Russia-Georgia Conflict Fueled by Rush to Control Caspian Energy

Russia-Georgia Conflict Fueled by Rush to Control Caspian Energy Resources
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Human Rights Watch has accused both Russian and Georgian forces of killing and injuring civilians through indiscriminate attacks over the past week of fighting. Professor and author Michael Klare joins us to talk about how the Russian-Georgian conflict is largely an energy war over who has access to the vast oil and natural gas reserves in the Caspian region.
[includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Michael Klare, author of thirteen books, including Blood and Oil and Resource Wars. His latest is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. He is the defense analyst for The Nation and the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Human Rights Watch has accused both Russian and Georgian forces of killing and injuring civilians through indiscriminate attacks over the past week of fighting.


On Tuesday, a Russian cluster bomb strike in the town of Gori killed at least eight civilians including the Dutch journalist Stan Storimans. An Israeli journalist was seriously wounded in the same attack. Human Rights Watch said this is the first known use of cluster munitions since Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006.


Meanwhile, tensions remain high between Moscow and Washington. On Thursday, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a stern warning to Russia.


ROBERT GATES: If Russia does not step back from its aggressive posture and actions in Georgia, the US-Russian relationship could be adversely affected for years to come.



AMY GOODMAN: Russia is now maintaining that the events of the past week have fundamentally redrawn Georgia’s borders. Russia’s Foreign Minister said it will be impossible to persuade the separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to agree to be forced back into the Georgian state.


Our next guest has been closely examining how the Russian-Georgian conflict is largely an energy war over who has access to the vast oil and natural gas reserves in the Caspian region.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Three [years] ago the United States helped open a 1,000-mile-long pipeline that connected Azerbaijan to Turkey, running through Georgia. The pipeline was designed specifically to bypass Russia. More oil and natural gas pipelines are scheduled to be built in Georgia.


Michael Klare is the author of thirteen books, including Blood and Oil and Resource Wars. His latest book is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. He is the defense analyst for The Nation and the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst. He joins us this morning.


Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michael.


MICHAEL KLARE: Good morning.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, talk to us about the pipelines and the energy aspect that has received almost very little attention in all the coverage of the Russian-Georgia conflict.


MICHAEL KLARE: Well, I believe that this is what really underlies the conflict, and it has to do with the fact that the US has eyed the Caspian Sea, which lies just to the east of Georgia, as an energy corridor for exporting Caspian Sea oil and gas to the West, bypassing Russia. And this was the brainchild of Bill Clinton, who saw an opportunity, when the Soviet Union broke apart, to gain access to Caspian oil and gas, but he didn’t want this new energy to flow through Russia or through Iran, which were the only natural ways to export the energy.


So he anointed Georgia as a bridge, to build new pipelines through Georgia to the West. And it was he who masterminded the construction of the BTC pipeline, which is now the outlet for this oil, with new pipelines supposedly following for natural gas. And he chose Georgia for this purpose and also built up the Georgian military to protect the pipeline, and Russia has been furious about this ever since. And I think that’s the reason that they have clung so tightly to Abkhazia and South Ossetia ever since.


AMY GOODMAN: We’re not hearing very much about this conflict, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heads to the area—I mean, the energy oil politics behind this conflict.


MICHAEL KLARE: No, but if you study very closely the history of US ties to Georgia, it’s unmistakable. Even under the Clinton administration, when Eduard Shevardnadze was the president of Georgia, who was hardly a paragon of democracy, President Clinton said that we need Georgia as an energy ally of the United States. And that was the basis on which the US forged a military alliance with Georgia.


And since then, we’ve poured hundreds of millions of dollars into beefing up the Georgian military. And this is unmistakable in the State Department and military Department of Defense justifications for arming the Georgian military, specifically to protect the BTC pipeline against sabotage and attack. So, looking into the Pentagon and State Department documents, there’s no question that this is about energy security, not about democracy or human rights or the other justifications that have been given.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, how would the two breakaway provinces affect this battle? Does the pipeline run through one or either of them?

MICHAEL KLARE: No, they run very close to South Ossetia, in particular, and I believe that the Russians have always been resentful of this effort by the United States to bypass Russia. Now, previously to this effort by the Clinton administration, subsequently embraced by the Bush administration, to establish bypass pipelines, previous to that, all of the pipelines from the Caspian Sea ran through Russia, of course formerly the Soviet Union, ran through Russia to Europe.


And it is the ambition of the Russian leadership, especially Vladimir Putin, to dominate the flow of oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe, so they could maximize the profit and the political advantage of dominating the flow of Caspian energy to Europe. And by building these alternate pipelines, the US is trying to undercut Russia’s political and economic power in Europe. That’s what this is about. It’s a geopolitical contest between the US and Europe for—between the US and Russia for influence in Europe.


So, by clinging to these enclaves, this is Russia’s insurance policy, I guess you could call it, or veto power, over the American strategy, because they’re saying, “From our positions in these enclaves, we can sever those pipelines whenever we want,” which is exactly what they attempted to do this week. They did in fact bomb or attack the pipelines. And what they’re saying to the Europeans is, “You can build pipelines through Georgia, but we can snap them whenever we want.” And I think that the message that they’ve been sending to the Europeans is, “Don’t think that you could build more pipelines through Georgia and they’ll be safe. They’ll never be safe.
”

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Michael, as you mentioned in one of your recent articles, the Russian leadership is as tied to its energy infrastructure as the present Bush administration is to the energy infrastructure here.
President Medvedev is a former head of Gazprom, isn’t he?

MICHAEL KLARE: Yes, exactly. And what’s underway in Europe is an effort headed by the EU to try to get under the thumb of Gazprom’s dominant role in the delivery of natural gas. Gazprom now delivers something like one-fourth of Europe’s natural gas. And if Gazprom has its way, it will double the amount of natural gas it supplies to Europe.


This has many Europeans and the United States deeply worried, because it kind of undercuts NATO’s independence. So, under American prodding, Europe has plans to build an alternative energy natural gas system called Nabucco, after the opera by Verdi, and this would go right through Georgia. And I think one of the major objectives of Russia’s incursion into Georgia is to say to the European leadership, “Your ideas about Nabucco are futile, because we can smash the Nabucco system anytime we want.
”

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Klare, I wanted to ask you about John McCain’s adviser, the controversy around Randy Scheunemann, part owner of the lobbying firm Orion Strategies, the Washington Post revealing Scheunemann briefed McCain before an April phone call with Georgian President Saakashvili, the same day Orion signed a $200,000 contract to advise Saakashvili’s government. Scheunemann then helped McCain draft a strong statement of support for Georgia. And Saakashvili has been talking directly to McCain, I mean, speaking through the press to McCain.


MICHAEL KLARE: Yes. It’s my impression that neoconservative circles in Washington have been egging Saakashvili on, have been telling him that he had much stronger support in Washington for this move, for this attack he made last week into South Ossetia, than he really did. I think, like so much else that’s happened in the past few years, there are really two foreign policy voices in Washington: the State Department voice of Condoleezza Rice and the Vice President’s Office and other elements around Dick Cheney that have a completely different foreign policy. And I wouldn’t be surprised if people around John McCain and Vice President Cheney weren’t telling Saakashvili that if he invaded South Ossetia, he would get much more support from the United States than in fact he did, and that this is what motivated him to provoke this clash, thinking that the US would come to his rescue. I have absolutely no evidence for that, but this kind of report that you just cited leads me to think that he went into South Ossetia last week with some sort of promises that never materialized.


JUAN GONZALEZ: And what do you make of Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, his response to this crisis? Do you see any difference in his approach at this point from those of Bill Clinton previously or President Bush, in terms of the situation in Georgia?

MICHAEL KLARE: Well, you know, I get the sense that he was caught off guard by all of this. You don’t get the impression that he was following this as closely maybe as he should have. I don’t think he was aware of just how much—how much there has been this history of US support for Saakashvili and how much encouragement he’s probably been receiving from elements in Washington to engage in this adventuristic policy against the Russians.


And again, I don’t know how much he’s even aware of the degree to which Georgia has been a US military protectorate, the hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid, the fact that there are US military instructors in Georgia, and that this fast-track NATO policy that the Bush administration has favored—all of this has been viewed in Moscow as an effort, as part of this larger effort, that the Bush administration has pushed—is seen in Moscow as part of an offensive, you know, an attack on Russia. It’s tied, of course, to plans for putting missile interceptors in Poland and with the radars in Czechoslovakia. They see this as a Cold War assault on Russia coming from Washington, tied also to plans I mentioned a minute ago to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. They feel they’re under attack and very threatened. And so, all of this is viewed by them as something that required a strong countermove.


I don’t get the sense that Senator Obama was quite aware of the degree to which they felt under attack and were poised for some kind of counter-response.


AMY GOODMAN: It’s also interesting to see the presidents of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia standing with the Georgian president. They all went to Georgia. I just came back from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and I was very struck by, when asking why these countries had joined with the US in invading Iraq, albeit their forces very small in number but both in Iraq and Afghanistan, people repeatedly said, “We have to do this, because we need the US support against Russia.” They’re still very afraid of a Russian occupation. They don’t forget the sixty years.


MICHAEL KLARE: Yes, this is true. But on the other hand, I—again, I come back to this notion that we have two foreign policies. We have the State Department foreign policy, Condoleezza Rice, who often speaks of the need for a cooperative relationship with Russia, with working out these complicated issues, and we have a neoconservative foreign policy emanating from the Vice President’s Office, which isn’t interested in cooperation, which is interested in confrontation and in reviving the Cold War. And I think that they go to the countries on the border of the Soviet Union and encourage them to take a confrontational line and seek out leaders who are willing to speak this way. This is not where the rest of Europe is inclined.


AMY GOODMAN: Michael Klare, we want to thank you for being with us, defense analyst for The Nation, director of the Five College Program for Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst. His latest book is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy.

No Way Out...Endogamy is the Enemy...

This is one of those topics that just gets under my skin and pisses me off to no end..."Honor" killings of women (mostly) to protect a families supposed honor...However, to me the most insidious, pernicious, and yet still so prevalent manifestation is endogamy or "the practice of marrying within a social group." You see this phenomenon throughout many different cultures/societies...



What is of primary importance to me is not that there is any greater benefit to marrying outside of ones social group but in erasing any of the distinctions and alleged differences that exist for some (even against their often vociferous denials)...

The link to the BBC documentary that spurred me to write this is below as well as a few other resources of interest to those seeking to fight endogamy and social injustice more broadly...

Choice
..



Loving Day
Loving Day Myspace
Inter-"racial" Marriage


No Way Out

Programme Two: No Way Out

Shazia Khan, for BBC World Service, meets some young women in the UK for whom attempting escape from abusive marriages means risking murder by the men in their own families.

According to official statistics, one woman a month is killed in the UK by her family in the name of honour, usually because she has rejected or tried to escape from a forced marriage, or has found a partner to love of her own choosing.

Each year over 300 cases of forced marriage are dealt with by the Forced Marriage Unit set up by the British government.

But campaigners suspect that the figures are much higher, with women being driven to kill themselves out of desperation, or murders being disguised to look like suicide.

Honour killing

Though honour killing is sometimes thought to be a Muslim problem, it occurs in many patriarchal communities around the world, including Hindu, Sikh and Christian too.

Presenter Shazia Khan, who is herself a Muslim of Pakistani descent, is troubled that forced marriage and honour killings take place in her own Pakistani community. She is concerned that young men of her own generation, born or brought up in the UK, are prepared to go so far as to kill to preserve their family name.

Shazia talks to three women, one of them in hiding in fear of her life, about why they have become targets of such rage and threatened violence and how the very people who they would have hoped would protect them have turned on them.

For the women who have challenged their family's expectations, it can feel as if there is 'No Way Out', a life-long price to pay.

US Contractors, FARC, u*ibe, Colombian Para's and the Generals

A VERY good and informative article...

As Freed US Contractors Speak Out, a Look at the FARC, Colombian Paramilitary Groups and the Generals Being Feted for the Hostage Rescue

Three American military contractors freed from the Colombian jungle have spoken out against their former captors, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell were among the fifteen hostages, including the French Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, rescued in an elaborate military operation last week in a major blow to the FARC. We host a roundtable discussion with Mario Murillo, author of Colombia and the United States; Michael Evans of the Colombia Documentation Project; and Manuel Rozental, a Colombian physician and human rights activist living in Canada following several threats on his life. [includes rush transcript]


Guests:

Mario Murillo, Professor of communications at Hofstra University and producer at Pacifica radio station WBAI here in New York. He is author of Colombia and the United States: War, Terrorism and Destabilization and is completing a book on the indigenous movement in Colombia and its use of popular media in community organizing.

Michael Evans, Director of the Colombia Documentation Project at the National Security Archive.

Manuel Rozental, physician, human rights activist, member of the Hemispheric Social Alliance and the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca in Colombia. Fled to Canada in 2005 following several threats on his life.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the three American military contractors freed from the Colombian jungle, speaking out against their former captors, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC—Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell, among the fifteen hostages, including the French Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, who was rescued in an elaborate military operation last week. The Colombian government says it managed to infiltrate FARC command and fool the rebels into thinking they were transferring the hostages to another location.

On Monday, the three Americans spoke publicly for the first time since their release. Marc Gonsalves called his former FARC captors “terrorists” and urged them to release hundreds of remaining hostages.

The freed Americans are employees of the military firm Northrop Grumman. They have been captured—they were captured in 2003 after their surveillance plane crashed in the Colombian jungle.

The rescue operation was widely seen as a major blow to the FARC. The fifteen freed prisoners were the most high-profile of hundreds the FARC had held in hopes of securing the release of captured rebels and achieving other political demands. The group has already been depleted by the deaths of three senior leaders this year and a series of defections.

Criticism of FARC has come from all sides. Indigenous, peasant and human rights groups have denounced FARC’s kidnappings and armed operations and said they also deflect attention from government abuses.

I’m joined now by three guests. Here in the firehouse, Mario Murillo, professor of communications at Hofstra University, a producer at Pacifica radio station WBAI here in New York, author of the book Colombia and the United States: War, Terrorism and Destabilization, currently finishing another book on the indigenous movement in Colombia and its popular use of the media in community organizing. Also, in Washington, D.C., I’m joined by Michael Evans, director of the Colombia Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. And on the line from New Brunswick, Canada, Manuel Rozental. He’s a Colombian physician, human rights activist and member of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca in Colombia. He fled to Canada in 2005 following several threats on his life.

Mario, you have been writing about what happened, and now there’s serious questions, Swiss reports of whether in fact this was staged, whether $20 million wasn’t paid in ransom for these prisoners by the Colombian government.

MARIO MURILLO: Right. There’s a lot of questions, actually, because there’s three different versions. Unfortunately, the official version is the one that’s getting the most play, and obviously Alvaro Uribe is getting a lot of political mileage out of it. And that’s, of course, this dramatic rescue operation that you described in the introduction.

There’s two other reports. The one that you just alluded to from the French—Swiss radio—public radio service, that—based on high sources that the reporters had, saying that one of the wives of one of the guards, one of the FARC rebels who was involved in securing and maintaining security around the hostages, was in constant contact and made this arrangement for a $20 million ransom pay. And that’s from one report.

Another report, which probably is a lot more feasible if this—you know, I haven’t gotten deeper in that one, but the other report is that the Colombian government actually took advantage of a diplomatic effort that was already underway for a long time by the former French consul in Bogota, as well as a leading Swiss diplomat who was in Colombia, and they were making arrangements, and they even got the green light from the Colombian government. It was in the Spanish daily, El Pais, when the president, Colombian president, actually announced that, yeah, this interchange, this dialogue, was actually proceeding. And it turns out, apparently, according to this report, that the Colombian government intercepted the helicopters that were on their way, so it wasn’t really a high infiltration operation that was in the highest levels of the FARC commanders. The FARC were actually turning the folks over to specifically this delegation led by these two diplomats, and apparently the Colombian government kind of took, you know, a right turn and got a lot of political mileage as a result.

A lot of questions are still around what happened, but unfortunately, as I said, the official story is the one that’s getting out the most.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn now to the freed American military contractors. On Monday, they spoke out for the first time since their rescue. Marc Gonsalves was the most vocal of the three in criticizing FARC. This is some of what he had to say.

MARC GONSALVES: There was a time that when I slept, I would dream that I was free. That time was only a few days ago. It feels so good to be free here now with all of you.

I want to tell you about the FARC, a guerrilla group who claim to be revolutionaries fighting for the poor people of Colombia. They say that they want equality. They say that they just want to make Colombia a better place. But that’s all a lie. It’s a cover story, and they hide behind it, and they use it to justify their criminal activity.

The FARC are not a revolutionary group. They are not a revolutionary group. They are terrorists. Terrorists with a capital T. Bad people. Their interests lie in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping. They refuse to acknowledge all human rights. And they reject democracy.

I’ve seen them hold a newborn baby in captivity, a baby that needed medical help, that was sick. They kept him there in the jungle.

I, myself, and my friends, Tom and Keith, we’ve also been victim of their hate, of their abuse and other torture. And I have seen how even their own guerrillas commit suicide in a desperate attempt to escape the slavery that the FARC have condemned them to.

The majority of the FARC’s forces are children and young adults. They come from extreme poverty and have very little or no education. Many of them, they can’t even read. So they’re easily tricked into joining the FARC, and they’re brainwashed into believing that their cause is a just cause. But once they join, they can never leave, because if they try, they will be killed.

There are people who right now in this very moment, they’re still there in the jungle being held hostage. In this exact moment, right now, they’re being punished, because we got rescued successfully. I want you guys to imagine that. Right now, right now, they’re wearing chains around their necks. They’re going to get up early tomorrow morning, and they’re going to put a heavy backpack on their backs, and they’re going to be forced to march with that chain on their neck, while a guerrilla with an automatic weapon is holding the other end of his chain like a dog.

Those are innocent people. Those are people that were fighting or working for the country. And all they want is what we wanted and what God had the grace to give us: our freedom.

I want to send a message to the FARC. FARC, you guys are terrorists. You deny that you are. You say with words that you’re not terrorists, but your words don’t have any value. Don’t tell us that you’re not terrorists; show us that you’re not terrorists. Let those other hostages come home. Agree to President Uribe’s proposal of an encounter zone. Anywhere and any time you want, he proposed an encounter zone. Then make the humanitarian agreement and let the others come home. Then after that, a peace process, because otherwise this downward spiral that the FARC are on now will continue, and the Colombian military is going to dismantle the entire organization.


AMY GOODMAN: That is the quote of the man, the American contractor, who was captured, Gonsalves, speaking yesterday—Marc Gonsalves—in San Antonio. Let’s begin with you, Mario. Your thoughts?

MARIO MURILLO: Well, first of all, he said a lot of things, so we can comment on a lot of things, obviously. One of the things being the fact of the terrible conditions in which these hostages are held is something that obviously nobody could really argue about. It’s unjust, and everybody from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez to many other people around the world have been demanding the FARC turn these folks over.

But he also says a lot of things that kind of whitewash the situation. First of all, I think it’s very important, one of the tragedies of this whole thing is that we will never get to the bottom of what Gonsalves and his so-called contractors were doing in Colombia. We have to recall that he was—first of all, the fact that his plane went down—the official record says it was an accident and they went down in the jungles, although the FARC had claimed initially that they shot it down.

We also have to point out that to use the term “hostages” in their case—not to justify that they were held for five years, by no stretch of the imagination—but to use the term “hostages” is very problematic in the context in which they were operating in southern Colombia. They were there in 2003, two years—a year and a half after President Bush already authorized US servicemen and contractors to conduct counterinsurgency, not counter-drug operations. That was in the heart of where the FARC were operating, in Caqueta and in the southern part of the country. So we will never get to the bottom of what exactly these folks were doing down there—again, not to justify, but I think that’s one of the many questions that are left unsaid.

And then, finally, his last comments there about what Uribe’s proposals are really are optimistic, if not completely naive. He doesn’t seem to understand that Uribe’s strategy is not to dialogue with the FARC. His intention is to totally dismantle them. He does not recognize them as a belligerent force. And the argument that they’re terrorists, which Gonsalves here is arguing, is something that Uribe has embraced to the detriment of any possibility of dialogue for long-lasting peace in Colombia.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me turn to Manuel Rozental. Your response right now, as a man who has fled Colombia, a physician, a human rights activist, now living in Canada, hearing the description of the FARC and also talking about the Uribe government? It’s interesting that Ingrid Betancourt, perhaps the most well-known hostage, who has now returned to France—said she may run for president again, in fact ran against Uribe—said Colombian President Alvaro Uribe should soften his tone when dealing with FARC guerrillas. She urged Uribe to break with the language of hatred. Manuel?

MANUEL ROZENTAL: Yes. Hi, Amy. Indeed, it’s very interesting. I, first of all, have to say, like I think almost every Colombian, that we were absolutely elated by the liberation of Ingrid and that her condition is good, and one cannot downplay that. Regardless of how it was achieved, it was fantastic that she was released unharmed and that all the other ones were, as well.

Also, what Mario was saying, they were really fourteen prisoners of war and one hostage released. The fourteen prisoners of war, mistreated, abused, and I’m also glad, as everybody, that they’re free.

And in fact, I would say, knowing Ingrid before she was kidnapped, and precisely two or three days before she was kidnapped by FARC, she actually met with FARC commanders, including Raul Reyes, and said directly that she demanded a gesture of goodwill from FARC in order for peace to be achieved in Colombia. And her almost exact words were “Your gesture of goodwill has to be no more kidnapping in Colombia, and then, otherwise, if you don’t do that gesture, if you don’t carry it out, then Colombia will explode into a spiral of disaster, and you will lose all credibility.” So I think that background is essential, because just a couple of days after she says that, she’s kidnapped by the very people she demands that gesture from.

But I think it’s very important to put the whole thing into context. First, the Uribe government has peaked in popularity but also has reached a bottom in terms of illegitimacy. It was condemned just a few days before this operation of liberation was carried out because of buying out votes from congress to achieve re-election in a fraudulent way. Uribe’s administration is also linked to death squads, and so are the members of a coalition that led him to win the elections twice and high officials in government, including the secret police. So we’re talking about the regime with the worst human rights record in the continent and the army with the worst human rights record in the continent with the greatest US support, including the contractors or mercenaries that Mario was talking about. So the fact that this regime was involved in this liberation does not and should not and cannot cover up the fact that it is a horrendous regime.

So, the main point I’d like to make here beyond the discussion as to whether FARC or the government, which one is worse or which one is legitimate, the main point here is an SOS for the popular movements and organizations and the people of Colombia who right now, with the validation of Uribe’s regime, are at the greatest risk of continuing to be or even worsening the human rights records and abuses.

And to put this into perspective, there is a major plan in progress within Colombia and from Colombia with US support and for corporate interests to take over resources and wealth in territories in Colombia and, from there, to launch a war or a major conflict in the Andean region. That agenda is going to advance even further, after—if Uribe gets away with the legitimization of his regime after the liberation of Ingrid.

So, to go back to where I started, if Ingrid was the same Ingrid that was kidnapped by FARC, the one that denounced corruption of the government and launched a presidential campaign, she would be saying what I’m saying now. You cannot legitimate a corrupt regime for profit because you have liberated somebody. In fact, the person they’ve liberated fought against that corruption, and we hope she’ll do it again.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Michael Evans into this discussion, director of the Colombia Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. Inter Press Service wrote an interesting piece called "Colombia: The General Ingrid Hugged,” and they’re talking about General Mario Montoya—General Mario Montoya Uribe and Ingrid Betancourt. For our radio listeners, we’re showing the image. You can go to our website at democracynow.org. Tell us about this general.

MICHAEL EVANS: Sure. Thanks for having me on the show. General Mario Montoya is the commander of the Colombian army, and he has a sort of spotted history with respect to human rights.

And it’s important to—for the listeners of this show to realize that there’s another side to the coin with the FARC. Few people have illusions that the FARC are well-intentioned liberals, but the other side of it are the right-wing paramilitary groups that have operated virtually unhindered in Colombia for decades.

Mario Montoya, the general that Ingrid hugged—and I haven’t seen the Inter Press story, but I can imagine where it goes—just last year was the subject of a CIA report leaked to the Los Angeles Times that implicated him in a joint operation with paramilitary forces in the city of Medellin just a few years ago, when he was a commander of an army brigade there. And Montoya, throughout his career, has been dogged by these kinds of allegations. A unit that he was a member of in the late 1970s, when he was a young intelligence officer, had actually formed a supposedly independent spontaneous paramilitary group known as the Triple A, the American Anticommunist Alliance, that was responsible for bombings and other kinds of threats and intimidation, sort of black ops type operations in Colombia. The unit that he was associated with created it as a completely clandestine project. So General Montoya has a lot to answer for, as does President Uribe. You know, many of his political allies have been implicated in the parapolitical scandal, a scandal touched off by the discovery of a paramilitary laptop a couple of years ago.

So there’s another side to this that I think is lost in this and is in danger of sort of being consumed or buried under this sort of all this wave of adoration for, you know, what is, I think, rightly considered a very successful military operation. Of course, everybody is happy that the hostages have been released, and it’s a huge victory for them and their families, but you have to also see this as a huge victory for Uribe and for—really as something that’s going to help him to get through and sort of avoid addressing some of these larger problems that he faces.

AMY GOODMAN: The Triple A, what is it, Michael Evans?

MICHAEL EVANS: Yeah, the Triple A was a group, again, that in the late 1970s and early 1980s operated as a clandestine unit of a Colombian military intelligence unit. Essentially, they were formed completely covertly, behind the scenes, without any attribution to the Colombian army. They were responsible for bombing the Communist Party headquarters and some other acts of intimidation around that time. It’s really the first documented evidence that I’ve seen, at least in US government documents, declassified documents, where a Colombian army unit is directly tied to a clandestine paramilitary group or right-wing—

AMY GOODMAN: And its relation to the United States?

MICHAEL EVANS: Well, its relation to the United States, as far as I know, ends where—in a cable reported from the US ambassador, Diego Asencio, in 1979, where he knows of this project and says—kind of downplays it and says, well, it’s not a big deal; you know, these are kind of dirty tricks being carried out by a desperate military facing this—excuse me, this guerrilla threat from the—what then was the M-19 guerrillas. But the US certainly knew about that project, and if they had done a little digging, would have known that Mario Montoya was a part of it, the man, of course, who is now the senior Colombian army official that is considered a great ally of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Manuel Rozental, can you return to Colombia today?

MANUEL ROZENTAL: Yeah, actually, I have been returning to Colombia, and my situation is not unusual, in that many of the people under threat actually go back to Colombia and have to be very careful and keep looking for mechanisms to work with social movements. In fact, my working with the Association of Indigenous Councils is at a moment when more indigenous peoples, through this regime of Alvaro Uribe, have been threatened, killed, disappeared or attacked than in any other previous regimes, which has a lot to say about what’s going on.

But, Amy, I wanted to point out something. Maybe you saw this, or the people listening to us. There was a 60 Minutes special on the Chiquita Brands scandal. The Chiquita is, of course, a banana company. And the documentary actually interviewed the CEO of Chiquita that had pleaded guilty of funding the paramilitary forces. But the argument he presented was that he was forced to fund the paramilitaries in order to survive, because he was threatened by them.

The main point here is that the person doing the interview managed to get through to Mancuso, the paramilitary commander and a close friend of Uribe’s, and Mancuso stated clearly in the program that many people saw in the US that there was never a threat, and it was out of consideration that there would be any tense relationship or threat between three companies—Dole, Chiquita, and Del Monte—in Colombia, because they were actually allies. He actually said clearly, “They funded us. They armed us. They trained us,” which is very important.

In fact, just a few days after this came out to the US public, Mancuso and another fourteen paramilitaries were taken, extradited into the US, so that they would be charged for drug trade and all the crimes against humanity and all the names he said he was going to name—Mancuso said he was going to denounce the direct links between the multinational US corporations, the US government, the Colombian government and the paramilitaries to the State Department and Department of Justice. And just after he says that, he is thrown into jail into darkness in the US, so that all these criminal activities and the architecture of power in Colombia could not be exposed. All this stuff is covered up.

And then, the links between corporate interest, paramilitary death squads, the Uribe and the Bush administration have been hidden, covered up completely. And then, the real problem in Colombia, which is an experiment from transnational corporations through the Uribe administration with the support of the Bush and the US government, can be hidden, and further hidden with what just happened.

As was being explained before, the whole paramilitary and death squad machinery in Colombia has been in existence for a long time with clear US support, with direct involvement of military and paramilitary forces in Colombia, and the Uribe regime is directly linked to all that.

AMY GOODMAN: It seems that the FARC has served the president of Colombia very well—Uribe. The US has given billions of dollars to Colombia. Mario Murillo, let’s end there.

MARIO MURILLO: Yeah. Well, I would make the argument that the FARC continue to be a kind of crutch for Uribe, and it’s all couched in the war against narcotrafficking and the war against terror. The United States is looking at this as the prime éxito or success story, and they’re pumping tens of millions of—billions of dollars into Colombia. And McCain was down there just last week, touting it—

AMY GOODMAN: Was there the day of the release.

MARIO MURILLO: Was there the day of the rescue, and he’s touting it as a success story, without pointing out what already has been said, as well as the—it’s not only a thing of the past, it’s a thing of the present. Amnesty International and the Fellowship of Reconciliation came out with a scathing report in May—late April, early May this year, documenting how the regiments, the army units that the Colombian army is receiving the most money of Colombian—of US support are directly involved in extrajudicial executions, a story that has been reported in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post but that, unfortunately, as you know, doesn’t get the drumbeat that this dramatic rescue would get.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Mario Murillo is a WBAI producer, professor at Hofstra University, author of the book Colombia and the United States: War, Terrorism and Destabilization. Michael Evans in D.C., director of the Colombia Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. We’ll link to that. And Manuel Rozental, physician, human rights activist, member of the Hemispheric Social Alliance and Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca in Colombia. I wish we could be speaking to him in Colombia, but he fled to Canada in 2005 following several threats against his life.

Spitzer’s Shame Is Wall Street’s Gain...

Spitzer’s Shame Is Wall Street’s Gain

Tell me again: Why should we get all worked up over the revelation that the New York governor paid for sex? Will it bring back to life the eight U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq that same day in a war that makes no sense and has cost this nation trillions in future debt? Will it save those millions of homes that hardworking folks all over the country are losing because of financial industry shenanigans that Eliot Spitzer, as much as anyone, attempted to halt? Perhaps it provides some insight into why oil has risen to $108 a barrel, benefiting most of all the oil sheiks whom our taxpayer-supported military has kept in power?

...The best rule of thumb these days is that ordinary Americans should be mightily depressed over any news that Wall Street hustlers cheer, for they have been exposed as a dangerous pack of scoundrels quite willing to rob decent, hardworking people of their homes. And of course no one on Wall Street ever paid for sex.

Tell me again: Why should we get all worked up over the revelation that the New York governor paid for sex? Will it bring back to life the eight U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq that same day in a war that makes no sense and has cost this nation trillions in future debt? Will it save those millions of homes that hardworking folks all over the country are losing because of financial industry shenanigans that Eliot Spitzer, as much as anyone, attempted to halt? Perhaps it provides some insight into why oil has risen to $108 a barrel, benefiting most of all the oil sheiks whom our taxpayer-supported military has kept in power?

Sure, the guy, by his own admission, is quite pathetic in all those small, squirrelly ways that have messed up the lives of other grand public figures before him, but why is an all-too-human sin, amply predicted in early Scripture, getting all this incredible media play as some sort of shocking event? The answer is that, while having precious little to do with serious corruption in public life, it does have a great deal to do with stoking flagging newspaper sales and television ratings.

The sad truth is that reporting on major corruption, say, the rationalizations of a president who has authorized torture, doesn't cut it as a marketing bonanza. Just days before this grand exposé, the president vetoed a bill banning torture, and instead of being greeted with horrified disgust, the president's deep denigration of this nation's presumed ideals was met with a vast public yawn. Torture, unlike paid sex, doesn't have legs as a news story.

Sex sells, and frankly it would seem far more exploitative for the news media to pimp this tale to the public than anything that VIP escort service did with the pitiable governor. His behavior was not really any more wretched than messing around with a young and vulnerable White House intern who didn't even get paid for her efforts, yet Bill Clinton survived that one, whereas Spitzer was presumed dead on the arrival of this "news." The New York Times, which editorially has supported the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, whose vast White House experience clearly did not include corralling her husband, now editorializes contemptuously about Spitzer's betrayal of the public trust as well as about his exploitation of his "ashen-faced" wife, who, like Hillary, stood by her man.

The media consensus from the opening salvo was that Spitzer must resign and he will be thrown to the dogs, which is unfortunate because, like Clinton, he has done much valuable work in the public interest, and the outrage over this personal dereliction, tawdry in the extreme, is excessive. I certainly never wanted Clinton to resign, let alone be impeached, but why is Spitzer's paying for sex more disgraceful than ripping it off? Yes, Spitzer allegedly broke a law that shouldn't be on the books, and his resignation in disgrace is inevitable, but it bothers me that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney remain in office despite having violated enormously more serious laws.

Frankly, I don't care what any of these politicians do in their personal lives as long as the practice is consensual, and the thousands of dollars that exchanged hands in this case would provide a presumption that the lady in question was indeed a willing partner in this commercial transaction. True, Spitzer is an outrageous hypocrite for having prosecuted others caught in what should not be considered criminal behavior, but since when is hypocrisy on the part of a politician, particularly as to sex, so shocking?

I wouldn't have written this column had I not read The Wall Street Journal's Page 1 news story headlined "Wall Street Cheers as Its Nemesis Plunges Into Crisis." The article begins with the crowing statement "It's Schadenfreude time on Wall Street" and goes on to quote those whom Spitzer went after over what should be considered the criminal greed that has predominated on Wall Street. It was Spitzer, as much as anyone, who sounded the alarm on the subprime mortgage crisis, the obscene payouts to CEOs who defrauded their shareholders and the other financial scandals that have brought the U.S. economy to its knees.

The best rule of thumb these days is that ordinary Americans should be mightily depressed over any news that Wall Street hustlers cheer, for they have been exposed as a dangerous pack of scoundrels quite willing to rob decent, hardworking people of their homes. And of course no one on Wall Street ever paid for sex.

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Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq. See more of Robert Scheer at TruthDig.

Uh-Obama: Racism, White Voters and the Myth of Color-Blindness

Good article as usual...Also check out Michael Eric Dyson and his thoughts on all this and a lot more...



Uh-Obama: Racism, White Voters and the Myth of Color-Blindness

By Tim Wise

March 6, 2008

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write, at least not as soon as I am now compelled to write it: It may well be the case that the United States is on its way to electing a person of color as President. Make no mistake, I realize the way that any number of factors, racism prominently among them, could derail such a thing from coming to fruition. Indeed, results from the Ohio Democratic primary suggest that an awful lot of white folks, especially rural and working-class whites, are still mightily uncomfortable with voting for such a candidate, at least partly because of race: One-fifth of voters in the state said race was important to their decision, and roughly six in ten of these voted for Hillary Clinton, which totals would then represent roughly her net margin of victory over Barack Obama.

But having said all that--and I think anyone who is being honest would have to acknowledge this as factual--we are far closer to the election of a person of color in a Presidential race than probably any of us expected. Obama's meteoric rise, from community organizer, to law professor, to Illinois state senator, to the U.S. Senate, and now, possibly, the highest office in the land, is something that could have been foreseen by few if any just a few years ago. Obama's undeniable charisma, savvy political instincts, passion for his work, and ability to connect with young voters (and not a few older ones as well) is the kind of thing you just don't see all that often. The fact that as a black man (or, as some may prefer, a man of biracial background) he has been able to catapult to the position in which he now finds himself makes the accomplishment even more significant. It does indeed mean something.

But this is where things become considerably more complicated; the point at which one is forced to determine what, exactly, his success means (and doesn't mean) when it comes to the state of race, race relations, and racism in the United States. And it is at this point that so-called mainstream commentary has, once again, dropped the ball.

On the one hand, many a voice has suggested that Obama's success signifies something akin to the end of racism in the U.S., if not entirely, then surely as a potent political or social force. After all, if a black man actually stands a better-than-decent shot at becoming President, then how much of a barrier could racism really be? But of course, the success of individual persons of color, while it certainly suggests that overt bigotry has diminished substantially, hardly speaks to the larger social reality faced by millions of others: a subject to which we will return. Just as sexism no doubt remained an issue in Pakistan, even after Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister in the 1980s and again in the 90s (or in India or Israel after both nations had female Premiers, or in Great Britain after the election of Margaret Thatcher), so too can racism exist in abundance, in spite of the electoral success of one person of color, even one who could be elevated to the highest office in the world's most powerful nation.

More importantly, to the extent Obama's success has been largely contingent on his studious avoidance of the issue of race--such that he rarely ever mentions discrimination and certainly not in front of white audiences--one has to wonder just how seriously we should take the notion that racism is a thing of the past, at least as supposedly evidenced by his ability to attract white votes? To the extent those whites are rewarding him in large measure for not talking about race, and to the extent they would abandon him in droves were he to begin talking much about racism--for he would be seen at that point as playing the race card, or appealing to "special interests" and suffer the consequences--we should view Obama's success, given what has been required to make it possible, as confirmation of the ongoing salience of race in American life. Were race really something we had moved beyond, whites would be open to hearing a candidate share factual information about housing discrimination, racial profiling, or race-based inequities in health care. But we don't want to be reminded of those things. We prefer to ignore them, and many are glad that Obama has downplayed them too, whether by choice, or necessity.

Erasing Race and Making White Folks Happy

The extent to which Obama's white support has been directly related to his downplaying of race issues simply cannot be overstated, as evidenced by the kinds of things many of these supporters openly admit, possessing no sense of apparent irony or misgiving. So, consider the chant offered by his supporters at a recent rally--and frankly, a chant in which whites appeared to be joining with far greater enthusiasm than folks of color--to the effect that "Race Doesn't Matter, Race Doesn't Matter," a concept so utterly absurd, given the way in which race most certainly still matters to the opportunity structure in this country, that one has to almost wretch at the repeated offering of it. Or consider the statements of support put forth by Obama supporters in a November 2007 Wall Street Journal article, to the effect that Obama makes whites "feel good" about ourselves (presumably by not bothering us with all that race talk), and that Obama, by virtue of his race-averse approach has "emancipated" whites to finally vote for a black candidate (because goodness knows we were previously chained and enslaved to a position of rejectionism). Worst of all, consider the words of one white Obama supporter, an ardent political blogger in Nashville, to the effect that what he likes about the Illinois Senator is that he "doesn't come with the baggage of the civil rights movement." Let it suffice to say that when the civil rights movement--one of the greatest struggles for human liberation in the history of our collective species--can be unashamedly equated with Samsonite, with luggage, with something one should avoid as though it were radioactive (and this coming from a self-described liberal), we are at a very dangerous place as a nation, all celebrations of Obama's cross-racial appeal notwithstanding.

What does it say about the nation's political culture--and what does it suggest about the extent to which we have moved "beyond race"--that candidate Obama, though he surely knows it, has been unable to mention the fact that 2006 saw the largest number of race-based housing discrimination complaints on record, and according to government and private studies, there are between two and three million cases of housing discrimination each year against people of color?

What does it say that he has failed to note with any regularity that according to over a hundred studies, health disparities between whites and blacks are due not merely to health care costs and economic differences between the two groups (a subject he does address) but also due to the provision of discriminatory care by providers, even to blacks with upper incomes, and black experiences with racism itself, which are directly related to hypertension and other maladies?

What does it say that Obama apparently can't bring himself to mention, for fear of likely white backlash, that whites are over seventy percent of drug users, but only about ten percent of persons incarcerated for a drug possession offense, while blacks and Latinos combined are about twenty-five percent of users, but comprise roughly ninety percent of persons locked up for a possession offense?

Why no mention of the massive national study by legal scholars Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen, which found that at least a third of all businesses in the nation engage in substantial discrimination against people of color--hiring such folks at rates that are well below their availability in the local and qualified labor pool, and well below the rates at which they are to be found in non-discriminating companies in the same locales and industries? Indeed, according to the Blumrosen study, at least 1.3 million qualified people of color will face job discrimination in a given year. Or what of the study of temporary agencies in California, which found that white women who are less qualified than their black counterparts, are still three times more likely to be favored in a job search? And what are the odds that he'll be likely to mention, to any significant degree, the recent EEOC report, which notes that in 2007 there was a twelve percent jump in race-based discrimination complaints in the workplace relative to the previous year (almost all of which were filed by persons of color): bringing the number of such complaints to their highest level since 1994?

As Obama talks about change and making the "American Dream" real for all, why is he unable to mention the fact--let alone propose specific remedies for it--that thanks to a history of unequal access to property and the inability to accumulate assets on par with whites, young black couples with college degrees and good incomes still start out at a significant disadvantage (around $20,000) relative to their white counterparts? In fact, the wealth gap between whites and blacks--with the average white family now having about eleven times the net worth of the average black family--continues to grow, even as income gaps for similarly educated families with similar background characteristics have shrunk.

And why such muted discussion about the way that, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, government at all levels and across party lines has engaged in ethnic cleansing in New Orleans, failing to provide rental assistance to the mostly black tenant base for over a year, plotting to tear down 5000 perfectly usable units of public housing, failing to restart the city's public health care infrastructure, and even ordering the Red Cross not to provide relief in the first few days after the city flooded in September 2005, so as to force evacuation and empty out the city? While Obama has spoken much about the failures of the Bush Administration during Katrina, openly discussing the deliberate acts of cruelty that go well beyond incompetence, and which amount to the forced depopulation of New Orleans-area blacks, has been something about which he cannot speak for fear of prompting a backlash from whites, most of whom, according to polls, don't think the events of Katrina have any lessons at all to teach us about race in America.

Surely, that Obama is constrained in his ability to focus any real attention on these matters, suggests that whatever his success may say about America and race, one thing it utterly fails to say is that we have conquered the racial demons that have so long bedeviled us. And to the extent he must remain relatively silent about these issues, lest he find his political ascent headed in a decidedly different direction, it is true, however ironic, that his success actually confirms the salience of white power. If, in order to be elected, a man of color has to pander to white folks, in ways that no white politician would ever have to do to people who were black or brown, then white privilege and white power remain operative realities. Obama's ascent to the Presidency, if it happens, will happen only because he managed to convince enough whites that he was different, and not really black, in the way too many whites continue to think of black people, which according to every opinion survey, is not too positively.

Transcending Blackness, Reinforcing White Racism: The Trouble With Exceptions

Obama's rise has owed almost everything to his ability--and this, again, coming from people who support him and are willing to speak candidly--to "transcend" race, which is really a way of saying, his ability to carve out an exception for himself in the minds of whites. But this notion of Obama "transcending race" (by which we really mean transcending his blackness) is a patently offensive and even racist notion in that it serves to reinforce generally negative feelings about blacks as a whole; feelings that the presence of exceptions cannot cancel out, and which they can even serve to reinforce. To the extent Obama has become the Cliff Huxtable of politics--a black man with whom millions of whites can identity and to whom they can relate--he has leapt one hurdle, only to watch his white co-countrymen and women erect a still higher one in the path of the black masses. If whites view Obama as having transcended his blackness, and if this is why we like him so much, we are saying, in effect, that the millions of blacks who haven't transcended theirs will remain a problem. To praise the transcending of blackness, after all, is to imply that blackness is something negative, something from which one who might otherwise qualify for membership ought to seek escape, and quickly.

Note, never has a white politician been confronted with questions about his or her ability to transcend race, or specifically, their whiteness. And this is true, even as many white politicians continue to pull almost all of their support from whites, and have almost no luck at convincing people of color to vote for them. In the Democratic primaries this year, Obama has regularly received about half the white vote, while Hillary Clinton has managed to pull down only about one-quarter of the black vote, yet the question has always been whether he could transcend race. The only rational conclusion to which this points is, again, that it is not race per se that needs to be overcome, but blackness. Whiteness is not seen as negative, as something to be conquered or transcended. Indeed, whereas blacks are being asked to rise above their racial identity, for whites, the burden is exactly the opposite: the worst thing for a white person is to fail to live up to the ostensibly high standards set by whiteness; it is to be considered white trash, which is to say, to be viewed as someone who has let down whiteness and fallen short of its pinnacle. For blacks, the worst thing it seems (at least in the minds of whites) is to be seen as black, which is no doubt why so many whites think it's a compliment to say things to black folks like, "I don't even think of you as black," not realizing that the subtext of such a comment is that it's a damned good thing they don't, for if they did, the person so thought of would be up the proverbial creek for sure.

In what must prove among the greatest ironies of all time, for Barack Obama to become President, which he well may accomplish, he will have to succeed in convincing a lot of racist white people to vote for him. Without the support of racists he simply can't win. While this may seem counterintuitive--that is, after all, what makes it ironic--it is really inarguable. After all, according to many an opinion survey in the past decade, large numbers of whites (often as high as one-half to three-quarters) harbor at least one negative and racist stereotype about African Americans, whether regarding their intelligence, law-abidingness, work ethic, or value systems. Without the votes of at least some of those whites (and keep in mind, that's how many whites are willing to admit to racist beliefs, which is likely far fewer than actually hold them), Obama's candidacy would be sunk. So long as whites can vote for a black man only to the extent that he doesn't remind them of other black people, it is fair to say that white people remain mired in a racism quite profound. To the extent we view the larger black community in terms far more hostile than those reserved for Obama, Oprah, Tiger, Colin, Condoleezza, Denzel and Bill (meaning Cosby, not Clinton, whose blackness is believed to be authentic only by himself nowadays), whites have proven how creative we can be, and how resourceful, when it comes to the maintenance of racial inequality.

By granting exemptions from blackness, even to those black folks who did not ask for such exemptions (and nothing I have said here should be taken as a critique of Obama himself by the way, for whom I did indeed vote last month), we have taken racism to an entirely new and disturbing level, one that bypasses the old and all-encompassing hostilities of the past, and replaces them with a new, seemingly ecumenical acceptance in the present. But make no mistake, it is an ecumenism that depends upon our being made to feel good, and on our ability to glom onto folks of color who won't challenge our denial let alone our privileges, even if they might like to.

In short, the success of Barack Obama has proven, perhaps more so than any other single thing could, just how powerful race remains in America. His success, far from disproving white power and privilege, confirms it with a vengeance.

Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade - A Book Review by Louis Proyect

Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade - A Book Review by Louis Proyect

May 26, 2003

Diana Johnstone, FOOLS' CRUSADE Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Monthly Review Press, New York, N.Y, 2002; ISBN 1-58367-084-X. $19.95 paper; 288 pp.




INTRODUCTION

On December 8th 2002, George Packer wrote the following in a New York Times Magazine article titled "The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq":

"Why there is no organized liberal opposition to the war?

"The answer to this question involves an interesting history, and it sheds light on the difficulties now confronting American liberals. The history goes back 10 years, when a war broke out in the middle of Europe. This war changed the way many American liberals, particularly liberal intellectuals, saw their country. Bosnia turned these liberals into hawks. People who from Vietnam on had never met an American military involvement they liked were now calling for U.S. air strikes to defend a multiethnic democracy against Serbian ethnic aggression. Suddenly the model was no longer Vietnam, it was World War II -- armed American power was all that stood in the way of genocide. Without the cold war to distort the debate, and with the inspiring example of the East bloc revolutions of 1989 still fresh, a number of liberal intellectuals in this country had a new idea. These writers and academics wanted to use American military power to serve goals like human rights and democracy -- especially when it was clear that nobody else would do it."

If George Packer's assertion is true, and I believe it is, then it becomes necessary to revisit the Yugoslavia events in the light of everything that has transpired over the past decade. As we move inexorably toward permanent warfare, naked imperialist rule and growing repression at home, the "turn" on the part of a broad sector of the left -- symbolized by Christopher Hitchens's mutation -- needs to be examined with a cold, clinical eye. The "humanitarian intervention" themes that were first raised on behalf of Bosnia crop up repeatedly. Not only were they used as an excuse to make war in the Balkans on two occasions, they have been used twice in Iraq as well. There are never-ending supplies of evil dictators, who are either the next Hitler or the next Stalin or a combination of the two, to unite the American people in Orwellian "hate minutes."

In the latest variation on this theme, some of the USA's highest profile leftists have lent their names to two petitions that basically support their country's right to fund and organize a counter-revolutionary movement in Cuba. The same kind of narcissism that allowed one signatory, Susan Sontag, to call for the bombing of Yugoslavia is now displaced to Cuba. One wonders how long it will take for her and her son David Rieff to demand a US military rescue in Cuba.

In the introduction to "Fool's Crusade", Johnstone puts forward the standard liberal narrative of Yugoslavia:

Yugoslavia was a "prison of peoples" where the Serbs oppressed all the others. It was destroyed by the rise of an evil leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who set out to create a "Greater Serbia" by eliminating other peoples in a process called "ethnic cleansing". Those other peoples sought to escape, by creating their own independent states. The Yugoslav army, actually Serbian, invaded them. In Bosnia, the invading Serbs tried to drive out the Muslims, who wanted to perpetuate an exemplary multi-ethnic society. The Serb ethnic cleansing killed 200,000 unarmed Muslims while the international community looked on and even prevented the Muslims from arming in self-defense. At Srebrenica, the United Nations allowed the Serbs to commit genocide. Only U.S. bombing forced Milosevic to come to the negotiating table at Dayton. The resulting agreement brought peace and democracy to multi-ethnic Bosnia. However, the international community had failed to save the Albanian majority in Kosovo from apartheid. In 1998 Madeleine Albright warned that NATO must intervene to keep Milosevic from "doing in Kosovo what he could no longer get away with in Bosnia". In January 1999, Serbian security forces massacred defenseless civilians in the Kosovo village of Racak, awakening the NATO governments to the need to act to stop genocide. After the turning point of Racak, the Serbs were summoned to peace negotiations in Rambouillet, in France. Milosevic stubbornly refused to negotiate. NATO had no choice but to start bombing Yugoslavia. Masses of Albanians were deliberately driven out according to a preconceived plan called "Operation Horseshoe". Finally, Milosevic gave in, and NATO liberated the Kosovars from their oppressors. Conclusion: from now on, humanitarian intervention constitutes a principal mission for NATO, as the military arm of an international community henceforth committed to protection of human rights.

After presenting this version of what took place, Johnstone says, "Almost everything about this tale is false." When much of the left was cheering the NATO war on Yugoslavia, another large section gave credence to the false story while drawing the line at intervention. For example, shortly after the government of Yugoslavia was overthrown by violent, rightwing gangs, Noam Chomsky compared this to the overthrow of South Africa's Apartheid system. It therefore comes as no surprise that he would have the same kind of myopia when it comes to Cuba.

Johnstone identifies a sharp disjunction between the movement against globalization that took shape in the 1990s and a widespread failure to see how that very process was at the root of the Balkans wars and the immiseration that has followed in its footsteps. It is easy for activists to respond to Chiapas; it was much harder to break through the propaganda and mystification over Yugoslavia where defense of the right of the Serb peoples to live in peace became tantamount to Holocaust denial.

Johnstone writes:

The sovereign nation is being broken down subtly by the pressures of economic globalization. It may also be undermined from within, by domestic insurgencies. In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, "groups within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of self-determination." In regard to these conflicts, "American interests and ideals compel a more active role." This may go so far as military intervention when self-determination claims or internal repression of such claims lead to "humanitarian calamities." In the future, the authors announced in 1992, "humanitarian interventions will become increasingly unavoidable." The United States will have the final word as to when and how to intervene. "The United States should seek to build a consensus within regional and international organizations for its position, but should not sacrifice its own judgment and principles if such a consensus fails to materialize."

Indeed, just as WWI was launched in part to stop Hun atrocities, so are the wars of the last 10 years or so framed in terms of saving lives and upholding democracy. Unless the left learns how to distinguish between government propaganda and the true aims of an ever more aggressive imperialism, we will be useless. Diana Johnstone's book is a very good place to start.


CHAPTER ONE -- The Yugoslav Guinea Pig

Here Johnstone poses the question: "How did the Serbs go from being the heroic little people who stood up to empires and Nazis in defense of freedom, to being the 'new Nazis', pariahs of the Western world?"

The answer first of all requires that attention be paid to the underlying economic pressure that drove all Yugoslavs to desperate measures, including the Serbs. When the USSR began to collapse at the end of the 1980s, Yugoslavia was no longer needed as a kind of pro-Western counterweight to the Kremlin. With easy access to cheap credit cut off, the country began to succumb to a debt crisis of the sort that was ravaging most of the developing world. Long devoid of any serious commitment to revolutionary politics, the central government responded not by challenging imperialism, but by cutting jobs and social services. The economic crisis had the effect of eroding the social order and heightening nationalist resentment, particularly among the Croatians.

Although Franjo Tudjman had been a life-long CP functionary, he found it easy to remold himself as a nationalist when running for president of Croatia in 1990, especially since this earned him the support of the émigré community, including remnants of the fascist Ustashe movement. After his election, Serbs -- who made up 12 percent of Croatia's population -- were probably alarmed to see the Ustashe flag flown unabashedly in public once again. As a corollary to this symbolic display, the Tudjman administration began to fire Serb government employees and encourage violent attacks on people and property.

After the Serbs began to resist these encroachments, the western press responded by characterizing it as expansionism directed from Belgrade. As Malcolm X once said, the victim was turned into the criminal.

In September of 1991, over 120 Serbs living in the town of Gospic were abducted from their homes and murdered. It was an act calculated to have the same effect among Serbs as the Deir Yassin massacre in Palestine. They would no longer be safe in Croatia. Croatian human rights activists told Johnstone in 1996 that this was the first major massacre of civilians in the Yugoslav civil wars. Unlike Srebrenica or Racak, Gospic never became part of the litany of atrocities in the western news media or journals of "conscience."

In 1997 a disgruntled Croatian ex-cop named Miro Bajramovic decided to tell the world what really happened in Gospic. He said that the Croatian Interior Ministry sent paramilitaries to spread terror among the region's 9,000 Serbs. Johnstone quotes him as follows:

"The order for Gospic was to perform ethnic cleansing, so we killed directors of post offices and hospitals, restaurant owners and many other Serbs. Executions were performed by shooting at point-blank range. We did not have much time. The orders from headquarters were to reduce the percentage of Serbs in Gospic."

The International Criminal Tribunal (ICT), which went to all sorts of lengths to bring Milosevic to justice, has been lackadaisical about Croatian war crimes. After some of the Croatian soldiers who committed war crimes at Gospic came forward to present testimony to the ICT, they were not given adequate protection even after receiving daily death threats and having their cars firebombed. One of them, Milan Levar, was murdered by an explosion in the front yard of his Gospic home.

In June of 1999 Croatian courts acquitted 6 soldiers of war crimes committed at Gospic, including Bajramovic. In light of this, it is highly revealing that the chief Tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte has decided that Croatian courts can render justice in the prosecution of war crimes. Alas, this has been the pattern all along. When Serbs react to murder, they are charged with "aggression."

After the secession of Croatia and Slovenia, it was only a matter of time before Bosnia-Herzegovina would be torn apart by the same contradictions. In all of the regions where Serbs were a minority, they saw their survival as a function of the continuation of the Yugoslav republic and protection by the federal army. Whenever they pressed forward in this manner, they were regarded as "expansionist" or worse.

From the very beginning, the USA tilted toward the Bosnian Muslim faction. In a highly enlightening review of the power politics behind this foreign policy initiative, Johnstone explains it in terms of developing ties to Turkey and oil-producing regimes in the Middle East. In addition, she provides some insights into class formation in Bosnia that go against the conventional thinking of Muslims as an oppressed nationality. Most of the high-profile Muslim politicians, including Izetbegovic, were scions of the families that enjoyed elite privileges during centuries of Ottoman rule. In elite circles in Washington and London, they were considered more reliably anti-communist than the Bosnian Serb descendants of downtrodden peasants.

While the State Department was developing a policy based on such bottom-line calculations, a number of intellectuals were already beginning to develop what Johnstone rightly calls "the Bosnia cult." They developed a romanticized version of Bosnian Islam that once again turned the Serbs into the "bad guys".

Susan Sontag's son David Rieff wrote that "Bosnia was and always will be a just cause" in the same fashion that people once wrote about the Spanish Civil War. For an entire generation of 60s radicals, the fight for Bosnia became a fight against fascism and genocide. In countries like France that were grappling with a sullen and resentful Islamic population driven to emigration by economic crisis, the sight of gentle, blue-eyed Bosnian Muslims playing musical instruments was comforting. They were "like us." "Multicultural" Sarajevo became a test tube for the kind of integration that was largely impossible in Western Europe, where skinheads had begun to victimize their own Muslim citizens. If France or Great Britain could not be made safe for Muslims, then military force could surely impose tolerance on a Balkan nation.

Unfortunately, "multicultural" Bosnia was largely a myth. By 1992, Croatian militias had already driven Serbs out of Herzegovina in an early act of ethnic cleansing that once again was largely ignored by the western media. As for Izetbegovic, the darling of Rieff and other western progressives, he was under no illusions. In a 1994 speech, he said, "Multicultural togetherness is all very well, but -- may I say it openly -- it is a lie! We cannot lie to our people or deceive the public. The soldier in combat is not dying for a multinational coexistence..."

Somehow, Izetbegovic's statement and the arrival of 5,000 former Afghanistan fighters in Bosnia escaped Rieff's attention, who continued to press for military action in order to prevent "genocide" in Bosnia. The Serbs were compared not only to the Nazis, but to the Khmer Rouge as well. In the course of his agitation for an imperialist rescue, he kept repeating the unverified figure of 200,000 dead Muslims. Former State Department official George Kenney finally tracked it down to Bosnian information minister Senada Kreso, who first circulated the figure -- hardly an unbiased source. Afterwards Kenney tried to come up with a more reliable amount, based on the Red Cross and other less politicized sources. For instance, a Stockholm-based research institute estimated that there were between 30 and 50 thousand casualties during the course of the civil war, but this included all sides. After concluding his survey, Kenney observed:

"In the words of the writer David Rieff, 'Bosnia became our Spain', though not for political reasons, which is what he meant, but rather because too many journalists dreamed self-aggrandizing dreams of becoming another Hemingway."


CHAPTER TWO -- Moral Dualism in a Multicultural World

This seeks to explain how the Yugoslavia wars became cast in Manichean terms, with the Serbs representing darkness and evil and all their adversaries as goodness and light. This requires her to examine in some detail the role of the media in fabricating three key elements of a narrative that would effectively condemn the Serbs as the Nazis of our era: concentration camps in Bosnia and rape as a political tool.

The question of concentration camps in Bosnia became hugely controversial after Living Marxism magazine (LM) ran an exposé in 1997 that charged an ITN television team from Great Britain supervised by Penny Marshall with using falsified footage. Using an image of an emaciated Muslim "prisoner" named Fikret Alic behind barbed wire, the reporters claimed that this amounted to a new Auschwitz. Among the British reporters was Nation Magazine contributor and anti-Cuba petition signer Ian Williams, who was working for England's Channel Four at the time. This is also the same Ian Williams who told radicals in the audience at a recent Socialist Scholars Conference panel on Orwell, including me, that "Wait until the war starts, then you'll see all those WMD's that Saddam has stashed away."

The caption for story number 17 in Project Censored top 25 stories in 1999 was "U.S. Media Promotes Biased Coverage of Bosnia". For documentation, the project included the LM article as well as Diana Johnstone's "Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass" that appeared originally in Covert Action Quarterly. (http://www.covertaction.org/full_text_frameset_65_01.htm)

Attempts to find the Deichmann article on the Internet will be in vain, since a libel decision against LM initiated by Marshall and Williams in a British court resulted not only in the quashing of Deichmann's article but in the liquidation of LM itself. In claiming that barbed wire did not surround Fikret Alic but rather a nearby tool shed, Deichmann went against the grain of prevailing liberal opinion in Europe. He paid dearly for this, but nowhere near as much as the Serb people.

Leaving aside the question of whether Fikret Alic was behind or in front of some barbed wire, the real issue was how this image was used to drive home the message that the Serbs were running concentration camps throughout Bosnia on a scale not seen since Hitler. The simple truth is that by the summer of 1992 all sides in the civil war -- Serb, Muslim and Croat -- were setting up prison camps for people they considered threats to their territorial control. According to the International Red Cross, in the autumn of 1992 a total of 2,692 civilians were being held in 25 detention centers. Of these, Bosnian Serbs held 1,203 detainees in 8 camps. The Muslims held 1,061 captives and the Croats 428. This hardly amounts to Auschwitz, by any stretch of the imagination.

In January and February 1993, the French-based Médecins du Monde used the ITN pictures as part of a vast publicity campaign costing $2 million that resulted in the distribution of 300,000 posters throughout France. Half of them showed Milosevic side by side with Hitler, accompanied by the caption, "Speeches about ethnic cleansing, does that remind you of anything?" Bernard Kouchner, former head of Médecins sans Frontières, was an ex-CP'er who became an outspoken advocate of "humanitarian interventions." His tireless efforts on behalf of NATO beneficence earned him the top spot as UN administrator of Kosovo in 1999.

It didn't take long for the US press to exploit these themes themselves. Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to reporters who could come up with the most grizzly Serb atrocity tale. First on line at the trough were Newsday's Roy Gutman and the New York Times's John Burns who won a joint award in 1993. David Rohde of The Christian Science Monitor picked up his Pulitzer in 1995. All of them filed reports that were riddled with the kinds of errors that got Jayson Blair fired from the newspaper of record on May 11, 2003. In retrospect, it seems that the Big Lie on behalf of the imperialist crusade against the Serbs was certain to enhance one's journalistic career rather than torpedo it.

Rohde got his award for "discovering" a mass grave near Srebrenica. Not speaking a word of Serbo-Croat, he told his readers that he found what amounted to a smoking gun: a human femur and tibia scattered among the area delineated within US satellite photos. How did he find this needle in a haystack? Like the New York Times's Judith Miller, he tells us that a little birdie told him: "I had the locations of the graves marked on a map...which I got from a US intelligence source."

In addition to writing propaganda about Serb "death camps," Gutman specialized in the rape as political weapon story. On August 9, 1992 he filed a story titled "Bosnia Rape Horror" that relied on the testimony of a single 16-year-old girl that supposedly was repeated in the "tens of thousands". Gutman also relied on the information provided by Jadranka Cigelj, whom he described in Newsday as a "lawyer and political activist." Cigelj supposedly witnessed nightly beatings and rape at a Serb prison camp in Omarska.

Gutman conveniently omitted the exact character of Cigelj's political activism. Johnstone points out that "Cigelj was a vice president of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman's ruling nationalist party, the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) and was in charge of the Zagreb office of the Croatia Information Center (CIC), a wartime propaganda agency funded by the same right-wing Croatian émigré groups that backed Tudjman. The primary source for reports of rape in Bosnia was Cigelj's CIC and associated women's groups, which sent 'piles of testimony to Western women and to the press'." She adds:

"The CIC benefited from a close connection with the 'International Gesellschaft fur Menschenrechte' (International Association for Human Rights, IGfM), a far right propaganda institute set up in 1981 as a continuation of the Association of Russian Solidarists, an expatriate group which worked for the Nazis and the Croatian fascist Ustashe regime during World War II. In the 1980s, this organization led a propaganda campaign against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, accusing them of running camps where opponents were tortured, raped, and murdered on a massive scale."

This did not prevent Cigelj from becoming a feminist heroine. She was feted by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Women Make Movies in a 25 city tour that featured a documentary "Calling the Ghosts: A Story of Rape, War and Women."

In response to all of the atrocity stories flowing out of Bosnia, the United Nations launched an investigation that unsurprisingly corroborated the lurid reports penned by Gutman and others. The original president of the committee was Frits Kalshoven, professor of humanitarian international law at the University of Leiden in Germany. An Egyptian-American named Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni, whose sympathy for the Muslims was obvious, replaced him. Notwithstanding the propaganda consensus that Serbs were using mass rape as a political weapon, Kalshoven concluded:

"Terms like 'genocide' came all too easily from the mouths of people like Bassiouni, an American professor of law, who had to establish a reputation and to work on fund-raising. In my opinion these terms were way out of line. 'Genocidal rape' is utter nonsense. 'Genocide' means extermination, and it is of course impossible to exterminate people and make them pregnant at the same time. It is a propaganda term which was used against the Serbs right from the start, but I have never found any indication that rape was committed systematically by any of the parties -- and I understand by 'systematically', on orders from the top."


CHAPTER THREE -- Comparative Nationalisms

In this chapter Diana Johnstone deals with the national question. For many Marxists, especially those from a Trotskyist tradition, Milosevic was another Stalin trampling on the rights of oppressed nationalities. Backing the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and -- finally -- Kosovo became a litmus test for Leninists. The Militant newspaper, for example, described Kosovo as being under the thumb of chauvinist overlords in much the same fashion as Puerto Ricans being dominated by the USA:

"In the Yugoslav constitution of 1946, Kosovo was given only limited regional autonomy. Although important gains were made in the area of language and education, the key area of internal security and all managerial appointments were to be controlled from Belgrade. Using the pretext of suppressing Albanian irredentism, longtime chief of the Federal Police Alexander Rankovic, ordered police pressure on Albanians to emigrate. Between 1954 and 1957 some 195,000 Albanians left for Turkey."

To say the least, The Militant's characterization of the Titoist system as heavy-handed Stalinist centralism not only falsifies the way the system worked but what drove the secessionist impulses of the 1980s and 90s. While Tito was bureaucratic, he was not a centralizer. He continually resorted to methods of decentralization, including "workers' self-management" in the economic sphere. Closely related to this policy was a tendency to strengthen the powers of the constituent republics and autonomous regions against the central Federal government. Both of these "radical" practices eventually contributed to the implosion of the nation. As soon as the economic benefits afforded by a special relationship to imperialism began to unwind, the various components of Yugoslavia began to flee a sinking ship. When Lenin spoke in favor of national self-determination, he had socialism in mind. The fracturing of Yugoslavia has done nothing except strengthen capitalism. This is something the Marxist left has to come to terms with at last.

The first republic to bolt from Yugoslavia was Slovenia, which had been seduced by the capitalist charms of its neighbors immediately to the west, especially Austria and Italy. Johnstone cites an increasing affinity between Slovenian intellectuals and Western European leftists, whose attention was being drawn increasingly to German Green type issues such as disarmament, feminism, human rights and the environment. In this changing climate, opposition to Belgrade's power, especially its army, was seen as a vanguard of democratic progress in the spirit of a renewed "civil society." The old Titoist vision of workers' self-management and trans-national solidarity had gone out of fashion.

The Slovenian intelligentsia, who defined their agenda in the pages of Mladina (Youth), were as recognizably "one of us" to the Western Europeans as the blue-eyed Bosnian Muslims. In article after article, they lambasted the Yugoslav army which was suppressing "democratic civil society." The hero of the anti-army movement was Janez Jansa, a leader of the "Alliance of Socialist Youth of Slovenia," who was pushing to "modernize" the organization by dropping the word "socialist" from its name. After Jansa was arrested for stealing a secret military document that purportedly detailed plans to contain a domestic uprising, he became an icon to the German peace movement.

Jansa's defenders saw the conflict as a simple one of democratic modernization versus conservative repression. A closer examination would reveal a different reality. The Slovenian modernizers sought to be freed from the constraints of the federal state. With only 8 percent of the population, they contributed 20 percent of the federal budget. Slovenia's deliverance would come through the free market and improved job opportunities for college-educated urban professionals. Ironically, this milieu resented the money being "wasted" on Kosovo and regarded all of the Eastern peoples of Yugoslavia, either Albanian or Serbs as unwelcome country cousins. In June 1991, Dr. Peter Tancig, the Slovenian minister of science, send out a mass e-mail to the world's scientists that tried to explain the "mess" in Yugoslavia. One on side was a "typical violent and crooked oriental-bizantine [sic] heritage, best exemplified by Serbia and Montenegro." On the other side was a "more humble and diligent western-catholic tradition."

Fast-forwarding a couple of years we discover that Janez Jansa, the darling of the German peace movement, had gone through a remarkable transformation that would anticipate Joschka Fischer's. After the former anti-militarist icon became Slovenia's defense minister, he oversaw the clandestine import of weaponry into his country, most of which was sold illegally to Croatia.

When Croatian nationalism exploded in the 1980s, there was very little to inspire leftists. The modern movement saw itself as fighting for the recognition of the "rights" of the medieval Kingdom of Croatia, which had been absorbed by Hungary in 1102. It was always torn between the Serb revolutionary nationalist movement of the late 1800s and the Hapsburg empire, which always sought a Slavic outpost to pursue its ambitions. When the Hapsburgs ended up on the losing side in WWI, it made the choice easier for the Croat nationalist leaders. By becoming part of the new nation of Yugoslavia, they would avoid the heavy reparations imposed by Versailles.

After Hitler invaded Yugoslavia, Croatia was detached from the country. While it lost portions of the Adriatic coast to Italy, it was awarded the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Under Ustashe rule, Croatia set out to develop a racially pure state. On May 14, 1941, over 700 Serbs were rounded up in Glina and taken to the local Orthodox Church. After the doors were locked, Ustashe gunmen killed everybody inside. The total number of Serbs who died in such fashion will probably never be known, but it is at least 700,000. It is, therefore, not surprising that Serbs began to demand protection from the federal government after Tudjman demonstrated an affinity for the Ustashe. What is surprising, however, is the willingness of some Marxists to regard this as Serb expansionism.


CHAPTER FOUR -- Making of Empires

If there is one continuing theme in Diana Johnstone's "Fool's Crusade," it is how florid sounding phraseology about peace, civil society and human rights became the cover for the first war on European soil since the defeat of Hitler. Ironically, the impetus for this war came from the new Germany itself. While cloaked in the rhetoric of NGO's, the German state's true motive was expansion of its geopolitical influence over the Balkans. She characterizes this aptly as a singular blend of "ideals and interests" -- and personified by the rise of Joschka Fischer, the German Green Party leader.

By 1991, when Yugoslavia began to unravel at the seams, a hate campaign in the German media was already in full swing. In the influential Frankfurter Allgemene Zeitung (FAZ), editor Joann Reissmuller denounced the "the Serbo-communist power called Yugoslavia", or "Belgrade Serbo-communism" that held a "Greater Serbian-communist knife at the throat" of the Slovenes and the Croats. Reissmuller's racist hysteria was often framed in terms of anti-fascist rhetoric such as the time he warned the "civilized world" against the Serb's "master race madness." This propaganda was written at exactly the time when Serbs were being massacred in Croatia under the banner of a crypto-Ustashist movement. The liberal Der Spiegel was not much better. It had a cover article on July 8, 1991 devoted to "Serb terror" and depicted Yugoslavia as a "prison of peoples" trying to free itself.

Considering the Nazi massacres of Serbs during WWII, this kind of demonization was appalling. One might have expected the German Greens and other anti-Serb leftists to be more sensitive to this kind of smear campaign.

What accounts for this monomaniacal drive to destroy Yugoslavia? Johnstone explains it in terms of an almost ritualistic purification for the trauma Germany suffered when it ended up on the losing side of two world wars. Indeed, a leading policy-maker named Rupert Scholz linked the question of Yugoslavia with the need "to overcome the consequences of World War I." By enlisting Germany on behalf of a crusade to "liberate" Yugoslavia, it would be possible to kill two birds with one stone. Not only would humanitarian ends be realized, Germany would become a "normal power" in the process.

Johnstone identifies a peculiarity in German thinking about nation-state formation that can be found from Kaiser to Hitler to Joschka Fischer and that would explain to some degree the zeal for dismantling Yugoslavia. In succinct terms, the nationalist intelligentsia in Germany has a history of favoring states built on a racial or ethnic basis. While obviously most closely associated with the Third Reich, it was first articulated in the waning days of WWI when Chancellor Max von Baden submitted a paper to the Kaiser titled "Thoughts on Ethical Imperialism." (Sounds familiar, doesn't it?) Von Baden saw Germany as protector of 'Randvolker' (peripheral peoples) in Europe. In the name of protecting the weak and the helpless, the support of ethnic claims in neighboring and hostile states would weaken their host and facilitate the spread of German influence. Of course, when those 'Randvolker' are German minorities, it is all to the better.

This policy was pursued not only by Hitler, but by the "enlightened" Weimar Republic that preceded it. In neighboring Poland and Denmark, 30 million Reichsmarks were spent to buy up real estate and businesses that were ultimately used on behalf of German 'Volksgruppen' in what the Foreign Ministry called 'Kampf um den Boden' (struggle for land).

This trickle turned into a full-scale flood after Hitler took power. It provided the excuse for the invasion of both Czechoslovakia and Poland, as well as the absorption of Alsace. In Franz Neumann's "Behemoth," a study of Nazism, the strategy is described as follows:

"Nothing could be more frank. Self-determination is merely a weapon. Take advantage of every friction growing out of the minority problem. Stir up national and racial conflicts where you can. Every conflict will play into the hands of Germany, the new self-appointed guardian of honor, freedom, and equality all over the world."

It was not just German minorities who were "rescued" by Nazi humanitarian interventions. The Nazis surveyed all of Europe in pursuit of other regional populations that could be drawn into their orbit, including the Bretons in Brittany.

Not long after the end of WWII, Germany once again took up the cause of 'Volker' or small nationalities. In outfits like "The International Association for the Defense of Threatened Languages and Cultures", founded in 1963, the oppression of Croats and Slovenes was weighed and remedies considered, among which was the "right to independence" of the two republics.

Once the Berlin Wall fell and the two Germanys united, the nationalist intelligentsia gained a new hearing from a newly emboldened ruling class anxious to reassert itself. A parliamentarian named Rupert Scholz put forward some proposals in a 1995 paper titled "The Right to Self-Determination and German Policy" that basically followed in the volk-state tradition. Now that Germany was reunited, many "lesser" nationalities could be expected to turn to the new power for support. Furthermore, Germany should not shrink from "military operations on behalf of oppressed nationalities," especially those groaning under the Serb heel.

Just at the time German imperialism was rediscovering itself, important figures in the German left were beginning to dispense with the foolish pacifist illusions of their youth. Although the Green Party was devoted to peace, ecology, feminism and grassroots democracy, Johnstone points out that Joschka Fischer was not a typical Green. He was a Maoist street fighter who joined the Greens after the sectarian movements in Germany imploded in the 1980s, just as they had in the USA. As "war minister" of his organization's combat unit, Fischer trained his comrades in street-fighting tactics. His journey from ultraleftism into warmongering reformism was a well-traveled one, considering the path of other sixties radicals who would soon learn how to "work within the system."

He was joined by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who became famous as "Danny the Red" in the May-June events in France, 1968. After he moved to Frankfurt, he joined the "Realo" faction of the Greens that unlike the misty-eyed "Fundis" showed a readiness to compromise principles in order to win elections.

In 1994, after the war in Bosnia took a bloody turn for the worse, the German big-business press and bourgeois politicians began to call for a war against the Serbs. They dragged figures like Fischer and Cohn-Bendit in their wake. Johnstone describes their role in the sorry march toward war:

The highly controversial question of German participation in military intervention against Bosnian Serbs was a burning issue in December 1994. At that time, Chancellor Kohl was arguing that, on the one hand, because of the suffering caused to the people of Yugoslavia in World War II by the Wehrmacht, Germany should stay out; but, on the other hand, "precisely because of German history we cannot evade our responsibility" to contribute German Tornado fighter planes to "humanitarian intervention." At that time, the Social Democrats and Greens were overwhelmingly against such intervention. The exception was Cohn-Bendit, who dismissed Green objections as "ridiculous" and found original arguments to support Kohl's position. He claimed that the peoples of the world would revert to nationalism if they saw that the international community was failing to defend the "little multicultural Volk" in Bosnia -- overlooking the regrettable fact that the "multicultural Volk" was split into warring factions unlikely to be reunited by Tornados flying to the aid of one against another.

At that time, Fischer was still arguing that Germany should stay out. But by the following August, Cohn-Bendit was able to announce that his friend Joschka was "on the right path," even though he still opposed sending in German soldiers. But, predicted Cohn-Bendit with remarkable clairvoyance, "Once Fischer is foreign minister, he won't be able to maintain this position." Ambition was having its effect. On 6 December 1995, the historic question of sending German armed forces to intervene outside the NATO area came before the Bundestag. By then, the Green parliamentary group was split on the question of sending troops into Bosnia. As Green spokesman, Fischer was in the early stages of the transformation that would make Cohn-Bendit's prediction come true. The rhetorical hinge by which Fischer led the gradual swing from one "moral obligation" to its opposite was a profound moral dilemma allegedly afflicting the Green conscience: a "genuine conflict of basic values." On the one hand, "non-violence;" on the other, the need to help people survive. Over several years, Fischer developed variations on this theme of a dilemma between "values." In a sharper version, the value of "non-violence," or "pacifism," was pitted against the need to "combat Auschwitz," or "genocide," posited as a special German obligation.

As it turns out, Cohn-Bendit's appetite for war was shared by some names we have become familiar with in recent weeks. In an open letter that was addressed to "The United Nations, President Clinton, and the Congress" and that appeared in the March 4, 1993 New York Review of Books, a citadel of neoliberal imperialism, demanded that the "cruel arms embargo" imposed against Bosnia be lifted (an embargo that Johnstone characterizes as largely ignored). In addition to Cohn-Bendit, the signatories included Ariel Dorfman, Erika Munk, Jennifer Scarlott, Joanne Landy, Ken Worcester, Manuela Dobos, Michael Lerner, Peter Weiss, Thomas Harrison, and Todd Gitlin. All of these luminaries have the additional distinction of signing the Campaign for Peace and Democracy's (CPD) anti-Cuba petition.


CHAPTER FIVE -- The New Imperial Model

We now have arrived at the fifth and final chapter of Diana Johnstone's "Fool's Crusade," a postmortem on the war in Kosovo.

In contrast to sections of the radical movement that superimposed their own ideologies of liberation on "plucky" Albanians, Johnstone takes an unsentimental view of the Albanian society and culture. This involves at the outset a consideration of the importance of blood feuds as part of the 'Kanun' (orally transmitted code) among the clans that reside in the province's mountains. Even among themselves, the "Shqiptars" (a more common term than Kosovar or Albanian) would carry out vendettas from generation to generation. Johnstone writes:

"The male members of the victim's family are under obligation to kill the person responsible, or any male member of his family. To escape revenge, the men in a family caught in a blood feud may remain housebound for years, while their women carry out the tasks necessary for survival. This custom is reflected in the form of the typical Albanian rural home -- a wall-enclosed compound, which can serve as a defensive fortress."

On the face of it, this does not appear to be fertile soil for the growth of a socialist movement. Largely as a result of the failure of a coherent Albanian national movement to emerge, the region became part of Yugoslavia after the end of WWI. Johnstone does not really try to whitewash the record of Belgrade's role in assimilating Kosovo and even compares it to Zionism or other colonialisms.

But is it fair to judge Titoist Yugoslavia from this perspective? There is a tendency to view the Albanian nationality through the prism of other oppressed groups such as the Kurds. For example, in a 1999 Z Magazine interview, Noam Chomsky said, "Or consider Turkey, a neighbor to the former Yugoslavia. By a very conservative estimate, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo." Unfortunately, there seems to be as much forethought in this comment as there was when Chomsky added his name to the CPD's anti-Cuba petition.

Turkish repression against the Kurds means first and foremost the violent campaign against a language. Amir Hassanpour, a leading Kurdish scholar, has written in "Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan":

"Physical violence and separation from one's own family were some of the other methods used in Turkish schools to prevent the student from speaking Kurdish. Students were also punished for speaking their language outside the classrooms during the breaks. Boarding schools were established in 1964, in order to isolate students for the greater part of the year and to encourage them to forget their mother tongue."

Nothing like this ever happened to Albanians in Yugoslavia. From the time of the birth of Tito's Yugoslavia, not only was there an attempt to raise literacy levels throughout the republic, but in the native language of all the peoples. Johnstone claims, "Despite a severe shortage of able to provide a instruction in Albanian, serious efforts were made to educate the Albanians of Kosovo, including girls and women, in their own language." (Her source on this and many other matters of fact is Miranda Vickers's excellent "Between Serb and Albanian: a History of Kosovo," a reliable source despite Vickers's open advocacy of Albanian nationalism.)

Also, according to an Albanian professor at Pristina University in 1981, "not a single national minority in the world has achieved the rights that the Albanian nationality enjoys in Socialist Yugoslavia." Only the Hungarians in Romania and the Swedes in Finland had their own universities, but neither had the kind of autonomy enjoyed by the Albanians.

To continue the false analogy with the Kurds one step further, it is commonly acknowledged that the Ankara government withholds development funding for the Kurdish region. However, Belgrade introduced electrification, paved roads and sewages systems into Kosovo for the first time in its history.

Despite such efforts, Albanian resentment grew. Even though it was progressive to allow Albanians to be taught in their own language, there were negative side effects. Since written Albanian was a relatively new phenomenon, there were no large-scale libraries in Kosovo that could serve education and technical advancement. Schooling in Serb would have provided greater access, but at the expense of nationalist resentment. Such are the contradictions of the national question in Yugoslavia that mattered little to European and North American radicals who projected their own schematic understandings on a poorly understood terrain.

But no amount of affirmative action could make up for centuries of underdevelopment and a retrograde paternalistic social structure. Unemployment and illiteracy not only remained deeply entrenched but accelerated during the financial crisis of the 1980s. When Kosovo began to erupt in secessionist protests, Belgrade began to crack down. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the confrontation was most often viewed as a variation on the Turkey-Kurdish conflict.

Once this view became popular in the world of Western NGO's, there was little that Yugoslavia could do to reverse the perception, just as there is little that Cuba can do today to reverse the perception in this milieu that it is a totalitarian dungeon. The only thing one can hope for is that the radical movement can view such things impartially. Given the defection of a large part of the left into NGO liberalism, our work seems cut out for us today.

The job of demonizing Yugoslavia fell to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) just as it had a decade earlier in Nicaragua. The editor of Kosovo's main newspaper, which had become the beneficiary of NED and Soros Foundation largesse, announced that Kosovo had become "the world's biggest non-governmental organization." With NED funding, the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedom circulated reports worldwide condemning Serb repression. Because the goal was secession, the reports had a one-sided character. In light of its historical record, is it of any wonder that Cuba would crack down on an NED inspired opposition? What is truly of wonder is the inability of people like Noam Chomsky to take this record into account before signing petitions on a half-cocked basis.

NED funding made it possible for the Council to support a network of 2,000 volunteers in the province while its inflammatory reports went out unimpeded to a score of human rights agencies and the media. Despite all this, Kosovo was characterized as being in the grips of a fierce repression that was likened to either Hitler's or Stalin's -- or in some quarters, a combination of the two.

After NATO's war began, the Council continued to be the main source of "human rights abuses" in the west. It was joined by high officials of the German government, who felt free to make up atrocity stories of the same kind that marked recent media coverage of both wars in Iraq. Not only did defense minister Rudolf Scharping claim that a genocide was in progress in Kosovo, it appeared to be carried out with a relish that might have even shocked the Nazi high command: "it is recounted that the foetus was cut out of the body of a dead pregnant woman in order to roast it and then put it back in the cut-open belly... that limbs and heads are systematically cut off, that sometimes they play football with heads..."

In the aftermath of the ouster of the Serbs, the Milosevic government found itself the target of the same "human rights" intervention that had served NATO's goals in Kosovo itself. The USA openly poured money into coffers of rival parties, such as the one led by Zoran Djindjic, the recently assassinated politician who spearheaded privatization and austerity. The NED lavished millions of dollars on "Otpor" (Resistance), a youth group that expressed no other goal except to be "normal" on western terms. When the west is making war and enforcing economic hardship against "abnormal" forces in one's country, it is no wonder that many will seek this kind of normalcy. In Nicaragua, this is what Reagan called "crying uncle."

In the first round of Serb elections on September 24, 2000, Milosevic failed to gain re-election but his rival Kostunica failed by 2 percent to achieve the 50 percent required for victory. Instead of following Yugoslav law, he encouraged the NED-funded opposition to take to the streets in a "democratic revolution." In practice this meant storming and setting fire to the parliament building, a so-called "symbol of the Milosevic regime." Images of this violent attack were depicted in an endless television loop reminiscent of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue. If this wasn't enough, a gang of thugs was bussed in from the town of Cacak, whose fiercely anti-Communist mayor Velimir Ilic openly boasted the deed and described his activists as "ex-parachute troops, former army and police officers as well as men who had fought in special forces." Some of these commandoes had undoubtedly fought in Croatia and Serbia, where the same kind of reckless and violent behavior on behalf of "ethnic cleansing" was now winning them plaudits from exactly the same panoply of "human rights" leftists who had urged military intervention to stop Serb aggression in the first place.


POSTSCRIPT

In her discussion of the Albanian lobby in the United States, Johnstone makes it clear that the Balkans policy was very much a bipartisan affair. Although the prime mover in this lobby was a Republican named Joseph DioGuardi, who was of partial Albanian descent, it also tapped into the Clinton campaign through the auspices of Ilir Zherka, an Albanian-American. Although the Clinton campaign was anxious to court the ethnic vote, no Serbs were invited to apply.

One of the most important lobbyists for the Kosovo cause, however, was a Croatian. Mira Radievolic Barrata, who went to work for Robert Dole in 1989, was credited for pushing Congress to lift the arms embargo against Bosnian Muslims, a key demand of Joanne Landy, Danny "the Red" Cohn-Bendit and other rightward-lurching members of the 1960s generation. Among Baratta's biggest boosters in Washington were some names that are no doubt familiar: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Long before these characters had been identified as exclusively promoting Zionist interests worldwide, they had no problem raising support for the Muslim cause in Bosnia, whose field combatants included many of the same elements now demonized by the very same neoconservatives. As Perle himself was an adviser to the Bosnian Muslims in the Dayton Peace Talks, one can easily conclude that the only constant in all of this is dedication to US imperial interests, and not to any particular deity.

Although there has been emphatic denial in establishment quarters that material self-interest -- especially related to oil -- explained the wars against Yugoslavia and Iraq (less so in the latter case), it became very clear after the victory in the Balkans that long-term geopolitical interests were key. Nothing symbolized this more than Camp Bondsteel, a permanent base for US troops in Kosovo. This base dominates a strategic corridor in Kosovo guarding mountain passes and in close proximity to Thessalonika, a key Greek port.

Johnstone describes Camp Bondsteel as a self-sufficient high tech enclave. Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, whose CEO was Dick Cheney, supplies all the basics, including electricity, transport, fire department, etc. When George W. Bush chose to sign a bill that increased military spending by 1.9 billion dollars, he chose to commemorate it at Camp Bondsteel. So those who yearn for a return to the good old days of a Democratic presidency might give careful consideration to the way that all this played out during Clinton's term in office. When it comes to defending US long-term imperial interests, it is strictly a bipartisan affair.

Furthermore, if something like Camp Bondsteel and the Albanian lobby represent the convergence of class interests between the two major parties, so does the NATO victory itself represent the affinity between Europe and the United States. This old boys club has been around since the 1500s practically. Except for some unpleasantries in 1914 and then again in 1940, the imperialists have always stood on the opposite side of the barricades of the colonized. The Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema summed up this relationship as follows:

"The crisis of Kosovo created new networks of relations. For example, the daily teleconferences between the Foreign Ministers of five countries: the United States, Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy. With Kosovo, we entered such a group. It isn't written in any official document, but in fact, around Kosovo was born a sort of Club. It's difficult to define the rules of membership in the noble circle of the great, there exists no statute."

Only the French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, found himself capable of striking a discordant note. He warned that the bloodletting in the Balkans was disturbingly similar to the "civilizing mission" of nineteenth century French imperialists and to the "white man's burden" celebrated by Rudyard Kipling. It is no accident that the bourgeois intelligentsia, including figures such as NYU's Niall Ferguson, has begun speaking openly of the benefits of imperialism to the benighted denizens of the South.

In a very real sense, the clock has been turned back to this period. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the old justification for imperialist intervention is no longer possible. Containing Communism has given way to a new set of rationalizations that were mobilized prior to October 1917. When the imperialists conducted "rescues" against the Mahdists, the Boxers or the Sepoys, the excuse was always about protecting innocent civilians and wiping out backward, atavistic revolts.

For those who have had a hard time figuring out why such a large swath of the left defected into the imperialist camp, we would remind them that history has a tendency to repeat itself -- hopefully not in a Viconian sense.

In a January 5, 1898 article titled "The Struggle of Social Democracy and the Social Revolution," Social Democratic leader Eduard Bernstein made the case for colonial rule over Morocco. Drawing from English socialist Cunningham Graham's travel writings, Bernstein stated that there was absolutely nothing admirable about Morocco. In such countries where feudalism is mixed with slavery, a firm hand is necessary to drag the brutes into the civilized world:

"There is a great deal of sound evidence to support the view that, in the present state of public opinion in Europe, the subjection of natives to the authority of European administration does not always entail a worsening of their condition, but often means the opposite. However much violence, fraud, and other unworthy actions accompanied the spread of European rule in earlier centuries, as they often still do today, the other side of the picture is that, under direct European rule, savages are without exception better off than they were before.

"Even before the arrival of Europeans in Africa, brutal wars, robbery, and slavery were not unknown. Indeed, they were the regular order of the day. What was unknown was the degree of peace and legal protection made possible by European institutions and the consequent sharp rise in food resources..."

Let's be clear about the division on the left that emerged with the wars in Yugoslavia, that continued with the recently concluded war in Iraq and that now figures in the Cuba petition controversies. It is fundamentally a problem of what was known commonly in the Marxist movement as 'social patriotism'. The tendency of some leftists, especially those who enjoy privileged positions as trade union bureaucrats, parliamentarians, professors and journalists, to tail end the foreign policy initiatives -- including warfare -- of their own bourgeoisie has been around since the earliest days of imperialism. Our task, of course, is to delineate clear class lines and mobilize working people and their allies to destroy this irrational system that threatens not only the people of the South but us as well. As Marx once said, as long as the Irish are unfree, the British workers cannot be free. Substitute Yugoslavia or Iraq for Ireland (still unfree) and the task remains the same.



Diana Johnstone, FOOLS' CRUSADE Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Monthly Review Press, New York, N.Y, 2002; ISBN 1-58367-084-X, and Pluto Press, London, U.K., Sept. 2002; ISBN 0745319505.

The book can be ordered on-line directly from Monthly Review Press at,
http://www.monthlyreview.org/storefrnt.htm.
It can also be ordered on-line directly from Pluto Press at,
https://secure.metronet.co.uk/pluto/cgi-bin/web_store/web_store.cgi?sc_query_subject=International%20Studies.


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Resources

FOOLS' CRUSADE: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, by Diana Johnstone (Book Excerpt)

Diana Johnstone On The Balkan Wars - Book Review by Edward S. Herman

Diana Johnstone And The Demise Of 'Yugoslavism' - Book Review by Gilles d'Aymery

The Balkans and Yugoslavia on Swans



Louis Proyect is a computer programmer at Columbia University and a long-time peace activist and socialist. He is also the moderator of the Marxism mailing list at www.marxmail.org. He writes a bi-monthly book review for Swans.

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