same year. It would have saved the hundreds of thousands of refugees whose lives have been destroyed by war.
Washington sabotaged this original agreement by telling the Bos nian regime of Alija Izetbegovic that it could get much more—possibly domination of the whole region—with U.S. backing. The U.S. role in destroying this carefully crafted agreement is acknowledged by all sides. Even the June 17, 1993, New York Times described Washington’s role. The U.S. government officially encouraged Izetbegovic, the head of the right-wing Party for Democratic Action, to unilaterally declare a sovereign state under his presidency.
Muslim groups in two separate areas of Bosnia have challenged the government led by Alija Izetbegovic. They dispute Izetbegovic’s claim that he represents the interests of the Muslim community. They want a policy of cooperation and trade with the other nationalities of the region. Both groups have condemned Izetbegovic for right-wing nationalist policies and reliance on U.S. military aid.
The elected Bosnian Muslim government in the city of Tuzla, one of the wealthiest industrial centers of old Yugoslavia, claims that the U.S.-supervised rewrite of the Bosnian constitution gave power only to the most extreme right-wing nationalist forces of Izetbegovic’s Party for Democratic Action and neo-fascist Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union. Other political forces even among Muslims were excluded.
A Bosnian Muslim group in the northwest Bihac area led by Fikret Adbic declared its autonomy from the U.S.-backed government based in Sarajevo. In retaliation, the Izetbegovic government launched a military attack against these Muslim forces that wanted peace with their Serbian and Croatian neighbors. This attack on an elected Moslem Bosnian government was organized by the U.S. As was reported in November 1994 in Britain in such newspapers as the Guardian, the Observer and the Independent as well as newspapers in France and Germany, six U.S. generals took part in planning the offensive in June 1994. The attack violated the cease-fire and a UN-declared safe area.
The Izetbegovic government’s U.S.-backed offensive was at first successful in the Bihac region. But the Bosnian Serbs, in alliance with Serbs in Croatia and Bosnian Moslem forces led by Fikret Adbic, reorganized and began a strong push back. U.S. bombers under NATO command came to Izetbegovic’s defense.
In the U.S. media, neither the U.S. role in planning the offensive nor the fact that the U.S.-backed forces were the ones to violate the cease-fire was examined. The Bosnian Muslim forces opposing the Izetbegovic government based in Sarajevo have received only scant mention as "renegade forces."
Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Charles G. Boyd, the deputy commander in chief of the U.S. European Command from 1992 to 1995, wrote in the September/October 1995 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine that Adbic’s government in Bihac was "one of the few examples of successful multi-ethnic cooperation in the Balkans." Further, Boyd writes, "Abdic, a powerful local businessman, was a member of the Bosnian collective presidency. He outpolled Izetbegovic in national elections and had been expelled from the government when Sarajevo [Izetbegovic’s headquarters] rejected an internationally brokered peace agreement."
U.S. backing of Izetbegovic’s attack on other Bosnian Muslim forces exposes just how cynically the Pentagon is using right-wing Muslim forces in order to prolong and widen the war. Those who call on the Pentagon to come to the defense of Muslim people should recall the U.S. role in the Middle East. The U.S. government has demonized Muslim people and made war on the people of Palestine, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Somalia. Muslim people in Bosnia will be the greatest losers in this war-torn region as a result of the alliance of the narrow, right-wing Izetbegovic grouping and the Pentagon.
The CIA role in Bosnia
Another view of U.S. aims and U.S. involvement develops from reading the European press.
Here are some headlines from the British press:
"CIA agents training Bosnian army," The Guardian (Nov. 17, 1994)
"America’s secret Bosnia agenda," The Observer (Nov. 20, 1994)
"How the CIA helps Bosnia fight back," The European (Nov. 25, 1994)
"Allies facing split over Bosnia," The Independent (Nov. 12, 1994) "Europe braces for more rows with U.S.," The Guardian (Nov.12, 1994)
These few headlines expose both the CIA role in Bosnia and the depth of the growing dispute in NATO. The media in France, Germany and Italy have carried similar exposés of large-scale CIA involvement in the widening war in Bosnia.
Coverage has included information on tactical operations, sharing satellite information and controlling local air traffic. Units of both
the Croatian and Bosnian armies have reportedly been trained within the region and in the U.S. U.S.-based forces have provided assistance in building airstrips and organizing large weapons shipments through Croatia to the Bosnian forces.
Also reported was the meeting of six U.S. generals with the leaders of the Bosnian army to plan the military offensive that broke the nine-month cease-fire in Bosnia and opened the fighting in the UN-declared "safe zone" of Bihac. All of this immediately raises the question, how long has the CIA been involved? What is its purpose? The budget of the CIA is today three times the budget of the U.S. State Department.
The debate in the European press—complete with Pentagon denials and "clarification"—has received scant coverage in the U.S. media. This avoidance of an issue receiving wide coverage in Britain and France raises further questions of why the major U.S. media are aiding and abetting this operation and why the European media are exposing this information.
The exposés follow months of increasingly sharp criticisms and veiled charges by UN officials that the U.S. has sabotaged each agreement, peace plan and even the cease-fires.
It is clear that the civil war in Yugoslavia has broken the growing unity of the European powers. They are at each other’s throats over how to proceed. The struggle between the use of UN peacekeepers versus NATO bombing reflects these divisions.
UN leaks information on U.S. role
Occasionally the debate makes it into the back pages of U.S. newspapers. On April 30, 1994, the Washington Post cited two senior UN officials—a general and a civilian—who blame the U.S. "for the continuation of the war in Bosnia because it has given the Muslim-led Bosnian government the false impression that Washington’s military support was on the way."
The article explained that the officials interviewed were two of the highest ranking UN representatives in Bosnia. Yet they feared using their names lest they be expelled from Bosnia. However, both claimed that U.S. moral and financial support of the Izetbegovic regime was prolonging the war.
The officials accused the U.S. of leading on Izetbegovic’s forces by promising full-scale NATO intervention on his side. U.S. Gen. John Shalikashvili, chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had gone to Sarajevo to meet with Bosnian military leaders. It was a powerful incentive to keep fighting.
That was reinforced when, in an impassioned speech at the opening of the new U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright said, "Your future and America’s future are inseparable."
On June 24, 1994, the New York Times described the new supplies, including heavy weapons, flooding into Bosnia since the U.S. organized the Croatian-Bosnian alliance.
Each "peace proposal" or map defining the areas of Moslem or Serb control divides the area into dependent, unsustainable enclaves needing constant resupply, which would require a military presence for many years. Industrial centers and the major roads in this mountainous region are partitioned so the Bosnian government based in Sarajevo controls them. The Bosnian Serbs have been allocated the poorest rural and mountainous regions with no connecting roads or corridors between them. The Bosnian Serbs cannot survive under these plans. Their situation is untenable. They are driven to resist.
Use of war propaganda
The siege of Gorazde in the spring of 1994 is one of the clearest examples of the U.S. propaganda barrage to justify and demand measures that would widen the war and give the U.S. military a blank check. Nightly news broadcasts about Gorazde focused on the Serbian bombing of a hospital and claimed casualties in the thousands. Then, after days of gory stories in the media and heavy U.S. pressure, U.S. planes flying under NATO auspices bombed Serb positions. A heated UN Security Council debate and vote, however, blocked the full-scale NATO air strikes that the U.S. was demanding. After the siege was lifted, the commander of UN troops in Bosnia, British Army Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, told visiting U.S. Rep. John P. Murtha, chair of the House Appropriations Committee subcommittee on defense, that reports of damage and casualties were greatly exaggerated. The Bosnian casualties around Gorazde "were closer to 200 than 2,000." The media had wildly exaggerated casualties in order to promote a war climate and justify NATO intervention.
The UN officials found that the hospital in Gorazde, which had been repeatedly described as all but destroyed by the Serbs, basically needed a broom to clear up the rubbish. It was still functioning. The hospital had been damaged because the Izetbegovic government forces had established their military headquarters next to the hospital.
After the siege ended, a report in the April 24, 1994, New York Times referred to a giant munitions factory in Gorazde under Bosnian Muslim control. The Pabjeda Munitions Factory includes "a honeycomb of underground tunnels and storage bunkers." There were "enough explosives in the factory to flatten a city." Throughout the siege the public has been bombarded with countless stories on the plight of unarmed Bosnian Muslim forces versus a well-armed Bosnian Serb army.
World sympathy for the government of Izetbegovic has been built mainly through horror stories of brutal Serbian attacks on unarmed civilians in Sarajevo. One of the most gruesome was an attack on an open-air market that left 68 people dead on Feb. 5, 1994. As the rift between the U.S. forces and the British and French forces under UN flag grows more heated, these widely publicized "Serb atrocities" are being disputed. A UN analysis of the crater showed that the Izetbegovic regime’s forces were responsible for the explosion at the market. (Reuters, Feb. 18, 1994)Later, the UN publicly released a crater analysis of another shell that exploded, wounding a child, as proof that Izetbegovic’s Bosnian army had fired on its own civilians to gain sympathy. (New York Times Nov. 10, 1994)
Just a few weeks earlier U.S. war propaganda had reached new depths with gory descriptions of carnage, mass rapes, disembowelment, even massacres of children when the Bosnian government pulled out of Srebrenica. However, a UN investigative team reported on July 24, 1995, that they could not find a single eyewitness to any atrocity.
Hubert Wieland, personal representative of the UN high commission for human rights, traveled with a team of investigators to Srebrenica and to Tuzla, the Bosnian city to which almost all the refugees were taken. Although his team spoke with scores of Muslims at the main refugee camp and at other collection centers, no eyewitness could be found.
U.S. support for Croatian invasion of Krajina
In contrast to the storm of outrage in the media when the Serbs moved into the town of Srebrenica, there was no such coverage two weeks later when on Aug. 3, 1995, in a blitzkrieg attack, Croatian forces with U.S. backing launched the biggest and the bloodiest offensive in four years of civil war.
Within a week 200,000 new refugees were fleeing the Croatian army. However, there was no coverage of these old people being driven from their homes or the chaos of thousands fleeing the bombing of their villages. There was no sympathy and there was no talk of sanctions on Croatia. Secretary of State Warren Christopher declared that the crushing military offensive was "to our advantage."
Pentagon support amounted to far more than just a nod of approval. According to the London Independent of Aug. 6, 1995, "The re-arming and training of Croatian Forces in preparation for the present offensive are part of a classic CIA operation: probably the most ambitious operation of its kind since the end of the Vietnam war."
The London Times of Aug. 5 reported that "the rearming of Croatia remains one of the biggest untold stories of the Yugoslav war. American officials strenuously deny any involvement in this operation but the region is teeming with former generals who unconventionally chose the Balkans, rather than Florida, for their well-earned retirement."
"Safe areas" launching pads for U.S. war
On a daily basis news coverage in the U.S. refers to Serb violations of UN-declared "safe areas," six towns held by the Bosnian government and surrounded by Serb-held territory. This term reinforces the popular misconception that the "safe areas" are neutral, demilitarized, civilian havens removed from the civil war. U.S. military support has made this term a cynical fraud.
The excuse for every NATO bombing of the Bosnian Serb forces has been an alleged Serb attack on a "safe area." But it is U.S. military intervention that has made these "safe areas" unsafe. The "safe areas" are really staging areas for U.S.-backed Bosnian army offensives against the Bosnian Serb forces.
UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali confirmed this in a report to the UN Security Council on May 30, 1995 (UN Document S/1995/444):
"In recent months [the U.S.-backed Bosnian] government forces have considerably increased their military activity in and around most safe areas, and many of them, including Sarajevo, Tuzla and Bihac, have been incorporated into the broader military campaign of the [Bosnian] government’s side.
"The headquarters and the logistics installations of the Fifth Corps of the [Bosnian] government army are located in the town of Bihac and those of the Second Corps in the town of Tuzla.
"The government also maintains a substantial number of troops in Srebrenica (in this case a violation of a demilitarization agreement),
Gorazde and Zepa, while Sarajevo is the location of the General Command of the government army and other military installations. There is also an ammunition factory in Gorazde.
"The Bosnian Serb forces’ reaction to offensives launched by the [U.S.-backed Bosnian] government army from safe areas have generally been to respond against military targets within those areas."
The pretext for NATO bombs
Still another explosion on Aug. 28, 1995, at a small enclosed marketplace in Sarajevo killed 37 people. It became the U.S. pretext for the most massive military action in Europe since World War II. More than 4,000 U.S.-NATO military air sorties were carried out.
New York Times Washington correspondent David Binder reported in the Oct. 2, 1995, issue of The Nation magazine that the explosion came the day after Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke promised more active NATO air strikes. Only an excuse was needed. Binder quotes four different military sources disputing the immediate UN report that blamed the Bosnian Serbs for the explosion.
Russian artillery officer Col. Andrei Demurenko went on television in Sarajevo to denounce the UN report on the explosion as a falsification. He announced that the probability of hitting a street less than 30 feet wide from Serb artillery positions one to two miles away was "one in one million."
A Canadian specialist with extensive service in Bosnia told Binder that the fuse of the mortar shell recovered from the marketplace crater "had not come from a mortar tube at all."
Two unidentified U.S. administration officials in Sarajevo explained to Binder that based on the trajectory, the shallowness of the crater, and the absence of any high-pitched distinct whistle, the shell was either fired from a very close range or dropped from a nearby roof into the crowd.
Although Binder is a regular correspondent for the New York Times, he had to go to The Nation with this story.
The U.S. media’s outrage over the marketplace explosion in Sarajevo stands in sharp contrast to the great approval for the U.S. launch of 13 Tomahawk cruise missiles targeting the city of Banja Luka. Banja Luka is a city behind the Bosnian Serb lines. It is the second largest city in Bosnia—and the city with the most refugees of all of the former Yugoslavia. In the U.S.-NATO attack many civilians were killed and one hospital was bombed.
‘End the arms embargo’ means widen the war
The demand to "end the arms embargo" is raised as a simple slogan of the Bosnian government’s right to defend itself. Like the term "safe areas" the reality is far different.
"End the arms embargo" means to legitimize tens of thousands of U.S. troops technically training the Bosnian army in advanced military equipment, securing airports and roads for landing and moving heavy equipment. It further involves U.S. surveillance flights and ground cover in a mountainous region where a dependent, isolated minority government currently controls small enclaves. This would greatly expand Pentagon involvement beyond the CIA training and supply level of today and the NATO air cover of more than 40,000 sorties in the past three years.
There’s a struggle within the summits of U.S. power between those who want to rely on U.S./NATO bombing missions to destroy the Bosnian Serb forces and those who feel the only way to decisively control and reshape the region is through U.S. ground troops and an end to the arms embargo. Both sides of the debate seek to expand and widen the war. Both sides of the debate assert the right of U.S. finance capital to impose its solution.
War is called peace
The newly formed Action Council for Peace in the Balkans best reflects the cynical double-speak where peace means war. It is composed of the bipartisan forces of U.S. militarism that are framing the debate. Members of the Executive Council include Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor under Carter; Frank Carlucci, a national security advisor and secretary of defense under Reagan; Hodding Carter, a state department spokesperson under Carter; Max Kampelman, who headed Reagan’s nuclear arms team; and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s United Nations ambassador.
On July 12, 1995, this Council for Peace in the Balkans issued a call for "an end to the arms embargo against Bosnia, the withdrawal of the UN forces from Bosnia and an effective NATO air campaign." This "peaceful" group asserts that the "air campaign" should be "strategic and sustained," not "pinprick strikes." The statement concludes, "A failure to act will be disastrous for the people of Bosnia, for the U.S., and for our vital interests in Europe."
Inter-imperialist rivalry CIA and Pentagon involvement in the civil war in the Balkans has positioned the U.S. militarily in a strategic region. At the same time
it has frayed the developing unity among its European imperialist rivals. These U.S. rivals bear the increasing burden of hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees, thousands of ground troops in position and the bitter acrimony of competing interests.
What appears to be a bureaucratic dispute between NATO and UN officials is in reality a struggle between the imperialist ruling class of the U.S. and its European rivals, who fear being drawn into a protracted war. Each defends its right to carve up this strategic region in accordance with its own interests. But the Europeans have troops on the ground. If their forces take casualties while the U.S. calls the shots, opposition at home will rise.
There seems to be a great deal of information on close German-U.S. collaboration at the expense of British and French interests. But even this may change. The fact that the U.S. arms and trains the Croatian troops may be a sign that Washington is asserting itself in Croatia also.
The debate on U.S.-controlled NATO forces helping to evacuate UN "peacekeepers" reflects an expanding effort to make the U.S. the only power deciding the fate of the Balkans. Both France’s and Britain’s determination to be bigger powers in Europe now that the Cold War is over is reflected in their large commitment of troops under the UN flag throughout Bosnia.
But the Pentagon has been able to totally frustrate the British and French troop placements by encouraging the Bosnian government, which is totally dependent on the U.S., to sabotage any agreements.
Washington’s November 1994 decision to unilaterally end support for the UN Security Council arms embargo was the most open statement to date that it would pursue its own agenda in Bosnia at the expense of the Europeans. This decision is also at the expense of the hundreds of thousands of uprooted and displaced people caught in the crossfire.
Sanctions: Economic domination of the region
The UN Security Council voted to impose a sanctions blockade on the remains of the Yugoslav Federation (Serbia and Montenegro) on May 30, 1992.
The UN Security Council vote was rushed through to pre-empt a UN report published two days later saying that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was in full compliance with the UN demands that all Yugoslav Federal Army troops be withdrawn from Bosnia.
These sanctions strangling all economic life were imposed only on the Serbs, in spite of the fact that the World Court in the Hague ruled that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) was not the aggressor in the conflict in Bosnia.
UN sanctions have not been imposed on Washington’s client states in the region, the Croatian and Bosnian governments. The UN Security Council did not even discuss imposing sanctions on the Croatian government in response to its August 1995 massive attack on the Krajina section of Croatia and its expulsion or "ethnic cleansing" of over 200,000 Serbs there.
Although the stated aim of sanctions is to end arms shipments from Serbia to the Serbs in Bosnia, U.S. and Western powers used the opportunity of enforcing the sanctions to gain control of all the roads, waterways and communications in this strategic part of Europe. All approaches to seaports and airports are sealed off.
The Pentagon now controls all navigation on the mighty Danube River—major thoroughfare of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. All shipping is restricted. The Danube is more important for Europe than the Mississippi River is for commerce in the U.S. All countries of the Danube Basin—not only Serbia but Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia—thus effectively come under the blockade.
The Western capitalist powers are the only ones that stand to benefit from the resulting economic dislocation in a number of formerly socialist countries that are now forcibly going through privatization of their major industries and resources. Entire industrial complexes, no longer able to be competitive in the world market or even to receive raw material for production or ship their goods, can literally be bought for a song by multinational corporations.
Although medical and humanitarian goods are supposedly exempted, the sanctions disrupt the entire supply system—its markets, foreign trade, communications and transport. Funds, bank accounts and credit are frozen. Yugoslavia is a country with limited resources that is forced to cope with a flood of almost 2 million refugees displaced from Croatia and Bosnia. More than 40% of the refugees are under 18 years old. Basic medicines, food, fuel for cooking, heating and running industries and sanitation are at crisis levels.
All the imperialist powers, but particularly the U.S., recognize that Yugoslavia sets precedents for intervention in the former republics of the Soviet Union. In early December 1994, the summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe met. Its first military action was to authorize a "peacekeeping mission" to Nagorno-Karabakh, the enclave disputed by Armenia and Azerbaijan. The stated purpose of the forces going into Nagorno-Karabakh is to prevent a Bosnia-like situation. Their track record is not encouraging.
Ownership and control of the newly privatized industries and natural resources is at stake. In a war-torn region, all of this can be bought for a song. Who will control the markets, the rich resources, the rebuilding and the new investments? Military control of the situation will be decisive. Diplomacy is only a cover for the military struggle.
The Pentagon plan
The U.S. is determined to be the dominant power in the Balkans. This thinking is best reflected in an extraordinary 46-page Pentagon document excerpted by the New York Times on March 8, 1992. The document, leaked by Pentagon officials, asserts the need for complete U.S. world domination in both political and military terms and threatens other countries that even aspire to a greater role. The public threats seem to be aimed at the European powers and Japan. Why else would the document be released with no disavowal by the Pentagon?
This Pentagon policy document states: "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. ... First, the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.
"We must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
The document goes on to specifically address Europe. "It is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary instrument of Western defense and security.... We must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO."
No senior U.S. official has ever denounced or renounced this document. When President George Bush was asked directly about the document, he said that while he hadn’t read the report, "We are the leaders and we must continue to lead."
Operation Balkan Storm
Just how little U.S. involvement has to do with "aiding poor Bosnia" is best seen in an opinion piece in the Nov. 29, 1992, New York Times by retired Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael J. Dugan entitled "Operation Balkan Storm: Here’s a Plan." Dugan is best remembered for an unusually candid interview before the Gulf War where he laid out very precise plans for the destruction of Iraq. He was relieved of his command for being too frank in describing the Pentagon’s war plans at a time when the U.S. was claiming to the UN that it wanted to impose sanctions on Iraq to pursue a diplomatic solution. However, four months later the war unfolded almost exactly as Dugan had described.
"A win in the Balkans would establish U.S. leadership in the post-Cold War world in a way that Operation Desert Storm never could," Dugan crowed. He laid out a scenario of coalition building, if possible, with Britain, France and Italy on an ad-hoc basis since the UN Security Council is deadlocked on the use of force by NATO. He described arming the pro-U.S. Bosnian forces such as those around Izetbegovic and use of "unconventional" operations in Bosnia to suspend UN humanitarian operations. Then, he said, massive air power should be used against Serbs in Bosnia and Serbia. This Air Force general likes to brag about U.S. death technology. Dugan suggested using aircraft carriers, U.S. F-15s, F-16s, F-18s and F-111s, Jstars and Tomahawk missiles to destroy Serbia’s electricity grid, refineries, storage facilities and communications. "But the U.S. costs in blood and treasure would be modest compared with that of Bosnian trauma."
Whether it was the original U.S. legislation of November 1990, or the recognition of an independent Bosnia under a right-wing U.S.-backed government rather than the compromise government acceptable to all sides in March 1992, or the U.S.-brokered Croatian-Muslim Federation of March 1994—U.S. intervention at each stage in the growing conflict in the Balkans has fanned the flames of war.
Whether it is the early 1993 Vance-Owen plan to cantonize Bosnia into tiny enclaves or the Vance-Stoltenberg Plan of late 1993 for a three-way partition of Bosnia—each proposal is an assertion of U.S. determination to dominate the region and keep its imperialist rivals off guard.
Despite the many grim warnings of difficult terrain and low cloud cover, the Clinton administration has offered to send 25,000 troops as a "peacekeeping" force if a U.S. plan presented in late August 1995 is imposed on the people of the region. Massive use of air power began in September 1995. Once committed, more and more troops will be required in a war that can quickly escalate. There is a heated debate today in ruling military, corporate and government circles. But it is not about how to negotiate peace. It is about how to insure U.S. domination of a strategic region. The only solution—U.S. out
The analogy to U.S. CIA advisers in Vietnam followed by 25,000 troops to prop up the U.S. puppet Ngo Dinh Diem comes to mind all too quickly.
The war that is unfolding will not be fought in a Hollywood fantasy in front of computer screens, as the rank-and-file soldiers of other U.S. wars know so well. The trauma for millions of refugees from Southeast Asia continues to this day. It will cost much more in "blood and treasure" than General Dugan so callously estimates. A further exposé of U.S. war plans and involvement in the Balkans is desperately needed in order to open a debate and build a powerful opposition to the latest espisode in the Pentagon’s plans for world domination.
Concerned people of every political persuasion when confronted with the gruesome images of the war ask, "Doesn’t the U.S. government have a responsibility to do something to stop the bloodshed?" Or the question is posed, "How can the U.S. bring peace?"
The U.S. economy today is completely dependent on and intertwined with militarism. U.S. military spending is larger than the
military budgets of all the routher countries of the world combined. U.S. corporations are totally dependent on the profits of war and militarism. It literally keeps this system that is based on profits afloat. More than $250 billion a year is spent on militarism. This is the only area of the federal budget not facing drastic cuts.
The implications of greater and greater military involvement are not discussed with working and poor people here in the U.S. Yet the decisions will impact on the lives of every one in this country, in the form of further cutbacks in desperately needed social services.
All the many nationalities of the former Yugoslavia have shown from past experience that they are capable of resolving their differences. They lived together in peace and harmony for 45 years under a socialist federation. Although more than 1 million people died and millions were uprooted during World War II, driving out the imperialist invaders became a unifying force that galvanized all the many divided nationalities.
U.S. involvement in the Balkans is not about helping any of the people in the region—Muslims, Croats, Serbs or Albanians. The only interest of the Pentagon is in creating weak, dependent puppet regimes in order to dominate the entire region economically and politically. Only the giant multinational corporations will benefit.
The only demand for those genuinely concerned with peace is, "U.S. out, NATO out."
The involvement of the Pentagon can only bring wider war, more death and destruction, shattered lives and hundreds of thousands of additional refugees.
The same demand needs to be raised by the anti-war movements in each of the West European countries—Germany, France, Britain and Italy. They and the U.S are imperialist powers, meaning that the highest profits of the corporations of these capitalist countries come from their investments and economic control of other less developed countries.
It is not an easy task to build an anti-war movement. It must combat all the lies of the corporate media. But it has been done before. As the war widens and the cutbacks in education, healthcare and housing continue here in the U.S., this idea will take root.
The only way to end the Vietnam war was for the U.S. to get out. The years and years of negotiations were only an excuse to widen the war, continue the bombing and further the intervention. By the end of the war, all of South East Asia lay in ruins, the landscape pockmarked with bomb craters and poisoned with Agent Orange.
Getting the U.S. and the other imperialists out of the Balkans is the
only way to keep this war from escalating into an even wider
struggle that would engulf the whole region.