Media
Lies And Hypocrisy In
Wake Of Milosevic’s Death
By Bill Van Auken
17 March 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
death of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in his jail cell
at the Hague on Saturday has unleashed a torrent of historical distortions
and outright lies that echo the propaganda campaign waged more than
seven years ago to justify the US-NATO war against the country.
Officials with the UN war
crimes tribunal reported that Milosevic died from a massive heart attack,
but indicated a determination of whether it was from natural causes
would have to await a toxicology report.
Chief UN war crimes prosecutor
Carla del Ponte suggested that the former Yugoslav president may have
committed suicide in order to avoid an expected guilty verdict and a
life prison sentence. Milosevic’s lawyer, however, reported that
his client had written a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
just a day before he died pleading for help and charging that his jailers
were giving him harmful drugs in an attempt to silence him.
According to Dutch public
television, a blood sample taken from Milosevic last month showed traces
of a powerful drug used to treat leprosy which can neutralize other
drugs the former Yugoslav leader was taking for high blood pressure
and heart disease.
Milosevic’s assassination
cannot be ruled out. In any case, there is no question that the UN tribunal,
and behind it Washington, bear full responsibility for his death. It
was well known that Milosevic was suffering from serious heart problems,
yet last month the court’s chief judge denied his request that
he be allowed to receive treatment in Russia before resuming the trial.
It is also clear that the
trial—universally promoted by Western governments and media as
“the most important since Nuremberg”—had turned into
a political embarrassment, producing no real proof of Milosevic’s
direct responsibility for the terrible crimes carried out during the
civil wars that erupted in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It had threatened
to become even more of a problem for those who organized it after Milosevic,
at the end of February, asked the tribunal to issue a subpoena ordering
former US President Bill Clinton to testify, apparently with the aim
of showing that Washington itself was responsible for crimes against
humanity in waging an illegal war against Yugoslavia and conducting
a sustained bombing campaign against civilian targets.
Not a hint of the central
role played by US imperialism and other Western powers in the breakup
of Yugoslavia and the resulting carnage is to be found in the media’s
reaction to Milosevic’s death. Instead, most of what has been
written and stated on broadcast news consists in vilifying the former
Yugoslav president as a latter-day Hitler and lamenting the fact that
he will not get the punishment he deserves.
Typical of the media coverage
was the commentary provided by Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief
international correspondent, who declared Saturday: “From the
moment he ascended to the pinnacle of power that is where he stayed
and that is where he directed what went on in the Balkans—the
worst crimes against humanity that Europe and the world had seen since
World War II in Europe. This was something that went on almost unabated
for the better part of the 1990s decade. He was known to his enemies
and to his victims as the ‘Butcher of the Balkans.’”
Amanpour’s statements
are of the same character as the grotesquely exaggerated and unsubstantiated
charges—made at the time by former State Department spokesman
James Rubins, who happens to be her husband—of “genocide”
against Kosovo Albanians, the pretext for the US war against Yugoslavia
in 1999.
Similarly, Roger Cohen, the
New York Times’ former foreign editor, published a smug and cynical
piece on the newspaper’s front page Sunday portraying Milosevic
as a man for whom “the truth was always a commodity to be manipulated
in the single-minded pursuit of power.” As an example, he claims
the Yugoslav leader had “reinvented” the Croats “as
World War II fascists.”
Is this meant to suggest
that the World War II mass murder of approximately 900,000 Serbs and
Jews by the fascist Ustashe movement either didn’t take place
or is merely ancient history, or that the ideology of the Ustashe’s
political heirs played no role in the resurgence of Croatian national
separatism? Cohen, despite his professed concern for the truth, doesn’t
bother to spell this out.
He goes on to characterize
Milosevic as “a ruler of exceptional ruthlessness always ready
to use force in a series of wars, from Croatia in 1991 to Kosovo in
1999.” He continued, “In effect Mr. Milosevic destroyed
the delicate balance of the Yugoslavia he professed to defend and then
expressed wonderment at its violent destruction.”
There is no doubt that Milosevic
bore substantial responsibility for the political developments that
facilitated the break-up of Yugoslavia. For the Western media, however,
to portray him as the all-powerful figure who “directed what went
on in the Balkans” or single handedly “destroyed the delicate
balance of...Yugoslavia” is as false as it is patently self-serving.
What is entirely absent from
this potted—“bad Milosevic”—version of recent
Yugoslav history is the decisive role played by major imperialist powers.
The US and Germany, in particular, deliberately engineered the country’s
breakup, with a thorough indifference to the inevitable tragic consequences
of their intervention.
It should be recalled that,
like that other arch villain, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Milosevic
was at one time viewed with favor by Washington, which, in the 1980s,
supported him as he championed IMF-dictated “market reforms”
and privatizations of nationalized industries. Like his counterparts
in the other Yugoslav republics—Franjo Tudjman in Croatia, Alija
Izetbegovic in Bosnia and Milan Kucan in Slovenia—Milosevic attempted
to divert popular anger over the loss of jobs and the decimation of
living standards that resulted from these policies by fomenting ethnic
nationalism. He was not, however, the initiator of this process. Rather,
like other reactionary Stalinist bureaucrats, he adapted himself to
the centrifugal social forces that it unleashed.
With the collapse of the
USSR and the reunification of Germany in 1991, the geopolitical position
of Yugoslavia underwent a fundamental transformation. A resurgent German
imperialism saw its interests in the Balkans—historically a German
sphere of influence—best served through the promotion of secession
by Slovenia—the most prosperous Yugoslav region—and then
Croatia.
Washington, after first opposing
Germany’s intervention and the breakup of Yugoslavia, decided
to get in on the act itself in order to further its goal of hegemony
over the former Eastern bloc countries newly opened to capitalist exploitation.
It became the chief sponsor of Bosnian independence, and later backed
Albanian nationalism and the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army in the
run-up to the 1999 US-NATO war.
All those who were knowledgeable
of Yugoslav history and politics warned that this kind of piecemeal
breakup of the Yugoslav federation would inevitably lead to civil war.
The forging of new nation states based upon ethnic nationalism led inexorably
to the practice that came to be known as “ethnic cleansing.”
Washington, having thrown
its support to Yugoslavia’s dissolution, targeted Serbia, which
defended the unitary state, as its enemy. The US opposed ethnic cleansing
only when it was carried out by Serbs, while actively supporting it
when Croatia, Bosnia and the Kosovo Albanians pursued identical aims
through the same bloody methods.
While none of this excuses
the crimes for which Milosevic is responsible, the fact remains that
those who initiated his prosecution themselves bore direct responsibility
for the bloodshed in the Balkans.
The International Criminal
Tribunal at the Hague was in every sense an exercise in victors’
justice. Milosevic was essentially kidnapped from Serbia through a corrupt
deal that offered the regime in Belgrade that had replaced him economic
aid in exchange for surrendering the ex-president.
The indictment of Milosevic
was a political rather than a juridical document, issued in the midst
of the US-NATO bombing campaign against Serbia. The tribunal itself
was established and financed by the very same powers that launched the
illegal war against Yugoslavia and carried out what are clearly war
crimes—the bombing of civilian targets—during that intervention.
That the US has been a principal
organizer of this trial exposes the fraud of the entire enterprise.
Washington itself accepts neither international law nor the jurisdiction
of any international court over its own actions on the world arena.
It has boycotted the International Criminal Court and strong-armed governments
around the world into signing waivers exempting US officials and US
troops from any liability for war crimes carried out against their peoples.
If, moreover, the trial of
Milosevic were really about human rights and international justice,
the obvious question is: Why has the UN not put George W. Bush in the
dock?
There is no question that
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others in the current US administration are
responsible for far greater war crimes and a far greater loss of innocent
human life in waging an unprovoked and illegal war against Iraq than
anything perpetrated by Milosevic.
The strongest charge that
can be made against Milosevic—presented in Cohen’s commentary
in the Times—is that he resorted to war as a means of achieving
political ends. How immensely greater the guilt, then, of the current
US president? At least Milosevic could make the argument that his military
actions were carried out against the dissolution of his own country,
largely as the result of the machinations of powerful outside powers.
What is Bush’s defense?
Every pretext given for the invasion of Iraq has been exposed as a lie.
In the end, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that the military
force of the most powerful imperialist nation on the planet was unleashed
against a small and already war-ravaged country in order to achieve
the hegemony of US capitalism over a strategic region and its oil wealth.
In other words, it was a criminal war of plunder.
That Milosevic was tried,
while Bush was numbered among his prosecutors, only exposes the so-called
international justice system as an instrument of imperialist foreign
policy.