The Dismantling of Yugoslavia (Part IV)

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10. The Role of the Media and Intellectuals in the Dismantlement

Media coverage of the Yugoslav wars ranks among the classic cases in which early demonization as well as an underlying strong political interest led quickly to closure, with a developing narrative of good and evil participants and a crescendo of propaganda steadily reinforcing the good-evil perspective. This was the case after the shooting of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981, where dubious evidence of Bulgarian-KGB involvement was quickly accepted by the New York Times and its mainstream colleagues, and only plot-supportive evidence was of interest to the media thereafter. They remained gulled for years.135

In the case of Yugoslavia, the gullibility quotient has been breathtakingly high: Only material that conformed to the reigning victim-demon dichotomy would be hunted down with tenacity and reported; material that contradicted it, or that served to weaken and disconfirm it, would be ignored, discounted, excluded, even attacked. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power writes that by the spring of 1992 (the period of the earliest serious fighting in Bosnia), some U.S. diplomats had become “eager to see a Western military intervention” there. But, she adds, they “needed help from American reporters, editorial boards, and advocacy groups,” and help wasn’t forthcoming. Everyone was too “even-handed” and “neutral” (in Power’s judgment), and far too few portrayed the war “as a top-down attempt by Milosevic to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia,” reducing the likelihood of intervention.

And then in early August 1992,

the proponents of intervention within the U.S. government gained a weapon in their struggle: The Western media finally won access to Serb concentration camps. Journalists not only began challenging U.S. policy, but they supplied photographic images and refugee sagas that galvanized heretofore silent elite opinion. Crucially, the advocates of humanitarian intervention began to win the support of both liberals committed to advancing human rights as well as staunch Republican Cold Warriors, who believed the U.S. had the responsibility and the power to stop Serb aggression in Europe.136

We believe that Power’s time-frame misdates the shift by Western intellectuals and journalists into the good-versus-evil mode by 18–24 months. Nevertheless, her basic point is well-taken—and we find it amusing that she chose the claim of Milosevic’s “attempt…to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia” to illustrate what from the standpoint of military interventionists was judged to be lacking in media coverage. Something was required that was unambiguously evil, and some power great enough to righteously smite it. Also simple storylines and committed storytellers were needed. That is to say, propaganda and willing propagandists, including politically attached journalists and intellectuals like Samantha Power.

Power herself takes it as a self-evident truth that Milosevic initiated the wars in a quest for an “ethnically pure Greater Serbia,” a finding that, as we have pointed out, is ideological history, denied even by ICTY prosecutor Geoffrey Nice (see section 7). Power also refers to the importance of Western access to Serb “concentration camps” and related “images,” “skeletal men behind barbed wire” and “Holocaust echoes.” “Journalists generally reported stories that they hoped would move Western policymakers, but pundits and advocates openly clamored for more,” she notes. “The public commentary aided [pro-intervention] dissenters within the bureaucracy. They began filtering much of what they read and saw through the prism of the Holocaust.”137

Nowhere does Power contest the use of these emotionally laden words and images for the events of 1992. She doesn’t mention that the Bosnian Muslims and Croats also had such camps, which were of no interest to Western journalists, although there is no evidence that abuses there were not at least as great as those in Serb camps.138 She also fails to mention that the key “image,” that of the emaciated Fikret Alic at Trnopolje, first circulated by the Independent Television Network on August 6, 1992, and which Power says “concentrated grassroots and elite attention and inflamed public outrage about the war like no postwar genocide,”139 was later revealed to have been staged. In fact, it was taken not at a “concentration” but a transit camp; Alic, the main subject of these images, had been suffering from a long-term illness when he was found, and was unrepresentative of the other prisoners who can be seen standing around him. Although at the moment the images were recorded, a barbed-wire fence physically was standing in between the camera and its subject, the barbed wire enclosed no one at the camp; instead, the angle from which the images were recorded conveyed the false impression that the subject was imprisoned behind barbed wire at an encampment—hence the full-page “Belsen 92” story on the cover of the August 7 Daily Mirror (London), and on the following week’s editions of Newsweek and Time (August 17), among hundreds like them. This monumental misrepresentation was a powerful propaganda instrument for the war-makers, but it was the misrepresentation of fact that concentrated attention, along with the deliberate allusions to Nazi Germany—not the circumstances at the camp.140 Years after its exposure, Samantha Power still fails to recognize that it was a fraud.

We may note also that Samantha Power justified NATO’s 1999 bombing war against Serbia on the grounds that it “likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives.” “As high as the death toll turned out,” she writes, “it was far lower than if NATO had not acted at all.” She then mentions “Serbia’s atrocities in Operation Horseshoe,” a campaign presumably preempted by NATO’s war, “ensuring the return of 1.3 million Kosovo Albanians….”141 Actually, the death toll in Kosovo turned out to be low; perhaps when Power was writing her book, she still took as truth the hugely inflated estimates of her government (i.e., “from a low of 100,000…up to nearly 500,000”142). She fails to note British Defense Secretary George Robertson’s admission that the KLA killed more people in Kosovo prior to the bombing war than had the Serbs; she overlooks the fact that so-called “Operation Horseshoe” is well established as a fraud;143 and she remains enamored with NATO’s great “humanitarian” war of 1999, even though the 1.3 million ethnic Albanians who returned to Kosovo after NATO stopped bombing were the same 1.3 million who had been uprooted during the bombing. This is Pulitzer Prize-winning work on a topic in which anything goes—as long as it supports the standard narrative.

A Pulitzer Prize for international reporting on Yugoslavia was given to John F. Burns of the New York Times in 1993 for his articles on the “destruction of Sarajevo and the barbarous killings” in Bosnia, but especially for his articles profiling the confessions of Borislav Herak, a Bosnian Serb who, after capture by the Muslim side, admitted to large numbers of killings and rapes.144 Burns took Herak’s confessions at face value, but suppressed the fact that Herak had also accused the Canadian head of UNPROFOR, General Lewis MacKenzie, of rapes and murders in a local brothel.145 Mentioning this would have made Herak’s other confessions about killing and raping Muslims seem less credible, so Burns simply avoided it. Several years later, Herak recanted and several of his alleged victims turned up alive.146 But these revelations about Burns’s work during his busy year in Bosnia never appear to have taken any shine off his Pulitzer.

Burns shared the 1993 Pulitzer for international reporting with Newsday’s Roy Gutman, acclaimed for “reporting that disclosed atrocities and other human rights violations….” Gutman was an early and energetic purveyor of the Serb “concentration camps” story;147 in Power’s “A Problem from Hell,” his work is singled out for praise as among the most forceful to draw comparisons between the Bosnian Serbs and the Nazis.148 Gutman’s reporting was lurid and emotive, as when he repeatedly used the term “death camps,” and told of prisoners “slaughtered” by the thousands. But Gutman’s 1992 work on the camps was never based on direct observation, but rather alleged witness evidence that itself was frequently second- or third-order hearsay.149 In one of his more celebrated dispatches, in the same week that the Fikret Alic photo went into circulation, Gutman recounted some truly harrowing scenes described to him by the Bosnian Muslim Alija Lujinovic of “throats slit,” “noses cut off,” and “genitals plucked out” at one of the camps. Then Gutman permitted this man he was interviewing to confirm the story for him: “I saw it with my own eyes,” Lujinovic said.150

Roy Gutman also led the charge over alleged Serb “rape camps” and rape as a massive, deliberate, and uniquely Serb instrument of state policy, although he carried out this campaign in close coordination with Bosnian Muslim and Croatian propaganda agencies.151 These charges reached a frenzied level in early 1993, with the media and women’s groups mobilized and calling for action against these horrors, and their service to the Serb demonization process rivaled that of the Fikret Ali photo at Trnopolje. The number of Bosnian Muslim women allegedly raped by the Serbs ranged from 20,000 to 60,000 or more, based entirely on a small number of claimed victims plus unverified hearsay and wild extrapolation. One of the media agents for this story (Charles Lane) belatedly mentioned that “too many reporters quoted the Bosnian government’s patently unconfirmable claim that 50,000 Muslim women were raped by the Serbs.”152 But the media didn’t insist on confirmation—they sought emotionally supercharged stories about atrocities, and only when the atrocities could be attributed to Serbs. There is not a shred of evidence for the lower-end claim of 20,000 rapes. Nor that the Serbs had established an “archipelago of sex-enslavement camps…and program of systematic mass rape,” as the Crimes of War volume maintains.153 Nor that rapes by Serb forces were more substantial than by Bosnian Muslim or Croat forces—or anything more than crimes of opportunity. In fact, the Serbs put together a larger dossier of hard evidence of rapes of Serb women in the form of affidavits and documented testimonies than did the Bosnian Muslims, but the media were not interested. As with every other major theme of these wars, the rape allegations were a propaganda coup—and media failure—of the first magnitude.154

A third Bosnian war-based Pulitzer was awarded in 1996 to David Rohde of the Christian Science Monitor for his “on-site reporting of the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.” Rohde’s performance was reminiscent of what we witnessed several years later in the interplay between the media and official U.S. and UK claims about Iraq’s WMD programs and ties to al-Qaeda—including Rohde’s closeness to official sources he cited but never named, and his willingness to conduit their allegations. Starting out in Zagreb, Rohde was prompted by “American officials” whom, he claims, faxed him “spy-satellite photos” of the alleged sites of atrocities near Srebrenica and Zepa. In Rohde’s first report on what he found there (August 18, 1995), he wrote that the “physical evidence was grim and convincing,” and included a “decomposing human leg protruding from the freshly turned dirt,” empty ammunition boxes, the scattered personal effects of Muslims associated with Srebrenica, and human feces and blood at a soccer stadium. For his second report one week later (August 25), the Christian Science Monitor introduced it by saying Rohde’s previous account had “confirmed U.S. charges of a massacre based on spy satellite photos.” Nothing in Rohde’s first report had confirmed anything; and in this second report, Rohde recounted the fanciful tale about how, on a trek to Banja Luka and Pale to interview “Serbian refugees who had fled Croatia,” he had gotten lost but ended up “near the area shown in the photos” that had been faxed him earlier.

Rohde’s next major reports (October 2 and 5) were built out of interviews with displaced persons in Muslim-controlled Tuzla. But now he added the authority of “senior UN officials close to The Hague-based International War Crimes Tribunal” who, he wrote, “confirmed the findings” of Rohde’s original August 18 report, and told him that an “overwhelming amount of physical evidence of what could be the single largest war crime in Europe since World War II lies along a 20-mile network of roads in eastern Bosnia” (October 5).155 But though Rohde’s single decomposing human leg, of unidentified origin, and empty ammunition boxes, “confirmed” for his editors, the ICTY, and the Pulitzer Prize committee, some 8,000 executions, mass graves near Srebrenica, and Europe’s worse massacre since the Second World War, other than repeating what official sources within the prosecutorial nexus between the United States and ICTY were alleging, and reporting that these same sources later “confirmed” what turned up under Rohde’s byline, Rohde himself found nothing.

Reporting from Bosnia alone produced three Pulitzers in the 1990s (John Burns, Roy Gutman, and David Rohde); if we add Samantha Power’s 2003 prize for “A Problem from Hell,” which devotes a larger share of its approximately 620 pages to the former Yugoslavia than any other topic, four Pulitzers have been awarded on the basis of these wars, twice as many as any other conflict during the 1990s. The work of all four winners is replete with graphic accounts of atrocities perpetrated by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims during the 1992–95 war, Power’s 2002 book includes atrocities perpetrated by Serbs against Kosovo Albanians as well. There is little or no interest in anything else; and all four violate every principle of substantive objectivity. Pulitzers for work in Yugoslavia at least show a consistency in service to U.S. policy, if not to truthfulness and integrity.

Burns and the New York Times maintained that the confessed crimes of Borislav Herak were a microcosm of the whole, and showed what the civilized world was up against in Bosnia. It is not clear how this one villain and his acts—which turned out to be fabricated—provided the basis for such generalizations, or why anyone should assume that in a civil war these kinds of horrors would be confined to one side but not the other. But where there is a strong demand for stories about the atrocities and uniquely evil and threatening nature of an official enemy, Western journalists have never been shy about supplying them.

An even more dramatic case concerns the well-publicized videotape of the execution of six Bosnian Muslim captives by the “Scorpions” unit affiliated with Bosnian Serb forces some time in the summer of 1995. This video was introduced during the defense phase of the Milosevic trial.156 Although immediately called “sensationalism” by the amicus curiae attorney Steven Kay, and never admitted as evidence at trial, its mere showing was widely taken as proof of Milosevic’s responsibility for the events depicted in it, as well as the larger Srebrenica massacre. Tim Judah and Daniel Sunter called the video the “smoking gun”—“the final, incontrovertible proof of Serbia’s part in the Srebrenica massacres in which more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered.” The New York Times noted that “reporting about the video has dominated mainstream news media. Analysts say the cassette is the most significant piece of evidence to shape Serbian public opinion since the end of the Balkan wars of the 1990’s.” The event “ripped away the veil of secrecy and denial of Serbian military operations in Bosnia during the 1992–95 war, particularly the massacre of as many as 8,000 Muslim men and boys in and around Srebrenica,” the Washington Post reported. “No longer was it possible to label atrocity tales as Bosnian Muslim propaganda amplified by inventive foreign correspondents, as many Serbs had done for a decade.”157 As in the Burns-Herak case, or Gutman’s use of atrocity stories told by camp survivors, the assumption that one can generalize from these six killings, which took place over a hundred miles from Srebrenica, and where the integrity of the tape has been challenged, to the alleged execution of 7,500 or 8,000 Muslim males at Srebrenica, is more than problematic.

It is also revealing that comparable videotapes showing Bosnian Muslim or Croatian perpetrators of atrocities against Serbs exist but have drawn minimal attention, led to no broad generalizations, and were of little interest to the ICTY. The most notable are the tapes of killed and beheaded Serbs proudly shown by Naser Oric, the Bosnian Muslim commander at Srebrenica, to Western reporters while his forces still had their base there. As Bill Schiller of the Toronto Star wrote:

I sat in his living room, watching a shocking video version of what might have been called Naser Oric’s Greatest Hits. There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed heads and people fleeing. Oric grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork. “We ambushed them,” he said. The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by explosives: “We launched those guys to the moon,” he boasted. When footage of a bulletmarked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce. “We killed 114 Serbs there.” Later there were celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices chanting his praises.158

Visits to Naser Oric’s residence were reported once by John Pomfret in the Washington Post, and twice by Schiller in the Toronto Star,159 but the subject was quickly dropped and led to no reflections on what it implied about the nature of the Bosnian Muslims, let alone inferences about other mass killings by this proud warrior, or about his superiors back in Sarajevo. It is also of interest that despite this tape and admitted killing of 114 Serbs in just one place, Oric was not indicted until 2003, and then only on the relatively minor charges of mistreatment of prisoners and failure to restrain the soldiers serving under him.160

And there are other tapes. In early August 2006, Serbian and Croatian television began playing videotapes that allegedly depict scenes shot at various stages of Operation Storm. One shows the “Croatian army’s ‘Black Mamba’ unit and the Bosnian military’s ‘Hamze’ squad killing and abusing Serb soldiers and civilians.” A second shows the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina Fifth Corps Commander Atif Dudakovic “ordering his troops to torch Serb villages in northwestern Bosnia in September 1995. ‘I’m ordering the village to be torched….Torch everything without exception,’ Atif Dudakovic…shouted in the film that showed houses in flames.” A BBC report translated Dudakovic ordering: “[B]urn that village….Burn, burn everything….Go on, burn everything in your wake!” But when asked during its weekly press briefing whether the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) “was conducting an investigation” into these matters, spokesman Anton Nikiforov “stated that it was regrettable that the tape had surfaced now just as the OTP had finished its investigative mandate.” Through early 2007, the ICTY had not indicted Dudakovic, although Sefik Alic, a subordinate of Dudakovic who also appears in the video, has been arrested on charges related to it.161 Is it not interesting how videotapes such as these, and Naser Oric’s impressive series, are not “important” to the ICTY or Western media and humanitarian war intellectuals, in contrast with the Scorpions tape, and allegedly come too late for action, just as the long-awaited (and perhaps nonexistent) indictments of Tudjman and Izetbegovic were never served during their lifetimes?

This all follows a broad pattern in the coverage and treatment of Yugoslavia, where only evidence fitting the accepted demon-victim design would be looked for and reported, and with the gullibility quotient exceedingly high. This is why the early claim of 200,000 or more Bosnian Muslim deaths was quickly institutionalized around the start of 1993, and why the eventual finding of only some 100,000 deaths on all sides by ICTY and NATO-government sponsored sources has only slowly, incompletely, and reluctantly crept into the media. It is why the official U.S. claims of 100,000, 225,000, and 500,000 Kosovo Albanian male deaths during the seventy-eight-day bombing war have never been ridiculed, and why the eventual finding of only some 4,000 bodies after one of the great forensic searches of all time has not been publicized and analyzed, along with the claim of “genocide” in both Bosnia and Kosovo.162 It is why George Robertson’s statement that the KLA had killed more people in Kosovo than the Yugoslav government prior to the bombing war, and the evidence of U.S. support for the KLA during the prewar struggle, has not been reported in the New York Times (etc.). Such information would undercut the institutionalized claim that the NATO war was based on unprovoked genocidal acts by the Serbs.

You won’t read in the New York Times (etc.) that the Romani and Ashkali minorities still living in Kosovo are exceedingly worried about the prospects of independence to Kosovo with full Kosovo Albanian control. They were never ethnically cleansed by the Serbs, but they have been relentlessly attacked in NATO-occupied Kosovo with the former KLA now in the police force. Under NATO authority some 12,500 Roma homes were destroyed by the returning Kosovo Albanians, and as Paul Polansky reports, “The massive ethnic cleansing and internal displacement of Roma in Kosovo…translates to a decrease of 75% of the prewar Romani population, primarily in the summer months of 1999 when the triumphant ethnic Albanian population (re)possessed Kosovo under the protection of KFOR [Kosovo Force] ‘peacekeeping’ forces. These vast numbers of frightened and desperate Roma were driven from Kosovo in spite of the fact that there were over 300 international NGOs providing humanitarian aid and assistance on the ground in Kosovo during this period.” Polansky believes that “independence” will result in the flight of most of the remaining Roma from Kosovo.163 But this doesn’t fit the narrative, so it isn’t news fit to print.

It is also worth repeating that the stunning abandonment of the crucial charge about the Milosevic-Serb drive for a “Greater Serbia” by the ICTY prosecutor during the Milosevic trial on August 25, 2005, was never reported in the New York Times or elsewhere in the mainstream media; and as we have noted, the charge remains intact as a truth in the media and among human rights intellectuals, even though never really believed by the prosecutor. They need it, just as they must stay away from the real and large-scale ethnic cleansings in Croatia and Kosovo by the good guys and the evidence that the charge of “genocide” in both Bosnia and Kosovo was based on hugely inflated and one-sided claims.

Another anomaly in the demonization process is that despite the claims of Milosevic’s ultra-nationalist and killer-manager role, during the long trial and intense search for his ugly words and orders to kill, nothing was uncovered: Not one line in which he displayed a hatred and intolerance towards members of the other “nations” in Yugoslavia or a single order to commit criminal acts. The claim of Ed Vulliamy that Milosevic and his wife spoke contemptuously of “mongrel races” is almost certainly disinformation.164 Tudjman and Izetbegovic did make explicit statements that betrayed their eagerness and intent to get rid of the Krajina Serbs (Tudjman) and unwillingness to accept any “non-Islamic political institutions” within Bosnia (Izetbegovic). But these statements were by clients of the West, hence any of their remarks about ethnically cleansable races and mongrel political institutions are not cited by Marlise Simons and Ed Vulliamy or used by the ICTY to prepare indictments for a “joint criminal enterprise.”

The ICTY was a PR and faux-judicial arm of NATO, designed to serve its diplomacy and war, as was even acknowledged by former State Department lawyer Michael Scharf: “The tribunal was widely perceived within the government as little more than a public relations device,” and a “useful policy tool” that could be used to “isolate offending leaders diplomatically…and fortify the international political will to employ economic sanctions or use force.”165 Scharf of course saw nothing wrong with creating and using this tool for U.S. political ends, and neither did the mainstream media and humanitarian war intelligentsia. The ICTY was a weapon of the good guys, therefore politicization and an abandonment of rules of decent judicial practice were ignored. It has been an absolutely uniform practice of the U.S. media to treat the ICTY as an unbiased judicial institution seeking justice. Its clear political role is so thoroughly accepted and internalized it isn’t even noticed. The way the Western establishment media treat the ICTY surely rivals the manner in which the Soviet media treated their own show trials of 1936–37. (For a case study of the New York Times’s coverage of the Milosevic trial that makes this point, see Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia Tribunal: A Study in Total Propaganda Service,” ZNet, 2004, http://www.zmag.org/simonsyugo.html.)

The left and liberal media in the United States did little better than the mainstream in reporting and analyzing the dismantlement of Yugoslavia; and they sometimes did worse. For the most part they simply avoided the difficult questions. The demonization of the Serbs had worked well, had been implanted early, and liberals and much of the left were swept along before they had thought much about these events. By the late 1990s, In These Times replaced their outstanding reporter and Balkans expert Diana Johnstone with Paul Hockenos, a man who had worked for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Bosnia and followed the mainstream narrative undeviatingly. Milosevic stood on the verge of creating “an ethnically compact Greater Serbia,” Hockenos wrote several weeks into NATO’s 1999 war. “In the course of three Balkan wars, the Serbian leader has redrawn the region’s demographic map and destabilized southeastern Europe for decades to come….Even if Serbia lies in ruin at his feet, Milosevic stands as testimony that a fascistic policy of carving ethnic nation-states from multiethnic countries is a viable project in contemporary Europe.”166

Until the summer of 1999, The Progressive largely bypassed the former Yugoslavia. Its first major article was entrusted to Mary Kaldor (September 1993), a member of the “Europe begins in Sarajevo” school and later advocate for NATO’s 1999 war against Serbia. “The international community’s failure to save Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina is a monumental betrayal of fundamental human values,” she opened. Inverting reality, Kaldor found that the “international community…has been completely unwilling…to intervene politically in this war.” She thus missed the decisive earlier interventions that supported the secessions and the perversity of the Badinter Commission’s rulings, among other matters. However, The Progressive did publish important critiques of NATO’s 1999 war as it wound down and shifted into the occupation phase, including a fine statement by Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich, one of the decent left voices in American politics; it also published an analysis of the role that private military corporations had played in arming and training “Clinton’s Contras,” better known as the KLA.167

Aside from Alexander Cockburn, whose work on this front continues to shine,168 The Nation suffered greatly from the fact that columnist Christopher Hitchens had taken a dive by the early 1990s, just in time for this major European conflict; in one memorably bad passage out of dozens, Hitchens wrote that these were wars “between all those who favor ethnic and religious partition and all those who oppose it”—good versus evil, with the columnist distinguishing himself by taking the side of the good.169

The Nation has also suffered from the fact that its UN correspondent Ian Williams not only counts himself a partisan of the humanitarian brigades but is rabidly anti-Serb; the mix has produced a toxic mess. “Nor can [the conflict in Kosovo] be treated as an internal Yugoslav affair,” Williams wrote as early as March 1998, just after the ICTY’s chief prosecutor Louise Arbour had publicized her first warning to the Serbs. “Belgrade’s behavior…is on the verge of triggering the duties of signatories to the Genocide Convention. Allowing Milosevic to get away with his suppression of human rights in Kosovo in 1989 led directly to the massacres in Bosnia by the cruel methods now employed in Kosovo.” Thirteen months later, Williams teamed-up with Bogdan Denitch to defend NATO’s war. “Those who want an immediate NATO cease-fire owe the world an explanation of how they propose to stop and reverse the massive ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in light of Milosevic’s history as a serial ethnic cleanser and promise-breaker,” they wrote. Later, while mocking the “apologists for genocide” (i.e., people who opposed NATO’s war) who had participated in a Nation Institute/Pacifica Radio “teach-in” in Los Angeles, Williams reminded his readers that “Milosevic had started and lost one war in Slovenia and another in Croatia, and had caused the deaths of a quarter of a million people in the inconclusive Bosnian war….I am more concerned about deliberate genocide in Kosovo than NATO accidents.”170 This material is breathtaking for its ignorance as well as crude apologetics for imperial aggression and violations of the UN Charter (and Williams is the Nation’s UN correspondent).

Perhaps most disappointing of all, The Nation suffered from the fact that in the late 1990s, its highly respected contributor and editorial board member Richard Falk followed the pack regarding the circumstances in Kosovo, and even went on to serve as an apologist for NATO’s 1999 war.171 Falk was a principal in the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, which was organized in the immediate aftermath of the war by the government of Prime Minister of Göran Persson of Sweden, and went on to coin the empire-friendly phrase “illegal but legitimate” to sum up its take on the aggression.172 In Bosnia, Falk writes, “diplomatic responses exhibited an unwillingness to mount a credible interventionary challenge to the Serbian operations,” as the UN “was severely limited by its mandate of impartiality, an astonishing posture in view of the genocidal behavior on display.”173 Falk appears unaware of the diplomatic responses of the Clinton administration in sabotaging the Lisbon accord and its successors, and its military responses in helping arm the Bosnian Muslims and Croatians and helping bring thousands of Mujahedin to fight in Bosnia. He swallows the claims of genocidal behavior (on one side only) in Bosnia just as he inflates it for Kosovo and ignores the facts about KLA killings in Kosovo and U.S. aid to the KLA in the run-up to the bombing war. Here he was adopting a position similar to the Kosovo Commission, which acknowledged that NATO’s war “was not legal because it contravened the Charter prohibition on the unauthorized use of force,” and expressed its concern over the “growing gap between legality and legitimacy that always arises in cases of humanitarian intervention.” Nevertheless it concluded that the illegality of NATO’s war proves that the law itself is “inadequate,” and emphasized the “need to close the gap between legality and legitimacy,” as NATO’s need to wage “humanitarian” wars will continue to arise.174

But it was just as clear on March 24, 1999 (as it was on September 11, 2001, and March 19, 2003) that—when it comes to questions of war and peace, U.S. power, and “why international law matters”175—for the left to reject a fixed, consensually attained, rule-governed system in favor of flexible, ad hoc, readily manipulable “norms” will bring about less a normative revolution than a counterrevolution. In other words, if you give the supreme international criminal an inch, it will take a mile. We need look no further than the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to see what formulas like “illegal but legitimate” mean in real-world terms: They offer neither an advance “beyond Westphalia,” to use a phrase popular among the “humanitarian” war-sect, nor an end of impunity, but provide yet another cover for the “option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security,” in the words of the September 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy.176 “Old wine, new bottles,” as Noam Chomsky put it.177

The Nation did run an important article by George Kenney in June 1999, in which he cited a U.S. official’s admission that the “bar” had been raised high enough at the Rambouillet peace conference to assure rejection by the Serbs; as the official put it, the “Serbs needed a little bombing.” But by July 2003 the magazine had regressed, devoting an issue to “humanitarian intervention” that included no important dissident voice on Yugoslavia, but several party liners such as Falk, Samantha Power, Mary Kaldor, David Rieff, and Swedish official Carl Tham, all of whom had supported NATO’s 1999 war.178

Sadly, truly left critiques of the foreign interference, military interventions, and outright war and occupation that the former Yugoslavia has endured have been scarce. One major exception was Z Magazine and the more encompassing ZNet, which ran lengthy reviews of four outstanding critical works on Yugoslavia: Diana Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade, Michael Mandel’s How America Gets Away With Murder, Peter Brock’s Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, and John Laughland’s Travesty.179 Z also published a series of articles that called into question the standard narrative and media coverage of Yugoslavia. Another important exception was Monthly Review and its affiliated Monthly Review Press, which published Johnstone’s book in the United States, had a strong trio of critical articles during the NATO bombing war in 1999 (“Forget humanitarian motives. This is about U.S. global hegemony.”180), and in the following year ran John Rosenthal’s rejection of the “hyperinflationary use of the term ‘genocide’” to mobilize the “humanitarian” brigades.181 Jean Bricmont’s recent Humanitarian Imperialism takes up the same torch.182 MR’s editorial comments have also been highly critical of Western policies in Yugoslavia, recognizing their place in the wider process of imperialist expansion. One more exception to this left failure was CovertAction Quarterly, which had a series of critical articles by Diana Johnstone, Sean Gervasi, several by Gregory Ehlich and by the present writers, and articles by Karen Talbot, Michel Chossudovsky, and Michael Parenti.183

Despite these exceptions, the failure of the left in the United States and elsewhere in dealing with Yugoslavia has been egregious, reflecting the power of the standard narrative, while also reinforcing it.

11. Final Note

Yugoslavia’s breakup was driven by both internal and external factors. Of major importance were the economic disparities that no amount of state planning and redistribution ever countered. Over four decades, the rich regions grew richer, and the poor poorer; and these disparities tended to parallel Yugoslavia’s republican as well as its ethnic structures. The depression of the 1980s and the loss of the wartime generation of leaders left fewer defenders of socialism as well as federalism. Pressure for terminating both rose sharply in Slovenia and Croatia; the republics of the haves no longer wanted the burden of the have-nots and the federal structure that administered it. Contrary to the standard narrative, the nationalisms of the Slovenes and Croats, coupled later with the aims of the Izetbegovic faction in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Albanian nationalists within the impoverished province of Kosovo, proved more important to the whole process than did the rise of Slobodan Milosevic or Serb nationalism.

But Western interference also contributed greatly to the dismantlement of Yugoslavia. Slovenia and Croatia, then Bosnia-Herzegovina, and several years later Kosovo—all were encouraged to “dissociate” (to use a term that was popular in Slovenia), and each recognized that the West, and in particular the United States, could be mobilized to their cause. By encouraging the secession of republics, but flatly ruling out some comparable form of self-determination or secession for the Serb minorities who feared for their security in the newly independent states of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Western powers ensured that the conflicts would become open wars with all their brutality and ugliness. Worse, by blocking settlements to these armed conflicts from Lisbon in early 1992 until Dayton in late 1995, and then again by crafting proposals to ensure Belgrade’s rejection at Rambouillet in early 1999, the United States and its allies kept the first series of wars churning for four bloody years, while in the latter case establishing the pretext for NATO’s war and takeover of southern Serbia.

When NATO started bombing what was left of Yugoslavia in March 1999, foremost among the reasons Bill Clinton cited in justification of the war was “to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive.” Jürgen Habermas asserted that “[T]he intervening states are attempting to vindicate the claims of those whose human rights are being trampled by their own government.” Vaclav Havel told the Canadian parliament that the “war places human rights above the rights of the state…as both conscience and international legal documents dictate.” At war’s end, Tony Blair added by way of epilogue that “We now have a chance to build a new internationalism based on values and the rule of law.” And in a commentary about the “need for timely intervention by the international community when death and suffering are being inflicted on large numbers of people,” Kofi Annan admitted that the humanitarian principle at stake here “will arouse distrust, scepticism, even hostility” in some quarters. But, he added, “on balance we should welcome it.”184

But this entire intellectual and moral construct was a fraud; and that it found as many advocates as it did tells us more about the grip of imperial ideology, ignorance, and potent propaganda in the West than anything about the new norms of the wished-for cosmopolitan order. In the very beginning were the big lies about Milosevic’s “ultra-nationalism” and quest for a “Greater Serbia.” Once established, the good-versus-evil dichotomy was reinforced by the discriminatory rulings of the Badinter Commission and scores of Security Council resolutions; by the creation of a political tribunal to punish the wicked and affirm the justness of the intervening powers; by the telling evidence of which side NATO bombed and which side it did not; and by years of news coverage and commentary that took their cues from all of the above. The good-versus-evil dichotomy—with NATO avenging the innocent, and now trying to liberate oppressed people and build states on two continents—may have suffered serious blows when Croatia expelled Serbs from the Krajina in 1995 in what was numerically the largest cleansing of the wars. And then again under the protection of NATO from 1999 on, with Serbs and Roma fleeing Kosovo in the greatest ethnic cleansing as a percentage of a population these wars have seen. But, it was reinforced by the events following the evacuation of the Srebrenica “safe area” in July 1995, a symbol of ultimate evil that is recited time and again in the work of the ICTY and the “never again” chorus.

When in late August 1995, Kofi Annan, an under secretary in charge of peacekeeping, handed the “key” to NATO to launch a bombing war against the Bosnian Serbs, the UN transferred its exclusive Chapter VII right to make war to the most powerful band of international aggressors and law-breakers the world has ever known. So brazen was this coup against the charter that three years later, as the same band of aggressors was threatening Serbia, it declared that it already possessed the Chapter VII right to enforce a Security Council resolution demanding that “all parties…cease hostilities…in Kosovo.” And when one month after the start of the bombing war, in April 1999, this band held its fiftieth anniversary summit in Washington, it told the rest of the world that from then on, if it ever turns out that they want to make war, but fail to gain the Security Council’s blessings, it won’t matter. They will still make war.185

It should come as no surprise that political leaders of all kinds welcome changes that weaken the constraints on their ability to act. Nor should anyone be surprised by the intellectual labors in the contemporary era to distinguish the justness of “our” interventions from the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide perpetrated by others. Some endeavors are as old as Adam; and these truisms ring particularly true among the richest and most powerful states, where the interests, motives, and above all resources to use force are heavily concentrated, along with ever-growing opportunities and temptations.

We know of no instance in which advocates for “humanitarian” war and the “responsibility to protect” recognize that the principles they expect the world to embrace must apply equally to their enforcers as to the states they are to be enforced against—or that, in Hans Kelsen’s words, “Only if the victors submit themselves to the same law which they wish to impose upon the vanquished States will the idea of international justice be preserved.”186

No humanitarian interventionist has ever suggested that the U.S. and UK threat and use of force against Iraq triggered a “responsibility to protect” Iraqis from their invaders, or called for the use of force by a “coalition of the willing” to bring to a halt the destruction that ensued—“until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security,” as Article 51 prescribes. On the contrary, the only “never agains” around which we’ve observed the “humanitarian” war-sect mobilizing are the ones that advance an imperial agenda—never that run counter to it. The Bosnian Serbs, Yugoslavia in Kosovo, and the Sudan in Darfur (to name three examples). But the focus is never on the United States in Vietnam and Iraq, Indonesia in East Timor, Israel in the West Bank and Lebanon, or the NATO bloc collectively in Afghanistan.

In the International Committee of the Red Cross’s classic formulation (which the present authors fully accept), humanitarianism is “impartial, neutral and independent,” and its sole “mission is to protect the lives and dignity of victims of war and internal violence and to provide them with assistance.” What humanitarianism clearly is not is war, and no truly liberal or leftist approach to the issues of war and peace would ever forget this. But when it comes to the former Yugoslavia, left and liberal voices led the way. Those on the left recognize the enormity of the lying that helped insulate U.S. and UK policymakers during their preparation to seize Iraqi territory, the depth of ideology required for educated Westerners to speak of a “war on terror” or a “clash of civilizations” without laughing, and so on. These lies and the structure of false beliefs that undergird them have not fared too well lately—at least to a point. In this respect, the contrast with the as yet far more impregnable edifice of lies that serves and protects the Western interventions in the former Yugoslavia—and which laid the ideological foundations for the U.S. role in Iraq and for future so-called humanitarian interventions—is stark indeed.

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Notes

135. ↩ See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 2nd Ed., 2001), xxvii-xxix, and 143–67.
136. ↩ Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell,” (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 268–69.
137. ↩ Power, “A Problem from Hell,” 277–78.
138. ↩ See, e.g., Carl Savich, “Celebici,” Serbianna, November 11, 2003, http://www.serbianna.com; “Rape and War,” Serbianna, December 1, 2006, http://serbianna .com; and Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade, 71–2.
139. ↩ Power, “A Problem from Hell,” 276. Power adds: “In July 45 percent of Americans had disapproved of U.S. air strikes and 35 percent approved. Now, without any guidance from their leaders, 53 percent of Americans approved, whereas 33 percent disapproved. Roughly the same percentage supported contributing U.S. forces to a humanitarian or peacekeeping mission” (276).
140. ↩ For the original debunking of this image, see Thomas Deichmann, “The Picture That Fooled The World,” LM (formerly Living Marxism), February, 1997. See also Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade, 72–3; and Peter Brock, Media Cleansing (Los Angeles: GM Books, 2005), 246–56.
141. ↩ Power, “A Problem from Hell,” 472–73.
142. ↩ See the entry for “Detentions,” in “Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo: Fact Sheet based on information from U.S. Government sources,” U.S. Department of State, April 19, 1999, http:// www.state.gov.
143. ↩ See Heinz Loquai, Der Kosovo- Konflikt. Wege in einen vermeidbaren Krieg (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2000). In English, Loquai’s title translates as “The Kosovo Conflict: The War That Could Have Been Avoided.” Although NATO launched its war on March 24, 1999, news of the German Defense and Foreign Ministries’ knowledge of “Operation Horseshoe,” alleged to have been a preexisting Serbian plan to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of its Albanian inhabitants, was not publicized until Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer released it on April 6—some thirteen days later. “I have come to the conclusion that no such operation ever existed,” Loquai, a retired Brigadier General in the Bundeswehr, told the London Times. “The criticism of the war [in Germany], which had grown into a fire that was almost out of control, was completely extinguished by [the news of] Operation Horseshoe.” See Franz-Josef Hutsch, “Hufeisenplan– das KriegsrätselKein Zweifel,” Hamburger Abendblatt, March 21, 2000; and John Goetz and Tom Walker, “Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake, says general,” Sunday Times, April 2, 2000.
144. ↩ See, e.g., John F. Burns, “A Killer’s Tale,” New York Times, November 27, 1992; and John F. Burns, “Bosnia War Crime Trial Hears Serb’s Confession,” New York Times, March 14, 1993.
145. ↩ See Brock, Media Cleansing, esp. 163–76.
146. ↩ See Kit R. Roane, “Symbol of Inhumanity in Bosnia Now Says ‘Not Me,’” New York Times, January 31, 1996; Chris Hedges, “Jailed Serb’s ‘Victims’ Found Alive, Embarrassing Bosnia,” New York Times, March 1, 1997; and Jonathan Randal, “Serb Convicted of Murders Demanding Retrial After 2 ‘Victims’ Found Alive,” Washington Post, March 15, 1997.
147. ↩ See, e.g., Roy Gutman, “Prisoners of Serbia’s War,” Newsday, July 19, 1992; Roy Gutman, “Like Auschwitz,” Newsday, July 21, 1992; and Roy Gutman, “Bosnia’s Camps of Death,” Newsday, August 2, 1992. Also see Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), which collects all of Gutman’s bylined work for Newsday from November 21, 1991 to June 22, 1993. Gutman’s twentysix- page introduction to this book ranks among the most factually inaccurate and openly prejudicial documents published in the English language.
148. ↩ Power, “A Problem from Hell,” 269–70.
149. ↩ See Brock, Media Cleansing, esp. 85–116.
150. ↩ Roy Gutman, “Bosnia’s Camps of Death,” Newsday, August 2, 1992.
151. ↩ See Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade, 78–80.
152. ↩ Charles Lane, “War Stories,” New Republic, January 3, 1994, emphasis added.
153. ↩ Thom Shanker, “Sexual Violence,” Crimes of War, 323.
154. ↩ For full accounts of this remarkable case of demonization and media willingness to report outlandish falsehoods, see Brock, Media Cleansing, 59–72; and Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade, 78–90.
155. ↩ David Rohde, “Evidence Indicates Bosnia Massacre,” Christian Science Monitor, August 18, 1995; “How a Serb Massacre Was Exposed,” Christian Science Monitor, August 25, 1995, emphasis added; “Bosnia Muslims Were Killed by The Truckload,” Christian Science Monitor, October 2, 1995; “Eyewitnesses Confirm Massacre in Bosnia,” Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 1995, emphasis added. Also see Rohde, “Serbia Held Responsible For Massacre of Bosnians,” Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 1995; “Graves Found That Confirm Bosnia Massacre,” Christian Science Monitor, November 16, 1995; “What the US Knows and Won’t Reveal,” Christian Science Monitor, November 16, 1995. Also see his Endgame (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).
156. ↩ See Milosevic Trial Transcript (IT-02-54), June 1, 2005, 40275ff.
157. ↩ Tim Judah and Daniel Sunter, “How the video that put Serbia in dock was brought to light,” The Observer, June 5, 2005; Nicholas Wood and Marlise Simons, “Videotape of Serbian Police Killing 6 Muslims From Srebrenica Grips Balkans,” New York Times, June 12, 2005; Daniel Williams, “Srebrenica Video Vindicates Long Pursuit by Serb Activist,” Washington Post, June 25, 2005.
158. ↩ Bill Schiller, “Fearsome Muslim warlord eludes Bosnian Serb forces,” Toronto Star, July 16, 1995.
159. ↩ Bill Schiller, “Muslims’ hero vows he’ll fight to the last man,” Toronto Star, January 31, 1994; and John Pomfret, “Weapons, Cash and Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica’s Tough Guy,” Washington Post, February 16, 1994.
160. ↩ See Carla Del Ponte, The Prosecutor of the Tribunal Against Naser Oric (IT-03-68-I), March 28, 2003, pars. 22–38.
161. ↩ Tanja Subotic, “Bosnia minister urges action on war crimes videos,” Agence France Presse, August 8, 2006; “TV shows footage of ex-Bosnian army chief ordering torching of Serb villages,” BBC Worldwide Monitoring, August 7, 2005; Anton Nikiforov, “ICTY Weekly Press Briefing,” August 9, 2006; “Bosnian Muslim brigade commander arrested for war crimes,” Agence France Presse, November 2, 2006.
162. ↩ For the 4,000 figure, see “Statement to the Press by Carla Del Ponte” (FH/P.I.S./550-e), ICTY, December 20, 2000, par. 16, http://www.un.org; and for the number of missing in Kosovo, see “Over 18,000 persons still missing in the Balkans,” ICRC, August 30, 2006, http://www.icrc.org. At the time, the ICRC listed a total of 2,284 persons as “missing” in Kosovo.
163. ↩ Note that estimates of uprooted persons frequently fail to account for large numbers of Roma, who simply never register with any agency. See Paul Polansky, The Current Plight of the Kosovo Roma, Voice of Roma Web site, 2001, 5; 13, http://www.scn.org. Also see Tilman Zulch, Until the Very Last ‘Gipsy’ Has Fled the Country, Society for Threatened Peoples International, Human Rights Report No. 21, (Göttingen), September 6, 1999; and Andrej Grubacic, “Kosovo’s Unworthy Victims,” ZNet, April 30, 2007.
164. ↩ As usage of the phrase “mongrel races” to denigrate an ethnic group contradicts the long-held, publicly expressed beliefs of the late Slobodan Milosevic and his wife Mirjana Markovic, we suspect that Ed Vulliamy’s attribution of this phrase to one or both of them to denigrate Bosnia’s Muslims or the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo is a fabrication. Although we have found a total of five different instances in which the phrase “mongrel races” was attributed to Milosevic and/or his wife, we have been unable to get a single confirmation from any of the three British newspapers in which the articles were published of an authentic, original source for it. Neither the three journalists under whose bylines the articles were published (i.e., Allan Hall, Vicky Spavin, and Ed Vulliamy), nor the three newspapers that published them (i.e., Scottish Daily Record, The Scotsman, and The Observer), have responded to our repeated requests for information about their sources for the alleged quote. (See Allan Hall, “The Glamorous Witch Wife and the Drug Lord Son,” Scottish Daily Record, October 6, 2000; N.A., “Saturday profile: Mirjana Markovic,” The Scotsman, October 7, 2000; Vicky Spavin, “Deadlier than the Male,” Scottish Daily Record, April 5, 2001; Allan Hall, “Power-Mad Couple Who Ruled by Terror,” The Scotsman, June 29, 2001; and Ed Vulliamy, “The Observer Profile: Mira Milosevic,” The Observer, July 8, 2001.)
165. ↩ Michael Scharf, “Indicted For War Crimes, Then What?” Washington Post, October 3, 1999.
166. ↩ Paul Hockenos, “Milosevic Wins Again?” In These Times, May 15, 1999.
167. ↩ Mary Kaldor, “Sarajevo’s Reproach,” The Progressive, September, 1993; Dennis J. Kucinich, “What I learned from the War,” The Progressive, August, 1999; and Wayne Madsen, “Mercenaries in Kosovo,” The Progressive, August, 1999.
168. ↩ See, e.g., Alexander Cockburn, “The Laptop Bombardiers,” The Nation, May 23, 1994; and Alexander Cockburn, “Where Are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?” CounterPunch, March 24/25, 2007.
169. ↩ Christopher Hitchens, “Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia,” The Nation, October 23, 1995. For an indication of Hitchens’ trajectory in recent years, see “A War to Be Proud Of,” Weekly Standard, September 5/12, 2005. Two sentences will suffice: “By the middle of 1990, Saddam Hussein had abolished Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was attempting to erase the identity and the existence of Bosnia. It turned out that we had not by any means escaped the reach of atavistic, aggressive, expansionist, and totalitarian ideology.” As is now standard for Hitchens, the four modifiers preceding “ideology” do not refer to Washington or to U.S. conduct globally, but rather to Washington’s official enemies.
170. ↩ Ian Williams, “Kosovo Another Bosnia?,” The Nation, March 30, 1998; Ian Williams and Bogdan Denitch, “The Case Against Inaction,” The Nation, April 26, 1999; Ian Williams, “You can’t negotiate with a war criminal,” Slate, May 27, 1999.
171. ↩ See, e.g., Richard Falk, “Reflections on the War,” The Nation, June 22, 1999; and “Kosovo Revisited,” The Nation, April 10, 2000.
172. ↩ See the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4 and passim.
173. ↩ Richard Falk, Human Rights Horizons (New York: Routledge, 2000), 179–80.
174. ↩ The Kosovo Report, 290–91; 10.
175. ↩ Cf. Richard Falk, “Why International Law Matters,” The Nation, March 10, 2003. Notice that between twenty-four and thirty-six months before this reassessment appeared, Falk had argued not only that in certain cases international law shouldn’t matter, but that the law ought to be rewritten to make everything alright.
176. ↩ George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, esp. chap. 5, eptember 17, 2002.
177. ↩ See Noam Chomsky, Failed States (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), esp. 79–101.
178. ↩ George Kenney, “Rolling Thunder,” The Nation, June 14, 1999; and “Humanitarian Intervention,” The Nation, July 14, 2003.
179. ↩ See Edward S. Herman, “Johnstone on the Balkan Wars,” Z Magazine, February, 2003; Edward S. Herman, “How America Gets Away With Murder,” Z Magazine, June, 2004; Edward S. Herman, “Media Cleansing,” Z Magazine, January, 2006; and Edward S. Herman, “Travesty,” Z Magazine, April, 2007.
180. ↩ See Monthly Review, June, 1999; here quoting Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Kosovo and the New Imperialism.”
181. ↩ John Rosenthal, “Kosovo and ‘the Jewish Question,’” Monthly Review, February, 2000.
182. ↩ Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007).
183. ↩ See, e.g., Sean Gervasi, “Germany, the U.S., and the Yugoslav Crisis,” Covert Action, Winter, 1992–93; Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Yugoslavia—Colonizing Bosnia,” Covert Action, Spring, 1996; Ellen Ray and Bill Schaap, “NATO and Beyond,” Covert Action, Spring-Summer, 1999; Diana Johnstone, “NATO’s Parallel Wars,” Covert Action, Spring-Summer, 1999; and Gregory Elich, “The CIA’s Covert War,” Covert Action, April-June, 2001.
184. ↩ Bill Clinton, “In the President’s Words,” New York Times, March 25, 1999; Jürgen Habermas, “Bestiality and Humanity,” in William Joseph Buckley, Kosovo (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 314–15; Vaclav Havel, “Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State,” New York Review of Books, June 10, 1999; Tony Blair, “A New Moral Crusade,” Newsweek, June 14, 1999; Kofi Annan, “Two concepts of sovereignty,” The Economist, September 18, 1999.
185. ↩ See Bruno Simma, “NATO, the UN and the Use of Force, European Journal of International Law 10, no. 1, 1999, http://www.ejil.org. And for NATO’s Strategic Concept, adopted in Washington D.C. on April 24, 1999, http://www.nato .int.
186. ↩ Köchler, Global Justice or Global Revenge?, 147.