To Kill a Nation - The Attack on Yugoslavia. Michael Parrenti.Excerpts from the Book.

[Milos Uzelac]

"I will argue that Western intervention in Yugoslavia has not 
been benign but ruthlessly selfish, not confused but well directed, given the interests that the interventionist serve. The motive behind the intervention was not NATO's newfound humanitarianism but a desire to put Yugoslavia—along with 
every other country—under the suzerainty of free-market globalization. I am not the only one who sees the conflict this way; the decision-makers themselves do too. As I will show, they 
have been far more concerned about privatization and neoliberal "reforms" (rollbacks) than about the well-being of the various Yugoslav peoples."

p. 2-3

"So corporate-dominated media rather faithfully reflect the line put out by corporate-dominated political leaders, those decision makers who build their careers in service to the economic powers that be. In regard to Yugoslavia, the Western press dropped all pretense at critical independence and—with some notable exceptions—went into overdrive to demonize the Serbs and create the sensationalist justification for NATO's destabilizing and violent interventions."

p. 4

"There are some people who grow 
indignant at the suggestion that their political leaders lie to them, especially in regard to foreign policy. To suggest as much is to indulge in "conspiracy theories," they maintain. In fact, US 
presidents never lie so much as when they talk about US foreign policy. In the public stances he took in regard to 
Yugoslavia, Bill Clinton proved himself a professional liar. When dealing with what he and his associates have said, we can, without turning to alternative sources, point to the lack of evidence to support their claims, and to the contrary evidence suggested by their actions. And we can note their persistent manipulation of images and labels by which they have tried to short-circuit our critical thinking and make evidence itself irrelevant. As is frequently the case, liars can be the best witnesses against themselves."

Introduction, p. 6-7

"Much of the debate about the Yugoslav conflict revolves around questions like: Whom do we believe? What sources do we rely on? Is it the free and independent Western media or Belgrade's government-controlled press? I would answer as follows: The US media, as with most of the news media in other Western nations, are not free and independent. They are owned and controlled by largely conservative corporate cartels 
that adhere to the self-serving neoliberal ideology of international finance capital. The goal of these politico-economic elites is to transform the world into a global economy under the tutelage of the transnational corporations, backed by the 
unanswerable imperial might of the United States and its allies. 
A key component of that global strategy, of course, entails 
capitalist restoration within the former Communist countries. The corporate-owned media seldom stray too far from that dominant ideological paradigm."

Introduction p. 5

Edited July 13, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

Chapter I

Hypocritical Humanitarianism

"From March 24 to June 10 1999, US military forces,in coordination with a number of other NATO powers, launched round-the-dock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia, dropping twenty thousand tons of bombs and killing upwards of three thousand women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo — all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism - or so 
we were asked to believe."

p.9

"Some of us cannot help noticing that US leaders have been markedly selective in their supposedly humanitarian interventions. They made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Roma (gypsies), or Britain for its longtime repression of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the mass murder of half a million Tutsi in Rwanda—or the French who were complicit in that massacre. Nor did US leaders consider launching "humanitarian bombings" against the Guatemalan people for the Guatemalan military's systematic slaughter of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers, or against the Indonesian people because their generals killed over two hundred thousand East Timorese and were engaged in such slaughter through the summer of 1999, not to mention the estimated half million to one million Indonesians these same generals exterminated in 1965 and after. Nor have humanitarian concerns caused US leaders and right-wing paramilitary forces to move against the scores of other 
countries around the world engaging in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, death squads, mass murder, and wars of attrition—actions that have been far worse than anything Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has been charged with. In most cases, the US national security state has not only tolerated such atrocities but has been actively complicit with the perpetrators who usually happened to be recipients of US aid and trade."

p. 10

Edited July 14, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

"But not a critical word has been uttered against Turkey, that most faithful and repressive US client state, with its long history of torturing and killing dissidents. In recent times Turkish leaders have razed or forcibly evacuated three thousand Kurdish villages; forty thousand Kurds have died in the process, with two million rendered homeless. Here was an ethnic repression that dwarfed anything the Serbs were accused of perpetrating. Yet US leaders made no move to bomb Turkey. On the contrary, they have sold or given Ankara $15 billion worth of weapons since 1980. As a NATO member, Turkey was one of the countries that assisted in the bombing of Yugoslavia.In 1995 the Clinton administration grudgingly acknowledged that Turkish leaders were committing serious abuses. But not to worry. Turkey's human rights record was reportedly "improving." In any case, as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck pointed out, "I don't think theUnited States is responsible for Turkey's internal policies." Why then does the United States presume to be so urgently responsible for Yugoslavia's internal policies, to the point of leveling death and destruction upon its people?"

"the United States and Britain were calling for an interventionist campaign to rescue the Bosnian Muslims from the reputedly wicked Serbs. At that very time, more than a thousand people were dying every day in the CIA-sponsored war of attrition against Angola, far many times more than were perishing in Bosnia. The civil war in Liberia had displaced 85 per cent of the population. In Afghanistan, in Kabul alone, about a thousand people were killed in one week in May 1993. In July 1993, the Israelis launched a saturation shelling of southern Lebanon, turning some three hundred thousand Muslims into refugees, in what had every appearance of being a policy of depopulation or "ethnic cleansing." Why were Western policy makers and media commentators so concerned about the Muslims of Bosnia but so unconcerned about the Muslims of Lebanon or Iraq? Why were they so stirred by the partition of Bosnia but not the partition of Lebanon?" 

p. 11, 12

Edited August 7, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

"Bosnia must remain "multi-ethnic," Western leaders argued, even as they tirelessly contrived to break up the large multi-ethnic federation of Yugoslavia, itself a nation of twenty-eight nationalities—and form fear-ridden mono-ethnic statelets. "All in all, there seems to be little consistency and even less principle involved in the liberal crusade for Bosnia. It makes you think that there might be a hidden agenda here somewhere," Phillips concludes. So the question remains: is the US-NATO forceful intervention in Yugoslavia really motivated by a concern for the various non-Serbian ethnic groups? Is it to keep the peace and stop a genocide? For more than a decade, the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia have been presented as the culmination of historically rooted ethnic and religious enmities. The fact is, there was no civil war, no widespread killings, and no ethnic cleansing until the Western powers began to inject themselves into Yugoslavia's internal affairs, financing the secessionist organizations and creating the politico-economic crisis that ignited the political strife. Are the Serbs really the new Nazis of Europe? For those who need to be reminded, the Nazis waged aggressive war on a dozen or more nations in Europe, systematically exterminating some nine million defenseless civilians, including six million Jews, and causing the deaths of millions of others during their invasions, including twenty-two million Soviet citizens.The charges of mass atrocity and genocide leveled against Belgrade will be treated in the chapters ahead."

p. 13

Edited August 7, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

"It is said that lies have wings while truth feebly slogs behind, destined never to catch up. This is often treated as being the inherent nature of communication. And it may sometimes be the case that truthful but mundane information cannot compete with the broad images repeatedly splashed across the media universe. But this is not sufficient explanation for the way issues are propagated in the global arena. Rather than ascribing reified, self-determining powers to concepts like truth and falsehood, we should note that the lies our leaders tell us succeed so we'll because they are given repeated and ubiquitous dissemination. The truth seldom catches up because those who rule nations and manage the mass communication universe have no interest in giving it equal currency. If millions believe the lies again and again, it is because that is all they hear. After a while, it becomes the only thing they want to hear."

p. 14

[Milos Uzelac]

"Of course, Americans did not like what they heard about "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing," but there were no signs of the jingoistic fervor that gripped many people during the Gulf War a decade earlier."

"The obviously one-sided character of the air war, the fact that Yugoslavia had not invaded anyone, and the impact of the bombing upon a European civilian population contributed to a general sense of unease. Indeed, in the eleven weeks of NATO's "mission," support dropped from over 65 per cent to barely 50 per cent and promised to continue downward. In response, the Clinton administration, with the active complicity of the media, took every opportunity to downplay the death and destruction caused by the bombings and every opportunity to hype images of satanic Serbian atrocities. Still, the wavering support for the onslaught must have played a part in the White House's decision to stop the bombing and settle for something less than the total occupation of Yugoslavia."

p. 15, 16

Edited August 7, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

Chapter II Third Worldization

[Milos Uzelac]

Unlike most nations, Yugoslavia was built on an idea, Ramsey Clark once noted. With a federation of their own, it was hoped that the southern Slavs would not remain weak and divided peoples, easy prey to imperial interests. The idea was that they would learn to live together, forming a substantial territory capable of economic development. Indeed, after World War II, socialist Yugoslavia became something of an economic success. Between 1960 and 1980 it had one of the most vigorous growth rates, along with free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to an income, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 per cent, and a life expectancy of seventy-two years. Yugoslavia also offered its multi-ethnic citizenry affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, in a mostly publicly owned, market-socialist economy. 

As late as 1990, better than 60 per cent of the total labor force was in the public sector, much of it self-managed.' Even Misha Glenny, who sees Stalinism lurking in every Communist system, was able to state: 
"Throughout forty years of Communist control in central and south-eastern Europe, Belgrade had always offered a ray of optimism. Together with its sister cities in the [Yugoslav] federation, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Sarajevo, it boasted a lively cultural life, [and] a relatively high standard of living..."

This was not the kind of country that global capitalism would normally countenance. Still, the United States tolerated socialistic Yugoslavia's existence for forty-five years because it was seen as a wedge to divide the Warsaw Pact nations. The continued existence of Yugoslavia as a nonaligned socialist country also had the grudging support of the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia was a founding member of the United Nations and of the Nonaligned Nations Conference, and a regular participant in UN peacekeeping missions. But by 2000 it had been reduced to a pariah, the only country ever expelled from the United Nations. After the overthrow of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free-market system. It also proudly had no interest in joining NATO

Edited August 10, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

The US goal has been to transform the FRY into a Third World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities with the following characteristics:

§ Incapable of charting an independent course of self-development.

§ Natural resources completely accessible to transnational corporate exploitation, including the enormous mineral wealth in Kosovo.

§ An impoverished but literate and skilled population working at subsistence wages, a cheap labor pool that will help depress wages in Western Europe and elsewhere.

§ Dismantled petroleum, engineering, mining, fertilizer, pharmaceutical, construction, automotive, and agricultural industries, so they no longer offer competition against Western producers.

 

Edited August 10, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

US policy makers wanted to abolish Yugoslavia's public sector services and social programs, using the same "shock therapy" imposed on the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The ultimate goal has been the complete privatization and Third Worldization of Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe, and, for that matter, every other nation. It is to replace the social wage with a neoliberal global free market, a process that would deliver still greater wealth and power into the hands of those at the top.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, FRY leaders, not unlike Communist leaders in other Eastern European countries, committed a disastrous error. They decided to borrow heavily from the West in order to simultaneously expand the country's industrial base, its export production, and its output of domestic consumer goods. But when Western economies entered a recession and blocked Yugoslav exports, thereby diminishing its export earnings, this created a huge debt for Belgrade. And the massive debt began to develop its own interest-fed momentum.

As in so many other debtor nations, the creditors, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), demanded a "restructuring."

Restructuring consists of a draconian austerity program of neoliberal "reforms": wage freezes, the abolition of state subsidized prices, increased unemployment, the elimination of most worker-managed enterprises, and massive cuts in social spending. The Yugoslavs were to consume less and produce more, so that a larger portion of the national wealth might be redirected toward meeting debt payments.

Edited August 10, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

Restructuring wreaked its neoliberal havoc. The World Bank drove hundreds of firms into bankruptcy, producing six hundred thousand layoffs in 1989-90, with additional hundreds of thousands working without pay for months at a time. Tens of thousands of Yugoslavs were forced to find employment as guest workers in West Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere.

Industrial production, which had averaged over 7 per cent annual growth during the late 1960s, plummeted to less than 3 per cent in the 1980s, and to minus 10 per cent by 1990. The IMF and World Bank "financial aid package" allowed for an influx of imports and unrestricted foreign capital, leading to a further slump in domestic production. Transfer payments from Belgrade to the republics were frozen, again undermining the federal fiscal structure. The drastic economic depression induced by IMF restructuring in turn helped fuel the ensuing ethnic conflicts and secessionist movements .

By 1991, the international creditors were in control of monetary policy. Yugoslavia's state-run banks were dismantled and the federal government no longer had access to its own Central Bank. Economist Michel Chossudovsky points out that the country "was carved up under the close scrutiny of its external creditors, its foreign debt carefully divided and allocated to the republics, each of which was now committed to decades of debt payments . "With a few strokes, the international creditors helped dismember the FRY and put a fiscal headlock on the newly "independent" republics.

Edited August 10, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

Through all this, the Serbian Republic was to prove especially troublesome. The government of Serbia rejected the austerity programs to which the federal government (then under a conservative president) agreed. Some 650,000 Serbian workers engaged in massive walkouts and protests, joined in many instances by workers of other ethnic backgrounds including Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Roma, and Slovenes . In the 1990s, the rump Yugoslav federation (Serbia and Montenegro) continued to prove refractory. It refused to produce primarily for export and would not privatize completely. As late as 1999, more than three-quarters of its basic industry was still publicly owned. 

As far as the Western free-marketeers were concerned,  these enterprises had to be either privatized or demolished. A massive aerial destruction like the one delivered upon Iraq might be just the thing needed to put Belgrade more in step with the New World Order.

Edited August 10, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

Not Cleansed Enough

Belgrade reveals remnants of its Communist past in them any streets and buildings named for famous Communist leaders and partisan fighters. One major thoroughfare is "Boulevard of the Revolution;" others include "Lenin Boulevard" and "Brotherhood and Unity Highway." Surely, I thought to myself, as I read such street signs, US leaders will not leave this country alone until those names are changed to "IMF Avenue" and "Morgan Trust Way," or at least renamed after some orthodox saints or reactionary military heroes of yore.

[Milos Uzelac]

Chapter III Divide and Conquer

[Milos Uzelac]

Some people argue that nationalism, not class, has been the real motor force behind the Yugoslav conflict. This presumes that class and ethnicity are mutually exclusive. In fact, ethnic enmity can be enlisted to serve class interests, as the CIA tried to do with indigenous peoples in Indochina and Nicaragua—and more recently in Bosnia and Kosovo. One of the great deceptions of Western policy, remarks 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, US leaders have supported "self-determination" in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and Vojvodina. "Self-determination" has meant the end of ethnic multiculturalism, the forced monopolization of territory by one or another national group, and the subverting of Yugoslav sovereignty. Legitimate measures of self-preservation taken by the FRY were now stigmatized as criminal actions. The Yugoslav army was no longer a legal instrument of national defense but an aggressor, a threat to the independence of "new nations."

When different national groups are living together with some measure of social and material security, they tend to get along.There is intermingling and even intermarriage. Misha Glenny,who ascribes the Yugoslav crisis almost entirely to ethnic enmities, nonetheless admits that before May 1991, Croats and Serbs lived together in relative contentment, experiencing everyday friendships throughout regions that were subsequently "so dreadfully ravaged." While aware that Yugoslavia was entering troubled seas, nobody in their wildest fantasies predicted that towns would be leveled, and Croats and Serbs killing each other.

In Bosnia, too, there were "a large number of Muslims, particularly intellectuals in Sarajevo, who refused to give up the Yugoslav idea. They believed genuinely and reasonably that the chaotic mix of Slavs and non-Slavs on the territory of what was Yugoslavia forced everybody to live together."` 

Edited August 10, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Milos Uzelac]

But as the economy  gets caught in the evertightening downward debt spiral, with cutbacks and growing unemployment, it becomes easier to induce internecine conflicts, as the different nationalities begin to compete more furiously than ever for a share of the shrinking pie. And once the bloodletting starts, the cycle of vengeance and retribution takes on a momentum of its own.

In order to hasten the discombobulation of Yugoslavia, the Western powers provided the most retrograde, violent, separatist elements with every advantage in money, organization, propaganda, arms, hired thugs, and the full might of the US national security state at their backs. 

Once more the Balkans were to be balkanized.

Edited August 10, 2021 by Milos Uzelac