Archive for the ‘Bosnia’ Category

Once more on ‘left-wing’ genocide denial

Posted: May 22, 2012 in Bosnia, genocide, Rwanda, the left
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The Guardian journalist George Monbiot has written a further article, ‘See No Evil’, on the denial by Edward Herman and David Peterson of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1995, in their book The Politics of Genocide which includes a supportive Preface by Noam Chomsky.

Monbiot is responding to Herman and Peterson’s reply on ZNet to his original criticism in The Guardian,  following his unsuccessful attempts in lengthy email correspondence (reproduced on Monbiot’s own site) to get Chomsky to address his collaborators’ genocide denial.

Last year I published a review which came to similar conclusions to Monbiot’s. In preparing his latest reply Monbiot asked me and three other academic writers on genocide (Adam Jones, Linda Melvern and Marko Atilla Hoare) to write our own responses to Herman and Peterson’s new justification of their position. Monbiot refers to my review and response in his article, and has published all four comments on his site. Below I reproduce my own new response to Herman and Peterson.

Edward Herman and David Peterson, in their reply to George Monbiot, do little to respond to the wave of incredulity and revulsion which their denial of genocide and its endorsement by Noam Chomsky are causing.

They misrepresent Monbiot, a widely respected critical journalist, as a cog in a Guardian-Observer propaganda machine which – in turn – is simply churning out a version of something called the ‘Western party-line’. Such crude, amalgamated constructs not only make serious debate difficult, but are also designed to damage one of the most important arenas for critical information and debate in the mainstream media – in precisely one of the areas in which it has been strongest, reporting on and debating crimes against humanity.

Herman and Peterson do this because, as I have argued in my full review in the Journal of Genocide Research, their Politics of Genocide ‘does not stop at raising … counter-examples to the Western mainstream. Instead, it engages in what can only be described as extensive genocide denial.’ Deniers need to block out key information and misrepresent opponents to support their perverse world-views. As the sociologist Stanley Cohen puts it in a classic study, ‘One common thread runs through the many different stories of denial: people, organizations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. Or else the information “registers” well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.’

What is the information which disturbs Herman and Peterson? They cannot accept what has now been established by extensive and rigorous enquiry, that in 1995 unarmed Bosniak men and boys from the Srebrenica ‘safe area’, who were captured by Bosnian-Serbian forces, were murdered in cold blood. They suggested in their book that the case was ‘extremely thin, resting in good part on the difficulty of separating executions from battle killings’. This is a classic genocide denial mechanism (which can be traced back to the Armenian genocide), representing genocidal killing as really only war, suggesting that the victims were not really civilians (they might have been killed in battle), or if they were, as killed accidentally in the course of fighting.

Herman and Peterson believe that their trump card against Monbiot is that he ‘fails to mention that … we point out that the Bosnian Serbs “had taken the trouble to bus all the women, children, and the elderly men to safety”.’ What this shows, however, is that do not understand genocide, which involves not just indiscriminate attacks on entire populations, but also narrower, targeted violence – as often against men of military age (as potential resisters) as against women (whose sexual violation completes the humiliation of a community).

They also cannot accept that an exceptionally large, fast campaign of mass murder was carried out by Rwandan Hutu Power forces in 1994, claiming that the ‘great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million’. Claiming that Monbiot’s objections are ‘laughable’, they ridicule him for running ‘to his readers with the scoop that we are so sloppy in our use of sources’.

Yet the principal academic reference for Herman and Peterson’s claim is an unpublished paper, ‘Rwandan Political Violence in Space and Time’, which they attribute to Christian Davenport and Allan Stam and source to Davenport’s website, dated to 2004. Yet on page 37 of the same paper (which while citing a database compiled jointly with Stam, is attributed only to Davenport and dated 2008), are printed in black and white the following unequivocal conclusions: ‘we find that the majority of killings take place in the zone under government control (accounting for approximately 990,000 deaths). They are the ones directly responsible for almost all of the political violence.’ (Accessed on 17 October 2011)

A charitable explanation could be that Davenport’s paper has been updated since 2004, and this conclusion added since then, although 2008 was still well before The Politics of Genocide went to press. But Herman and Peterson can hardly have missed a clear line of argument which, while qualifying previous accounts of the Rwandan genocide, does not undermine the conclusion that the majority of killing in Rwanda in 1994 was committed by Hutu Power forces. The difference is that Davenport and Stam want to raise questions about the narrative of genocide; Herman and Peterson want to fully overturn it.

So they are sloppy with their sources: it is they, in the nice phrase they use against Monbiot, who are ‘hit-and-run intellectuals’, scooping up quotes and references without due care. As Cohen says, in denial ‘information is … somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted.’ We find bucket-loads of all these tendencies in Herman and Peterson – and their patron, Chomsky. Indeed one suspects that, as Cohen continued, ‘the information “registers” well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.’

The remaining question is why do the Chomskyites do it? The obvious answer is political: they have such a huge investment in the idea that the USA and the West are the source of all the world’s evils, that they can only process information to fit this case. More complex answers might include, that like their fellow deniers in the former LM coterie, they are building an intellectual and political niche out of contrarian positions. The danger is that such nonsense, with its pseudo-scholarly apparatus of extensive footnotes and media science, finds a ready audience among the political idealistic.

Review of Bosnia Remade and Balkan Genocides

Posted: April 24, 2012 in Bosnia, genocide, genocide reviews, reviews, Yugoslavia
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Draft review for the Journal of Genocide Research

Gerard Toal and Carl C. Dahlmann, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 978-0-19-973036-0.
Paul Mojzes, Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011, 978-1-4422-0663-2.

The anti-population violence during the Bosnian War of 1992-95 was, together with the mass murder in Rwanda in 1994, one of the seminal events for the public awareness of genocide in the period after the Cold War. Yet while the Rwandan Genocide has been clearly named and is the focus of ever-growing academic study, the significance of the Bosnian events remains highly contested and their study lacks the momentum of the Rwandan field. Most of the general literature dates from the 1990s, and there have been few recent attempts to synthesise the events themselves and their legacy. Gerard Toal and Carl C. Dahlmann’s Bosnia Remade, with its incisive empirical study of the problematic post-war ‘return’ of the expelled and its ambitious critical-geopolitical theoretical framework for understanding the war and its aftermath, is therefore a very welcome addition.

The authors’ primary aim is to evaluate the process of return of displaced people. Annexe 7 of the 1995 Dayton General Framework Agreement committed the international authorities supervising Bosnia to upholding this right in the aftermath of the war, and there followed what was probably the most determined attempt to enforce the return of expelled populations anywhere in the world. (Omar Bartov was therefore wrong to claim, in this journal, that the right of return is demanded only for Palestinians displaced by Israel.#) Although around a million, out of over two million, Bosnians expelled from their homes and home districts during the war had returned by 2004, Toal and Dahlmann’s analysis – using detailed studies of three key municipalities as well as general data – shows that most of these were ‘majority returns’, of people belonging to the same ethnic group as the postwar controllers of particular areas. ‘Minority returns’, of people belonging to different groups from local powerholders, were often met with violence and obstruction. Despite sometimes determined efforts by international bodies, they were largely unsuccessful.

This outcome is explained as a consequence of the character of the wartime processes that produced displacement and how the political structures that they produced were largely embedded in the postwar settlement, and explains why Bosnia Remade’s account of the returns process is preceded by a very full synthesis of the war itself and the original expulsion process. Ethnic cleansing, they say, was a ‘military tactic to realise a larger strategic vision … as much about seizing and consolidating territory as … about identity. More than simply the removal of an out-group from a location, ethnic cleansing involves the ethnicization of space.’ It is thus a form of geopolitics, involving two related practices, the attempts to produce a new ethnoterritorial order of space, and to build an ethnocratic political order. The latter involved a ‘fundamental reorganisation of a local political economy’, through ‘accumulation by dispossession’, with housing, land and valuables stolen (116-17). The phenomenon originated in the Serbian strategy ‘to reconstitute Yugoslavia as a smaller, more compact federation controlled from Belgrade’ (21) and Serbian nationalists were responsible for most expulsions, although the Croatians developed similar strategies in some areas and their ethnic cleansing in 1995 constituted its ‘largest single instance’ (6). Although Toal and Dahlmann ‘reject as lazy and irresponsible the nostrum that there is a “moral equivalence” between the fighting factions in Bosnia’ (17), they recognise that Bosnian forces were also responsible for some expulsions and show that Muslim-based parties sometimes blocked minority returns to areas they controlled after the war.

The key to the relative failure of the returns process is that Dayton mostly allowed parties controlling localities at the end of the war – in many cases having removed much of the original population – to consolidate their power. Post-war politics was ‘the continuation of the war by other means’; local elites ‘established patronage systems in their captured opstine [municipalities] that endured into the peace.’ (235) US President Bill Clinton insisted on early elections, in the belief that democratisation was a way out of Bosnia’s impasse, but just as the earlier 1990 elections had originally ethnonationalised Bosnian politics – laying the basis for territorial division – so post-Dayton elections were manipulated by local powerholders who boosted their own population group’s electoral registration and absentee voting, while blocking the participation of the expelled – so confirming territorial division. ‘Rapid elections … mostly served to entrench nationalist parties and collective rights’ (234), at the expense of the individual rights of expelled people. Moreover this local control was reinforced by the establishment of the wartime Republika Srpska as an ‘entity’ (within a new federal structure for the Bosnia-Herzegovina state), which Serbian politicians treated as far as possible as a separate state. Although the literature has often emphasised the lack of ‘will’ of international authorities, Toal and Dahlmann point to the inherent weakness of multinational bureaucracy and its lack of capacity faced with local intransigence: ‘the international community soon realised that it was insuffiently equipped to monitor and enforce Dayton’s provisions across two entities, ten cantons and 148 local governments, each with its own tactics for discouraging returns and repossession.’ (237)

Thus Bosnia Remade shows that Michael Mann’s argument that ethnic cleansing is the ‘dark side of democracy’ is particularly relevant when the latter is proposed as an answer to ethnic conflict: as a growing literature attests, elections can be catalysts for conflict. The book also matches two of the themes of Stathis Kalyvas’ influential arguments about civil war violence: the importance of the local level, and the fact that populations help produce the violence that is directed at civilians.#  Thus Toal and Dahlmann argue that ethnic cleansing ‘is never straightforwardly “ethnic” or motivated only by a desire to “cleanse” localities thought the murder and expulsion of ethnic others. Criminal opportunism, local grievances, revenge and nihilism fuelled by alcohol and drugs are also elements of the practice. Some violence … was motivated by long-held grudges.’ (13) However their demonstration of the centrality of Serbian and Croatian geopolitical projects to the cleansing process contradicts Kalyvas’ claim, in an article with Nicholas Sambanis, that it can be mainly explained by the level of resistance to Serbian power.#

Toal and Dahlmann argue that both ethnic cleansing and return are unavoidably geographical projects, and their approach is based on critical geopolitics, ‘an approach that produces “categories of analysis” to grasp and explain the too-often unproblematized “categories of practice” of banal and not-so-banal nor benign geopolitics.’ (9) Thus they reject the subsumption of the events in the categories of ‘civil war’ and ‘ethnic conflict’, and similarly to David Campbell’s earlier post-structuralist account#, show how ethnopolitics was constructed out of Bosnia’s historic hybrid, plurinational society. However, despite pointing out that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is ‘a vivid metaphor conveying the commitments of its perpetrators’ (3), they are remarkably content to use this as their main analytical category. ‘Genocide’, in contrast, is treated overwhelmingly as a rhetorical device of actors, whether of Serbian perpetrators recalling their peoples’ historic victimisations, or of Bosnian Muslim leaders complaining about Serbian ‘cleansing’. In a surprising lapse of critical focus on the ‘categories of practice’, they reproduce the view (now conventional in international legal circles) that genocide was only committed at Srebrenica in 1995, while the general destruction of plural Bosnian society, which occurred as they show mainly in 1992, was not genocide.

Yet what Toal and Dahlmann describe is what others from Raphael Lemkin onwards have carefully defined as genocide: carving out imagined ethnic homelands by destroying Bosnia’s ‘common life, multiethnic settlements and the homes of ordinary Bosnians’ (134), and destroying its common public infrastructure and cultural and religious property, indeed its ‘lifeworld of coexistence (140). When they talk of a ‘geopolitical logic of erasure and refoundation’ (6) they reproduce Lemkin’s ‘two phases [of genocide]: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.’# Their argument that the ethnonationalism has largely succeeded even though it was not militarily victorious is another way of expressing his dictum that genocide is a way of winning even when the war itself is lost. Yet nowhere do Toal and Dahlmann argue for these conceptual choices.

Paul Mojzes makes similar conceptual decisions, but he does at least try to justify them. His book is a historical synthesis, which has the considerable virtue of bringing together the large number of genocidal events in the modern Balkans over the last century. He begins with the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, seen as an ‘unrecognized genocide’, and proceeds to the ‘multiple genocides of World War II’ and ‘retaliatory genocides against wartime enemies’, before arriving at ‘ethnic cleansing during Yugoslavia’s wars of distintegration in the 1990s’ (Kosovo is considered in a separate chapter, as is the ICTY). In each of this periods, Mojzes carefully accumulates the evidence on anti-population violence from all sides, and this will serve as a useful reference work. He also tries to say which events constituted genocide, and which not, and while his criteria and judgements may both be disputed, it is all done in a careful way that gives the readers useful pointers. The sheer range of events that are covered, the variety of their perpetrators, and the demonstrations of their interconnectedness, also provide useful antidotes to any simple ideas that only one or other type of actor perpetrated genocide. Mojzes falls into the trap of identifying the political factions with the ethnic groups themselves, so begging the question of the ethnopoliticisation that is the focus of Toal and Dahlmann’s analysis. But by placing the Bosnian war in the larger series of recent conflicts that began in Slovenia and Croatia and ended in Kosovo, he provides useful contextualisation, even if Balkan Genocides has neither the interpetative historical depth of Donald Bloxham’s work#, which covers the earlier part of its ground, nor the theoretical and empirical richness of Bosnia Remade.

Any optimism about the future of the Balkans in these books is highly tempered, but Toal and Dahlmann are right to say that Bosnia-Herzegovina is still in the process of being made. There is no inexorable law that condemns us to reproduce the crimes of the past, even if there are powerful social forces that work in that direction.

See the full review including references.

‘Left-wing’ genocide denial

Posted: June 15, 2011 in Bosnia, genocide, genocide reviews, Rwanda, the left
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George Monbiot has written an interesting take in The Guardian on ‘left-wing’ denial of the Srebrenica genocidal massacre and the Rwandan genocide, Left and libertarian right cohabit in the weird world of the genocide belittlers. Monbiot refers to the recent book by Edward Herman (Noam Chomsky’s collaborator of four decades) and David Peterson, with a foreword by Chomsky, which is explicit in its denial of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda. I have written the following review of this book for The Journal of Genocide Research (this is a draft; the final version appeared in issue 13, 3, 2011, 353-58):

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010
128 pp, $12.95 (pbk)

Genocide is an intensely political topic. This type of targeted anti-population violence arises from political and armed conflict and is justified by political ideology. Its discussion always reflects political interests, values and goals: even academic genocide studies are surrounded by critical political issues, and often informed by unstated political assumptions. So The Politics of Genocide is a good title; but for this book, it is a misnomer. Readers looking for a rounded treatment of the subject will be severely disappointed. What Edward Herman, long-time collaborator of Noam Chomsky (who writes the foreword), and his co-author offer us is a politics of genocide, based on the unremitting opposition to Western and especially US power that characterizes all the works of these authors.

This is a study, then, of the contradictions of official Western attitudes to genocide, with a superficial reference (but one significant for the book’s method) to mass media, and brief references to “‘genocide’-oriented intellectuals.” The core case is that all major sectors of the Western establishment are fundamentally compromised by partial attitudes to political violence, according to which some is regarded as “constructive” (committed by Western states and necessary to their aims), some “nefarious” (committed by the West’s enemies), some “benign” (committed by the West’s allies) and some downright “mythical” (supposed actions of the West’s enemies, actually invented for propaganda purposes). This framework, which the authors explain was devised by Herman and Chomsky as long ago as 1973 during the US war in Indochina, defines the book’s four main chapters, each devoted to proving the West’s politically motivated partiality towards violence across a wide range of cases.

The relatively novel element in The Politics of Genocide is the claim that “genocide” language has become increasingly central to the process by which the West interprets events in these four categories: “During the past several decades, the word ‘genocide’ has increased in frequency of use and recklessness of application, so much so that the crime of the 20th century for which the term originally was coined often appears debased” (p 103). Ironically, therefore, Herman and Peterson join many official Western, and especially pro-Israeli, advocates in suggesting a very special (perhaps “unique”?) place for the Holocaust in the modern history of violence. But this reference serves a definite purpose in the authors’ own political framework: if it can be argued that “current [Western] usage” is (as Chomsky puts it, p 7) “an insult to the memory of victims of the Nazis,” then that usage is discredited. And Herman and Peterson’s target is not just this usage, but, as Chomsky summarises, “[t]he vulgar politicization of the concept of genocide, and the ‘emerging international norm’ of humanitarian intervention” (p 10), and especially “all the fine talk about the ‘responsibility to protect’ and the ‘end of impunity’” (p 11). The real problem with the latter, in their view, is that (as Chomsky says) this fine talk “has never once been extended to the victims of these same [Western] powers” that promote it, “no matter how egregious the crimes” (p 11). Thus Chomsky concludes: “As for the term ‘genocide,’ perhaps the most honourable course would be expunge it from the vocabulary until the day, it ever comes, when honesty and integrity can become an international norm” (p 12).

The methodology of this study can be summarized as follows: sweeping assertions about historical events, political attitudes and intellectual positions, buttressed by selective quotation and ignoring most contending sources and arguments, with cavalier use of statistics, all calibrated via a one-dimensional media survey and offered without any attempt to define key concepts. Let us take as a starting-point the following statement: “The leading mainstream experts on ‘genocide’ and mass atrocity crimes today still carefully exclude from consideration the US attacks on Indochina, as well as the 1965-1966 Indonesian massacres within that country – just as they exclude the deaths and destruction that have followed from the United States’ and NATO-bloc’s aggressive wars of the past decade” (p. 17). At this point, one might expect a careful discussion of the “mainstream experts”: but although they are supposed to be an important part of the compromised Western consensus, Herman and Peterson’s sole reference in academic genocide studies is Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell” (2002).# One would not guess that the crimes of pro-Western Indonesia (both the military killings referred to and the invasion and repression of East Timor) are increasingly standard topics in genocide research.# Otherwise, the text is singularly devoid of references to the academic field – even to texts like Adam Jones’ edited Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (2004),# which might have provided partial support for the argument. The other “expert” works adduced are popular handbooks like Roy Gutman and David Rieff’s Crimes of War (1999)#and Christiane Amanpour’s TV documentary, Scream Bloody Murder (2008). It is clear that Herman and Peterson, having dismissed the utility of our field’s main concept, are not interested in what genocide scholars have to say, either.

But let us proceed further with the allegations in this quotation. Herman and Peterson charge genocide experts with ignoring the US attacks on Indochina and the deaths that have followed from the US’s and NATO’s recent wars. For them it is not good enough, moreover, that Power and many others note the role of the US attacks on Cambodia in producing the Khmer Rouge genocide – they also want the direct death toll from US bombing discussed in the genocide framework. But part of the problem is Herman and Peterson’s resolute indifference to conceptual questions. Sure, calling “their” violence “genocide” and “ours” merely “collateral damage” could be not-very-subtle political labelling. But is there any difference at all between “war” and “genocide”? Does saying that the US invasion of Iraq, for example, was war rather than genocide necessarily legitimate the deaths and destruction produced? Or is there a sociological difference between war and genocide, even if they are both morally objectionable? Herman and Peterson are only interested in the numbers of people killed, not in the rationales behind the killings. From their point of view, the difference between Auschwitz and Hiroshima would be only the larger number of people killed in the former. But should we not take into account the different, even if both deeply immoral, aims and motives of the perpetrators in these two events?

The problems of the Herman-Peterson approach are clearly displayed in their treatment of the 2003 Iraq invasion and its aftermath. Quick to entertain an estimate of “more than one million” deaths, they claim that “the media and intellectuals rarely treated Iraqi deaths as a consequence – direct or indirect – of the invasion-occupation, let alone as a deliberately imposed bloodbath, crime against humanity, or ‘genocide’” (p 34). Nowhere are the arguments for much lower death tolls (for example, in the careful estimates of Iraq Body Count, according to which currently about 100-125,000 Iraqi civilians may have died since 2003) addressed.# Nor is there any discussion of who is directly responsible for what is (even on this more conservative estimate) still a very substantial toll, although the majority of deaths are almost certainly directly attributable to Iraqi factions rather than US-UK forces. In this way, an emotive label – “deliberately imposed bloodbath, crime against humanity, or ‘genocide’” – is simply left hanging, so that we are implicitly invited to believe that any or all of these could apply to Western intervention. Paradoxically, the result of this comic-opera treatment is that the authors never pin clearly on the USA and UK either their proper share of the direct responsibility for casualties or their general, indirect responsibility for the mayhem following the invasion.

Herman and Chomsky are the authors of a standard book about mass media, Manufacturing Consent (1994).# Not surprisingly, then, Herman and Peterson’s chief empirical measure of the abuse of “genocide” language is the frequency with which certain key media apply the term to different historical and contemporary events, which is then cross-referenced to their death tolls to suggest the varying ratios of media mentions to deaths. Unfortunately, all the calculations developed from this crude yardstick and scattered throughout this book are undermined if we admit that genocide could actually be a different type of political violence from war. For example, Herman and Peterson make a good deal of the (estimated) 5.4 million victims of the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the low salience of media use of “genocide” language in this case, compared to Rwanda. But they never stop to consider the differences between the two cases. The complicated set of armed conflicts in the DRC involved multiple actors over the course of a decade, each fighting each other in changing alliances as well as variously targeting civilians, with most of the claimed death toll attributed to the disease, hunger, and dislocation which the fighting caused. In the relatively simpler case of Rwanda, a highly coordinated campaign of mass murder was developed during a two-sided war over a few weeks in 1994. There are certainly big “genocide” questions in the DRC wars, but there are good reasons (as well as the bad ones alleged here) to distinguish the application of “genocide” in the two cases.

If there may be good conceptual and analytical reasons for distinguishing between events with similar death tolls, a single quantitative measure cannot straddle the corresponding qualitative divides. Without exploring this question, all Herman and Peterson have done is to provide some evidence of the varying and growing use of the term “genocide.” Of course, related to this, in their haste to assert the significance of Western atrocities, the authors completely sidestep the question of whether, granted that Western democracies commit or are complicit in very serious mass crimes, there is any difference in type between their crimes and those of other regimes; or, indeed, whether there are any significant historical changes in the Western production of mass death, between – say – the eras of Vietnam and Iraq. But Herman and Peterson are not interested in such nuances. Their starting and end point is that “[a] remarkable degree of continuity stretches across the many decades of bribes and threats, economic sanctions, subversion, terrorism, aggression and occupation ordered-up by the policy-making elite of the United States” (p 13).

This whole book is little more than an elaborate demonstration of this and a few (equally simple) related assertions. Naturally, since the USA and the wider West are certainly not innocent of war crimes and complicity in genocide, and since official discourse does indeed tend to assume that “our” actions are justified, our enemies’ nefarious, and our allies’ condonable, Herman and Peterson’s blunderbuss approach achieves some hits. If the mass death produced by the USA in Vietnam and Cambodia did not constitute genocide, we certainly need to ask why. If the Rwandan Hutu Power regime murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, that does not mean we should ignore the death tolls attributable to the Rwandan Patriotic Front before and during 1994, or indeed afterwards in the DRC. If Serbian “ethnic cleansing” constituted genocide, there is no good reason not to examine Croatian expulsions of Serbs, during Operation Storm in 1995, within the same frame. If campaigning in the USA helped to establish Darfur as the prime early-21st-century genocide, it may also have simplified the political and military situation there. These and a number of similar issues, raised by Herman and Peterson, are certainly cogent – and indeed are recognized as such by critical genocide scholars.

However, The Politics of Genocide does not stop at raising these kinds of counter-examples to the Western mainstream. Instead, it engages in what can only be described as extensive genocide denial. Consider two cases. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, our authors claim, the West “demonized” the Serbs, engaged in “remarkable inflation of claims of Serb evil and violence … with fabricated ‘concentration camps,’ ‘rape camps’ and similar Nazi- and Auschwitz-like analogies” (p 46). They criticize the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for agreeing that “genocide could occur in one ‘small geographical area’ (the town of Srebrenica), even where the villainous party had taken the trouble to bus all the women, children and elderly men to safety – that is, incontestably had not killed any but ‘Bosnian Muslim men of military age’” (p 47). “The case for eight thousand ‘men and boys’ being executed,” they say, “is extremely thin, resting in good part on the difficulty of separating executions from battle killings” (p 48). (So, suddenly, they want to distinguish genocide from war, after all.) They point to the eventual acceptance of lower overall Bosnian death tolls (c. 50-100,000 rather than the 200-250,000 initially argued) as evidence of Western “gullibility” in the face of Bosnian Muslim propaganda – ignoring the fact that initial estimates are frequently revised downwards in such situations, and notwithstanding their own eagerness to accept without discussion problematically large counts (like the “over one million” excess deaths in Iraq since 2003, or 5.4 million in the DRC) when it suits their claims. They claim that “the word ‘genocide’ was used lavishly for the Bosnian Serbs’ conduct” (p 49), ignoring the emergence of “ethnic cleansing” as an alternative concept precisely in this period, partly because Western officialdom wanted to avoid recognizing genocide in Bosnia. (Herman and Peterson want to insist on the norm of Western interventionism despite all the evidence produced by Power and many others that often Western governments do their utmost not to intervene.)

If anyone is offering “an insult to the memory of victims,” it is clearly Herman and Peterson, who give credence to Serbian nationalist denialism which has been widely discredited. Yet, if anything, their position on Rwanda is even more outrageous. The Western establishment has “swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside-down” (p 51). The RPF not only killed Hutus, but were the “prime genocidaires” (p 54), their “large-scale killing and ethnic cleansing of Hutus by the RPF long before the April-July 1994 period” (p 53) contributing to a result in which “the majority of victims were likely Hutu and not Tutsi” (quoted with approval, p 58). Indeed, “a number of observers as well as participants in the events of 1994 claim that the great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million” (p 58). When we check the reference for this shocking statement, it turns on no more than a letter from a former RPF military officer and personal communications from a former defence counsel before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda – both participants (n 127, p 132). It does not seem to have occurred to the authors that if “theaters where the killing was greatest correlated with spikes in RPF activity” (p 58), killing could just as easily have been committed by the threatened Rwandan regime (as Scott Straus argues in The Order of Genocide)# as by the RPF themselves. But Herman and Peterson do not engage with Straus, or with much at all of the now very considerable literature on Rwanda. Certainly the “established narrative” needs to be questioned, the RPF’s own violence acknowledged, and the ICTR’s inability to deal with the latter (in contrast to the ICTY’s prosecution of perpetrators from many sides, which of course our authors could never credit) criticized. But this is hardly a licence to dismiss the idea of “800,000 or more largely Tutsi deaths” as RPF and Western propaganda, and the authors’ keenness to do so does as much as anything to utterly discredit this study.

This book therefore shows inadvertently that the politics of genocide are multi-directional. Certainly, official Western propagandists may sometimes minimize “our” crimes and represent those of “our” enemies in oversimplified ways. But it seems that anti-Western propagandists, among whom we must count Herman, Peterson, and Chomsky, are guilty of the same tendency from the other side of the fence. They suggest that in official Western narratives, “our victims are unworthy of our attention and indignation, and never suffer ‘genocide’ at our hands” (p 104, italics in original). In anti-Western, Chomskyan narratives, a similar process occurs: the West’s enemies, whether Serbian nationalist or Rwandan Hutu Power, have never committed “genocide.” For the journalist John Pilger, hyping this volume on its cover, Herman and Peterson “defend the right of all of us to a truthful historical memory.” Evidently this does not include the Srebrenica men, the massacred and expelled Kosovo Albanians, or the slaughtered Rwandan Tutsis, who are “unworthy victims” for these left-contrarians. For scholars of genocide studies, this is rich source material. It is not a serious contribution to analysis.

A fully referenced version of this review can be found here.

Also relevant: ‘Mediating Denial‘, my review of Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, editors, Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, London: Pluto, 2000.

Mladic, bin Laden and the future of international justice

Posted: June 1, 2011 in Bosnia, Global War on Terror, international justice
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A new article on openDemocracy.

The Karadzic trial and Bosnian realities, Open Democracy, 3 November 2009

Posted: December 12, 2009 in 2009, Bosnia, international justice
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The trial of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is a test of justice and accountability over terrible crimes. But the trend of events in Bosnia itself also demands the international community’s urgent attention, says Martin Shaw.

The trial of Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Serbian nationalist regime in Bosnia in the early 1990s, resumed in The Hague on 27 October 2009. The accused initially refused to appear in court on the basis that he needed more time to prepare his defence, but announced in a letter to the presiding judge on 2 November that he would indeed be present to face the court at a procedural hearing the following day.

Karadzic is charged with genocide over the attempt “to permanently remove Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks] and Bosnian Croats from the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina claimed as Bosnian Serb territory” between 1992 and 1995, as well as over the infamous massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995. The other charges include extermination; murder; persecutions; deportation; inhumane acts; acts of violence the primary purpose of which was to spread terror among the civilian population; unlawful attacks on civilians; and the taking of hostages.

These can be seen not as a series of different crimes but as components of a single campaign of genocide. Indeed the charges potentially broaden the overall legal assessment of the Serbian genocide in Bosnia-Hercegovina, which in earlier judgments – like that of the International Court of Justice in February 2007 – has been restricted to Srebrenica; the importance of the charges against Karadzic is that this enables understanding that Srebrenica was only the most murderous moment in the three years during which Serbian forces systematically targeted the destruction of the non-Serb population in the areas they controlled (see “The International Court of Justice: Serbia, Bosnia, and genocide”, 28 February 2007).

The trial – which starts sixteen months after Karadzic’s arrest in Serbia in July 2008, following thirteen years in hiding there – is widely seen as the last major case of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which is scheduled to begin winding down from the end of 2009 – despite the scandalous failure to arrest Karadzic’s fellow indictee Ratko Mladic, who commanded the Bosnian-Serbian forces at Srebrenica. The ICTY has had considerable success in arraigning secondary war-criminals of all nationalities, but no settling of the accounts of the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s will be complete until Mladic joins Karadzic in the dock. The fact that prime architects of Yugoslavia’s ethnic destruction in the 1990s – Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic’s (who died in March 2006, during his trial) and Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman (who died before he could be indicted) – escaped justice, means that the tribunal’s record will appear even more seriously flawed unless Mladic and Karadzic are successfully tried.

The new trial will doubtless rekindle the deep divisions which Bosnia opened in western publics in the 1990s. A reminder of these came on 29 October 2009 when Ed Vulliamy, the Guardian reporter who (with colleagues from the broadcaster ITN) exposed the Serbian concentration-camps at Omarska and Trnopolje in August 1992 – published an open letter to Amnesty International to protest against its invitation to the radical academic Noam Chomsky to give the annual Amnesty lecture in Belfast on 30 October 2009. Chomsky, says Vulliamy, has encouraged the “revisionist” view which denied the character of the camps (even if it was others such as Thomas Deichmann, writing in Living Marxism magazine, who were the direct authors of this denial [see Ed Vulliamy, “Poison in the well of history”, Guardian, 15 March 2000]).

In 2005, Chomsky told a Guardian interviewer: “Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true.” Vulliamy reminds Amnesty that he directly witnessed the situation he described, and went on to collect hundreds of testimonies; he accuses the human-rights organisation of “giving comfort” to Mladic and Karadzic through its invitation to Chomsky.

The logic of Dayton

The political realities on the ground in Bosnia put some of these controversies in perspective. Radovan Karadzic may be in the dock in The Hague, but the Serbian statelet of Republika Srpska (RS) which he founded is firmly entrenched. The first phase of the Serbian campaign in 1992-93 left RS in control of a formerly mixed territory, from which 90% of the non-Serb population (principally Muslims and Croats) were expelled through the brutal methods described in the ICTY’s indictment of Karadzic.

The Serb forces failed fully to defeat Bosnian and Croatian forces, but the diplomatic settlement of November 2005 – the Dayton (Ohio) peace accords, agreed by Bill Clinton (the United States president), Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, and Alija Izetbegovic (Bosnia’s president) – left the Serbian nationalists in control of the RS, even if it was reincorporated into a nominally unified and internationally supervised Bosnia-Herzegovina. The international regime was supposed to support the return of refugees to RS (as to Croatian- and Bosnian-controlled areas). In the event, the small number of returns achieved have not altered the outcome of the genocidal war: Serbs today form almost 90% of RS’s population.

The Dayton settlement thus (in Marko Attila Hoare’s words) “established a Bosnia-Hercegovina that was more partitioned than united”, and subsequent developments have reinforced the partitionist logic. For every year that the Dayton settlement persists it brings Bosnia another step closer (Hoare again) “to full and complete partition. Every year, Republika Srpska further consolidates itself as a de facto independent state; the Office of the High Representative [OHR; Bosnia's international overseer] declines in power and authority; the international community’s will and ability to coerce the Republika Srpska are that much weaker; the already dim prospect of Bosniaks and Croats returning to Republika Srpska recedes further; and the share of the Bosnian population that can remember the unified, multinational country that existed before 1992 becomes smaller.”

Even in late 2007 it was possible for Peter Lippman to argue that the international regime was having some success in integrating the police and the army into a unified Bosnian force (see “Crisis and reform: a turnaround in Bosnia?”, 18 December 2007). Two years on, the low-key current international efforts to move Bosnian politicians towards reform are completely deadlocked. Serbian secessionist impulses – part-cause and part-consequence of this situation – are never far from the surface. Moreover the current RS administration of Milorad Dodik is growing in its defiance of the international regime and (a linked matter given the statelet’s provenance) its denial of the very crimes of which Karadzic is accused.

Dodik, who has denied that genocide was committed at Srebrenica, further provoked the non-Serb population of Bosnia in September 2009 by pointedly denying one of the worst Serbian atrocities of the war: the massacre of seventy young people in a square in Tuzla in May 1995. (In this context, Ed Vulliamy is right to say that the questioning of well-documented atrocities such as the concentration-camps by western commentators is no academic matter; and that Noam Chomsky’s attitude to these issues raises questions about Amnesty’s choice of lecturer).

Against this background, even a conviction in the Karadzic trial – assuming the accused’s spoiling tactics are unsuccessful – will be a hollow victory for his victims. The danger, Hoare suggests, is that “however monstrous the injustice that Bosnian partition would represent, with every year that passes, the injustice is further forgotten by the world and full partition – like death – draws nearer. We need only look at the other injustices that have become realities on the ground: the three-way partition of Macedonia in 1912-13; the dispossession of the Armenian population of Anatolia; the dispossession of the Palestinian population of present-day Israel – these are realities on the ground” (see “Bosnia: weighing the options”, Bosnian Institute, 13 October 2009).

The cost of failure

It is difficult to gainsay this bleak assessment of the historical record: partitions have always involved appalling injustices which have rarely been reversed (see Sumantra Bose, “The partition evasion”, 23 August 2007). The Indian partition of 1947 is one of the worst examples. For a century, western “statesmen” have been tempted to draw lines on maps and consign hundreds of thousands of people to suffering; all the more reason by now to have learned from these experiences.

If the partition of Bosnia is indeed steadily becoming irreversible, this should cause alarm across Europe. It should not be assumed that Balkan politicians’ need for European recognition and funding will always inhibit radical moves that would once again destabilise the region. The integration of southeastern Europe into the European Union and western institutions has not proceeded so far as to provide full insurance against a new Bosnian – or even wider Balkan – war.

The situation of Bosnia, and especially of its Bosniak majority areas, is – under the pressure of Serbian separatism – getting more serious. It is time for western politicians, having accepted responsibility for Bosnia, to consider and take the steps necessary to prevent this already divided country from moving towards new and dangerous schisms.

Peter Lippman also argued in 2007 that “nationalist leaders – Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks” had a responsibility “to show that they are serious about developing the reforms that would allow Bosnia & Herzegovina to exist as a functional state that can join the European Union on its own.” But it is even more urgent that “the international community and the OHR maintain a robust stance with regard to these reforms, in order to prompt and encourage Bosnian leaders to see them through.” The Radovan Karadzic trial is a reminder of the worst that could happen if they fail.

The genocide file: reply to Anthony Dworkin, Open Democracy, 6 March 2007

Posted: December 12, 2009 in Bosnia, genocide
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The admitted evidence of Serbian atrocities in Bosnia makes the International Court of Justice ruling self-contradictory, insists Martin Shaw. Go to Open Democracy for the full text.

The International Court of Justice: Serbia, Bosnia, and genocide, 28 February 2007

Posted: December 12, 2009 in Bosnia, international justice
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The world court’s decision to clear Serbia of genocide in Bosnia is an exercise in denial, says Martin Shaw. Go to Open Democracy for the full text.

Reply to Kees van der Pijl on Yugoslavia, 2002

Posted: December 12, 2009 in Bosnia, Kosovo, the left, Yugoslavia
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Martin Shaw

Political economy and political reaction: a reply to Kees van der Pijl

This paper was submitted to the Review of International Political Economy, but declined for publication

In ‘From Gorbachev to Kosovo: Atlantic rivalries and the re-incorporation of Eastern Europe’ (Review of International Political Economy 8:2, 2001, 275-310), my colleague Kees van der Pijl offers an ambitious reinterpretation of Western economics and politics in the aftermath of the Cold War. He attempts to link three trajectories often considered separately: structural changes in Western capitalism; strategic economic and geopolitical policies of the United States and Western European states; and events in Eastern Europe, especially the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. It is in the nature of such a grand design, set out in article rather than book form, that the connections made will often appear contentious as well as illuminating. I shall argue, however, that the flaws in the final element of his analysis are systematic, and raise questions about the author’s underlying method and politics.

The politics of the Yugoslav wars

Van der Pijl’s case is that ‘the breakdown of Yugoslav federal unity up to NATO’s war over Kosovo … can be reinterpreted as [a] moment in a triumph of a neoliberal strategy supported by a transnational, Atlantic capitalist class over a rival, corporate liberal one with its strongholds in continental European capital, European social democracies, and the southern European societies generally.’ (275-6) We have here a striking starting-point: the crisis within Yugoslavia is to be understood primarily not in terms of the latter’s own internal contradictions, or even in terms of the relationship between Yugoslav and larger international structures, but primarily in terms of the contradictions of Western power systems themselves. Given this starting point, not surprisingly van der Pijl has relatively little to say about the underlying situation in Yugoslavia, describing it in rather conventional civilisational terms and seeing foreign debt as the active agent, exacerbating ‘centrifugal tendencies’ after Tito’s death. Post-1989 elite political trajectories are seen either as pro-independence and Euro-integrationist (Slovenia, Croatia) or as nationalist (Serbia).

The only analysis provided of ‘the Serbian nationalism of Milosevic’ is that this ‘was the project of a state class obtaining joint political and economic power by a revolution from above, not unlike what happened in Russia but leaving state ownership formally intact.’ (291) The inadequacy of this characterisation of Milosevic’s political project is the first major problem. In socio-economic terms, there may be some similarity between his project and that of the Russian reformers around Gorbachev – and more parallels with the oligarchic capitalism that gathered pace under Yeltsin. In political terms, however, Milosevic’s nationalism had distinctive effects that van der Pijl neglects: it was more of a counter-revolution than a revolution. It attacked simultaneously the established rights of national minorities (especially the Kosovo Albanians, whose political autonomy, social and language rights were summarily revoked) and the very basis of the Yugoslav federation. Seizure of Kosovo’s and Vojvodina’s votes, alongside those of Serbia and Montenegro, gave Milosevic control of the federal presidency for a Serbianisation of Yugoslavia. Thus while centrifugal tendencies were certainly there long before Milosevic, and foreign debt deepened them, it was Milosevic’s coup which made Slovenia’s and Croatia’ positions untenable and broke up ‘Yugoslav federal unity’.

This failure of understanding is deepened as van der Pijl offers an utterly distorted account of the Yugoslav wars. ‘The federal army’, he writes, ‘continued to defend the country’s unity.’ (291) This statement is quite offensive in its concealment of the Serbianised army’s destruction of the cities of Vukovar and Osijek, its bombardment of Dubrovnik, and the large losses of civilian life at its hands. In 1991, the army was in fact attempting to keep control of the areas of Croatia that Serbian nationalists had seized, and which Milosevic wanted for his Greater Serbia. By 1992 the pretence of federal impartiality was dropped, as the Yugoslav army handed over its men and weapons in Bosnia to the Serbian forces there. However the Bosnian war (1992-95) is almost invisible in van der Pijl’s analysis. It makes a shadowy appearance when he writes that ‘the Bosnian Muslim leadership around Izetbegovic was adopted as a militant new ally in what became the war’s greatest human drama. … the US became the effective sponsor of the policy of ethnic cleansing of Croatia’s Serb minority. In 1995 … NATO airpower was unleashed against the Bosnian Serbs.’ (295)

It is certainly true that Croatian forces, breaking up Serbian control of the self-styled ‘Krajina’, killed a significant number of civilians and pushed out Serb civilians in very much the way that Serbian forces had done in Bosnia and were to do in Kosovo. (The US hardly promoted this aspect of the offensive but showed little concern over it either.) However to describe this as ‘the war’s greatest human drama’ is absurd. Let us simply recall the sieges of Sarajevo and Gorazde as well as those in Croatia already referred to, and many others; the expulsion or killing of 90 per cent of the non-Serb population of Serbian-controlled Bosnia; the systematic torture, abuse, rape and killings in concentration camps; the Srebrenica massacre. All of these well-documented and generally known episodes – many of them now carefully investigated, like Croatian crimes, by the International Tribunal – rivalled or surpassed the Croatian campaign in their brutality and/or numbers of victims.

Van der Pijl writes that Madeleine Albright’s perspective ‘provided an authentic moral component to a completely one-sided interpretation of the Yugoslav collapse, in which Milosevic was cast as a latter-day Hitler and “genocide” became a term loosely applied to vigilante atrocities.’ (296) However it his own account, mentioning Croatian crimes but none of the main facets of the larger Serbian violence, that is completely one-sided. And although van der Pijl glibly dismisses Albright’s ‘moral’ perspective, a more careful analysis will only show the appropriateness of the position attributed to her, and the deeply misleading character of his own description.

No serious analyst of the Yugoslav wars believes that violence against civilians was limited to ‘atrocities’ (which implies that there could have been no more than a series of relatively isolated abuses) or was perpetrated mainly by ‘vigilantes’ (which implies ad hoc, localised and irregular forces). On the contrary it is well known that there were organised campaigns by the Serbian-Yugoslav ‘federal’ state, army and police (in Croatia and Kosovo), as well as by the forces of the Serbian Krajina (in Croatia) and the Republika Srpska army, police and local authorities (in Bosnia). Serbian forces were aided and abetted by paramilitaries (most notoriously on the Serbian side those of Arkan and of Vojislav Seselj, the fascist politician who was later a coalition ally of Milosevic) as well as sometimes by local forces that might deserve the ‘vigilante’ label. These forces were paralleled on the Croatian side by the newly formed Croatian army, as well as the forces of Herzeg-Bosna, the Croatian statelet, and fascistic party militia.

What was the character of the organised violence, and what was its relationship to genocide and Nazism? It is most commonly described (using the euphemistic term, originating in Serbian thought, which has now entered even academic parlance) as ‘ethnic cleansing’. If this term must be used, it is should be qualified, given the systematic killing that accompanied it, as ‘murderous ethnic cleansing’ (Mann, 2001), but it is most appropriate to describe it as ‘murderous expulsion’. What this meant was the forcible removal of non-Serb (and non-Croat) populations from Serbian- (and Croatian-) controlled areas. This was done by administrative measures and deportations, but also by the physical violence, killing and terror already described. The aim was to destroy the non-Serb (or non-Croat) population in territory that was controlled, either through political means before the war, or by seizure during the war.

This violence was not really so different in its aims and character to the first armed phase of the Nazi war campaign, in Poland in 1939-40. At this stage the Nazis did not aim to exterminate the Jews (as happened from 1941 onwards), although many Jews and other Poles were killed. Rather they aimed to clear western Poland, which was incorporated into the Greater German Reich, of Poles (except those who could be Germanised), Jews and others, and expel them into areas of rump Poland (the ‘General Government’), and in the case of the Jews into ghettos. The newly incorporated areas were to be resettled by ethnic Germans from all over Nazi-conquered Europe. (Browning, 2002)

There is an essential similarity in the attempt by Serbian nationalists, of whom Milosevic was the undisputed leader, to carve out Greater Serbia, to expel Croats and Muslims from the annexed areas, and to force them into the overcrowded ghetto-like towns and villages of rump Bosnia. To be sure, some differences are clear. Serbian ethnic classifications were based on the existing national categories of Tito’s Yugoslavia, rather than expressions of an elaborate racial ideology like that expressed in the Nuremberg laws. Above all, Serbia was a medium-sized state carving out a modest Greater Serbia, not a great power aiming at a ‘thousand-year’ world empire. Although Hitler, too, kept a watchful eye on US opinion, Milosevic was under more sustained and effective international scrutiny, which obliged him and his allies to put together Greater Serbia in constitutionally separate pieces.

Was this genocide? The Nuremberg Tribunal recognised the Nazis as having practised genocide against Poles (although clearly they never aimed to exterminate them as a people) as well as Jews in the period mentioned. Genocide is the destruction of a people through means that include killing, but not necessarily their complete extermination. (For the International Convention, see Roberts and Guelff, 2000; for the Nazi case, Browning 2002; also discussion in Shaw, 2003.) The attempted destruction of the Bosnian Muslims by Serbian forces has been widely regarded as genocidal, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia has obtained a conviction against the Serbian general, Krstic, for genocide committed at Srebrenica. In the light of that massacre one would have thought that a Dutch scholar, especially, would have known better than to lightly dismiss the application of genocide to the Yugoslav wars.

Van der Pijl’s neglect of the inner dynamics of the Yugoslav wars is sustained in his treatment of Kosovo. There is no hint of the history of largely peaceful Albanian civil resistance there throughout the 1990s (Clark, 1999). There is no mention of the war already going on in Kosovo from early 1998, with an estimated 2000 killed and 200,000 displaced by Serbian arms, before the NATO intervention of March 1999. The talks at Rambouillet are predictably framed as an American plot to present Serbia with an impossible ultimatum. There is no mention of the American agreement with Milosevic in late 1998, nor how this agreement was flouted by Serbian forces, which continued to escalate their campaign of burning out Albanian villages even under the eyes of international monitors.

In short the dynamics of the struggle within Kosovo and of the relationship of Serbia with the US are both missing from van der Pijl’s account of the origins of NATO’s Kosovo campaign. Instead, NATO’s war comes straight out of a German ‘challenge’ to American hegemony, and how the SPD finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, together with other European social democrats, ‘favoured an industrial employment policy and regulating international financial flows.’ ‘It was this challenge’, van der Pijl writes, ‘which kicked [the US-led offensive strategy towards Eastern Europe and the Balkans] into high gear.’ (298) It is ‘in this light’, he says, that NATO’s war over Kosovo can be analysed. If ever there was a non sequitur in social analysis, this is surely it. But it takes us to the heart of the flaws in van der Pijl’s larger argument.

‘Universalism’ and Euro-American relations

If Kosovo is the culmination of van der Pijl’s case, Euro-American relations are its core. There can be no doubt about the tensions in these relations, or that they encompass economic, political, military and ideological dimensions, or that they have been sharply expressed in relationships with Russia, east-central Europe and above all the Yugoslav wars. So far so good, and van der Pijl certainly captures some important features in a wide-ranging argument. However his misinterpretation of Yugoslavia reveals a central incoherence in his account of strategic tendencies in Euro-American relations.

Van der Pijl’s thesis is that there was a shift from a first post-Cold War phase in which ‘the impact of neo-liberalism was still contained within a conservative, balance-of-power conjuncture’ to ‘the second, coinciding with the Clinton presidency and amplified by the shift to the left in Europe, marked by a high-pitched ideological posture and actual war.’ (276) ‘It is this particular Atlantic configuration’, he argues, ‘that was mobilized in the Kosovo war.’ (277) Reinserting the dynamics of the Yugoslav wars themselves into the picture suggests a rather different interpretation of Western divisions. In the early 1990s, European Community leaders attempted to manage the outbreak of war by peaceful means, but lamentably failed to prevent Serbian aggression in both Croatia and Bosnia. European states (France, Britain, Netherlands, etc.) then provided the backbone of the reactive UN intervention forces (UNPROFOR). These were so ineffectual that by 1995 Serbian forces were taking even British and French soldiers hostage, as well as committing the Srebrenica massacre under the eyes of Dutch troops, their French commander and the United Nations in New York (Norbert and Both, 1996). The ‘appeasement’ of Serbia by the British and other European governments (Simms, 2001) had created a general crisis of Western-UN intervention which Clinton (who faced a campaign for re-election in which Bosnia could backfire) could not afford to neglect. Only in these circumstances did the US move from covert backing of Croatian and Bosnian forces, which by now had grown to a substantial local threat to Serbian dominance, to fully fledged military and diplomatic intervention.

This was less ‘a universalist offensive’ than a recognition of the threat to Western, NATO, American and Clinton’s own positions that unbridled Serbian power represented (similar to the belated recognition of an Iraqi threat after the invasion of Kuwait, and the tardy focus on al-Qaeda after 9/11). Still, the Dayton settlement (curiously neglected by van der Pijl) was basically a US deal with the arch-robbers Milosevic and Tudjman even if it also gave something to the Bosnians. Under a thin veneer of what van der Pijl might call ‘universalism’ (a unitary Bosnian state under international supervision), Dayton actually cemented the results of genocide in the Serbian ‘entity’. Even after a new war broke out in Kosovo in 1998, Clinton still sought a deal with Milosevic to contain the violence; it was only when this failed that the US went into confrontational mode. Still, all the evidence is that the US didn’t seek a serious war: the initial bombing was demonstrative in character and had to be radically stepped up because Milosevic failed to give in as scripted.

It was thus events in Yugoslavia – indeed the over-confidence of Serbian forces both in 1995 and 1999 – that pushed a reluctant Clinton (who after assuming office had quickly backtracked on his pro-Bosnian campaign speeches) towards more interventionist positions. Likewise it was the manifest failure of conservative European policies – as Simms (2001) suggests, the British axis of Major-Hurd-Owen was their most dismal component – that left European governments with no alternative but to support new US policies. Recognising the earlier failures led leaders like Tony Blair, Gerhardt Schroder and Joschka Fischer in the new wave of centre-left (for van der Pijl, ‘nominally left’) governments to recognise the need for action in 1999. Western interventionism since 1990 has thus been as much reactive, in relation to challenges by local power actors in zones of war, as the product of specific strategic or ideological tendencies. The most striking demonstration of this general proposition is the most recent phase: George W. Bush came into office intending to roll back even his predecessor’s limited policies of international engagement, in the Balkans and elsewhere. It was the September 11, 2001, massacre in New York and Washington that pushed him, against his initial commitments, towards massive new interventions. And it is in this context that the more arrogant Anglo-American apologists have begun to expound a conscious ‘new imperialism’.

For van der Pijl, the Clinton era exacerbated an underlying conflict between an American-led ‘universalist offensive’ and the more cautious continental European position (in relation to which Blair, Fischer etc. appear as departures). He traces this back to earlier conflicts around NATO’s introduction of cruise and Pershing II missiles into Europe after 1979. Citing the alliance of Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand, he suggests that then ‘France and Germany already grew closer out of concern over the risks involved in the aggressive international posture adopted by the Reagan administration.’ (285) They pushed towards ‘a “Euro-global” relative autonomy from the Atlantic mainstream.’ (286) However van der Pijl misinterprets Euro-American relations in this case too. He ignores the active pressure of the social-democratic governments of Helmut Schmidt, in Germany, and James Callaghan, in Britain, to tie the US further into European defence, which was partially responsible for NATO’s cruise/Pershing II decision. He also ignores the extent to which pressure towards European ‘autonomy’ reflected the ‘universalism’ of the European peace movements’ own resistance in the 1980s. This contributed, in turn, to the new Euro-global social democratic attitudes that have matured since 1989 and have been manifest in the support of many of the left for intervention to halt genocide in Yugoslavia.

Political economy and political reaction

Underpinning van der Pijl’s account of Yugoslavia is the argument that Euro-American strategic divergences reflected different structural forms of capitalist organisation. In so far as I have brought into question his account of strategic orientations, I have already indirectly weakened this further chain of the argument. If Western policies towards Yugoslavia and other crises respond to the dynamics of political-military struggle, rather than flowing from underlying strategic options that are themselves outgrowths of structural tendencies, then the type of political economy argument that van der Pijl attempted is brought into question. Despite the appearance of building from structural basis to strategy and then to specific policy, in reality the method of interpretation is reductive. The nuances of policy that are detected are those that fit with the underlying case: as we have seen, most of the specific dynamics are omitted or distorted.

If more attention must be paid to politics, especially military politics, as self-sustaining processes, then the relevance of political economy is different from that proposed by van der Pijl. For him, generally, it is economic interests that take on political form. In a more convincing account of conflicts like Yugoslavia, attention would be paid to how political interests become self-sustaining as they are embedded in economic relations. Van der Pijl himself hints at this alternative political economy when he notes that ‘Milosevic’s promise of social protection was cruelly contradicted by a manipulative hyperinflation and bank fraud which transferred an estimated DM 26bn of hard currency earnings into the pockets of the new state class.’ (291) However van der Pijl, like many Serbian critics of Milosevic, fails to recognise how his regime – like many others – used war as a prime means of pursuing systematic self-enrichment. Writers like Kaldor (1999) and Duffield (2001) have shown that there is a new ‘political economy of war’ in which violence enforces a parasitic appropriation of wealth. This is the modus operandi of many organised actors in episodes like Yugoslavia; it is not restricted to state elites but is pursued also by paramilitary warlords and even individual soldiers, policemen and civilians. Violence with specific political and ideological roots is reproduced within new economic circuits which include theft of farms, houses, money and goods, taxation of deportees and humanitarian agencies, as well as privatisation of state enterprises. In turn, of course, these politics then come to represent these new interests.

Van der Pijl’s article is heavily political but its specifically political arguments are not explicit. Despite his manifest debts to the emancipatory tradition of social theory, in its Marxist form, his argument is denuded of open emancipatory purpose. Morality and universal values are implicitly suspect; the ‘universalism’ of the US Democrats and the ‘nominal left’ in Europe is invariably linked to the idea of an ‘offensive’ chipping away at ‘protection’ from the market, as though the latter was the greatest evil from which people suffer. It is difficult to believe that the victims of war in Yugoslavia or other zones of conflict would agree. They would doubtless have gladly traded their history, with its ersatz markets of murderous theft and other forms of primitive accumulation, for a more or less functioning market society along the lines of central (let alone western) Europe. ‘The definition of grand objectives, phrased preferably in terms of transcendent universalist goals such as freedom, democracy or human rights’, which van der Pijl ascribes to Wilsonian liberalism (277), thus appears as the supreme political evil. By implication, at least, the ‘conservative, balance-of-power politics’ of the first post-Cold War phase was preferable. And yet, as we have seen, it was this kind of politics, with its toleration of genocide, that had failed by the mid-1990s; leading precisely to the greater interventionism van der Pijl attacks.

Van der Pijl’s implicit preference for conservative realism over liberal and social-democratic universalism echoes fellow-Marxist, Perry Anderson’s, explicit call for an alliance of the Left with the anti-interventionist Right (Anderson, 2000: 1) and his quixotic early judgement on George W. Bush, that his ‘lack of knowledge or interest in the world outside the US is a positive sign.’ (Anderson, 2001: 20) This perspective seems a poor guide to the world after September 11, 2001. We now know that behind the renewed ‘conservative, balance-of-power politics’ of Bush lurked a far starker and more nationalistic aggressive momentum. While in Europe, the ‘mainstream’ Right has forged alliances with the extreme Right in Austria, Italy and even the Netherlands; in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen successfully harnessed the anti-globalisation rhetoric of the ‘anti-capitalist’ protestors to a racist anti-immigrant politics. As the full logic of the unholy alliance of Left and Right is revealed, we should surely abandon the theoretical and political prejudices that have cast liberal and social-democratic ‘universalism’ as the villain of the piece.

Bibliography

Anderson, P. (2000), Editorial, New Left Review 1.

Anderson, P. (2001) New Left Review 7.

Browning, C. (2002) Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Clark, H. (1999) Civil Resistance in Kosovo. London: Pluto

Duffield (2001) Global Governance and the New Wars. London: Pluto

Kaldor (1999) Old and New Wars. Cambridge: Polity

Roberts, A. and Guelff, C. (2000) Documents on the Laws of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shaw, M. (2003) War and Genocide. Cambridge: Polity

Simms, B. (2001) Unfinest Hour: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Bosnia. London: Allen Lane

Denying the Bosnian genocide: the ICJ judgement

Posted: February 27, 2007 in Bosnia, genocide
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Letter to The Guardian, published in a slightly edited version, 28 February 2007

The International Court of Justice judgement on Serbia’s role in Bosnia is narrow, conservative and ultimately perverse. Sticking to the findings of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, the Court rules that only the Srebrenica massacre was genocide. Thus the judges isolated this massacre from the larger Serbian project of destroying Bosnian Muslim society and the widespread killings, rapes and brutal expulsions used to effect it. As the Court’s vice-president said in his dissenting opinion, ‘the Court refused to infer genocide from a “consistent pattern of conduct” disregarding in this respect a rich and relevant jurisprudence of other courts.’ Likewise, the Court curiously indicts Serbia for failing to prevent genocide but exonerates it of having committed or even being an accomplice to genocide. These decisions, while politically convenient, amount to nothing less than genocide denial by one of the world’s highest legal authorities, and bring the law into disrepute.

See also my Open Democracy article on this verdict, published 28 February 2007, and my subsequent reply to Anthony Dworkin who questioned whether ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia constituted genocide. Also my interview on this issue with the English-language Turkish paper, Today’s Zaman.

Martin Shaw

http://theorypolitics.blogspot.com

http://www.martinshaw.org