Part 2: Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass


(Diana Johnstone's article, continued)

Media Momentum

From the start, foreign reporters were better treated in Zagreb and
Ljubljana , whose secessionist leaders understood the prime importance
of media images in gaining international support, than in Belgrade. The
Albanian secessionists in Kosovo or “Kosovars,” (10) the Croatian
secessionists and the Bosnian Muslims hired an American public relations
firm, Ruder Finn, to advance their causes by demonizing the Serbs. (11)
Ruder Finn deliberately targeted certain publics, notably the American
Jewish community, with a campaign likening Serbs to Nazis. Feminists
were also clearly targeted by the Croatian nationalist campaign directed
out of Zagreb to brand Serbs as rapists. (12)

The Yugoslav story was complicated; anti-Serb stories had the advantage
of being simple and available, and they provided an easy-to-use moral
compass by designating the bad guys.

As the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina got under way in mid-1992, American
journalists who repeated unconfirmed stories of Serbian atrocities could
count on getting published, with a chance of a Pulitzer Prize. Indeed,
the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting was shared between
the two authors of the most sensational “Serb atrocities stories” of the
year: Roy Gutman of Newsday and John Burns of the New York Times. In
both cases, prize-winning articles were based on hearsay evidence of
dubious credibility. Gutman’s articles, mostly based on accounts by
Muslim refugees in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, were collected in a
book rather misleadingly entitled Witness to Genocide, although in fact
he had been a “witness” to nothing of the sort. His allegations that
Serbs were running “death camps” were picked up by Ruder Finn and widely
diffused, notably to Jewish organizations. Burns’s story was no more
than an interview with a mentally deranged prisoner in a Sarajevo jail,
who confessed to crimes some of which have been since proven never to
have been committed. (13)

On the other hand, there was no market for stories by a journalist who
discovered that reported Serbian “rape camps” did not exist (German TV
reporter Martin Lettmayer), (14) or who included information about
Muslim or Croat crimes against Serbs (Belgian journalist Georges
Berghezan for one). (15) It became increasingly impossible to challenge
the dominant interpretation in major media. Editors naturally prefer to
keep the story simple: one villain, and as much blood as possible.
Moreover, after the German government forced an early recognition of
Slovenian and Croatian independence, other Western powers lined up
opportunistically with the anti-Serb position. The United States soon
moved aggressively into the game by picking its own client – Muslim
Bosnia – out of the ruins.

Foreign news has always been much easier to distort than domestic news.
Television coverage simply makes the distortion more convincing, TV
crews sent into strange places about which they know next to nothing,
send back images of violence that give millions of viewers the
impression that “everybody knows what is happening.” Such an impression
is worse than plain ignorance.

Today, worldwide media such as CNN openly put pressure on governments to
respond to the “public opinion” which the media themselves create.
Christiane Amanpour tells the U.S. and the European Union what they
should be doing in Bosnia; to what extent is this coordinated with U.S.
agencies is hard to tell. Indeed, the whole question of which tail wags
the dog is wide open. Do media manipulate the government, does
government manipulate the media, or are influential networks
manipulating both?

Many officials of Western governments complain openly or privately of
being forced into unwise policy decisions by “the pressure of public
opinion,” meaning the media. A particularly interesting testimony in
this regard is that of Otto von Habsburg, the extremely active and
influential octogenarian heir to the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire,
today a member of the European Parliament from Baveria, who has taken
great and one might say paternal interest in the cause of Croatian
independence. “If German recognized Slovenia and Croatia so rapidly,”
Habsburg told the Bonn correspondent of the French daily Figaro,
(16)“even against the will of [then German foreign minister]
Hans-Dietrich Genscher who did not want to take that step, it’s because
the Bonn government was subjected to an almost irresistible pressure of
public opinion. In this regard, the German press rendered a very great
service, in particular the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Carl
Gustav Strohm, that great German journalist who works for Die Welt.”

Still, the virtually universal acceptance of a one-sided view of
Yugoslavia’s collapse cannot be attributed solely to political designs
or to sensationalist manipulation of the news by major media. It also
owes a great deal to the ideological uniformity prevailing among
educated liberals who have become the consensual moral conscience in
Northwestern Euro-American society since the end of the Cold War.

Down with the State

This ideology is the expression in moralistic terms of the dominant
project for reshaping the world since the United States emerged as sole
superpower after the defeat of communism and the collapse of the Soviet
Union. United States foreign policy for over a century has been dictated
by a single overriding concern: to open world markets to American
capital and American enterprise. Today, this project is triumphant as
“economic globalization.” Throughout the world, government policies are
judged, approved or condemned decisively, not by their populations but
by “the markets,” meaning the financial markets. Foreign investors, not
domestic votes, decide policy. The International Monetary Fund and other
such agencies are there to help governments adjust their policies and
their societies to market imperatives.

The shift of decision-making power away from elected governments, which
is an essential aspect of this particular “economic globalization,” is
being accompanied by an ideological assault on the nation-state as a
political community exercising sovereignty over a defined territory. For
all its shortcomings, the nation-state is still the political level most
apt to protect citizens’ welfare and the environment from the
destructive expansion of global markets. Dismissing the nation-state as
an anachronism, or condemning it as a mere expression of “nationalist”
exclusivism, overlooks and undermines its long-standing legitimacy as
the focal point of democratic development, in which citizens can
organize to define and defend their interests.

The irony is that many well-intentioned idealists are unwittingly
helping to advance this project by eagerly promoting its moralistic
cover: a theoretical global democracy that should replace attempts to
strengthen democracy at the supposedly obsolete nation-state level.

Within the United States, the link between anti-nation-state ideology
and economic globalization is blurred by the double standard of U.S.
leaders who do not hesitate to invoke the supremacy of U.S. “national
interests” over the very international institutions they promote in
order to advance economic globalization. This makes it seem that such
international institutions are a serious obstacle to U.S. global power
rather than its expression. However, the United States has the overall
military and political power to design and control key international
institutions (e.g., the IME, the World Trade Organization, and the
International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia), as well as to
undermine those it dislikes (UNESCO when it was attempting to promote
liberation of media from essentially American control) or to flout
international law with impunity (notably in its Central American “back
yard”). Given the present relationship of forces, weakening less
powerful nation-states cannot strengthen international democracy, but
simply tighten the grip of transnational capital and the criminal
networks that flourish in an environment of lawless acquisition.

There is no real contradiction between asserting the primacy of U.S.
interests and blasting the nation-state barriers that might allow some
organized defense of the interests of other peoples. But impressed by
the apparent contradiction, some American liberals are comforted in
their belief that nationalism is the number one enemy of mankind,
whereas anything that goes against it is progressive.

Indeed, an important asset of the anti-nation-state ideology is its
powerful appeal to many liberals and progressives whose internationalism
has been disoriented by the collapse of any discernable socialist
alternative to capitalism and by the disarray of liberation struggles in
the South of the planet.

In the absence of any clear analysis of the contemporary world, the
nation-state is readily identified as the cause of war, oppression, and
violations of human rights. In short, the only existing context for
institutionalized democracy is demonized as the mere expression of a
negative, exclusive ideology, “nationalism.” This contemporary
libertarian view overlooks both the persistence of war in the absence of
strong States and the historic function of the nation-state as framework
for the social pact embodied in democratic forms of legislative
decision-making.

Condemnation of the nation-state in a structuralist rather than
historical perspective produces mechanical judgements. What is smaller
than the nation-state, or what transcends the nation-state, must be
better. On the smaller scale, “identities” of all kinds, or “regions,”
generally undefined, are automatically considered more promising by much
of the current generation. On the larger scale, the hope for democracy
is being transferred to the European Union, or to international NGOs, or
to theoretical institutions such as the proposed International Criminal
Court. In the enthusiasm for an envisaged global utopia, certain crucial
questions are being neglected, notably: Who will pay for all this? Until
such practical matters are cleared up, brave new institutions such as
the ICC risk being no more than further instruments of selective
intervention against weaker countries. But the illusion persists that
structures of international democracy can be built over the heads of
States that are not themselves genuinely supportive of such democracy.

The simplistic interpretation of the Yugoslav crisis as Serbian
“aggression” against peaceful multi-cultural Europe, is virtually
unassailable, because it is not only credible according to this
ideology, but seems to conform it.

It was this ideology that made it possible for the Croatian, Slovenian,
and Albanian secessionists and their supporters in Germany and the
United States in particular to portray the Yugoslav conflict as the
struggle of “oppressed little nations” to free themselves from
aggressive Serbian nationalism. In fact, those “little nations” were by
no means oppressed in Yugoslavia. Nowhere in the world were and are the
cultural rights of national minorities so extensively developed as in
Yugoslavia (including the small Yugoslavia made up of Serbia and
Montenegro). Politically, not only was Tito himself a Croat and his
chief associate, Edvard Kardelj, a Slovene, but a “national key” quota
system was rigorously applied to all top posts in the Federal
Administration and Armed Forces. The famous “self-management socialism”
gave effective control over economic enterprises to Slovenes in
Slovenia, Croatians in Croatia, and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The
economic gap between the parts of Yugoslavia which had previously
belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that is, Slovenia, Croatia, and
Serbia’s northern province of Vojvodina, on the one hand, and the parts
whose development had been retarded by Ottoman rule (central Serbia, the
Serbian province of Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia) continued
to widen throughout both the first and second Yugoslavia. The secession
movement in Slovenia was a typical “secession of the rich from the poor”
(comparable to Umberto Bossi’s attempt to detach rich Northern Italy
from the rest of the country, in order to avoid paying taxes for the
poor South). In Croatia, this motivation was combined with a comeback of
Ustashe elements which had gone into exile after World War II.

The nationalist pretext of “oppression” was favored by the economic
troubles of the 1980s, which led leaders in each Republic to blame the
others, and to overlook the benefits of the larger Federal market for
all Republics. The first and most virulent nationalist movement arose in
Croatia and Kosovo, where separatism had been favored by Axis occupation
of the Balkans in World War II. It was only in the 1980s that a much
milder Serbian nationalism reaction to economic troubles provided the
opportunity for all the others to pinpoint the universal scapegoat:
Serbian nationalism. Western public opinion, knowing little of
Yugoslavia and thinking in terms of analogies with more familiar
situations, readily sympathized with Slovenian and Croatian demands for
independence. In reality, international law interprets
“self-determination” as the right to secede and form an independent
State only in certain (mostly colonial) circumstances, none of which
applied to Slovenia and Croatia. (17)

All these facts were ignored by international media. Appeals to the
dominant anti-state ideology led to frivolous acceptance in the West of
the very grave act of accepting the unnegotiated breakup of an existing
nation, Yugoslavia, by interpreting ethnic secession as a proper form of
“self-determination,” which it is not. There is no parallel in recent
diplomatic annals for such an irresponsible act, and as a precedent it
can only promise endless bloody conflict around the world.

NOTES:

10) Albanians in Albania and in Yugoslavia call themselves “Shqiptare”
but recently have objected to being called that by others. “Albanians”
is an old and accepted term. Especially when addressing international
audiences in the context of the separatist cause. Kosovo Albanians
prefer to call themselves “Kosovars,” which has political implications.
Logically, the term should apply to all inhabitants of the province of
Kosovo, regardless of ethnic identity, but by appropriating it for
themselves alone, the Albanian “Kosovars” imply that Serbs and other
non-Albanians are intruders. This is similar to the Muslim party’s
appropriation of the term “Bosniak,” which implies that the Muslim
population of Bosnia-Herzegovina is more indigenous than the Serbs and
Croats, which makes no sense, since the Bosnian Muslims are simply Serbs
and Croats who converted to Islam after the Ottoman conquest.

11) The role of the Washington public relations firm Ruder Finn, is by
now well-known, but seems to have raised few doubts as to the accuracy
of the anti-Serb propaganda it successfully diffused. See especially:
Jacques Merlino, Les Verites yougoslaves ne sont pas toutes bonnes a
dire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993); and Peter Brock, “Dateline Yugoslavia;
The Partisan Press,” Foreign Policy, p. 93, Winter 1993-94.

12) No one denies that many rapes occurred during the civil wars in
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, or that rape is a serious violation of
human rights. So is war, for that matter. From the start, however,
inquiry into rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina focused exclusively on
accusations that Serbs were raping Muslim women as part of a deliberate
strategy. The most inflated figures, freely extrapolated by multiplying
the number of known cases by large factors, were readily accepted by the
media and international organizations. No interest was shown in detailed
and documented reports of rapes of Serbian women by Muslims or Croats.
The late Nora Beloff, former chief political correspondent of the London
Observer, described her own search for verification of the rape charges
in a letter to The Daily Telegraph (January 19, 1993). The British
Foreign Office conceded that the rape figures being bandied about were
totally uncorroborated, and referred her to the Danish government, then
chairing the European Union. Copenhagen agreed that the reports were
unsubstantiated, but kept repeating them. Both said that the EU had
taken up the “rape atrocity” issue at its December 1992 Edinburgh summit
exclusively on the basis of a German initiative. In turn, Fran Wild, in
charge of the Bosnian Desk in the German Foreign Ministry, told Ms.
Beloff that the material on Serb rapes cam partly from the Izetbegovic
government and partly from the Catholic charity Caritas in Croatia. No
effort had been made to seek corroboration from more impartial sources.
Despite the absence of solid and comprehensive information, a cottage
industry has since developed around the theme. See: Norma von
Ragenfeld-Feldman, “The Victimization of Women: Rape and the Reporting
of Rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1993,” Dialogue (Paris), No. 21,
March 1997; and Diana Johnstone, “Selective Justice in The Hague,” The
Nation, Sept. 22, 1997, pp. 16-21.

13) See, Peter Brock, op. cit., n 11. See also, Diana Johnstone. Ibid, A
witness to Genocide by Roy Gutman was published by Macmillan in 1993.

14) Martin Lettmayer, “Da wurde einfach geglaubt, ohne nachzufragen,” in
Serbien muss sterbien: Wahrheit und Luge im jugoslawischen Burgerkrieg,
Klaus Bitterman, ed. (Berlin: Tiamant, 1994).

15 )Interview with Georges Berghezan, Oct. 22, 1997.

16 )Jean-Paul Picaper, Otto de Habsbourg: Memoires d’Europe (Paris:
Criterion, 1994), pp. 209-210.

17) See: Barbara Delcourt & Olivier Corten, Ex-Yugoslavie: Droit
International, Politique et Ideologies (Brussels: Editions Bruylant,
Editions de l’Universite de Bruxelles, 1997). The authors, specialists
in international law at the Free University of Brussels, point out that
there was no basis under international law for the secession of the
Yugoslav Republics. The principle of “self-determination” was totally
inapplicable in those cases.

(continued)