Serbia: The war criminal Karadzic and Western hypocrisy
By Michael Karadjis
August 2, 2008 (updated October 11, 2008) -- The new Serbian government last month finally cornered Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska), one of the two entities which make up Bosnia, during the war in 1992-5 when that statelet was created. Karadzic had been in hiding for many years from the International War Crimes Tribunal in, which in 1995 had indicted him for various war crimes including genocide.
The July 21 arrest led to a wave of hypocrisy in Western capitals, congratulating Serbia on the arrest of the vile criminal. Yet for the last seven years in Afghanistan and five years in Iraq, well upwards of a million people have been killed as a result of the US invasion and occupation of these countries. Whole countries are being destroyed; yet not only do these war crimes of climactic scale go unpunished, but these leading war criminals then see themselves as having the right to designate who is a war criminal.
Daily war
crimes are committed against the Palestinian people year in and out by a
country which has stood in open violation of international law for decades, yet
continues to receive massive military and economic aid from the
Such naked
hypocrisy can never lead to justice or even a feeling of justice among the
oppressed of the world. However, it is a big mistake to jump from this
condemnation of the overall system of injustice to any defense of Karadzic, let
alone viewing him as some kind of anti-imperialist hero, as some on the left
and far right fringes do.
Who is Karadzic and
what makes him so important?
Born in 1945 in
The victorious partisans set up a multi-ethnic socialist
federation, in which Serbs were just one of many equal nations. Extreme
nationalism was kept under wraps by Tito, in order that the dominant nations,
especially Serbs and Croats, could not dominate the smaller nations, to
maintain a united working class. The Chetniks by contrast had aimed to revive the
pre-war rule of the Serbian monarchy over the other non-Serb peoples.
However, as capitalism
swept across the former
A psychiatrist and a
"poet", Karadzic fell under the influence of leading anti-Titoist dissident
Dobrica Cosic, a prominent figure in the
This is where we have to
understand Karadzic. Neither an International Monetary Fund-linked party
technocrat like then Serbian prime minister Slobodan Milosevic, nor a sadistic
military officer like General Mladic, would necessarily have ended up destroying
Karadzic, by contrast, like
his close ally Vojislav Seselj, the founder of the quasi-fascist Serbian
Chetnik Movement (later Serbian Radical Party), was always an enemy of the old
power structure and a natural leader of the new. The entire ideology of
Karadzic, Seselj and the Serb nationalist lunar right was fundamentally
pro-imperialist: they were re-launching the crusades to finally drive "the
Turks" out of
Army hijacked
While the new bourgeoisie of other Yugoslav nations also promoted
national chauvinism – most notably the regime of Franjo Tudjman of Croatia –
that of the dominant Serb nation had an additional weapon to put their
chauvinist ideology into practice, with the aim of grabbing the largest slice
of the ashes of Yugoslavia: they hijacked the former Yugoslav army, the 4th
largest military force in Europe, and drove out the non-Serbs.
In 1992, there was a
country called
Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), all three of whom were represented in the elected
government proportionally, and at every level of the state apparatus. The three
peoples were inextricably mixed. About a quarter of the land mass of
From the outset, this
leader out of nowhere had a plan: to destroy
To do this, however, the
Muslim plurality of the population had to be eliminated. Unlike the much
smarter Milosevic, Karadzic made no bones about this; in a speech to the
Bosnian parliament months before
The blueprint for this genocide was
laid out by the SDS leadership in “The Strategic Goals of the Serbian People in
Bosnia and Herzegovina”, adopted by the Republika Srpska national assembly in
May 1992. These goals were: (1) Separation as a state from the other two ethnic
communities; (2) a corridor between Sermberija and Krajina; (3) the
establishment of a corridor in the Drina River valley, i.e., the elimination of
the border between Serbian states; (4) the establishment of a border on the Una
and Neretva rivers; and (5) the division of the city of Sarajevo into a Serbian
part and a Muslim part, and the establishment of effective State authorities
within each part.”[1]
Looking at a demographic map of these regions, particularly the
He set out to do that in 1992 -- and succeeded. In the northern spring and
summer of that year, his Chetniks and the now completely Serb-run "Yugoslav"
army swept across Bosnia and uprooted, bombed and massacred the non-Serb
population of 70 per cent of Bosnia (Serbs were only 30 per cent of the population).
While the July 1995 massacre in the east Bosnian town of Srebrenica – where Mladic’s
troops killed over 8000 Muslim captives in a few days – is the most terrible
crime committed, the massacre in the whole of Muslim-majority east Bosnia
occurred over many months of 1992, alongside the massacre in north and west Bosnia,
while the mixed population of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, along with dozens
of other towns and cities, were besieged and bombed daily throughout these
years. Officially, 100,000 people were killed, though like with the Iraq Body
Count, real numbers may be much higher. 83 per cent of civilian victims were Muslims,
and millions were driven from their homes or made refugees.
Nearly 1700 mosques were destroyed,
many flattened and turned into parking lots, whereas when revenge – never
justified but essentially inevitable – set in, only 34 Orthodox churches
suffered the same fate. Thus mosques were destroyed at a ratio of 50 to 1
compared to Orthodox churches (some 340 Croat Catholic churches were also
destroyed). The National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with over “a million
books, more than a hundred thousand manuscripts and rare books, and centuries
of historical records”, according to professor of Islamic Studies Michael
sells, went up in flames, the biggest book-burning in history, as did the
Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, containing more than five thousand Islamic and
Jewish manuscripts, from many parts of the Middle East.
The
Karadzic’s capture again
brought out some of this. For example, Louis Proyect, the moderator of the
Marxism List, wrote:
“In the latest issue of Links, Karadjis holds forth on the
arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the Serb warlord who is qualitatively worse than
all the other warlords in
This dishonesty is
astounding, and can only be uttered by someone so enamored to the cause of
Serbian chauvinism that he allows himself to write things he knows are untrue.
His suggestion here is that the war in east
Proyect however well knows
that the massacre and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims from
east Bosnia began in earnest – and extremely bloodily – from April 1992, and
that is why the Muslim military leader got holed up in the Gaza-like ghetto of
Srebrenica in the first place. Before that, most of east
These raids, which peaked
around late 1992 and early 1993, were often led by Oric, and sometimes bloody
vengeance was exacted on small numbers of Serb civilians. I have never covered
for any attack on civilians, but these raids were more or less the exact
equivalent of the raids out of the
Not only were the numbers of Serb casualties far less than the Muslim casualties either before or after this time, but above all, Proyect has casually reversed the chronology and causality involved. Surely he would have been more correct to say that the massive bloodlust pogroms against the Muslims throughout 1992 is what led to Oric’s much later and smaller-scale “bloodlust revenge”. How the latter can then be claimed as provoking the deliberate, planned capture and massacre of thousands in Srebrenica years later is a tall story indeed.
Imperialism
This then is the legacy of
Karadzic, the utter destruction of the nation of
But imperialism also wanted
the destruction of that
The EU continued to put
forward such partition plans throughout the war. In mid-1993, EU negotiator
Lord Owen from the UK Foreign Office and the UN envoy, Thorvald Stoltenberg,
decided the best way to achieve “peace” was to offer Karadzic everything he
wanted -- a full republic occupying 52 per cent of Bosnian territory within a
loose Bosnian confederation of three republics. Owen and Stoltenberg, Milosevic
and Tudjman, the Bosnian Serb and Croat paramilitary leaders Karadzic and
Boban, met and agreed on principles.[5] Alia Izetbegovic, president of the legal,
UN-recognised government of
Meanwhile, the imperialist
powers embargoed arms from the Bosnian government to force it to surrender, in
violation of Article 1 of the UN Charter, on the right of UN member states to
self-defence. Only
Examples of
NATO enforcement of the embargo include the interception by US officers, in
September 1992, at Zagreb airport of an Iranian plane bound for Bosnia with
4000 automatic rifles, and the turning back by NATO navies of a large shipment
of Iranian arms to Bosnia in January 1993, at a time that Bosnia could have
used such arms to face the huge combined assault by Serb and Croat nationalist
forces.[6] In
April 1993, the
Finally, the US took over, and after the Srebrenica genocide, intervened in late 1995 with a brief bombing of the Bosnian Serb artillery that had been bombing Sarajevo daily for years, a show necessary in order to hand over half of Bosnia to the "Serb Republic”, violently “cleansed” of its non-Serb plurality – obtaining "peace" via a total victory of Karadzic's war aims.
It is no wonder then that Holbrooke, the chief
Former Serbian Interior
Ministry cabinet chief, Vlado Nadezdin, recently claimed this agreement was
signed between Karadzic and Holbrooke before
This confirms similar
accusations by Florence Hartmann, the former spokeswoman for Hague Tribunal
Chief Prosecutor. In a recent book she claimed
Hartman claimed Western
leaders wanted to avoid their relations with Karadzic coming to light and
admitting that they did not make an effort to stop the Srebrenica genocide. Yet
other revelations suggest another US-Karadzic deal had already included
conspiring in the capture of Srebrenica (see http://mihalisk.blogspot.com/2007/03/us-green-light-to-bosnian-serbs-to.html),
which seems likely given that the Muslim town was handed to the now-recognised
Serb Republic at Dayton as if nothing had happened.
Meanwhile, the
Hartmann also claimed Karadzic's arrest “was never a problem for Serbia as much as for the West – unlike the case of Ratko Mladic, whom the Hague sees as a firm link of crime that connects Belgrade and Bosnia”, due to Mladic’s status as a general in the Bosnian Serb Army but having originally been a general in the Belgrade-based “Yugoslav” army.
Karadzic, by contrast, “was known to distance himself from
It is not only the
It is
significant that no-one had been asking
New situation
But 13
years have gone by, and Holbrooke's long gone. A new situation now allows a new
government coalition in
As a
maverick right-wing extremist, ideologically linked to those now in opposition
in
Serbian
nationalists and their supporters often claim
“However, of the 161 individuals indicted by the ICTY, from common soldiers to generals, police commanders and political leaders, three-quarters are Serbs or Montenegrins.”
This is a
very strange argument. Why should the number of indictees be 25:25:25:25
Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Albanians, as if they all committed, or were able to
commit, crimes in equal proportion? Would we complain if a world court indicted
70 per cent Israelis and "only" 30 per cent Palestinians for war
crimes, that the court was "anti-Jewish"?
Yes, some
three quarters of indictees from the
Clearly, this
fact suggests that any justice served by
However, if
the Holbrooke strategy was to cover up the crimes that imperialism and Karadzic
were jointly responsible for, the current imperialist powers supporting
the Hague process want him as a scapegoat for these joint crimes - as
long as he doesn't say too much. Though the ultra-right has failed to mobilise,
even the fact that it maintains the passive electoral support of some one third
of voters, far higher than it should be, is partially a reflection nevertheless
of
Notes
[1] http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/ibhy/ibhyjudgment/ibhy_ijudgment_20070226_frame.htm.
It is remarkable how similar this is to the plans of their Chetnik forebears in
World War II. Their plan was outlined as
follows in 1941: “To cleanse the state territory of all national minorities and
anti-national elements” and “To create a direct continuous border between
Serbia and Montenegro and between Serbia and Slovenia, by cleansing Sandzak of
its Moslem inhabitants and Bosnia of its Moslem and Croatian inhabitants,”
Tomasevich, J, War and Revolution in
Yugoslavia 1941-45: The Chetniks, Stanford, California, 1975.
[2] Katarina Luketić, Zarez,
[3] Proyect’s strange article
can be found on his blog at http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/the-dsp-versus-the-archfiends.
Apart from this particular aspect, the article contains a number of highly
inaccurate statements, as well as very imaginative speculations, about this
issue and about the views of the Democratic Socialist Perspective of Australia and myself on these issues, as is usual in
his world on this issue.
[4] Statement of Principles for New Constitutional Arrangement for Bosnia
and Herzegovina, Lisbon 23 February 1992,
from Yugoslavia Through Documents,
Ed Trifunovska, S, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Netherlands, 1994, pp
517-519.
[5] Report of the Co-Chairmen of the Steering Committee of the International
Conference on the Former
[6] Gordon, M, New York Times News Service,
[7] ‘Ex-ISI Chief Reveals Secret Missile
Shipments to
http://www.satribune.com/archives/dec23_29_02/P1_bosniastory.htm
[8] The Sunday Times,
[9] Malcolm, N, “The Whole
Lot of Them Are Serbs,” The Spectator,
[Michael Karadjis is the author of Bosnia, Kosova and the West: The Yugoslav Tragedy: A Marxist View. Published by Resistance Books, 2000, 256 pp, $24.95. He is a member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective of Australia. A shorter version of this article first appeared in Green Left Weekly issue #761, August 6, 2008.]