[Marxism] A Serbophobe outburst in the Nation Magazine

[Louis Proyect]

The current issue of the Nation Magazine has an extraordinarily long 
article titled “Western Promises” that accuses the Western imperialists 
being soft on the late Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbs. It was 
written by Marc Perelman, the diplomatic correspondent of the Forward, a 
Jewish-American weekly in NY with historic ties to the social democratic 
leadership of the ILGWU.

Perelman uses nearly 6000 words to make the case that the U.S. and 
Britain “sabotaged” the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for 
the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and allowed Serb criminals to go scot-free. 
It relies heavily on the word of one Florence Hartmann, a Serbophobe 
reporter for Le Monde in the early 1990s who became an assistant to 
Carla Le Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the ICTY. Hartmann is the author 
of one of those typically one-sided biographies of Slobodan Milosevic 
that makes him out to be Satan’s Spawn. Perelman’s article, however, 
relies heavily on her latest book titled “Paix et châtiment: Les guerres 
secrètes de la politique et de la justice internationales” (Peace and 
Punishment: The Secret Wars of Politics and International Justice) that 
is not yet available in English.

Hartmann is even too much for Marcus Tanner, who covered Yugoslavia for 
the Independent and hewed to their Serbophobe editorial position. In a 
review of a collection of articles on Yugoslavia co-edited by fellow 
Serbophobes Roy Gutman and David Rieff, Tanner dismissed Hartmann as an 
untrustworthy crank:

     Some of the articles are sermons and rants. Florence Hartmann’s 
piece on Bosnia is just a series of accusations that have been bundled 
together. That “Milosevic made it his mission to set Yugoslavia’s ethnic 
and national groups against one another” is one of a great many “facts” 
that are baldly asserted without any supporting evidence.

Why the Nation Magazine would waste 9 pages circulating ideas that 
stemmed from Ms. Hartmann is somewhat beyond me, but then again they had 
the “wisdom” to publish the awful Joaquin Villalobos’s attack on Hugo 
Chavez.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/a-serbophobe-outburst-in-the-nation-magazine/