[A-List] Diana Johnstone -- Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass

[james daly]

Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass: Politics, Media and the Ideology of 
Globalization

by Diana Johnstone

This article is divided in three parts. Each part fits in one email. Please 
feel free to send it far and wide, but please copy it in full including 
copyright information at the end.

Reprinted from: Covert Action Quarterly
Spring-Summer 1999 # 67
[For CAQ Subscription info, see end of PART III ]

Diane Johnstone was the European editor of In These Times (from 1979 to 
1990, and press officer for the Green group in the European Parliament from 
1990 to 1996. She is the author of The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe in 
America's World (London/New York: Verso/Schuchken) and is currently working 
on a book on the former Yugoslavia. This article is an expanded version of a 
talk given on May 25, 1998 at an international conference on media held in 
Athens, Greece)

Years of experience in and out of both mainstream and alternative media have 
made me aware of the power of the dominant ideology to impose certain 
interpretations on international news. During the Cold War, most world news 
for American consumption had to be framed as part of the Soviet-U.S. 
contest. Since then, a new ideological bias frames the news. The way the 
violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia has been reported is the most stunning 
example.

I must admit that it took me some time to figure this out, even though I had 
a long-standing interest in and some knowledge of Yugoslavia. I spent time 
there as a student in 1953, living in a Belgrade dormitory and learning the 
language. In 1984, in a piece for In These Times, (1) I warned that extreme 
decentralization, conflicting economic interests between the richer and the 
poorer regions, austerity policies imposed by the IMF, and the decline of 
universal ideals were threatening Yugoslavia with "re-Balkanization" in the 
wake of Tito's death and desanctification. "Local ethnic interests are 
reasserting themselves," I wrote. "The danger is that these rival local 
interests may become involved in the rivalries of outside powers. This is 
how the Balkans in the past were a powder keg of world war." Writing this 
took no special clairvoyance. The danger of Yugoslavia's disintegration was 
quite obvious to all serious observers well before Slobodan Milsoevic 
arrived on the scene.

As the country was torn apart in the early nineties, I was unable to keep up 
with all that was happening. In those years, my job as press officer for the 
Greens in the European Parliament left me no time to investigate the 
situation myself. Aware that there were serious flaws in the way the media 
and politicians were reacting, I wrote an article warning against combating 
"nationalism" by taking sides for one nationalism against another, and 
against judging a complex situation by analogy with totally different times 
and places. (2) "Every nationalism stimulates another," I noted. "Historical 
analogies should be drawn with caution and never allowed to obscure the 
facts." However, there was no stopping the tendency to judge the Balkans, 
about which most people knew virtually nothing, by analogy with Hitler 
Germany, about which people at least imagined they knew a lot, and which 
enabled analysis to be rapidly abandoned in favor of moral certitude and 
righteous indignation.

However, it was only later, when I was able to devote considerable time to 
my own research, that I realized the extent of the deception - which is in 
large part self-deception.

I mention all this to stress that I understand the immense difficulty of 
gaining a clear view of the complex situation in the Balkans. The history of 
the region and the interplay of internal political conflicts and external 
influences would be hard to grasp even without propaganda distortions. 
Nobody can be blamed for being confused. Moreover, by now, many people have 
invested so much emotion in a one-sided view of the situation that they are 
scarcely able to consider alternative interpretations.

It is not necessarily because particular journalists or media are 
"alternative" that they free from the dominant interpretation and the
dominant world view. In the case of the Yugoslav tragedy, the irony is
that "alternative" or "left" activist writers have frequently taken the
lead in likening the Serbs, the people who most wanted to continue to
live in multi-cultural Yugoslavia, to Nazi racists, and in calling for 
military intervention on behalf of ethnically defined secessionist movements 
(3) all supposedly in the name of "multi-cultural Bosnia," a country which, 
unlike Yugoslavia, would have to be built from scratch by outsiders.

The Serbs and Yugoslavia

Like other Christian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, the Serbs wereheavily 
taxed and denied ownership of property or political power reserved for 
Muslims. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Serb farmers led a 
revolt that spread to Greece. The century-long struggle put an end to the 
Ottoman Empire.

The Habsburg monarchy found it natural that when one empire receded, another 
should advance, and sought to gain control over the lands lost to the 
Ottoman Turks. Although Serbs had rallied to the Habsburgs in earlier wars 
against the Turks, Serbia soon appeared to Vienna as the main obstacle to 
its own expansion into the Balkans. By the end of the nineteenth century, 
Vienna was seeking to fragment the Serb-inhabited to prevent what it named 
"Greater Serbia," taking control of Bosnia-Herzegovina and fostering the 
birth of Albanian nationalism (as converts to Islam, Albanian feudal 
chieftains enjoyed privileges under the Ottoman Empire and combated the 
Christian liberation movements).

Probably because they had been deprived of full citizens' rights underthe 
Ottoman Turks, and because their own society of farmers and traders were 
relatively egalitarian, Serb political leaders were extremely receptive to 
the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. While all other liberated 
Balkan nations imported German princelings as their new kings, the Serbs 
promoted their own pig farmers into a dynasty, one of whose members 
translated John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" into Serbian during his student 
days. Nowhere in the Balkans did Western progressive ideas exercise such 
attraction as in Serbia, no doubt due to the historic circumstances of the 
country's emergence from four hundred years of subjugation.

Meanwhile, intellectuals in Croatia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian 
Empire increasingly rankling under subordination to the Hungarian nobility, 
initiated the Yugoslav movement for cultural, and eventually political 
unification of the South Slav peoples, notably the Serbs and Croats, 
separated by history and religion (the Serbs having been converted to 
Christianity by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Croats by the Roman 
Catholic Church) but united by language. The idea of a "Southslavia" was 
largely inspired by the national unification of neighboring Italy, occurring 
around the same time.

In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seized the pretext of the assassination 
of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand to declare war and crush Serbia once and 
for all. When Austria-Hungary lost the war it had thus initiated, leaders in 
Slovenia and Croatia chose to unite with Serbia in a single kingdom. This 
decision enabled both Slovenia and Croatia to go from the losing to the 
winning side in World War I, thereby avoiding war reparations and enlarging 
their territory, notably on the Adriatic coast at the expense of Italy. The 
joint Kingdom was renamed "Yugoslavia" in 1929. The conflicts between Croats 
and Serbs that plagued what is called "the first Yugoslavia" were described 
by Rebecca West in her celebrated book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first 
published in 1941.

In April 1941, Serb patriots in Belgrade led a revolt against an 
accordreached between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. This led 
to Nazi bombing of Belgrade, a German invasion, creation of an independent 
fascist state of Croatia (including Bosnia-Herzegovina), and attachment of 
much of the Serbian province of Kosovo to Albania, then a puppet of 
Mussolini's Italy. The Croatian Ustashe undertook a policy of genocide 
against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies within the territory of their "Greater 
Croatia," while the Germans raised SS divisions among the Muslims of Bosnia 
and Albania.

In Serbia itself, the German occupants announced that one hundredSerbian 
hostages would be executed for each German killed by resistance fighters. 
The threat was carried out. As a result, the royalist Serbian resistance 
(the first guerilla resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe) led by Draza 
Mihailovic adopted a policy of holding off attacks on the Germans in 
expectation of an Allied invasion. The Partisans, led by Croatian communist 
Josip Broz Tito, adopted a more active strategy of armed resistance, which 
made considerable gains in the predominantly Serbs border regions of Croatia 
and Bosnia and won support from Churchill for his effectiveness. A civil war 
developed between Mihailovic's "Chetniks" and Tito's Partisans - which was 
also a civil war between Serbs, since Serbs were the most numerous among the 
Partisans. These divisions between - torn between Serbian and Yugoslav 
identity - have never been healed and help explain the deep confusion among 
Serbs during the breakup of Yugoslavia.

After World War II, the new Communist Yugoslavia tried to build "brotherhood 
and unity" on the myth that all the peoples had contributed equally to 
liberation from fascism. Mihailovic was executed, and school children in 
post-war Yugoslavia learned more about the "fascist" nature of his Serbian 
nationalist Chetniks than they did about Albanian and Bosnian Muslims who 
had volunteered for the SS, or even about the killing of Serbs in the 
Jasenovac death camp run by Ustashe in Western Bosnia.

After the 1948 break with Moscow, the Yugoslav communist leadership 
emphasized its difference from the Soviet bloc by adopting a policy of 
"self-management," supposedly to lead by fairly rapid stages to the 
"withering away of the State." Tito repeatedly revised the Constitution to 
strengthen local authorities, while retaining final decision-making power 
for himself. When he died in 1980, he thus left behind a hopelessly 
complicated system that could not work without his arbitration. (4) Serbia 
in particular was unable to enact vitally necessary reforms because its 
territory had been divided up, with two "autonomous provinces," Vojvodina 
and Kosovo, able to veto measures taken by Serbia, while Serbia could not 
intervene in their affairs.

In the 1980s, the rise in interest rates and unfavorable world trade 
conditions dramatically increased the foreign debt Yugoslavia (like many 
"third world" countries) had been encouraged to run up thanks to its 
standing in the West as a socialist country not belonging to the Soviet 
bloc. The IMF arrived with its familiar austerity measures, which could only 
be tak en by a central government. The leaders of the richer Republics - 
Slovenia and Croatia - did not want to pay for the poorer ones. Moreover, in 
all former socialist countries, the big political question is privatization 
of State and social property, and local communist leaders in Slovenia and 
Croatia could expect to get a greater share for themselves within the 
context of division of Yugoslavia into separate little states. (5)

At that stage, a gradual, negotiated dismantling of Yugoslavia into smaller 
States was not impossible. It would have entailed reaching an
agreement on division of assets and liabilities, and numerous adjustments to 
take into account conflicting interests. If pursued openly, however, it 
might have encountered popular opposition - after all, very many people, 
perhaps a majority, enjoyed being citizens of a large country with an 
enviable international reputation. What would have been the result of a 
national referendum on the question of preservation of Yugoslavia?

None was ever held. The first multiparty elections in postwar Yugoslavia 
were held in 1990, not nationwide in all of Yugoslavia, but separately by 
each Republic - a method which in itself reinforced separatist power elites. 
Sure of the active sympathy of Germany, Austria, and the Vatican, leaders in 
Slovenia and Croatia prepared the fait accompli of unilateral, unnegotiated 
secession, proclaimed in 1991. Such secession was illegal, under Yugoslav 
and international law, and was certain to precipitate a civil war. The key 
role of German (and Vatican) support was to provide rapid international 
recognition of the new independent republics, in order to transform 
Yugoslavia into an "aggressor" on its own territory. (6)

Political Motives

The political motives that launched the anti-Serb propaganda campaign are 
obvious enough. Claiming that it was impossible to stay in Yugoslavia 
because the Serbs were so oppressive was the pretext for the nationalist 
leaders in Slovenia and Croatia to set up their own little statelets which, 
thanks to early and strong German support, could "jump the queue" and get 
into the richmen's European club ahead of the rest of Yugoslavia.

The terrible paradox is that very many people, in the sincere desire to 
oppose racism and aggression, have in fact contributed to demonizing an 
entire people, the Serbs, thereby legitimizing both ethnic separatism and 
the new role of NATO as an occupying power in the Balkans on behalf of a 
theoretical "international community."

Already in the 1980s, Croatian and ethnic Albanian separatist lobbieshas 
stepped up their efforts to win support abroad, notably in Germany and the 
United States, (7) by claiming to be oppressed by Serbs, citing "evidence" 
that, insofar as it had any basis in truth, referred to the 1920-1941 
Yugoslav kingdom, not the very different post-World War II Yugoslavia.

The current campaign to demonize the Serbs began in July 1991 with a 
virulent barrage of articles in the German media, led by the influential 
conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In almost 
daily columns, FAZ editor Johann Georg Reismuller justified the freshly, and 
illegally, declared "independence" of Slovenia and Croatia by describing the 
"Yugo-Serbs" as essentially Oriental "militarist Bolsheviks" who have "no 
place in the European Community." Nineteen months after German 
reunification, and for the first time since Hitler's defeat in 1945, German 
media resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of 
the pre-war propaganda against the Jews. (8)

This German propaganda binge was the signal that times had changed 
seriously. Only a few years earlier, a seemingly broad German peace movement 
had stressed the need to put an end to "enemy stereotypes" (Feindbilder). 
Yet the sudden ferocious emerge of enemy stereotype of "the Serbs" did not 
shock liberal or left Germans, who were soon repeating it themselves. It 
might seem that the German peace movement had completed its historic mission 
once its contribution to altering the image of Germany had led Gorbachev to 
endorse reunification. The least one can say is that the previous efforts at 
reconciliation with peoples who suffered from Nazi invasion stopped short 
when it came to the Serbs.

In the Bundestag, German Green leader Joschka Fischer pressed fordisavowal 
of "pacifism" in order to "combat Auschwitz," thereby equating Serbs with 
Nazis. In a heady mood of self-righteous indignation, German politicians 
across the board joined in using Germany's past guilt as a reason, not for 
restraint, as had been the logic up until reunification, but on the 
contrary, for "bearing their share of the military burden." In the name of 
human rights, the Federal Republic of Germany abolished its ban on military 
operations outside the NATO defensive area. Germany could once again be a 
"normal" military power - thanks to the "Serb threat."

The near unanimity was all the more surprising in that the "enemy 
 stereotype" of the Serb had been dredged up from the most belligerent 
German nationalism of the past. "Serbien muss sterbien" (a play on the word 
sterben, to die), meaning "Serbia must die" was a famous popular war cry of 
World War I. (9)

Serbs had been singled out for slaughter during the Nazi occupation of 
Yugoslavia. One would have thought that the younger generation of Germans, 
seemingly so sensitive to the victims of Germany's aggressive past, would 
have at least urged caution. Very few did.

On the contrary, what occurred in Germany was a strange sort of mass 
transfer of Nazi identity, and guilt, to the Serbs. In the case of the 
Germans, this can be seen as a comforting psychological projection which 
served to give Germans a fresh and welcome sense of innocence in the face of 
the new "criminal" people, the Serbs. But the hate campaign against the 
Serbs, started in Germany, did not stop there. Elsewhere, the willingness to 
single out one of the Yugoslav peoples as the villain calls for other 
explanations.

1)"The Creeping Trend to Re-Balkanization," In These Times, Oct. 3-9, 1994, 
p. 9.

2) "We Are All Serbo-Croats," In These Times, May 3, 1993, p. 14.

3) "Ethnically defined" because, despite the argument accepted by the 
international community that it was the Republics that could invoke the 
right to secede, all the political arguments surrounding recognition of 
independent Slovenia and Croatia dwell on the right of Slovenes and Croats 
as such to self-determination.

4) See Svetozar Stojanovic, "The Destruction of Yugoslavia," Fordham 
International Law Journal, Volume 19, November 2, Dec. 1995, pp.341-3.

5) For an excellent and detailed account of the economic and constitutional 
factors leading to the breakup of Yugoslavia, see Susan
Woodword, Balkan Tragedy (Washington, D.C.; Brookings Institution, 1995).

6) Recognition of the internal administrative borders between the
Republics as "inviolable" international borders was in effect a legal
trick, contrary to international law, which turned the Yugoslav army
into an "aggressor" within the boundaries its soldiers had sworn to
defend, and which transformed the Serbs within Croatia and Bosnia, who 
opposed secession from their country, Yugoslavia, into secessionists. This 
recognition flagrantly violated the principles of the 1975 Final Act (known 
as the Helsinki Accords) on the Conference on, now Organization for, 
Security and Cooperation in Europe., notably the territorial integrity of 
States and nonintervention in internal affairs. Truncated Yugoslavia was 
thereupon expelled from the OSCE in 1992 sparing its other members from 
having to hear Belgrade's point of view. Indeed, the sanctions against 
Yugoslavia covered culture and sports, thus eliminating for several crucial 
years any opportunity for Serbian Yugoslavia to take part in international 
forums and events where the one-sided view of "the Serbs" presented by their 
adversaries might bechallenged.

7) In Washington, the campaign on behalf of Albanian separatists in
Kosovo was spearheaded by Representative Joe DioGuardi of New York, who 
after losing his congressional seat in 1988 has continued his lobbying for 
the cause. An early and influential convert to the cause was Senator Robert 
Dole. In Germany, the project for the political unification of all croatian 
nationalists, both communist and Ustashe, with the aim of seceding and 
establishing "Greater Croatia," was followed closely and sympathetically by 
the Bundesnachrichtendiensi (BND), West Germany's CIA, which hoped to gain 
its own sphere of influence on the Adriatic from the breakup of Yugoslavia. 
The nationalist unification which eventually brought former communist 
general Franjo Tudjman to power in Zagreb with the support of the Ustashe 
diaspora got seriously under way after Tito's death in 1980., during the 
years when Bonn's current foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, was heading the 
BND. See Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, Der Schattenkrieger: Klaus Kinkel und der 
BND (Dusseldorf: ECON Verlag, 1995).

8) The point is developed by Wolfgang Fohrr, "Entscheidung in
Jugoslawien," in Wolfgang Schneider, ed., Bet Andruch Mord: Die deutsche 
Propaganda und der Balkankrieg (Hamburg: Konkret, 1997). A sort of climax 
was reached with the July 8, 1991, cover of the influential weekly Der 
Spiegel, depicting Yugoslavia asa "prison of people" with the title "Serb 
terror."

9) The slogan was immortalized in the 1919 play by Austrian playwright Karl 
Kraus, "Die letzten Tage der Menschheit."

(continued)