Chomsky takes Slobbo's Bait.

Response to Chomsky

this my response to Chomsky's unphilosophical screed in response to mine on R2P



Ian Williams | August 21, 2009

Editor: John Feffer

Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

I am afraid that simply because Noam Chomsky makes an ex cathedra observation does not make it "uncontroversial" — not even when he hyperbolically accuses me of having "blood on my hands." He still defends his statement that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning March 24, 1999] actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo," and is surprised that I find this untrue — let alone morally unpalatable.

One hesitates to teach logic, let alone linguistics, to the distinguished professor, but his use of the world "precipitate" shifts the blame for the massacres and mass deportations that he admits took place from the actual perpetrators to those who were trying to stop them. (Incidentally, at the time Bogdan Denitch and I called for intervention but also condemned the form of intervention that President Clinton chose — high-level bombing.)

One can certainly accuse the West of neglecting the plight of the Kosovars, but it was Milosevic and his regime that deprived the Kosovars of their rights and then began to kill and deport them. It was that regime that had recently killed up to 8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica, whose dismembered and reburied bodies are still being found. There was no NATO bombing to blame for that rather shameful inaction.

In fact, faced with that cold-blooded massacre, NATO leaders had every reason to fear the worst in Kosovo.

I would recommend that Chomsky read the judgment of the UN war crimes tribunal, after it had considered the evidence of 113 witnesses for the prosecution and 118 for the defense, not to mention tens of thousands of pages of documents submitted by both sides. It found five Serb officials guilty of the "criminal enterprise" that he attributes to NATO. It concludes that "the direct testimony from many witnesses demonstrates that the Kosovo Albanian population was fleeing from the actions of the forces of the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] and Serbia, rather than the NATO bombing and the KLA."

For a flourish that should excite some indignation, the report added that "there is no doubt that a clandestine operation consisting of exhuming over 700 bodies originally buried in Kosovo and transferring them to Serbia proper took place during the NATO bombing" and adds that the "great majority of the corpses moved were victims of crime and civilians, including women and children."

In finding the Serbian officials guilty, the tribunal noted that "the NATO bombing provided an opportunity to the members of the joint criminal enterprise — an opportunity for which they had been waiting and for which they had prepared by moving additional forces to Kosovo and by the arming and disarming process described above — to deal a heavy blow to the KLA and to displace, both within and without Kosovo, enough Kosovo Albanians to change the ethnic balance. And now this could all be done with plausible deniability because it could be blamed not only upon the KLA, but upon NATO as well [italics mine]." The blame-shifting certainly seems to have worked with Chomsky, but the judges looked at the mass of evidence and decided to the contrary.

Chomsky betrays a persistent Manichaean worldview in which the United States is always the source of evil in the world. Even with that in mind he would surely like to reconsider his implied comparison of the United States with Nazis. ("It would be like raising the question of why Nazis didn't intervene to stop the slaughter of Jews by local forces in the regions they occupied.")

The United States is often, but not always wrong, and its enemies are sometimes, but not always right. The United States was certainly wrong in East Timor, and indeed in the near contemporary situation in Western Sahara, and I have been reporting on those injustices for many decades. Along with the other members of the Security Council the United States had a clear duty to intervene to assert international law. In the absence of effective international (i.e., U.S.) intervention, the Indonesian military would have been every bit as brutal and aggressive.

We could deplore this intervention as much as we like, but I fail to see what was going to stop Indonesia's brutality otherwise. Indeed, Chomsky points out that it was Clinton's intervention that persuaded the Indonesian general's that the game was up in East Timor. Yes it was long overdue, but it was an American intervention, which deserves some grudging credit. Also, by delegating U.S. forces to the UN on the Macedonian border, the United States successfully prevented yet another former Yugoslav republic being sucked into Milosevic's bloodstained mire. There are hundreds of thousands of dead Rwandans who would have welcomed a U.S. intervention there.

However, Chomsky takes an absolutist position on intervention in principle, which would have had him picketing the Normandy beaches to stop the war against German workers.

The United States is culpable in many ways over East Timor, but that should not detract from the primary role of the Indonesian government and military. Nor should any person of ethics try to shield the Milosevic regime from its unique culpability for events in Srebrenica and Kosovo. Chomsky's quasi-theological conception of the United States as the supreme evil power tends to exonerate the less evil powers, turning Ariel Sharon, the Indonesian generals, Milosevic, and the others into mere secondary agents. Meanwhile, condemning in principle any effective action to stop these malign actors actually lends them aid and comfort — while doing nothing for their victims.

Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author. Much of his work can be found on his blog, Deadline Pundit.

PInter Bitter

Pinter bitter
We remember Harold Pinter as a brilliant writer of dialogue. But as a political agitator he was sometimes tone-deaf

o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 December 2008 19.00 GMT

Harold Pinter, playwright and militant pacifist, was a vivid testimony as to why poets should indeed remain unacknowledged as legislators of the world. Epitaphed everywhere as the playwright of pauses and silences, like many pacifists he remained noisily silent about what should happen in the real world.

For example, one would expect the author of Mountain Language, on the repression of the Kurds, to show similar empathy towards the Kosovars, a small mountain people whom Milosevic was expelling, to have offered some constructive alternatives to Nato action, even if he quite rightly opposed Bill Clinton's chosen method of high-level bombing. His pacifism inhibited him from advocating the one method that actually worked – the threat of a ground invasion, which eventually led to Milosevic running up the white flag immediately.

Pinter's intemperate attacks on the Western European countries that decided on action to protect the Kosovars made him seem an ally of the murderous tyrant in Belgrade – an impression he gave even more substance when he joined the "International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic", as the Serb leader, overthrown by his own people, awaited trial in The Hague. That did not sit well with his declaration in his earlier letter to the Guardian that "Milosevic is undoubtedly ruthless and savage." Indeed, even as Pinter passed away, a Serb court was trying Serb militiamen for their part in murdering a Kosovar family.

It is the traditional poetic pacifist dilemma, highly visible in Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, which implies blame for the second world war and the Holocaust on the warmongers Roosevelt and Churchill while in some measure exonerating those more directly responsible. Orwell said of Gandhi that he did "did not take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins."

But, as Orwell also pointed out, all too often Manichaean pacifists assume reflexively that their own governments are worse than those their opponents'. "Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval, but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States."

However, that is not to detract from Pinter's dramatic achievements, merely to separate his direct political pronouncements from his playwrighting, which was all the better for being more subtly imbued with his political sensibilities. Indeed, he was quite right in his overall assessment of Clinton and Blair, and indeed the broad parameters of US policy. But the Kosovars whom he claimed would suffer "disastrous consequences" from Nato's actions now understandably name streets and buildings after Clinton and Blair, not Pinter and Milosevic

If he had put the subtle pauses and timing in his political pronouncements that he did in his plays, it would have been a considerable step forward.

Bashir Bashing

The age of impunity is over

The ICC's indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir should remind world leaders that they aren't above the law
All comments (13)

\
o guardian.co.uk,
o Tuesday July 15, 2008


There have been pre-emptive complaints that the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir and his governmental accomplices for crimes against humanity would make diplomacy more difficult. People said the same thing about Slobodan Milosevic and Liberia's amputator-in-chief Charles Taylor. In all three cases, the argument does not hold water. Diplomacy, without the big stick, without the hint of handcuffs, is having little or no success at all in stopping Bashir's murderous recidivism. In fact, the years of envoys queuing up for audiences with Milosevic simply persuaded him that he was so indispensable that he could carry on killing with no personal consequences.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) had already indicted Bashir's surrogates in Darfur. It would certainly be a travesty of justice not to follow up the chain of command and indict the man without whom none of these massacres would have been possible.

We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th'inventor.


Macbeth mused these words while contemplating ordering the death of Duncan. At least, in the end, he and the missus had the courage to do the deed themselves and paid for it.

But no one ever saw any of our latter-day genocidaires walking the balconies of their presidential homes wrestling with their consciences. At least in part, that was because they thought they had impunity. Killing a king may have consequences, but what are a few million peasants, trade unionists or scribblers to a sovereign statesman?

Ban Ki-moon's statement recognised the independence of the ICC prosecutor – a concept that may be a shock to many of the regimes he has had to deal with. And the secretary-general will persist in trying to talk to Bashir in an attempt to get him do the right thing, but the talking will be done by phone. Bashir's travels to many parts of the world will be circumscribed until a one way ticket to the Hague can be arranged by the next coup in Khartoum. Sadly, however, if he can get a non-stop flight to New York he will be fine, since, for increasingly obvious reasons, the Bush administration does not accept the ICC's jurisdiction.

While the White House's handpicked attorneys have provided legal opinions to authorise torture, rendition and similarly Cheneyesque deeds, most lawyers in the Pentagon and the US state department are well aware that those idiosyncratic opinions have little or no currency in the rest of the democratic world. US top brass have been warned to be careful where they travel.

Over indiscreet drinks at an international conference a few years ago, a US official explained Washington's resistance to the ICC by recounting that French police detained Henry Kissinger at the airport in Paris on a warrant issued over his responsibility for the Chilean coup and subsequent killings. It took top-level calls from Washington to get him out, he complained. One of the few positive auguries as the 20th century came to its sanguinary end was the ending of impunity, so that the Pinochets, Sharons, Kissingers and their ilk had to consult their lawyers as well as their travel agents before they set off on journeys.

In fact, Kissinger should have been arraigned for much more, from East Timor to Central America. The time has passed that so-called statesmen could wash their hands of the crimes they ordered. As that Scottish coup practitioner, Macbeth, recognised:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

It may make sovereign torturers, kidnappers and murderers see red, but they deserve no more immunity or impunity than any other criminal conspirators.

A New Kosovo -FPIF

A new Kosovo
Amid the joy of long-delayed self-determination, Kosovars face serious obstacles. Serbia and its Russian ally continue to oppose independence.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
By Ian Williams
Article Tools

* Print article Print
* Discuss Discuss

Someone should erect a monument in Pristina to Slobodan Miloševic as the godfather of the new country. If he had not abolished Kosovar autonomy, practiced a form of apartheid for a decade, and rounded it off with a brutal episode of ethnic cleansing and mass murder, Kosovo would not likely have declared independence on February 17. Nor would its European neighbors and indeed so many of the most important countries of the world have recognized its independence so promptly.

Amid the joy of long-delayed self-determination, Kosovars face serious obstacles. Serbia and its Russian ally continue to oppose independence. There are some lingering doubts in certain European capitals and the new state has some persistent political and economic dysfunctions. But Kosovar independence is now a reality, and the international community will soon get used to it.

Serbian Arguments

Supporters of Serbia have objected to Kosovar independence on many grounds – often contradictory. Perhaps the most contradictory has been Belgrade's newfound attachment to international law. Both Moscow and Belgrade can make a limited case in international law with respect to sovereignty. But neither in recent history has been scrupulous about respecting boundaries or over-scrupulous concerning the sovereignty of their neighbors.

Indeed, neither country has shown the slightest contrition for Miloševic's crimes against international humanitarian law and their active or tacit support for them. There is a ghoulish form of revisionism among Serb nationalists and their supporters that either totally denies or downplays the murder of thousands of Kosovars, many of whose rotting corpses were later excavated and removed to destroy the evidence. Belgrade's forces drove almost a million Kosovars across the borders and out of their homes.

The Serb nationalist claim to Kosovo on historical grounds is not likely to get far in any international tribunal, Israeli fanatics’ claims from Moses notwithstanding. It is a sort of diplomatic neutron bomb that claims the land and disposes of the people. Belgrade's supporters have failed to explain how Serbia would in any way exercise effective sovereignty over an overwhelmingly hostile population, whose recalcitrance has, if anything, been reinforced by the Serbian leader's intransigence. A close parallel would be London deciding to take back Ireland based on a much longer political history of continuous sovereignty than Serbia can demonstrate over Kosovo.

sponsored by
Sponsored by ClearKitchen.com -- new products for cooking and entertaining.
Related Articles
Economics
Consolidation of Kazakhstan banking sector likely
The activity of foreign players has increased in the last two years as the government relaxed the requirements on foreign capital, and has accelerated significantly over the last months, as some local banks have struggled to secure funding.
Middle East
Reconciliation back on Iraqi agenda?
Series of factors combine to bolster bridge-building efforts that last year ground to a virtual standstill.
Self-determination has been one of the bedrock principles of modern times, strongly emphasized by the International Court of Justice in its ruling over Western Sahara. Various Balkan nations, including the Serbs, invoked that right earlier against the Ottoman Empire.

Bangladeshi Precedent

Any rational point of view would suggest that such atrocities by Belgrade extinguish any residual claim of sovereignty over or loyalty from the Kosovars. There is in fact a recent example, which could indicate the direction that the international community will take.

Pakistan was originally formed by the voluntary union of what is now Bangladesh and what is now left of the country in the West. You may note that, in contrast, no one asked the Kosovars about their incorporation into Serbia in 1912, or at any time since. When in 1971 the Pakistani army staged mass killings and rapes of the Bengalis in East Pakistan, and foolishly took on India, it lost and Bangladesh seceded. Bangladesh became a member of the Commonwealth, recognized by almost 90 countries. It joined many of the UN’s subsidiary bodies even before its first application to join the UN became the occasion of Beijing’s first veto, since the PRC and Pakistan were close allies against India and the USSR. In the end, reality triumphed, and China and Pakistan dropped the veto in 1974.

UN Role

When the Security Council passed Resolution 1244 in 1999, which put Kosovo under interim UN administration, Miloševic’s regime was already under UN sanctions and had been the subject of over 50 UN Security Council Resolutions and innumerable statements. The Council unanimously set up an International Tribunal to try the perpetrators of what they agreed had been egregious war crimes. Only months before NATO's bombing of Serbia, the Security Council endorsed Miloševic’s agreement to reduce troop numbers in Kosovo – and to stop killing and expelling Kosovars. He broke the agreement and the UN resolution.

In fact, Security Council resolution 1244, despite its tendency to bury the facts under diplomatic verbiage, pointed firmly at independence. Its purpose was to legalize NATO’s victorious intervention while saving Moscow’s feelings. The UN was charged with setting up an autonomous administration and holding democratic elections in Kosovo, "pending a final settlement," which would help in developing "substantial autonomy and self government." The resolution’s small print refers to the Rambouillet accords, which were sold to the Albanians on the basis of an implied promise of a referendum after three years. Kosovo’s independence had to wait an additional five years.

New Challenges

Some critics of Kosovar independence point out that the country risks being a dysfunctional state, with a limited economy, a severe crime and smuggling problem, and undeveloped institutions. That puts it on a par with about half the membership of the UN! Consider the wars that Belgrade has visited on its neighbors, the black-marketing and profiteering that Miloševic made the bedrock of the Serbian economy, the assassination of the most democratically minded prime minister Zoran Djindic, and its failure to reform its security apparatus to the extent of arresting war criminals. Yet no one calls into question Serbia’s right to be a state.

A more serious problem concerns ethnic minorities. Many Serbs in Kosovo were complicit in the persecution of their Albanian neighbors. Some, but not many, stood up for them. When the tables turned, many Serbs fled, expecting to be paid in like coin. Many Kosovars saw it as payback time. Some stood against it, but not many. There can be no justification for the attacks on Serbs that some Albanians have perpetrated. But those who now so strongly emphasize what happened to the Serb minority in Kosovo forget that such attacks have been the work of individuals, while what happened to the Kosovar Albanians before was the work of the organized forces of the state. Nonetheless it is very wise of Kosovo to accept the plan of UN Special Envoy Marrti Ahtisaari, which allows for years of tutelage to help build institutions and protect minorities.
It is reassuring that the declaration of independence specifically calls for friendship with Serbia "with whom we have deep historical, commercial and social ties that we seek to develop further in the near future." Indeed, the very fact that the declaration refers to Kosovo, instead of “Kosova,” is a step forward from the early days when Albanians tried to insist on using the latter, as the Albanian spelling.

Recognition of Kosovar independence has started with the United States and most of the European Union. Most Islamic countries will probably follow suit, along with many non-aligned states. So far Belgrade has blustered and threatened to downgrade relations with the dozens of very important neighbors who will recognize Kosovo. But after the multiple defeats that Miloševic caused for Serbs, fortunately there is little appetite for military action.

European Future?

But whatever the atavistic pan-Orthodox pan-Slavic ties invoked between Belgrade and Moscow, Serbia needs better relations with the EU, whose members and associates surround it. Selling former state assets to Russian companies at knockdown prices may give vengeful satisfaction to anti-Western politicians in Belgrade, but Serbia's economic future is with Europe.

Not only is the EU much more generous than Russia with funds, it has been extremely successful in making old boundaries obsolete and transforming fortified frontiers into administrative divisions. Less noticed has been the EU’s advancement of the rights of minorities, both in its original and aspirant members. Both should blunt the more atavistic forms of nationalism that still haunt the Balkans.

Brussels should indeed wave its juiciest carrots at Belgrade. However, the Netherlands and Belgium have, quite rightly, stopped the EU from offering Serbia an accession package unless it fulfils its own promises and its legal commitments to hand over indicted war criminals, notably Mladic and Karadjic, to The Hague. Until they do, Miloševic's undemocratic and criminal coterie will still control Serbia's security forces. It would be like admitting Turkey without provisions for freedom of the press and rights for Kurds and other minorities there.

For both the EU and the United States, firmness but respect should be the formula for re-establishing relations with both Moscow and Belgrade. It would be a good gesture, for example, for the United States to abandon the provocative anti-missile and radar stations on Russia's door-step in Poland and the Czech Republic. Without condoning Putin's moves to authoritarianism, the United States and EU should treat Moscow as a partner rather than an undercover enemy. As the Europeans point out, Kosovo is a special case. Any attempt by Moscow to generalize it to Abkhazia or Trans-Dneister could have serious blowback in Chechnya, for example.

During the Balkan wars, Moscow became progressively more intransigent in its support for Serbia. Partly this derived from pan-Orthodox sentiment. But Moscow also liked the idea of using the threat of its veto to try to get some respect from a disdainful Washington, whose denizens persisted in treating it as a defeated power In the best-case scenario, neither Serbia nor Russia will be able to use the politics of resentment to prevent Kosovo from entering the community of states.


Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs. More of his work is available on www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com. Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies.

Serbia's self-defeating posture

This was in Guardian Comment is Free while I was travelling and attracted some 260 traditionall splenetic comments. Go and enjoy them!

Serbia's self-defeating posture
Independence for Kosovo is going to happen, despite Belgrade's strenuous objections
Ian Williams

All Ian Williams articles
About Webfeeds December 15, 2007 6:00 PM | Printable version
One of the peculiarities of Balkan politics is how leaders have photographic memories for events that took place centuries ago, but total amnesia about what happened recently. On the face of it, Belgrade's offer of almost complete autonomy as long as Kosovo and the rest of the world accept Serb sovereignty seems, if somewhat dottily obsessive, eminently placatory. But the essential claim that Kosovo is theirs because a Serb prince lost a battle to the Turks there 700 years ago, is a bit like the British claiming France because of Dunkirk.

In recent reality, the Kosovar Albanians have seen what use Serb nationalists have made of such residual claims: from Slobodan Milosevic's dissolution of Kosovo's autonomy and imposition of apartheid on Albanians there to his pogroms and ethnic cleansing just before the Nato intervention (which a Russian diplomat at the time described to me as "absolutely insupportable", before in effect going on to support it).

For better or worse (frankly mostly for worse) most post-second world war dissolutions have followed established provincial or state boundaries, without too much regard for local feeling. Those who talk about taking away the "Serbian" areas north of Mitrovica again tend to amnesia.

Those are areas that were ethnically cleansed of Albanians in 1999 and stayed that way with the connivance of the French foreign legion who stopped Albanians going across the bridge where the bridge watchers from the Dolce Vita café waited to assault any who dared.

When I went I had a UN press pass, so they could not stop me, but assured me that they would not lift a finger if I were assaulted. In fact I had a good time and good coffee in the café and gave a radio interview to the local Serb station, telling them that, notwithstanding the legion, they should get used to it - UN security council resolution 1244 meant that this area was lost to Serbia.

As was clear at the time, the resolution implied eventual self-determination for Kosovo but tried to save Russian face by deciding "that a political solution to the Kosovo crisis shall be based on the general principles in annex 1 and as further elaborated in the principles and other required elements in annex 2", which in turn referred to the Rambouillet accords.

Those accords, which incidentally precluded partition, were hazed in another level of ambiguity, promising that within three years "an international meeting" would "determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo, on the basis of the will of the people, opinions of relevant authorities, each party's efforts regarding the implementation of this agreement and the Helsinki final act", which the Americans induced the KLA to sign on to by promising that it meant there would be a referendum.

After Rambouillet of course, Milosevic, assuming that with Sarajevo and Srebrenica behind him he was a modern day Achilles impenetrable to western weapons, went ahead with his ethnic cleansing and was overthrown after his defeat.

The old spiritual about Noah had a line about animals who went up two by two into the ark: "Said the ant to the elephant, 'who are you shovin'?" It came to mind at the self-deluding bluster from Belgrade about Kosovo, where successive nationalist worthies have warned of the terrible consequences of European acceptance of Kosovar independence - Serbia may not join the EU. Brussels is doubtless quaking with fear.

Even more preposterous is the military threat. Kostunica did not disagree with Milosevic for starting wars with his neighbours but for losing them. He has no intention of taking on the Kosovars, let alone Nato. The bellicose Serb nationalist militias would not be confronting and killing unarmed civilians this time.

Serbia and Russia are quoting the sanctity of security council resolutions. They would have been better off reading 1244 before they signed it to save Milosevic from the ground invasion that would have finished him off immediately.

If the leaders in Belgrade, not to mention Moscow, really cared about the Serbs in Kosovo, they would stop posturing about the fig leaf of Serb sovereignty and work to ensure the maximum EU, Nato and UN presence in a Kosovo under probationary independence. The genuine victimhood of Kosovar Albanians does not make them saints, any more than the crimes that some of them commit against the remaining Serbs mitigates Milosevic's deeds against them.

The best future in the region is for everyone to join the EU with its freedom of movement and shared citizenship.

Independence is going to happen, and Belgrade's threat to cut off diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe and the USA will have somewhat less effect than a declaration of war by the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

ICJ and Serbia, another take

From Tribune in the UK this week - another look at the ICJ verdict.

Two cheers for the International Court


When the International Court returned its verdict on Serbia, the reaction of some commentators was like a chill blast from the thirties. Some of those who would have rushed to condemn it is as a kangaroo court dispensing victor’s justice if it had found Serbia “guilty,” quickly pronounced exoneration for Belgrade and vindication for their own ceaseless downplaying of the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic and defence of “the Serbs.”

In the real world, an “exoneration” that found that the Serb state in Republika Srpska had committed numerous war-crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, including an “Act of Genocide” at Srebrenica, and that Belgrade had failed it prevent it, is far from being a finding of “not guilty,” let alone of innocence.

And we should remember that Britain used strong-arm tactics to force Bosnia to drop its other case, against London, for its failure to prevent genocide in the days when the Conservative government was covertly encouraging Milosevic to get it all done quickly.

The ICJ accepted that atrocities had indeed happened, and that among the perpertrators were officers like Ratko Mladic whom Belgrade had seconded to the Republika Srpska Army, and paid. However, because the Serb authorities refused to release the records of the Defence Council in Belgrade, which would almost certainly have shown direct command and control, judges held back from attributing direct responsibility to Serbia itself.

The verdict was illogical – but perhaps politically useful in that it avoided exacerbating the self-righteous sense of victimhood that it is at the basis of the crudest Serb nationalism.

Awarding collective reparations against all Serbs for the actions of the unelected thug who controlled their government and airwaves for the duration of the nineties would not have served justice nor advanced future peace in the Balkans.

Even so, the widows and orphans of Srebrenica are understandably upset that Court has innovatively invented the perpetrator-free crime. The verdict was to some extent distorted by the process and the use of the Genoocide Convention. The Bosnian government had to use it to have hearing at the ICJ. Conventions against rape, torture and “mere” mass murder are not in the Court’s domain.

“Genocide” has been stretched in popular usage to cover mass murder: it does not technically cover the extinction of kulaks, of the victims of the Khmers Rouges, nor, as the UN correctly assessed, mass murders of black Arabic-speaking Muslim agriculturalists by black, Arabic-speaking Muslim pastoralists in Sudan.

The case at the ICJ was brought about by Serb nationalist intransigence. Under pressure from a people that had suffered such horrors, Bosnia wanted its day in court, but Sarajevo would probably have settled out of court for genuine contrition and an apology from Serbia’s government.

After all, the Serb government is now democratically elected and could legitimately point out that Milosevic had not been. Indeed they had overthrown his regime and sent him off to The Hague. However, even Serb moderates had legitimate cause to worry that a more clearly adverse verdict would have saddled Serbia with punitive reparations, so they had half an excuse for refusing to release the incriminating minutes and admitting to the state’s responsibility.



But killing millions of people with or without prejudice to their ethnicity does not really qualify as innocence in my book. It is the killing that is wrong – and inexcusable. But even as as excavators are still at work on newly discovered charnel pits of victims of Serb nationalists from Kosovo, Srebrenica and other horrors in the Balkans, apologists try the same excuses.

Firstly, it did not happen, secondly, “only” a few thousands died, thirdly, we should not really worry about them because Serbs suffered as well, and fourthly, Clinton and Blair waged illegal war using cluster bombs and depleted uranium ammunition.

It puts the defenders of Milosevic in the same position as if they had sprung to the defence of the Nuremburg accused on the grounds that the Allies had bombed Dresden, and that the Czechs had ethnically cleansed the Sudeten Germans from the homeland with extreme brutality. These were indeed reprehensible deeds, but I suspect that few of the Milosevic fan club would argue for the posthumous acquittal of the Nazi leadership.

While, as the Milosevic fan club points out, people of all faiths and ethnicities suffered in the Balkan Wars, it is irrefutable that it was the now-deceased strongman’s exploitation of Serb nationalism to consolidate his power that set in train the tragic events.

But even after the verdict, nationalist pressure in Belgrade is now trying to prevent an acknowledgment of responsibility, and as the ICJ points out, Serbia is still effectively giving asylum to Mladic and Karadjic.

The current government in Republika Srpska has already apologized for the crimes committed at Srebrenica, perhaps well aware that the legitimacy of the Dayton agreement that confirmed their quasi-Apartheid state will come under close scrutiny now.

Anyone who really supports “the Serbs” should be telling them that it was time to ‘fess up to what Milosevic did in their name, and disclaim his deeds, rather than covering for them.

Squaring the Circle: Full text

Full text of the Guardian Comment is Free Squaring a circle of hell See the link below.

The ICJ ruling was confusing, but at least Serbia is guilty of something. Unfortunately, they aren't the only ones.
Ian Williams


The ICJ judgment on Serbia's role in the Bosnian genocide was, as the diverse comments on this site have shown, confusing. Its demand for proof of clear instructions from Belgrade to the perpetrators of "acts of genocide", would have exonerated Adolf Hitler from the Holocaust - the even that inspired the genocide convention. The officers were seconded from the Yugoslav Army, paid by the Belgrade government and in constant communication with it. What is more, the Court itself found that Serbia is effectively sheltering those responsible even now.

Even so, the verdict was far from "Not guilty"; it was more like the Scottish law verdict of "not proven". It held that Serbia was guilty of not stopping an "act of genocide", in Srebrenica, which implies there was a chain of command responsibility going all the way back to Slobodan Milosevic. In fact, Milosevic did not appear to be motivated by the type of ethnic bloodlust of the more extreme Serbian nationalists, but he certainly tolerated it when it was politically expedient. He knew what Mladic was like and left him in charge.

On the other hand, by hedging on the question of Serbia's direct responsibility for genocide - and in particular by refusing compensation - the court has achieved two positive outcomes: it has avoided collectively punishing a people for deeds conducted by a state; and it has perhaps stopped sowing even more seeds on the ever-fertile soil of Serbian victimhood.

And by failing to go the whole way, the judges may have avoided the automatic dismissal of their findings. In fact, in any other circumstances - bearing in mind Washington's persistent hostility to the ICJ - the concept of the court as an American plot would be amusing. But that certainly was a common Serb view.

Judging from the behavior of Serb nationalist politicians and those who vote for them, there is only a slender likelihood of acknowledgement, let alone contrition, from a disturbingly large proportion of the population. It was, after all, the sense of victimhood that Milosevic so cynically exploited to maintain power. Even at this stage there is opposition to the Serbian parliament expressing contrition, and until the government hands over the perpetrators wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal it stands condemned by the verdict for violations of the genocide convention.

If Serb citizens, as individuals, have been spared the taxpayers' burden of paying reparations to the State of Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia should recognize a debt to the individual victims, the orphans and widows of the massacre. Compensation and pensions for the victims would be a gesture that showed they were not just saying "sorry" in a half-hearted effort to comply with the Court.

And there should be others embarrassed as well. If Serbia is guilty of failing to prevent an act of genocide in Srebrenica, then so is the international community, whose forces set up alleged safe havens and refused to defend them; those who refused air strikes in support of the UN peacekeepers in the town; those who collaborated with the Serb forces during the war in maintaining the sieges of the Bosniak enclaves.

Perhaps even more responsibility rests with those at Dayton who rewarded the ethnic cleansers with control of half of Bosnia, including Srebrenica. Even though the Republika Srpska is rushing to apologize for the massacre, its very existence in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina enshrines the apartheid principles of the ethnic cleansers. It is well past time to revisit the whole ramshackle arrangement, and integrate the country.

ICJ Squares A Circle of Hell

The World Court verdict on Serbia left me puzzled, but thinking that politically it may have been the most astute verdict. However, I argue in the Guardian that it is not just the verdict but what people do with it -- and people in the broadest sense, not just the Serb nationalists in Belgrade.
Squaring A Circle of Hell

A Clark's Tale

I really do think there is a solid case for impeaching George W. Bush – and Dick Cheney as well come to think of it. But when I got an email passed on from Ramsey Clark, asking me to support his impeachment campaign, I had to demur.

There are many good reasons for opposing the war, but none of them involve the innocence of Saddam Hussein, Clark's erstwhile client. Bush lied about the war. The Bush dynasty covered up their complicity in Saddam's crimes, but that does not exonerate the latter.

Ramsey Clark has simply no credibility on this matter. He has a consistently recidivist record of defending war criminals, tyrants and butchers from Milosevic to Saddam. My article on Clark in Salon in 1999 still holds in still holds, and if anything, he has probably gone down hill since.

There were legitimate war resisters in the Second World War. Few of them had the bad taste to defend Hitler and Mussolini, yet what is about so much of what passes for the Left in America that they are so undiscriminating. They ally themselves with supporters of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, in Rwanda, and now the butcher of Kurdistan. It is perfectly acceptably, and indeed politically much more sensible to recognize that the US war can still be wrong even though Saddam Hussein was indeed an evil dictator.

And what is worse, Clark is a lousy lawyer. For example, in his defense of Rwanda genocide indictee Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, aligned with Neocon sentiment against multinational tribunals -- somewhat ironically for a case originating in Texas -- said his client faced execution if extradited. Unlike Texas, the Tribunal, of course, has no death penalty, and indeed when it found Ntakirutimana guilty of participating in the killing of hundreds who had sought refuge in a Seventh Day Adventist hospital, it only sentenced him to ten years – about what he would get for a driving offence while black in Texas.

Perhaps it is no wonder that Clark's clients are all found guilty are imprisoned, die in prison or are executed. I would sooner trust him with brain surgery than with drawing up credible articles of impeachment. I groan when I see him representing war resisters from the forces, seeing any legal defense disappear in a cloud of Neo-Trotsykite rhetoric inspired by his sponsors.