(Johnstone, continued) Part III
The New World Order
In fact, the breakup of Yugoslavia has served to discredit and
further
weaken the United Nations, while providing a new role for an
expanding
NATO. Rather than strengthening international order, it has
helped shift
the balance of power within the international order toward the
dominant
nation-states, the United States and Germany. If somebody had
announced
in 1989 that, well, the Berlin Wall has come down, now Germany
can unite
and send military forces back into Yugoslavia – and what is
more in
order to enforce a partition of the country along similar lines
to those
it imposed in 1941 – well, quite a number of people might
have raised
objections. However, that is what has happened, and many of the
very
people who might have been expected to object most strongly to
what
amounts to a most significant act of historical revisionism since
World
War II have provided the ideological cover and excuse.
Perhaps dazed by the end of the Cold War, much of what remains of
the
left in the early nineties abandoned its critical scrutiny of the
geostrategic Realpolitik underlying great power policies in
general and
U.S. policies in particular and seemed to believe that the world
henceforth was determined by purely moral considerations.
This has much to do with the privatization of “the
left” in the past
twenty years or so. The United States has led the way in this
trend.
Mass movements aimed at overall political action have declined,
while
single-issue movements have managed to continue. The single-issue
movements in turn engender non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
which,
because of the requirements of fund-raising, need to adapt their
causes
to the mood of the times, in other words, to the dominant
ideology, to
the media. Massive fund-raising is easiest for victims, using
appeals to
sentiment rather than to reason. Greenpeace has found that it can
raise
money more easily for baby seals than for combating the
development of
nuclear weapons. This fact of life steers NGO activity in certain
directions, away from political analysis toward sentiment. On
another
level, the NGOs offer idealistic internationalists a rare
opportunity to
intervene all around the world in the matter of human rights and
welfare.
And herein lies a new danger. Just as the “civilized
mission” of
bringing Christianity to the heathen provided a justifying
pretext for
the imperialist conquest of Asia and Africa in the past, today
the
protection of “human rights” may be the cloak for a new
type of
imperialist military intervention worldwide.
Certainly, human rights are an essential concern of the left.
Moreover,
many individuals committed to worthy causes have turned to NGOs
as the
only available alternative to the decline of mass movements
– a decline
over which they have no control. Even a small NGO addressing a
problem
is no doubt better than nothing at all. The point is that great
vigilance is needed, in this as in all other endeavors, to avoid
letting
good intentions be manipulated to serve quite contrary purposes.
In a world now dedicated to brutal economic rivalry, where the
rich get
richer and the poor get poorer, human rights abuses can only
increase.
From this vast array of man’s inhumanity to man, Western
media and
governments are unquestionably more concerned about human rights
abuses
that obstruct the penetration of transnational capitalism, to
which they
are organically linked, than about, say, the rights of Russian
miners
who have not been paid for a year. Media and government
selectivity not
only encourages humanitarian NGOs to follow their lead in
focusing on
certain countries and certain types of abuses, the case-by-case
approach
also distracts from active criticism of global economic
structures that
favor the basic human rights abuse of a world split between
staggering
wealth and dire poverty.
Cuba is not the only country whose “human rights” may
be the object of
extraordinary concern by governments trying to replace local
rulers with
more compliant defenders of transnational interests. Such a
motivation
can by no means be ruled out in the case of the campaign against
Serbia.
(18) In such situations, humanitarian NGOs risk being cast in the
role
of the missionaries of the past – sincere, devoted people
who need to be
“protected,” this time by NATO military forces. The
Somali expedition
provided a rough rehearsal (truly scandalous if examined closely)
for
this scenario. On a much larger scale, first Bosnia, then Kosovo,
provide a vast experimental terrain for cooperation between NGOs
and
NATO.
There is an urgent need to take care to preserve genuine and
legitimate
efforts on behalf of human rights from manipulation in the
service of
other political ends. This is indeed a delicate challenge.
NGOs and NATO, Hand in Hand
In former Yugoslavia, and especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Western NGOs
have found a justifying role for themselves alongside NATO. They
gain
funding and prestige from the situation. Local employees of
Western NGOs
gain political and financial advantages over other local people,
and
“democracy” is not the people’s choice but
whatever meets with approval
of outside donors. This breeds arrogance among the outside
benefactors,
and cynicism among local people, who have the choice of opposing
the
outsider or seeking to manipulate them. It is an unhealthy
situation,
and some of the most self-critical are aware of the dangers. (19)
Perhaps the most effectively arrogant NGO in regard to former
Yugoslavia
is the Vienna office of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki. On September
18,
1997, that organization issued a long statement announcing in
advance
that the Serbian elections to be held three days later “will
be neither
free nor fair.” This astonishing intervention was followed
by a long
list of measures that Serbia and Yugoslavia must carry out
“or else,”
and that the international community must take to discipline
Serbia and
Yugoslavia. These demands indicated an extremely broad
interpretation of
obligatory standards of “human rights” as applied to
Serbia, although
not, obviously, to everybody else, since they included new media
laws
drafted “in full consultation with the independent media in
Yugoslavia”
as well as permission meanwhile to all “unlicensed but
currently
operating radio and television stations to broadcast without
interference.” (20)
Human Rights Watch/Helsinki concluded by calling on the
Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to “deny
Yugoslavia
readmission to the OSCE until there are concrete improvements in
the
country’s human rights record, including respect for freedom
of the
press, independence of the judiciary, and minority rights, as
well as
cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former
Yugoslavia.”
As for the demand to “respect freedom of the press,”
one may wonder what
measures would satisfy HRW, in light of the fact that press
freedom
already exists in Serbia to an extent well beyond that in many
countries
not being served with such an ultimatum. There exists in Serbia
quite a
range of media devoted to attacking the government, not only in
Serbo-Croatian but also in Albanian. As of June 1998, there were
2,319
print publications and 101 radio and television stations in
Yugoslavia,
over twice the number that existed in 1992. Belgrade alone has 14
daily
newspapers. Six state-supported national dailies have a joint
circulation of 180,000, compared to around 350,000 for seven
leading
opposition dailies. (21)
Moreover, the judiciary in Serbia is certainly no less
independent than
in Croatia or Muslim Bosnia, and almost certainly much more so.
As for
“minority rights,” it would be hard to find a country
anywhere in the
world where they are better protected both in theory and practice
than
in Yugoslavia. (22)
For those who remember history, the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki
ultimatum instantly brings to mind the ultimatum issued by Vienna
to
Belgrade after the Sarajevo assassination in 1914 as a pretext
for the
Austrian invasion which touched off World War I. The Serbian
government
gave in to all but one of the Habsburg demands, but was invaded
anyway.
(23)
The hostility of this new Vienna power, the International
Helsinki
Federation for Human Rights, toward Serbia, is evident in all its
statements, and in those of its executive director, Aaron Rhodes.
In a
March 18, 1998, column for the International Herald Tribune, he
wrote
that Albanians in Kosovo “have lived for years under
conditions similar
to those suffered by Jews in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe just
before
World War II. They have been ghettoized. They are not free, but
politically disenfranchised and deprived of basic civil
liberties.”
The comparison could hardly be more incendiary, but the specific
facts
to back it up are absent. They are necessarily absent, since the
accusation is totally false. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have
never been
“politically disenfranchised,” and even Western
diplomats have at times
urged them to use their right to vote in order to deprive
Milosevic of
his electoral majority. But nationalist leaders have called for a
boycott of Serbian elections since 1981 – well before
Milosevic came on
the scene – and ethnic Albanians who dare take part in legal
political
life are subject to intimidation and even murder by nationalist
Albanian
gunmen. (24)
In order to gain international support, inflammatory terms such
as
“ghetto” and “apartheid” are used by the very
Albanian nationalist
leaders who have created the separation between populations by
leading
their community to boycott all institutions of the Serbian State
in
order to create a de fact secession. Not only elections and
schools, but
even the public health service has been boycotted, to the
detriment of
the health of Kosovo Albanians, especially the children. (25)
Human Rights Watch’s blanket condemnation of a government
which, like it
or not, was elected, in a country whose existence is threatened
by
foreign-backed secessionist movements, contrasts sharply with the
traditional approach of the senior international human rights
organization, Amnesty International.
What can be considered the traditional Amnesty International
approach
consists broadly in trying to encourage governments to enact and
abide
by humanitarian legal standards. It does this by calling
attention to
particular cases of injustice. It asks precise questions that can
be
answered precisely. It tries to be fair. It is no doubt
significant that
Amnesty International is a grassroots organization, which
operates under
the mandate of its contributing members, and whose rules preclude
domination by any large donor.
In the case of Yugoslavia, the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki
approach
differs fundamentally from that of Amnesty International in that
it
clearly aims not at calling attention to specific abuses that
might be
corrected, but at totally condemning the targeted State. By the
excessive nature of its accusations, it does not ally with
reformist
forces in the targeted country so much as it undermines them. Its
lack
of balance, its rejection of any effort at remaining neutral
between
conflicting parties, encourages disintegrative polarization
rather than
reconciliation and mutual understanding. For example, in its
reports on
Kosovo, Amnesty International considers reports of abuses from
all sides
and tries to weigh their credibility, which is difficult but
necessary,
since the exaggeration of human rights abuses themselves
regularly
employed by Albanian nationalists in Kosovo as a means to win
international support for their secessionist cause. (26) Human
Rights
Watch, in contrast, by uncritically endorsing the most extreme
anti-Serb
reports and ignoring Serbian sources, helps confirm ethnic
Albanians in
their worst fantasies, while encouraging them to demand
international
intervention on their behalf rather than seek compromise and
reconciliation with their Serbian neighbors. HRW therefore
contributes,
deliberately or inadvertently, to a deepening cycle of violence
that
eventually may justify, or require, outside intervention.
This is an approach which, like its partner, economic
globalization,
breaks down the defenses and authority of weaker States. It does
not
help to enforce democratic institutions at the national level.
The only
democracy it recognizes is that of the “international
community,” which
is summoned to act according to the recommendations of Human
Rights
Watch. This “international community,” the IC, is in
reality no
democracy. Its decisions are formally taken at NATO meetings. The
IC is
not even a “community”; the initials could more
accurately stand for
“imperialist condominium,” a joint exercise of
domination by the former
imperialist powers, torn apart and weakened by two World Wars,
now
brought together under U.S. domination with NATO as their
military arm.
Certainly there are fractions between the members of this
condominium,
but as long as their rivalries can be played out within the IC,
the
price will be paid by smaller and weaker countries.
Media attention to conflicts in Yugoslavia is sporadic, dictated
by
Great Power interests, lobbies, and the institutional ambitions
of
“non-governmental organizations” – often linked to
powerful governments
– whose competition with each other for financial support
provides
motivation for exaggerating the abuses they specialize in
denouncing.
Yugoslavia, a country once known for its independent approach to
socialism and international relations, economically and
politically by
far the most liberal country in Eastern Central Europe, has
already been
torn apart by Western support to secessionist movements. What is
left is
being further reduced to an ungovernable chaos by a continuation
of the
same process. The emerging result is not a charming bouquet of
independent little ethnic democracies, but rather a new type of
joint
colonial rule by the IC, enforced by NATO.
NOTES:
18) The matter is complex and far from transparent, but there are
some
grounds to believe that both the Western hostility to and Serbian
voters’ support for Slobodan Milosevic and his ruling
Serbian Socialist
Party, are due to the fact that his government has been slow to
privatize “social property” using the same drastic
methods of “shock
therapy” applied to other former socialist countries.
19) From his experience in Zagreb, British sociologist Paul
Stubbs has
written critically about “Humanitarian Organizations and the
Myth of
Civil Society” (ArkZin, no. 55, Zagreb, January 1996):
“Particularly problematic is the assertion that NGOs are
‘non-political’
or ‘neutral’ and, hence, more progressive than
governments which have
vested interests and a political ‘axe to grind.’ …
This ‘myth of
neutrality’ might, in fact, hide the interests of a
‘globalized new
professional middle class’ eager to assert its hegemony in
the aid and
social welfare market place. … The creation of a
‘globalized new
professional middle class’ who, regardless of their country
of origin,
tend to speak a common language and share common assumptions,
seems to
be a key product of the aid industry. In fact, professional power
is
reproduced through claims to progressive alliance with social
movements
and the civil society whereas, in fact, the shift toward NGOs is
part of
a new residualism in social welfare which, under the auspices of
financial institutions such as the World Bank and the
International
Monetary Fund challenges the idea that states can meet the
welfare needs
of all. … A small number of croatian psycho-socially
oriented NGOs have
attained a level of funding, and a degree of influence, which is
far in
excess of their level of service, number of beneficiries, quality
of
staff, and so on, and places them in marked contrast to those
providing
services in the government sector. One Croatian NGO, linked to a
U.S.
partner organization, has, for example, received a grant from
USAID for
over 2 million U.S. dollars to develop a training program in
trauma
work. The organization, the bulk of those who work … is
undertaken by
psychology and social work students, now has prime office space
in
Zagreb, large numbers of computers and other technical equipment,
and is
able to pay its staff members more than double what they would
obtain in
the state sector.”
20) At the time, some 400 radio and television stations had been
operating in Yugoslavia with temporary licenses or none at all.
The vast
majority are in Serbia, a country of less than ten million
inhabitants
on a small territory of only 54,872 square miles.
21) Figures from “State Media Circulation Slips,” on
page 3 of the June
8, 1998, issue of The Belgrade Times, an English language weekly.
There
is no doubt the press diversity in Serbia has profited from the
extremely acrimonious contest between government-backed media
(which are
not as bad or uniform as alleged) and opposition media seeking
foreign
backing. Without this ongoing battle, the government would almost
certainly have managed to reduce press pluralism considerably,
but it is
also fair to point out that the champions of independent media
need to
keep exaggerating the perils of their situation in order to
attract
ongoing financial backing from the West, notably from the
European Union
and the Soros Foundation. Private foreign capital is also
present: The
relatively mass circulation tabloid Blic is German-owned.
22) Serbia is constitutionally defined as the nation of all its
citizens, and not “of the Serbs” (in contrast to
constitutional
provisions of Croatia and Macedonia, for instance). In addition,
the
1992 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia
and
Montenegro) as well the Serbian Constitution guarantee extensive
rights
to national minorities, notably the right to education in their
own
mother tongue, the right to information media in their own
language, and
the right to use their own language in proceedings before a
tribunal or
other authority. These rights are not merely formal, but are
effectively
respected, as is shown by, for instance, the satisfaction of the
400,000-strong Hungarian minority and the large number of
newspapers
published by national minorities in Albanian, Hungarian and other
languages. Romani (Gypsies) are by all accounts better treated in
Yugoslavia than elsewhere in the Balkans. Serbia has a large
Muslim
population of varied nationalities, including refugees from
Bosnia and a
native Serb population of converts to Islam in Southeastern
Kosovo,
known as Goranci, whose religious rights are fully respected and
who
have no desire to leave Serbia.
23) After obtaining support from Berlin and the Vatican for war
against
Serbia, Vienna on July 23, 1914, delivered a 48-hour ultimatum in
Belgrade containing a list of ten demands, of which the Serbian
government accepted all but one: participation of Austrian
officials in
suppressing anti-Austrian movements on Serbian territory. This
refusal
was the official reason for the declaration of war on July 28,
1914,
which began World War I. See Ralp Hartmann, Die chrlicher Makler
(Berlin: Dietz, 1998), pp.31-33. Hartmann, who was East German
ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1982 to 1988, sees German policy
towards
Yugoslavia as a relentless revenge against the Serbs for the
events of
1914 which led to the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
24) The March 24, 1998 report of the International Crisis Group
entitled
“Kosovo Spring” notes that: “In many spheres of
life, including
politics, education and health-care, the boycott by Kosovars of
the
Yugoslav state is almost total. “In particular,”
Kosovars refuse to
participate in Serbian or Yugoslavian political life. The leading
Yugoslav political parties all have offices in Kosovo and claim
some
Kosovar members members, but essentially they are
“Serb-only”
institutions. In 1997 several Kosovars accused of collaborating
with the
enemy (i.e. the Serbian State) were attacked, including Charnilj
Gasi,
head of the Socialist Party of Serbia in Glagovac, and a deputy
in the
Yugoslav Assembly’s House of Citizens, who was shot and
wounded in
November. The lack of interest of Serb political parties in
wooing
Kosovars is understandable. Kosovars have systematically
boycotted the
Yugoslav and Serbian elections since 1981, considering them
events in a
foreign country.”
The ICG, while scarcely pro-Serb in its conclusions, nevertheless
provides information neglected by mainstream media. This is
perhaps
because the ICG addresses its findings to high-level
decision-makers who
need to be in possession of a certain number of facts, rather
than to
the general public.
Gasi was not the only target of Albanian attacks on fellow
Albanians in
the Glogovse municipal district, situated in the drenica region
which
the “Kosovo Liberation Army” (UCK) tried to control in
early 1998.
Others included forester Mujo Sejd, 52, killed by machine-gun
fire near
his home on January 12, 1998; postman Mustafa Kurtaj, 26, killed
on his
way to work by a group firing automatic rifles; factory guard
Rusdi
Ladrovci, ambushed and killed with automatic weapons apparently
after
refusing to turn over his official arm to the UCK; among others.
On
April 10, 1998, men wearing camouflage uniforms and insignia of
the Army
of Albania fired automatic weapons at a passenger car carrying
four
ethnic Albanian officials of the Socialist Party of Serbia
including
Gugna Adem, President of the Suva Reka Municipal Board, who was
gravely
injured; and Ibro Vait, member of the National Assembly of the
Republic
of Serbia and President of the SPS district board in the city of
Prizren. Numerous such attacks have been reported by the Yugoslav
news
agency Tanjug, but Western media have shown scant interest in the
fate
of ethnic Albanians willing to live Serbs in multi-ethnic Serbia.
25) In March 1990, during a regular official vaccination program,
rumors
were spread that Serb health workers had poisoned over 7,000
Albanian
children by injecting them with nerve gas. There was never any
proof of
this, no child was ever shown to suffer from anything more
serious than
mass hysteria. This was the signal for a boycott of the Serbian
public
health system. Ethnic Albanian doctors and other health workers
left the
official institutions to set up a parallel system, so vastly
inferior
that preventable childhood diseases reached epidemic proportions.
In
September 1996, WHO and UNICEF undertook to assist the main
Kosovar
parallel health system, named “Mother Teresa” after the
world’s most
famous ethnic Albanian, a native of Macedonia, in vaccinating
300,000
children against polio. The worldwide publicity campaign around
this
large-scale immunization program failed to point out that the
same
service had long been available to those children fro mthe
official
health service of Serbia, systematically boycotted by Albanian
parents.
Currently, the parallel Kosovar system employs 239 general
practitioners
and 140 specialists, compared to around 2,000 physicians employed
by the
Serbian public health system there. Serbs point out that many
ethnic
Albanians are sensible enough to turn to the government health
system
when they are seriously ill. According to official figures, 64%
of the
official Serbian system’s health workers and 80% of its
patients in
Kosovo are ethnic Albanians.
It is characteristic of the current age of privatization that the
“international community” is ready to ignore a
functioning government
service and even contribute to a politically inspired effort to
bypass
and ultimately destroy it. But then, Kosovo Albanian separatists,
aware
of the taste of the times, like to speak of Kosovo itself as a
“non-governmental organization.”
These facts are contained in the “Kosovo Spring” report
of the
International Crisis Group.
26) The ICG “Kosovo Spring” report noted that the two
main Kosovar human
rights groups, Keshelli and the Helsinki Committee, closely
linked to
nationalist separatist leaders, “provide statistical data on
‘total’
human rights violations, but their accounting system is
misleading. For
instance, of the 2,263 overall cases of human rights violations
in the
period from July to September 1997, they cite three murders,
three
‘discriminations based on language’ … and 149
‘routine checkings.’ By
collating minor and major offenses under the same heading , the
statistics fail to give a fair representation of the situation.
Kosovars
further lose credibility by exaggerating repression when speaking
to a
foreign visitor.”
C) 1999 Covert Action Publications, Inc
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