Still, Yugoslav television remains in the hands of people who refuse to look at the world as do the U.S. State Department, the White House, and the corporate-owned U.S. news media. Yugoslav television journalist Nevenka Jovicic told me that she once asked the U.S. ambassador, "What do you want from us?" And he replied "Your television system."
Yugoslavia allowed--until the NATO bombings began-- opposition radio stations and dissident publications. Over twenty political parties had their own newspapers. There are more opposition parties in the Yugoslav parliament than in any other European parliament. Yet the federation wasrepeatedly labeled a dictatorship. Slobodan Milosovic was elected three times, twice as president of Serbia and more recently as president of Yugoslavia, in contests that foreign observers said had relatively few violations. Yet he is called a dictator.
In 1992, another blow was delivered against what remained of Yugoslavia: international sanctions. Led by the United States, a freeze was imposed onall trade to and from Yugoslavia, with disastrous results for the economy: hyperinflation, mass unemployment of up to 70 percent, alnourishment, and the collapse of the health care system.
Divide and Conquer
One of the great deceptions, notes Joan Phillips, is that "those who are mainly responsible for the bloodshed in Yugoslavia--not the Serbs, Croats or Muslims, but the Western powers--are depicted as saviors." While pretending to work for harmony U.S. leaders have supported the most divisive, reactionary forces from Croatia to Kosovo.
In Croatia, the West's man-of-the-hour was Franjo Tudjman, who claimed in a book he authored in 1989 that "the establishment of Hitler's new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews." He further asserted that only 900,000 Jews, not six million, were killed in the Holocaust. Tudjman's government adopted the fascist Ustasha checkered flag and, for its army, the straight-arm Nazi salute.
Tudjman presided over the forced evacuation of over half a million Serbs from Croatia between 1991 and 1995, replete with rapes and summary executions. This includes the 200,000 from Krajina in 1995, whose expulsion was facilitated by attacks from NATO war planes and missiles. Needless to say, U.S. leaders did nothing to stop and much to assist these atrocities. Tudjman and his cronies now reside in obscene wealth while the people of Croatia wallow in economic misery. The Croatian leadership has imposed a tightly controlled one-party press on the new "demo-cracy." Anyone who criticizes the president risks incarceration. Yet the White House hails Croatia as a new democracy.
In Bosnia, the U.S. supported the Muslim funda-mentalist Izetbegovic, an active Nazi collaborator in his youth, who wants to establish a religious Islamic republic (for Muslims only), and who has called for strict Islamic control over the media. Bosnia is now under IMF and NATO regency. It is not permitted to develop its own internal resources, nor allowed to extend credit or self- finance through an independent monetary system. Its state-owned assets, including energy, water, telecommunications, media and transportation, are being sold off to private firms at garage sale prices.
Meanwhile, the Serbian segment of Bosnia had its democratically elected president removed by NATO troops because he was thought to be a "hardliner" against free market reforms. This too was reported in the press as a necessary measure to advance democracy.
In Kosovo, we see the same dreary pattern. The U.S. gives aid and encouragement to violently right-wing separatist forces such as the self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army, only a year ago considered a terrorist organization by Washington. The KLA has long been a prime player in an enormous heroin trade that reaches to Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Norway, and Sweden. The KLA has no
social program other than the stated goal of cleansing Kosovo of all non-Albanians, a campaign that had been going on for some thirty years, during which time the non-Albanian Kosovo population (Serbs, Romany, Turks, Macedonians, and others) has shrunk from some 60 percent in 1945 to about 25 percent in 1998.
Demonizing the Serbs
The propaganda campaign to demonize the Serbs fits the larger policy of the Western powers. None other than Charles Boyd, former deputy commander of the U.S. European command, commen-
ted on it in 1994:
The popular image of this war in Bosnia is one of unrelenting Serb expansionism. Much of what the Croatians call 'the occupied territories' is land that has been held by Serbs for more that 3 centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia. . . . In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs. The U.S. [has punished] one side in this war. It has supported the legitimacy of a leadership in the Bosnian [Muslim] government that has become increasingly ethnocentric in its makeup, single-party in its rule, and manipulative in its diplomacy. ... We say we want peace but we have encouraged a deepening of the war.
Why were the Serbs targeted for demonization? They were the largest nationality, and the one most opposed to the breakup of Yugoslavia. But what of the atrocities they committed? All sides have committed atrocities, but the reporting has been consistently one-sided. Grisly incidents ofCroat and Muslim atrocities against the Serbs rarely made it into the U.S. press. Recently, three Croatian generals were indicted by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal for the bombardment and deaths of Serbs in Krajina and elsewhere. Where were the U.S. television crews when these war crimes were being committed? And John Ranz, chair of Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, USA, asks: Where were the TV cameras when hundreds of Serbs were slaughtered by Muslims near Srebrenica?
Part 3