The role of the media

The fact that during the Croatian and Bosnian wars the Western alliance manifestly did not want to attack or bomb Serbia forced the left revisionists to search elsewhere for evidence of the anti-Serbian conspiracy. The fact that the Western media reported Serbian atrocities was not, of course, evidence that such atrocities were taking place but rather of the existence of an anti-Serb media conspiracy and, as Diana Johnstone points out, “it often seemed that the media were dictating policy to Western governments, rather than the other way around”.^[26] Consequently, the revelation by Western journalists and reporters of atrocities against Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovar citizens created a climate of public opinion in which the reluctant Western leaders were forced gradually to take action against the Serbian forces responsible. It was the democratic media, therefore, rather than the Western political and military leaders, which was the real carrier of the anti-Serbian conspiracy. In the left revisionists’ world of twisted logic and conspiracy theories, the Bosnian Muslims repeatedly shelled their own civilians in Sarajevo so that they could blame the massacres on the Serbs and then used the Western media to broadcast the images to the Western public in order to create an ‘anti-Serb’ climate of opinion and pressurise the Western leaders to intervene against the Serbs. The Muslims are thus transformed from victims of Milosevic’s genocide and Western indifference into diabolical puppeteers, using the Western media to manipulate the Western public and Western leaders who consequently become the victims along with Milosevic, Karadzic, and ‘the Serbs’.

The irony of this grotesque line of reasoning is that the numerous Western statesmen and military commanders who were opposed to military intervention against the Serbian forces then become witnesses to prove the existence of the anti-Serbian conspiracy in their own media. Parenti cites claims by US General Charles Boyd, British General Michael Rose, French General Philippe Morillon, EC peace mediator Lord David Owen, and other Western military and political leaders to prove that it was really the Muslims, not the Serbs, who were bombing and besieging Sarajevo for three and a half years; that the Muslims were pretending to be besieged; and that massacres of Muslim civilians in Sarajevo were carried out by the Muslims against themselves.^[27] Thus it transpires that whereas Christiane Amanpour, Roy Gutman, Maggie O’Kane, Ed Vulliamy, and other professional journalists and television reporters were part of the Western-media conspiracy to “demonise the Serbs”, virtually the entire military and diplomatic leadership of the Western intervention in Bosnia was opposed to the conspiracy and was motivated solely by the desire to present honestly and accurately the facts as they really were. A second group of witnesses whom the left revisionists draw upon are those Western journalists whom they happen to agree with, whose articles are somehow published in the mainstream media despite its supposed anti-Serb bias. Thus whereas O’Kane, Vulliamy, Amanpour, and Gutman are viewed as part of the anti-Serb conspiracy, David Binder, Misha Glenny, Robert Fisk, Edward Pearce, and Simon Jenkins are seen as wholly objective observers free from any political bias. Not to mention Mick Hume, former editor of the magazine Living Marxism, which during the 1990s repeatedly denied that genocide had taken place either in Bosnia or in Rwanda.^[28] Living Marxism was eventually forced to close after it accused the media company ITN of inventing concentration camps in Bosnia and was promptly sued by ITN and bankrupted, but Hume now has a regular column in The Times (London). If Ed Vulliamy reports on a contemporary Serbian concentration camp then this is ‘demonising the Serbs’ and proof that the Western media is biased against ‘the Serbs’, but if Robert Fisk writes about a Croatian concentration camp that existed half a century earlier during World War II, as he did in The Independent at the height of the Bosnian war,^[29] then this is proof positive that ‘the Croats’ are really the bad guys and consequently that the rest of the media is biased against ‘the Serbs’ for not pointing this out. It is a win-win argument.

The mindset of the left revisionists allows them to disregard all evidence of the genocidal activities of the Milosevic regime, no matter how damning. When, following Milosevic’s extradition to The Hague, the Serbian police began to unearth mass graves of his Albanian victims in Serbia, Seumas Milne responded by implying that even the government and police of democratic Serbia were part of the Western propaganda conspiracy against the Milosevic regime, that they were betraying their country to the capitalist Mammon and that the only real crime was the extradition itself: “Shamelessly bought with $1.3bn of aid for a country ravaged by sanctions and NATO bombing, Milosevic’s extradition had to be forced through by decree, in defiance of Yugoslavia’s constitutional court, by a government which knew it stood no chance of getting the decision through parliament.” By contrast the corpses of murdered Albanians were simply part of the Western conspiracy: “That is presumably why – as the new Belgrade administration dug up corpses to order – the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, described the cash as a ‘dividend of democracy’.”^[30] “Where are all the bodies buried?” asks Parenti, arguing that because only slightly more than two thousand bodies had been discovered in Kosovo, it followed that that was the total Albanian death toll: “how did the Serbs accomplish these mass-grave-disappearing acts?”, he asks ironically, quoting a newspaper as saying that a forensic team “‘found no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies.’”^[31] The ominous parallels of such arguments hardly need to be spelled out. In the words of the white-supremacist web-site Stormfront: “Auschwitz had no mass graves. The cremation of four million bodies would have left 15,000 tons of ash which was never found.”^[32] While Milosevic’s crimes against the Albanians are not equivalent to Hitler’s crimes against the Jews; what are equivalent are the arguments used by the apologists for both dictators. Indeed, the left revisionists’ atrocity denial recalls the fascist propaganda surrounding the most infamous Nazi atrocity in Europe before World War II. On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis’ Condor Legion bombed the Basque town of Guernica. The following day the Spanish fascists issued a statement to the foreign press accusing the Basques of blowing up their own town. They claimed in the days that followed that, “while a few bomb fragments” had been found in Guernica, the damage was mainly caused by Basque incendiaries in order to inspire outrage among the foreign public, and later that Spanish Republican planes had bombed Guernica using Basque-manufactured bombs and that the explosions were caused by dynamite placed by the Basques in the town’s sewers. Despite this fascist attempt at denial, the atrocity swung part of the US media (the magazines Time, Life, and Newsweek) round to supporting the Spanish Republicans.^[33]

The left revisionists claim to object to comparisons between the Bosnian genocide and the Holocaust on the grounds that they are emotional and hyperbolic. Johnstone complains of the fact that because of media exaggeration “Suddenly, Milosevic was the new Hitler”. She goes on: “Analogies should be employed with care, especially with such emotion-laden subjects as Hitler and the Holocaust. When applied to unfamiliar situations, they can create a powerful semi-fictional version that actually masks reality.”^[34] Mick Hume, usually proud to be politically incorrect, in this case also professes deep concern about talk of genocide or a Holocaust in the Balkans. He complains that the tendency for journalists to compare Serb forces in Bosnia and Kosovo with the Nazis “with talk of ‘echoes of the Holocaust’ and ‘genocide’ carried out in ‘true Nazi Final Solution fashion’ has seriously distorted the popular image of the Balkans today. It has helped to brand the Serbs as the evil new Nazis.” He goes on “This diminishing of the Final Solution is what ultimately concerns me most about the Nazification of the Serbs.”^[35] Nevertheless, the left revisionists are quite ready to exploit the legacy of the Holocaust in their own propaganda. A mere week after writing the statement quoted above, Johnstone wrote that “[I]f the Croatian fascists actually led, rather than followed, the German Nazis down the path of genocide, that doesn’t mean they have forgotten their World War II benefactors. After all, it was thanks to Hitler’s invasion of Yugoslavia that the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ was set up in April 1941, with Bosnia-Herzegovina (whose population was mostly Serb at the time [sic!]) as part of its territory.” Johnstone thus draws a parallel with Nazi aggression in the Balkans during World War II and democratic Germany’s diplomatic support for Croatia in 1991: “And the hit song of 1991, when Croatia once again declared its independence from Yugoslavia and began driving out Serbs, was ‘Danke Deutschland’ in gratitude to Germany’s strong diplomatic support for Zagreb’s unnegotiated secession.”^[36] So Johnstone, who urges caution in employing “emotion-laden subjects as Hitler and the Holocaust” when it is a question of Serbian atrocities, is quite happy to throw out this caution when it is a question of the Croats; her claim that “the Croatian fascists actually led, rather than followed, the German Nazis down the path of genocide” seems to imply that the Final Solution was Croatian in origin – a view that no serious student of the Holocaust would bother even discussing. As for Hume, Living Marxism magazine, of which he was the editor, hosted an exhibition in 1993 entitled ‘Genocide against the Serbs’, organised by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and funded by the Republic of Serbia, showing pictures of the corpses of Serbs killed by Croatian and Bosnian forces in the 1990s alongside pictures of the corpses of Serbs killed by Ustashas during World War II. Pictures from the exhibition were published in Living Marxism, which did not see fit to add any comment of its own.^[37] Throughout the war in Croatia and Bosnia Hume and Living Marxism constantly equated the Croats with the Nazis in order to shift the odium away from Milosevic and his forces. Finally John Pilger, in a piece devoted to minimising Albanian casualties during the Kosovo War, comments that “Today, the Serbs are the unpeople. They have no civilisation, no society, no poetry, no history. The savagery they suffered at the hands of the Nazis in the Second World War, exceeded only by the mass extermination of the Polish Jews, has been forgotten.”^[38]

Falsifying Yugoslav history

It is of course true that the Serb people suffered grievously at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators in Yugoslavia (Ustashas, Chetniks and others), but this suffering was on a scale little or no greater than that of the Croats, Muslims, and other Yugoslavs or of the Poles, Greeks, Ukrainians, and East Europeans generally. It certainly was not on a par with the fate that befell the Jews in Europe under the Nazis. Pilger however seems to be suggesting that the Serbs, whose total World War II losses were between 487,000 and 523,000 or approximately 7% of the total Serb population of Yugoslavia,^[39] suffered more than the three million non-Polish Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, more than the Jews massacred at Kishinev, Babi Yar, and Odessa. So while the left revisionists strenuously object to reference to the Holocaust in relation to the fate of the Bosnian Muslims and Albanians in the 1990s, they readily draw on the legacy of the Holocaust to highlight Serb suffering both in World War II and in the recent wars, even at the price of historical accuracy. In order to paint the Serbs as eternal victims equivalent to the Jews the left revisionists frequently mention the crimes of the Croat fascists (Ustashas) during World War II while ignoring similar crimes committed by Serb fascists and collaborators in the same period. It is true that there was an Ustasha regime in power in power in Zagreb during World War II; there was also a Serbian quisling regime in power in Belgrade, and on 18 September 1943 the Serbian quisling leader Milan Nedic met with Hitler and requested the establishment of a Great Serbia within the framework of the Nazi European order.^[40] It is true that the Ustasha regime pursued a genocidal policy toward the Serb population of the Croatian quisling state; there was also a parallel genocide carried out by the Serb Chetniks against the Muslims and Croats of Bosnia and Croatia. ^[41] The Ustasha regime assisted the Nazis in exterminating the Jewish population of Croatia and Bosnia; Nedic’s Serbian police assisted the Nazis in rounding up Serbia’s Jews. ^[42] Just as the Ustashas employed anti-Semitic propaganda, so too did the Chetniks. A Chetnik proclamation of 1941 claimed that the Communists were “people who are not of our blood, Serb name and our Serb Orthodox religion” but were “Jews, Turks and Croats”. ^[43] In 1943 a group of Chetnik commanders issued a joint proclamation to the people of Croatia and Bosnia claiming that “since we have cleansed Serbia, Montenegro and Hercegovina, we have come to help you to crush the pitiful remnants of the Communist international, criminal band of Tito, Mose Pijade, Levi Vajnert and other paid Jews” and that the Serbs had been “swindled by the Communist Jews”. ^[44] According to Israel Gutman’s Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, “There were many instances of Chetniks murdering Jews or handing them over to the Germans”. ^[45] None of this prevents Johnstone from describing the Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic as an “anti-Nazi resistance leader”. ^[46] The Serbs, like the Croats, were a nation deeply polarised during World War II; like the Croats, they produced both murderous Nazi-collaborators and brave resistance fighters. Many Serbs and Croats were victims; others were perpetrators of genocide. The left-revisionist version of World War II in Yugoslavia as a conflict between fascist Croats and anti-fascist Serbs who suffered “like the Jews” is pure fiction.

Pilger’s comment shows how the left revisionists viewed ‘socialist’ Serbia as a kind of left-wing holy land, its people martyred by the imperialist Antichrist. For the left revisionists the identification of socialism, anti-imperialism, and Serb nationalism, three forces that in reality have nothing particularly in common, has become absolute. They are not deterred by the fact that Milosevic’s nationalist campaign arose in opposition, not to Western imperialism, but to the Titoist constitutional order that governed Yugoslavia until the late 1980s and above all to its provisions regarding Kosovo. Milosevic is in their eyes a better Communist than Tito: Parenti complains that “Tito did little to discourage the Albanian campaign to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of non-Albanians.”^[47] Both Parenti and Johnstone consequently endorse Milosevic’s policy toward the Kosovo Albanians and his revision of Tito’s system. In Johnstone’s words, Milosevic’s suppression of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1988-89 was “necessary to enable the economic liberalisation reforms; they were enacted legally; and they left intact the political rights of ethnic Albanians as well as a considerable degree of regional autonomy”.^[48] Like Milosevic and his acolytes, the left revisionists combine an alleged support for ‘Yugoslavia’ with a pathological hatred for most Yugoslavs: Croats, Albanians, Muslims, Slovenes, and sometimes even anti-Milosevic Serbs. I noted earlier that the left revisionists do not hold Milosevic, Karadzic, and their forces responsible for any of the atrocities carried out in the former Yugoslavia, since all these atrocities were provoked or engineered by the West anyway. But by a curious sleight of hand the left revisionists portray all Croat, Muslim, or Albanian atrocities against Serbs as in no way related to previous aggressive policies by the Milosevic regime. Thus the Croatian persecution of Serbs in the former Krajina following Operation Storm in 1995, or the Albanian persecution of Serbs in Kosovo following the NATO victory in 1999, are not seen as responses to Milosevic’s aggression against Croatia in 1990-91 and the subsequent four-year occupation of Croatian territory or to his ten-year reign of terror in Kosovo in 1989-99. Rather, the left revisionists portray Croat, Muslim, and Albanian nationalism as inherently evil in a way that Serb nationalism is not.

Parenti and Johnstone project the righteousness of the Serbian struggle with the Albanians and other Yugoslav nations back into the past, painting a picture of pro-Nazi Albanians, Croats, and Muslims persecuting anti-Nazi Serbs. Parenti writes at length about what he calls “Croatia’s Nazi past” and about the Nazi collaboration of Muslims and Albanians.^[49] In a manner strikingly reminiscent of the way the Stalinists erased the role of Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other Old Bolsheviks from their historical account of the Russian Revolution, the left revisionists have erased the history of the tens of thousands of Croats, Muslims, and Albanians who fought alongside their Serb comrades against Nazism and Fascism during the 1930s and ‘40s under the leadership of Tito, Europe’s greatest anti-Nazi resistance leader and himself a Croat. There is no place in their propaganda for Vladimir Copic, the Croat who commanded the 15^th International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War; for Fadil Jahic-Spanac, the Muslim Partisan who led the Serbs of north-east Bosnia in the struggle against the Ustashas; for Marko Oreskovic-Krntija, the Croat Partisan who led the Serb struggle against the Ustashas in Lika; for the vanguard role played by the predominantly-Croat Partisan Dalmatian Brigades at the legendary battles of Neretva and Sutjeska against the Germans and Italians in 1943; for the 16^th Muslim Brigade that fought SS forces in East Bosnia and spearheaded the liberation of Sarajevo in 1945; for the Albanian Partisans who fought across the length of Yugoslavia to liberate the country from the Nazis; for the Albanian Partisan Fadilj Hodza who was one of Milosevic’s first victims. Nor is there a place for the numerous Serb Partisan veterans who had the courage to oppose Milosevic’s policies: Bogdan Bogdanovic, Draza Markovic, Koca Popovic, Milos Minic, Ljubo Babic, and many others.

‘Counter-revolutionary nations’?

Not content to erase the history of the multinational anti-Nazi Yugoslav Partisan struggle, Johnstone goes back further into the past in her effort to demonise the Albanians. She portrays Albanian nationalism as originating in the desires of Albanian Islamic feudal lords to retain their privileges, contrasting it with a Serb nationalism she sees as originating in the desire of Serb Christian serfs for liberty: “The ethnic Albanians who had converted to Islam by the 19th century gained privileges (to bear arms, serve in the administration, and collect taxes) denied the Christian population. Such privileges stood in the way of the development of an Albanian nationalism parallel to the 19th century Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian national liberation movements.” In Johnstone’s eyes Albanian national revolts were traditionally reactionary, so that “When Albanian feudal lords did revolt, it was rather to try to retain these privileges than to achieve an independent State of equal citizens.” By contrast, “Because they were deprived of equal rights under Ottoman rule, the Serb leaders adopted an egalitarian political philosophy borrowed from France as appropriate to their national liberation struggle in the 19th century. This meant advocacy of a state of equal citizens enjoying equal rights. The practice certainly did not always live up to the principles. But there is a significant and practical difference between a nation that proclaims principles of equal citizenship and one that does not.”^[50] The message is clear: the Serbs are a ‘revolutionary’ nation and the Albanians are a ‘counter-revolutionary’ nation. Johnstone appears wholly ignorant of Albanian history; of the existence of Catholic and Orthodox as well as Muslim Albanians, including some who were pioneers of Albanian nationalism; or of the Albanian national rebellions against the Ottomans from 1878 culminating in the successful rebellion of 1912.^[51] Indeed, the Albanians are the only Balkan nation whose national movement has succeeded in uniting Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox down to the present day. But there is no reason to believe that Johnstone or her comrades are interested in learning anything positive about the Albanians. It is as if, like the rulers of Orwell’s Oceania, the left revisionists are rewriting the past in order to make it conform to present policies.

Belief in the existence of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’ fit only to be exterminated was strongly upheld by Marx and Engels. Their hatred was particularly directed against the Czechs and the Croats. In 1849 Engels called for a “war of annihilation of the Germans against the Czechs” as the “only possible solution”; he described the Croats as a “naturally counter-revolutionary nation” and looked forward to the day when the Germans and Hungarians would “annihilate all these small pig-headed nations even to their very names.”^[52] Marx and Engels also hated the Serbs. In a letter to Marx in 1876 Engels cheered an Ottoman military victory over the Serbs: “The collapse of the Serbs is stupendous. The campaign was intended to set the whole of Turkey in flames, and everywhere the tinder is damp – Montenegro has betrayed the campaign for her own private ends, Bosnia has absolutely no intention of rebelling now that Serbia proposes to liberate her, and the worthy Bulgarians aren’t lifting a finger.” For Engels the Serbs were little more than brigands: “The Serbian army of liberation is having to live at its own expense and, after a swashbuckling offensive, withdrew into its robber’s lair without having been seriously defeated anywhere.”^[53] Marx and Engels sympathised with the Ottoman side and complained of Western media bias, as they saw it, in favour of the Serbs and against the Turks: “Not a word is said, of course, about the infamies perpetrated by the Montenegrins and Herzegovinians. Luckily the Serbs are getting knocked for six”.^[54]

Later generations of Marxists rejected the early Marxist tendency to demonise “counter-revolutionary nations”. As a journalist reporting on the Balkan wars of 1912-13 Leon Trotsky wrote passionately about the atrocities committed by the Balkan Christian states against the Albanians and other Balkan Muslims. In January 1913 Trotsky wrote that “the Bulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia, in their national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in the systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts.” (‘Old Serbia’ being a Serbian term for Kosovo.) He accused Russian liberal supporters of the Serbian and Bulgarian war-effort of bearing their share of responsibility for “the ripped-open bellies of Turkish children and the necks cut through to the bone of aged Muslims”.^[55] The following month Trotsky, arguing that “protest against the outrages in the Balkans cleanses the social atmosphere in our own country, heightens the level of moral awareness among our own people”, denounced the Russian liberal faction of Pavel Miliukov for supporting a Serbian Army that was massacring Albanian civilians: “But since the ‘leading’ newspapers of Russia kept on singing their praises and either hushed up or denied the exposures published in the democratic press, a certain number of murdered Albanian babies must be put down, Mr. Deputy, to your Slavophile account. Get your senior doorman to look for them in your editorial office, Mr. Miliukov!” Trotsky then insisted on the imperative of protesting against the atrocities in the Balkans: “Indignant protest against unbridled behaviour by men armed with machine guns, rifles, and bayonets was required for our own moral self-defence. An individual, a group, a party or a class that is capable of ‘objectively’ picking its nose while it watches men drunk with blood, and incited from above, massacring defenceless people is condemned by history to rot and become worm-eaten while it is still alive.”^[56] It is tempting to suggest that the fate Trotsky predicted for apologists of atrocities ironically ended up applying to a large section of the far left in the late twentieth century. Throughout his campaign to publicise Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek atrocities against the Islamic peoples of the Balkans, Trotsky never attributed these atrocities to any alleged inherently evil character of the Christian Balkan nations in question but blamed them on militarism and imperialism, of which other European countries were also guilty.

The Bolsheviks under Lenin likewise rejected the division of nations into “good” and “bad”, declaring in favour of an ideological commitment to national equality and the right of all nations to self-determination. This right of course did not apply in practice to the nationalities of the Soviet Union, but it applied to the nationalities enslaved by the Yugoslav state. Thus a proclamation of the Executive Council of the Communist International of June 1920 to the proletariat of the Balkan and Danubian nations declared that the “Macedonian Bulgars, Albanians, Croats, Montenegrins and Bosnians are rebelling against the rule of the bureaucratic and landowning oligarchy” of Yugoslavia.^[57] This support for national pluralism and rejection of the concept of “revolutionary” and “counter-revolutionary” nations is reflected in a famous passage by Tito, a Communist of the subsequent generation, written in 1942 during the Partisan struggle against the Nazis: “The term ‘People’s Liberation Struggle’ would be simply a phrase, even a lie, if it did not have, apart from its general Yugoslav character, a national character for every nation individually; that is, if it did not mean, in addition to the liberation of Yugoslavia, at the same time the liberation of the Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians, Muslims, etc.”^[58] Such an expression of equal appreciation of each individual Yugoslav nationality is unthinkable for the left revisionists of today. While they display the moral relativism typical of the post-1917 far left, in their treatment of the national question they are considerably more reactionary and have returned to the chauvinism of nineteenth-century Marxism. Thus, if the Albanians are a “counter-revolutionary” nation then their annihilation represents a sort of class justice equivalent to the extermination of the bourgeoisie. The playwright Harold Pinter is consequently more moved by the plight of Slobodan Milosevic, imprisoned in a comfortable cell in The Hague and visited regularly by his wife and family, than he is by the extermination of over a hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims or the expulsion of eight hundred thousand Albanians from their homes. For unlike these unpeople, Milosevic is seen by the left revisionists as being on their side of the barricades. The emotional identification of Pinter and other socialists with Milosevic and other Yugoslav war-criminals in their struggle against the ICTY is the other side of the walnut to their heartlessness toward Milosevic’s victims and contempt for their suffering.

Milosevic as martyr

Pinter has joined the ‘International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic’, organised by Milosevic’s passionate admirer Jared Israel, aimed at rescuing Milosevic from trial by the ICTY. Israel, who is reduced to translating Milosevic’s speeches in an effort to prove his idol is not a racist, represents the left revisionist in its purest form, without any of the dissembling. According to a petition for Milosevic’s release from prison issued by Israel, “Milosevic the so-called ‘ethnic cleanser’ preached multinational unity, not nationalist intolerance”; “Milosevic conducted no persecution of Albanian civilians”; “The most notorious ‘atrocities’ for which Milosevic is accused never happened”; “Crimes were committed in Yugoslavia – but not by Milosevic”. Not only was Milosevic not guilty of genocide, but he was in fact a freedom fighter against US imperialism: “Slobodan Milosevic’s real offence was that he tried to keep the 26 nationalities that comprise Yugoslavia free from US and NATO colonization and occupation; his nation’s resources, industries, and media from being stolen by multinational corporations; his nation’s institutions from being controlled by US consultants and advisers.” The Serbian opposition, by contrast, were merely part of the conspiracy: “His real offence was to defend his nation’s freedom and sovereignty from a political ‘opposition’ bought and paid for by the United States and installed into power by US specialists in psychological operations. He and all those now under attack resisted Western colonization to the very end, even as American naval ships waited off the coast of Yugoslavia to ensure the ‘correct’ results in Yugoslavia’s contested elections.”^[59] Thus Milosevic becomes a Christ-like figure; a martyr on the cross, while the Serbian opposition to him becomes the collective Judas. Similarly, Neil Clark in the New Statesman says of Milosevic that “When faced with the incessant violence of western-trained separatist groups, he had little option but to use military means to try to prevent the break-up of his country and to defend the Serbian and Roma people from being driven out of the lands they had inhabited for centuries.” Far from being a war criminal, Milosevic is a “prisoner of conscience” at the ICTY whose “worst crime was to carry on being a socialist”.^[60]

This sense of Milosevic as a socialist martyr and the ICTY as a form of Inquisition permeates the thought of the left revisionists, who view him as their man ‘fighting back’ against the Western enemy. Milosevic, currently threatened with life imprisonment in one of the world’s most comfortable prisons, signed the 1995 Dayton Accord that recognised the ICTY and pledged the arrest of Bosnian Serb war criminals. That was after his political enemy Radovan Karadzic had been indicted by the Tribunal while Milosevic was still on friendly terms with Washington. Now that he is in the dock himself he has decided that the ICTY is illegitimate after all. It is not however just Milosevic’s hypocrisy regarding the ICTY that is overlooked by the left revisionists, nor the fact that he is receiving a fair trial, unlike the men of Srebrenica who were massacred without a trial and whose rights were not championed by the left revisionists. The latter ignore the fact that in both Serbia and Croatia the ICTY is supported by the democrats and anti-nationalists and opposed by the fascists and criminals. In Serbia the student movement ‘Otpor’ that spearheaded Milosevic’s overthrow, and Velimir Ilic, Mayor of Cacak and one of the organisers of the overthrow of the regime, support the ICTY while the supporters of Milosevic and Vojislav Seselj oppose it. This may not seem a convincing argument to the left revisionists who no doubt view the overthrow of Milosevic as a counterrevolution, but what of the genuine Serbian anti-fascist left that Milosevic overthrew in 1987? It is often forgotten today that Milosevic’s first victims, before even the Albanians, were Serb Communists: the supporters of Dragisa Pavlovic and Ivan Stambolic, the latter murdered by Milosevic shortly before his overthrow. To those Serbian Communists brave enough to oppose Milosevic’s war-mongering policies and anti-Albanian chauvinism we may add Latinka Perovic, the liberal Communist leader purged by Tito in 1972; Bogdan Bogdanovic, former mayor of Belgrade; Draza Markovic, uncle of Milosevic’s wife Mira Markovic; Milos Minic, prosecutor at the trial of Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic; and many others. Then there are the Serbian human rights activists Natasa Kandic and Sonja Biserko who stood up for the rights of the Albanians when it was most difficult. All those living support the ICTY; none of their voices are heard by the left revisionists.

Similarly in Croatia the current, moderate regime of Stipe Mesic and Ivica Racan has put on trial Croats guilty of killing Serbs in 1991, rejected Croatian irredentism in Bosnia, and reaffirmed the Partisan legacy. It supports the ICTY. So do those anti-nationalist Croats who defended the rights of the Serb minority when it was most unpopular, such as Ivo Banac and Ivan Zvonimir Cicak of the Croatian Helsinki Committee and the famous satirical newspaper Feral Tribune. By contrast the Tudjmanites and Ustashas are opposed to it and have mobilised mass demonstrations in defence of their war criminals. Thus ironically the left revisionists who have spent the last ten years demonising the Croats as fascists now align themselves with the Croatian fascists and against the Croatian liberals. But it would be wrong to suppose that the left revisionists know or care about this; they oppose the ICTY for the sake of their own political agenda, not for the sake of the Serbs and Croats. David Chandler, in his negative assessment of the ICTY published in New Left Review, does not even bother to discuss which political currents in Serbia and Croatia support the Tribunal and which oppose it, as if the Tribunal has no relevance to anything outside the left revisionists’ anti-American crusade.^[61] So sure are they that the ICTY is part of the international conspiracy against Europe’s last socialist state that they predicted repeatedly that no Croat could possibly be indicted for crimes against Serbs during Operation Storm in 1995, because the US supported this Croatian military operation and surely would not let “its own” Tribunal indict “its own Croats”. Chomsky claimed in 2000 that “there is little likelihood that the Tribunal will pay attention to its 150-page ‘Indictment Operation Storm: A Prima Facie Case’, reviewing the war crimes committed by Croatian forces that drove some 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in August 1995 with crucial US involvement”.^[62] In May 2001 the ICTY did indeed indict Croatian General Ante Gotovina, a former favourite of Franjo Tudjman, for crimes against Serb civilians during Operation Storm. Two and a half months later Seumas Milne wrote of the “logistical US backing for the massacres and ethnic cleansing in the Krajina region of Croatia in 1995” and stated confidently that “War crimes indictments in the latter case are, needless to say, not expected”, therefore managing to predict incorrectly something that had already happened.^[63]

The bitterness of the left-revisionist campaign to deny the genocide in the former Yugoslavia carried out by Milosevic and the Serb nationalists reflects a neo-Stalinist determination to champion Europe’s last ‘socialist’ dictatorship against all the overwhelming evidence of its murderous and corrupt nature. This involves deliberately disregarding the responsibility of this regime for the destruction of Yugoslavia and upholding its chauvinistic discourse on Croats, Muslims, and Albanians. The left revisionists are neither progressives nor genuine anti-imperialists. Their a-historical, anti-democratic worldview and their refusal to condemn fascism or to stand up for the rights of its victims, make them morally complicit in the crimes that have taken place in the former Yugoslavia.

Marko Attila Hoare is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. He is the author of a short history of the Bosnian Army (How Bosnia Armed, Saqi Books, London, 2004). He is currently completing a major work on the Partisan movement of resistance in Yugoslavia during World War II.

An extended version of this article appears in the December 2003 edition of the Journal of Genocide Research.