Ratko Mladić in Srebrenica after Serbian troops took over the “safe area” with no opposition from NATO or the Dutch UN “peacekeepers.” Alija Izetbegović in league with Bill Clinton and Wim Kok fabricated a genocide to justify NATO intervention.
Original Facebook Note #85 published on 10 July 2020
“After meeting with American president Clinton, Alija [Izetbegović] was telling us about the offer of Clinton [in 1993]. Serbs would take Srebrenica and kill 5,000 Bosniaks, and then there will be a NATO military intervention.”
–Hakija Meholjić, War-time Srebrenica Police Chief
The wars that resulted from the imperialist-backed counter-revolutionary destruction of the Yugoslav deformed workers state has since been presented as a Hollywood movie. From CNN and Fox News to the BBC and virtually every major Western news network the public was told of the freedom-loving peoples of Croatia and Bosnia after having suffered decades of “Communist tyranny” broke free to establish harmonious democratic societies based on human rights and multiculturalism. But peace-loving Bosnians and Croatians were then subjected to genocide by an intolerant bloodthirsty Serbo-Nazi military whom were driven by the legacy of Adolf Hitler to the horror of the West and other “civilized countries” who sought any possible diplomatic solution short of war until there was no option left. The U.S and NATO growing more belligerent against the Serbians while they were reviving Auschwitz in Bosnia-Herzegovina. That’s what we heard and continue to hear. As American former right-wing survivalist Randy Weaver recalled how the media portrayed his family during the Ruby Ridge standoff with the U.S government: “They called me white supremacist. That’s big news! That kind of stuff sells newspapers. Because this is exciting stuff.” The U.S government murdered his wife and son during the standoff.
So, the question faced by the imperialists is how to prove the “Bosnian Genocide” beyond the shadow of a doubt. In the summer of 1995 in a town called Srebrenica, they got it. A massacre that occurred 25 years ago in Srebrenica, a town once known for its spa and holiday resorts, Bosnian-Serb forces under Gen. Ratko Mladić murdered up to 8,000 Bosniak men and boys was the final confirmation for the imperialist media that a Nazi-style genocide was transpiring in Bosnia. Focusing only on concentration camps manned by Serbs, and ignoring those manned by Croats or Bosniaks, now there was proof. The Srebrenica massacre was indeed an appalling crime of gargantuan proportions. It was mass murder. But the truth is that it was nothing like Auschwitz. The Srebrenica massacre was NOT genocide. For 15 years the truth was suppressed until Norwegian film makers and journalists with the help of a veteran in the Bosnian Army brought the truth to the world in the 2010 documentary Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed which confirmed that Srebrenica was not only sold out by the government of Alija Izetbegović, but provoked and fabricated for the purpose of legitimizing NATO military intervention on behalf of the Bosnian Islamist government.
Apologizing for the counter-revolutionary destruction of Yugoslavia, prominent Western journalists who covered the Balkan wars such as Christiane Amanpour, Martin Bell, Samantha Power, and Paul Madelenat told stories laden with racist jargon of these backwards Slavic savages who were forced to love each other by the barrel of a gun from the “evil Communists” and therefore they were too inferior to build a Western bourgeois democracy. In the 2004 documentary Targeted: Arkan, Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S ambassador to the United Nations, was blunter in this notion, “Both sides claimed the same land, claimed the same history. And they hated each other.” In all of their sensational and romantic explanations of the sectarian divisions in the Balkans, not once are the imperial powers of Austria and Turkey who dominated and created divisions in the first place ever blamed!
The Yugoslav workers state was born in 1945 as a result of the victory of the Yugoslav Revolution against the Nazis, Croatian Ustasha, and Serbian Chetniks. The Partisans of Josip Broz Tito almost single-handedly defeated the Nazis, Italians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians along with the Chetniks and Ustashi as well as the local capitalists and landlords who profited from fascism. But the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was bureaucratically deformed from birth, social revolution was carried out from above without democratically elected soviets (workers councils) with the masses ruled over by a parasitic caste with Tito at its head. Adopting the program of Brotherhood and Unity, the multinational Yugoslav workers state guaranteed universal civil rights for all its nations. Intermarriage was common in the republics. The symbol of Brotherhood and Unity in Yugoslavia was Bosnia-Herzegovina with its three main nationalities living in peace: Bosniaks (Slav Muslims) who represented the majority and the two minority groups Croats and Serbs.
Unfortunately, in order to keep nationalism in check although supportable Tito did not go beyond using the Yugoslav People’s Army, police, and security forces to suppress nationalists. In fact, upon the formation of the Yugoslav workers state, the interest of Tito and his neighboring fellow Stalinists in their endeavor to place nation about class was the preservation of the imperialist drawn artificial borders. After all, he was a Stalinist bureaucrat. In other words, under Tito the national antagonisms of the past were simply swept under the rug, and to mention them was taboo. This essentially defined by the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia underlined Stalinism’s inability through its political bankruptcy to form a strong united federation. The adoption of “market socialism” gave economic preference to the richer republics Slovenia and Croatia while leaving the poorer regions Macedonia and Kosovo dependent on economic surplus from the other republics which in the long term set the stages for the counter-revolution and the split within the Stalinist bureaucracy along national lines.
In 1990 without declaring Bosnia independent, nationalist Fikret Abdić long with Islamic reactionary Alija Izetbegović founded the bourgeois nationalist Party of Democratic Action (SDA-Stanka Demokratske Akcije) as both men were elected into the presidency. Abdić, a corrupt businessman whom was jailed for embezzling funds from the state-owned Agrokomerc food company based in Velika Kladuša in 1987 was voted head of the presidency. Izetbegović had long been a darling of imperialism for his fierce anti-Communism. During World War II Izetbegović was a recruiter for the Waffen-SS encouraging Bosniak reactionaries to enlist in the SS-Handžar Division and join the fight against the Communist Partisans. The Handžar Division joined the Nazi offensives committing numerous war crimes against civilians Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnians alike for supporting the Partisans. Eventually the SS-Handžar troops were turned into mincemeat by the Partisans and with help from the Red Army were mopped up.
In 1970, the staunchly anti-Communist Izetbegović published the Islamic Declaration where he calls for an independent Bosnia as a Muslim theocracy along the likes of Pakistan stating, “There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions…the state should be an expression of religion and should support its moral concepts.” When he was imprisoned in 1983 by the government, Izetbegović became a human rights icon and was added as “prisoner of conscience” of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch like others of Yugoslavia who would be involved in the sectarian bloodbaths such as the Chetnik demagogue Vojislav Šešelj whose men would tear through Croatia and Bosnia pillaging, raping, murdering civilians. The difference being that Izetbegović remains a human rights icon.
With the crumbling of the Stalinist system, Slobodan Milošević consolidated his power utilizing Serbian nationalism eventually controlling both the Serb party leadership and Yugoslav presidency as well as the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA-Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija) – whose officer corps was predominantly Serb – and began the counter-revolution by toppling the autonomous Communist leaderships of Kosovo and Vojvodina, and that of Montenegro. The move fueled reaction in the other republics notably Slovenia and Croatia. In 1990 Franjo Tudjman was elected president of Croatia under a secessionist program and quickly canonized the Ustasha fascists as national heroes. Despite the public rivalry Milošević and Tudjman behind closed doors were very good friends. Both men agreed that Bosnia had no right to exist, that it should be split between the two of them. After the phony war in Slovenia and the two-sided bloodbath in Croatia in 1991, Izetbegović consolidated his power using nationalism and Islamic dogma in the same way Milošević and Tudjman rode their wave to power.
The more modest Abdić in an effort to avoid Bosnia being consumed by war attempted to negotiate its future status with Milošević and Tudjman. The imperialist-backed Izetbegović wanted an independent Islamic Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina modeled after Iran and Mujahideen-ruled Afghanistan to be speedily recognized. Izetbegović and his Islamist cohorts successfully marginalized Abdić and his followers who then existed as a renegade faction of the SDA. Abdić was not “pro-Yugoslavia” as ultra-left scholars like the Serb apologist Jared Israel insisted on his website The Emperor’s New Clothes. The difference between Abdić and Izetbegović is that the former wanted Bosnia’s independence to be a negotiated one with respect to the Serbian and Croatian minorities. Perhaps Abdić’s method would have prevented the war, perhaps it would have caused a different one. But what is certain is that war or no war, Abdić would have subjected the Bosnian people to the same free market shock therapy as the rest of the counter-revolutionary regimes of Eastern Europe and impoverishing millions.
By then the federal and regional branches of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia of the six republics had become born again bourgeois social-democrats acting as a loyal opposition in the new capitalist order just as in the rest of Eastern Europe after the counter-revolution. Just as Bolshevik revolutionary and co-founder of the Russian Revolution Leon Trotsky predicted in the 1930s for the Soviet Union. Trotsky had written and lectured on numerous occasions that the ultimate fate of the Soviet degenerated workers state was counter-revolution led by the Stalinist bureaucracy who after wallowing in its status as a privileged caste above the masses would then become the new capitalist class. That the only way to stop this from happening is for the Soviet workers to rise up and oust the bureaucracy through a workers political revolution that would restore (in Yugoslavia’s case establish) the rule of the democratically elected soviets (workers councils). But this did not happen, so Brotherhood and Unity in the long run could not be maintained under a Stalinist system. The capitalist counter-revolution of 1989-1992 was the final proof of the bankruptcy of Stalinism.
Again, Bosnia-Herzegovina was the symbol of Brotherhood and Unity in Yugoslavia represented by the majority Muslim Bosniaks, and the two largest minorities the Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Friendship and intermarriage were common. But in a classic divide and rule policy, the imperialists backed the counter-revolution, empowering local reactionaries as a means of dominating the Balkans that would become their cheap labor. Reinvigorated by the capitalist reunification, German imperialism spearheaded the counter-revolutionary destruction of the Yugoslav workers state by recognizing Slovenia and Croatia as independent republics under nationalist governments creating the spark that would explode into a sectarian bloodbath. The move forced the other European imperialists to follow Berlin’s stance against the Serbians, while in Washington Republican president George H.W. Bush continued to refuse recognition of any republic that broke away from Yugoslavia. Bush was quoted several times saying “We don’t have a dog in this fight.”
As election year loomed, Bush’s position gave his opponent the Democratic Arkansas governor Bill Clinton fresh ammunition with which to attack him. Adopting “human rights” imperialism through military intervention as his foreign policy, Clinton shredded Bush for his apparent ineptitude in refusing to take a side against the JNA-backed Serbian nationalist rebels fighting the fascistic Croatian government, and for that matter for not intervening in famine-ravaged Somalia against the murderous ruling warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid and failing to unseat Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. This prompted Bush to join in with the other imperialists via the UN in alienating Serbia by implementing starvation sanctions and threatening military action if Belgrade launched an attack against Kosovo. Only then did Bush recognize Slovenia and Croatia as independent republics, and that April when Izetbegović declared Bosnia’s independence, Bush quickly recognized it. From then on Yugoslavia existed as a rump capitalist republic consisting of Serbia and Montenegro.
In October 1991 in Bosnia’s parliament, Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadžić issued his stark warning against independence saying “This, what you are doing, is not good. This is the path that you want to take Bosnia and Herzegovina on, the same highway of hell and death that Slovenia and Croatia went on. Don’t think that you won’t take Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell, and the Muslim people maybe into extinction. Because the Muslim people cannot defend themselves if there is war here.” After Izetbegović declared Bosnia’s independence, Karadžić responded by declaring 70% of the country to be the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The JNA in Bosnia disbanded and became the Bosnian-Serb Army armed to the teeth with federal military hardware that gave them the advantage held territory of the Serbian Republic. Gen. Ratko Mladić, a former JNA officer who commanded Serb forces in Croatia was appointed its commander. First blood however was drawn from the Bosnian side when a Serbian wedding in Baščaršija was attacked by Bosniak nationalists and the groom’s father was killed. Serb nationalists used this incident as proof of a developing war drive against the Serbian people and mobilized for war.
One can say that Sarajevo has the tendency to spark major wars. After all, it was in Sarajevo 1914 that young Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip unloaded his pistol into the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand Hapsburg and his wife the Czech duchess Sophie Chotková killing them both. The Austro-Hungarian imperialists used this assassination to start a war with Serbia triggering the first inter-imperialist war. As the wars in Yugoslavia progressed and the Serbians were widely painted as the sole villains, the assassination of the Austrian archduke by Princip being the spark that ignited the powder keg starting World War I became a sensationalized topic throughout Europe. School children particularly in Western Europe were taught that it was a Serbian with his warmongering culture that engulfed the entire continent in an entire bloody war. As with the explanation for the turbulent history of the Balkans, this lesson completely absolves imperialism’s role in the domination of the region.
After a combined Croat-Bosniak attack on the Serb village of Sijekovac where 60 civilians were massacred in late March 1992 triggered a response from Serbia. In April 1992, Chetnik paramilitaries invaded Bosnia from Croatia and Serbia, notably Arkan’s Tigers headed by the mobster warlord Željko “Arkan” Ražnatović and the White Eagles headed by neo-fascist Vojislav Šešelj, given the title Vojvoda (war leader or duke) of the Chetniks by World War II Chetnik leader Momčilo Djujić who escaped to the United States with help from the Allies where he became a prominent member of the Republican Party. The Chetniks tore through the country terrorizing, raping, murdering and driving out Bosniaks and Croats from villages while the Bosnian-Serb Army surrounded Sarajevo from the hills with tanks, and mortars. The most feared of the Serbian irregulars were Arkan’s Tigers who gained notoriety for their methods of beating, torturing, and raping their victims prior to looting their homes. It in the opening of the Serbian onslaught in Eastern Bosnia that Srebrenica first came under attack.
Meanwhile in Sarajevo anti-war protesters made up of Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats took to the streets waving Yugoslav flags, portraits of Tito, and denouncing both Izetbegović and Karadžić. Chetnik snipers fired into the crowd killing several people, while government police later used brute force to disperse the protesters. Izetbegović and Karadžić had scratched each other’s backs for the last time. Then the Serbs began shelling Sarajevo from the surrounding hills targeting Bosniak and Croat neighborhoods. The Bosnian-Croats found themselves in a dilemma. Many had heard the stories of atrocities committed by Chetniks in Croatia, while others were driven from their homes after witnessing massacres by the Chetniks who had crossed into Bosnia from Croatia. On the other hand, like the Serbians the Croatians were terrified of living under an Islamic fundamentalist government. Their fear and that of the Serbs was confirmed when Izetbegović recruited al-Qaeda militants that formed Mujahideen irregulars under Bosnian command, most of who had fought the Red Army in Afghanistan.
In October 1992 amidst growing tensions, Bosnian-Croat leader Mate Boban declared much of the region of Herzegovina to be the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, finalizing the split between the Bosnian government and the Croatian community turning the conflict into a multi-sided bloodbath. As the Bosnian-Croat Army and their Ustasha militias unleashed their attacks against both Bosniaks and Serbs, Boban was a proponent of trying to form a Christian alliance with Karadžić saying “The Serbs are our brothers in Christ, but the Muslims are nothing to us, apart from the fact that for hundreds of years they raped our mothers and sisters.” A position shared by the Bosnian-Croat Army commander Dario Kordić. This was followed by the rebel Bosniaks under Abdić mobilizing into rebellion against the central government. They based themselves near Bihać where Abdić declared the Republic of Western Bosnia that was backed by Croatian and Serbian forces.
RWANDAN GENOCIDE VERSUS “BOSNIAN GENOCIDE”
By late 1992, the war in Bosnia had become a three-sided bloodbath. Each of the three sides fighting the other, massacring each other’s villages and urban neighborhoods, and setting up concentration camps where beatings, rape, and murder were common occurrences. The imperialist media and politicians continued to spin the horrific tails of a Nazi-style genocide by the Serbians whilst ignoring atrocities against Serb civilians and the atrocities by Croatian forces against Bosniak civilians in the Lašva Valley and by Bosnian forces in central Bosnia against Croat civilians receiving minimal reporting if any. Upon taking office in 1993, the virulently anti-Serb Bill Clinton flaunting “human rights” imperialism made it transparently clear of his intention to intervene in the Bosnia against the Serbians whom he demonized by comparing them to the Nazis, as did Helmut Kohl and other imperialist leaders. Yet it was Clinton and Kohl who lauded Croatia’s Tudjman even after he made public speeches glorifying the Ustasha fascists who during World War II murdered over 1 million Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and anti-fascists for their Nazi bosses.
In fact, Tudjman who openly stated, “Thank God my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew,” was Clinton’s honored guest at the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C which drew an angry reaction from Holocaust survivors. Despite this, Zionist leaders used the ceremony to promote support for Clinton to intervene in the Balkans to stop the “Bosnian Genocide.” Clinton’s “humanitarian” intervention had first been demonstrated against Americans in Los Angeles during the Rodney King protests as well as the incineration of the Branch Davidians religious commune in Waco, Texas. The crazy part is that the bulk of the anti-Serbian warmongering in the West did not come from the right-wing, but from liberals, pacifists, social-democrats, and the far-left. By 1993, using words that could have come from Ronald Reagan or Gen. Curtis LeMay the majority of these doves including Vietnam War-era peaceniks like Joan Baez, Christopher Hitchens, Jane Fonda, Bogdan Denitch and Susan Sontag were screaming for war, that is “humanitarian” intervention against the Serbians in Bosnia, including launching a war against Serbia.
Hitchens even triumphed about how the Bosnian War was “when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia.” Having made their amends with U.S imperialism under Jimmy Carter as he rearmed it under the anti-Soviet “human rights” crusade, these peace doves have since become New World Order war hawks screeching at their loudest under a Democratic administration. In their first demonstration of loyalty to the “reformed” American imperialism, Sontag and Baez lashed out at Vietnam for its imprisonment of the U.S puppet murderers and torturers of the Saigon regime. The Croatian-born Denitch, then chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America, was an apologist for the born-again Ustasha Franjo Tudjman and calling for the U.S to lead a UN force in a Gulf War style intervention against the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. Meanwhile, the right attacked Clinton for being a wimp for not bombing the Serbian forces and overtly arming the Bosnian and Croatian forces.
But despite the overwhelming call by Clinton’s liberal war hawks in America and Europe to go to war against the Serbians from the air and ground, the American peacenik president who protested the Vietnam War at Oxford was reluctant to get into a costly quagmire that would result in large numbers of U.S casualties. Unwittingly comparing his role in the Balkans to Hitler’s, Clinton was quoted in the New York Times on 26 April 1993 saying “In the Second World War, Hitler sent thousands of soldiers to that area and never was successful in subduing it.” However the murderous Bosnian-Serb Army and Chetnik paramilitaries were a long distance from the Communist Partisans (Sontag called Communists “the most successful variant” of fascists) who almost single-handedly battered and defeated the Nazis and their allies, but a formidable foe nonetheless. Later that year any prospect of a ground invasion in Bosnia against the Serbians was scrapped after Clinton’s “humanitarian” intervention in Somalia suffered a humiliating defeat when armed Somalis killed 18 U.S commandos and wounded about 60 others forcing a U.S/UN withdrawal. From then on only airstrikes were on the table in Bosnia.
Now, in order to accomplish this Clinton had to end the fighting between Bosnian and Croatian forces. In early 1994, he sent an ultimatum to Zagreb telling Tudjman that if he did not order the Bosnian-Croat Army and Ustasha paramilitaries to cease their attacks against the Bosniaks, Croatia would face the same isolation and starvation sanctions as Serbia. In return for Tudjman’s cooperation, Clinton would buildup the Croatian Army, and help Tudjman retake the territory of the Republic of Serbian Krajina that declared independence from Croatia in 1991. It was an offer Tudjman couldn’t refuse. As the Croatian Republic ceased to exist, once again Bosniak and Croat forces were forced into an anti-Serb alliance, and that February NATO furthered its intervention by carrying out pinprick airstrikes against Serbian targets who fired into the UN so-called “safe areas” and declaring Bosnia a no-fly zone. It was the first military operation in the imperialist alliance’s history. The operation began to backfire after the Serbians shot down several NATO aircraft and took UN “peacekeepers” as hostages to deter airstrikes. The demand for further airstrikes in the name of “stopping genocide” increased in the United States and Western Europe.
Disturbingly enough while the imperialists and their mouthpiece were crying crocodile tears over the “Bosnian Genocide” by the “Serbian Nazis”, in another corner of the world an actual genocide was taking place in the tiny African country of Rwanda. In contrast to Bosnia where three opposing sides engaged in a vengeful communal bloodbath, in Rwanda the Hutu-dominated Army and Interahamwe (“They who fight together”) death squads engaged in a premeditated genocidal slaughter that was meant to exterminate the Tutsi minority. Again, in contrast to Bosnia, for decades after independence from Belgian colonial slavery, the Hutu government forced Rwandans to carry identity cards identifying their ethnicity. It began when extremist elements in the government had lists drawn up, carefully planned and executed via the Hutu-dominated officer corps and paramilitaries in a Final Solution style to exterminate the Tutsis. The Hutu-dominated Kigali government was at war with the Tutsi-dominated rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR-Front Patriotique Rwandais) since 1990 when they invaded from neighboring Uganda.
Despite having the full support of Belgian and French imperialism, the Rwandan Army was unable to defeat the RPF as the war was fought to a stalemate. When Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana signed a UN-brokered peace deal with the RPF, his plane was shot down by the Rwandan Army and later they murdered his prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and her family. Hutu extremists Théodore Sindikubwabo and Jean Kambanda took over as president and prime minister presiding over the genocide that unfolded. The Rwandan Army under Gen. Augustin Bizimungu and the Interahamwe under Georges Rutaganda conducted wholesale massacres against the Tutsi people. The objective was to exterminate the Tutsi inyenzi (meaning “cockroaches”) by the admittance of the “Hutu Power” butchers. The symbolic method of murder that would be synonymous with the Rwandan Genocide was the hacking to death of innocent men, women, and children by the machete-wielding Interahamwe. They hacked neighbors, children in schools and orphanages, patients in hospitals, and churches after being assured of protection by priests who then called in the Interahamwe. The ones that were rounded up and shot by Hutu soldiers were the lucky ones. Also targeted were moderate Hutus who refused to take part in the genocide, and protected their Tutsi friends and family.
As the imperialist media howled about the “Bosnian Genocide”, they wrote off the actual genocide in Rwanda as black-on-black violence in the latest episode of ancient feuding savage tribes along with other racist diatribes. There is a scene in a 2005 movie about the Rwandan Genocide Beyond the Gates where a BBC reporter explained to an English main character about how she cried herself to sleep seeing the carnage in Bosnia, but in Rwanda all she saw were dead Africans. Slavs being white may get a little more appreciation from the imperialists than do Africans. But it is always short-lived. When free market austerity prevents Eastern Europeans from improving their domestic conditions, be it poverty or war, they are subjected to the same racist jargon from the West as being naturally unable to adopt “Western values.”
At the same time the colored faces in high places of the United Nations: the Egyptian general-secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghali and the Ghanaian head of “peacekeeping” missions Kofi Annan (both human rights icons) not only ordered the withdrawal of most UN troops from Rwanda but ordered the remaining ones not to protect Tutsis that sought refuge in their compounds. One such case was at the École Technique Officielle (Official Technical School) where UN “peacekeepers” refused to protect the more than 2,000 mostly Tutsi refugees under their guard leaving them to be massacred by the Interahamwe. One of the pushers of this abandonment was Clinton’s ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright, who established herself as a “human rights” icon in Bosnia with her anti-Serb rhetoric and pushing for NATO intervention. In 1999 Albright played a leading role as Clinton’s secretary of state in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. But should this come as a surprise from the woman who unambiguously stated that 500,000 dead Iraqi children: “We think the price is worth it.”
In early 1994 before steamrolling the abandonment of civilians in Rwanda to the Hutu death squads that April, Albright was in Sarajevo as part of the objective to get the Serbians to remove their guns from around the capital city. When the weapons were removed, she ludicrously parroted John F. Kennedy infamous Berlin Wall speech “Ich bin ein Berliner” saying “Ja sam Sarajevka” (I am Sarajevan). Sarajevo was not Berlin. It was only when the FPR headed by Tutsi militant Paul Kagame began to gain the upper hand over the Hutu Army did the imperialists intervene. Including as it carried out the genocide, French imperialism (and to a lesser extent Belgium) was the blood-soaked Hutu government’s sole protector since 1990. The social-democratic government of François Mitterrand poured money and weapons into the Rwandan Army even as it carried out the extermination campaign against the Tutsis. Paris’ overseer of supplies to the Hutu extremists was none other than Bernard Kouchner, the same one who played a major role in the 1999 “humanitarian bombing” of Serbia to stop the “genocide” against ethnic-Albanians in Kosovo. In Rwanda, Kouchner headed the French operation under the UN that provided an escape corridor for the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide into neighboring Zaire (today the Congo) setting the stage for that country’s brutal civil war.
It was soon proven without a doubt that what had transpired in Rwanda was a genocide. It was then that Clinton and the other imperialists stepped in to grotesquely present themselves as “humanitarians” by helping the refugees after months of denying that a genocide was taking place so to not intervene. This included Belgian prime minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, from the country who created the division, enslaved, and murdered millions in the region setting the stage for the wars and genocide. Neary one million people were killed, almost three times of that in Bosnia in the entire war.
Blacks killing blacks was not a big deal to the U.S, UN, and NATO imperialists. Nor to their corporate media mouthpieces. In an even more sickening display of cynicism over U.S imperialism’s dismissal of the Rwandan Genocide, Clinton traveled to Kigali and standing next to Kagame said “We must have global vigilance. And never again must we be shy in the face of evidence.” Clinton had salvaged imperialism’s “humanitarian” credentials from Rwanda vowing (along with Boutros-Ghali, Annan, Mitterand and Dehaene) to live up to his words to stop the “Bosnian Genocide.” First, he needed to fabricate it, and he was by no means short of help. At his side, Clinton had the media, his fellow peaceniks from the Vietnam War, and Zionists like Elie Wiesel who used the ceremony of the opening of the Holocaust Museum to promote imperialist intervention in Bosnia under the popular slogan “Never Again!” A grotesque conscription of the Nazis’ Jewish victims that the imperialists would use time and again to launch wars of aggression. While the Zionists use the Holocaust to justify their own brand of racism: support for Israel’s dehumanization and massacres of the native Muslim Palestinians and continued theft of their lands.
SREBRENICA: THE SACRIFICED BOSNIAN CHESS PAWN
By 1995 the war in Bosnia was fought to a standstill. The new imperialist-backed Croat-Bosniak alliance against the Serbs had produced no results. The pinprick NATO airstrikes against the Bosnian-Serb Army’s pieces of hardware that fired into the UN-designated “Safe Areas” achieved nothing especially after the Serbians scored a few hits shooting down several NATO aircraft and took “peacekeepers” hostage that thwarted further attacks. Something had to be done, and the “safe areas” was the key. These “safe areas” were a sick joke conjured up by the UN that was sold as protecting citizens and refugees in each area located deep inside Serbian-held Bosnia which the Bosniak forces managed to hold on to. They were manned UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) “peacekeepers” who could not fire unless fired upon. As long as the Serbs were firing on civilian targets, the “peacekeepers” would do nothing…a perfect remedy for imperialist divide and rule. The six UN “safe areas” were Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bihać, Goražde, Žepa, and Srebrenica.
Due to the imperialist support for the Izetbegović government, the Bosnian Army and Mujahideen were allowed to use the “safe areas” to replenish their forces with armaments and fresh recruits with which to attack Serbian forces including the massacre of villages or terrorizing Serb neighborhoods in these “safe areas.” For this reason, the Bosnian-Serb Army surrounded these six areas turning them into some of the deadliest in Bosnia. The one that would become most notorious for that is Srebrenica. The commander of Bosnian forces in Srebrenica was Sarajevo’s answer to Arkan, the Islamic reactionary Naser Orić. Just as thugs like Arkan used the sanctions against Serbia to enrich themselves on the black market while ordinary Serbians starved, Orić in Srebrenica had done the same with international aid meant for the besieged and starving Bosniak civilians. Clinton had been an ardent supporter Izetbegović from the beginning, and authorized covert support in violation of the UN arms embargo to the Bosnian forces including providing the transportation for al-Qaeda militants via C-130, the so-called “black flights.”
In early 1995, a large quantity of U.S-supplied weapons were dropped into the Srebrenica enclave for the Bosnian forces. In winter-spring 1995, Orić on orders from Izetbegović with his 5,000 strong army launched an all-out surprise attack on Serbian forces in the Srebrenica and Bratunac enclaves forcing them into retreat and leaving the Serb villages in the areas undefended. Between January 1993 and summer 1995 Orić had personally destroyed over 50 Serbian villages and murdered over 3,000 Serb civilians. In fact, on Orthodox Christmas Day 1993, Mujahideen under Orić massacred dozens of civilians in the Serb village of Kravica, while engaging in rape and pillage. The Bosnian-Serb Army regrouped and launched a counter-attack driving the Bosniak forces back to Srebrenica. Orić and his most important men were then evacuated from Srebrenica to Sarajevo leaving only a small defense force commanded the enclave’s police chief Hakija Meholjić and sacked Bosnian Army officer Maj. Huso Salihović to face the vengeful Chetniks.
Unbeknownst to the Srebrenica defenders and the tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the “safe area,” an agreement had been reached between Sarajevo and Pale, the capital of the Serbian Republic. Srebrenica would be given to the Serbs who in return would surrender several Sarajevo suburbs to allow Bosnian forces easier access to other Bosniak enclaves. Izetbegović knew very well what was going to happen when the Bosnian-Serb Army overran Srebrenica, and he would have his genocide that he can cry to the world over. He had an agreement with his buddy Clinton that if the Serbians can kill 5,000 plus Bosniaks, the American president could lead a NATO air war against the Bosnian-Serbs according to the Srebrenica delegation led by Meholjić when they met with Izetbegović. The existence of this deal was corroborated by former Bosnian soldier turned SDA politician Ibran Mustafić including his regarding their own people as expendable to achieve a NATO intervention on their behalf.
Also complicit in this rotten deal was Dutch social-democratic prime minister Wim Kok. In 1995, Srebrenica was monitored by about 450 lightly-armed Dutch UN troops ordered there by Kok. Just like Clinton, Kok was a liberal icon because he had been dovish peacenik who fervently opposed the Vietnam War and was involved in student strikes of the 1960’s. He later become a trade union leader and joining the Labour Party (Partij van de Arbeid) before becoming an imperialist politician representing the blood-soaked House of Orange. And like Clinton, Kok was a major proponent of imperialist “humanitarian” intervention in Bosnia against the Serbians.
On 6 July, the Bosnian-Serbs under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladić launched their offensive against Srebrenica. The shelling of the town from the hills caused the besieged civilians to seek protection from the Dutch “peacekeepers.” On 11 July the Serbians advanced they took 30 Dutch soldiers hostage after mopping up what was left of the Bosnian resistance taking Srebrenica that was left as a ghost town with the entire population encamped at the UN base. When the Dutch commander Lt. Col. Thom Karremans called in for NATO airstrikes, two of their F-16s destroyed two Serbian tanks that were left unmanned. Mladić threatened to kill the 30 Dutch troops he had and then fire on the UN base if anymore airstrikes followed, forcing NATO to halt their attacks. As the UN troops tried to leave, they were blocked in by desperate people thinking their presence would prevent the Serbs from seizing the entire enclave. A Bosnian lobbed a grenade at one of the UN APCs killing a Dutch soldier Raviv van Renssen causing the sympathy of the “peacekeepers” to evaporate who then sought dialogue with Mladić.
As the Serbians took Srebrenica, they separated the men and boys of fighting age from the women, children, sick, and elderly. The women and children were packed into buses and transported to other Bosniak areas by order of Mladić. The Serbians were aided in this by the Dutch “peacekeepers” which included exposing young males dressed as women by their mothers or girlfriends in vain attempts to save their lives. For the next ten days without any opposition from the Dutch “peacekeepers”, the men and boys of Srebrenica were massacred. Most were shot and dumped into mass graves. Some had believed they were to be taken as POWs, while others who knew better fled into the hills where they were pursued. A few managed to evade the Serb troops. More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys had been murdered. With Srebrenica emptied of its Bosniak population, Mladić then had the Serbs from the traded Sarajevo suburbs bused in to settle in what was a predominantly Bosniak enclave.
The three warring sides in Bosnia were all rotten to the core. But the most grotesque was the Bosnian government of Izetbegović who deliberately targeted Bosniak civilians by shelling and sniping and then blaming the Serbians via the imperialist press in an effort to provoke NATO into launching airstrikes against the Bosnian-Serbs. Srebrenica was deliberated sacrificed for that purpose. A fact that became more transparent that not even the “poor little Bosnia” journalists could ignore. One example is Croatian-American Chuck Sudetic in his 1998 book Blood and Vengeance where he not only acknowledged that many Bosniaks were killed in the infamous sniper allies by Bosnian snipers but describes the butchery that Bosnian troops and Mujahideen committed against Serb and Croat civilians. But Chuck Sudetic doesn’t hold back his apologies for Izetbegović, Orić, and the Sarajevo government claiming they had no control over these men.
When bureaucratic planning held up NATO airstrikes, on 28 August a mortar attack tore through a crowded Sarajevo market killing more than 40 Bosniak civilians and injuring nearly 100 others. The Serbians were immediately blamed. UN investigators concluded that the shells were fired from where both Bosniak and Serb troops were, and the guilty party was inconclusive. What with being vilified in the global media, the Bosnian-Serbs had nothing to gain from the shelling of civilians although they were certainly capable of it with their countless attacks against Croat and Bosniak civilians. Izetbegović and his government had everything to gain from crying to the world about facing genocide from the cannibalistic Serbian beast. With the whole Western world screaming for Serbian blood, a war-crazed American president anxious to intervene in Yugoslavia to stop a “genocide” and militarily enact the policy of the New World Order, the Bosnian-Serbs had the least to gain from such a monstrous attack and everything to lose.
Clinton wanted to lead a NATO war against the Serbian forces in Bosnia and Croatia as early as February 1994 after he forced Tudjman to make peace with Izetbegović and forge a Croat-Bosniak alliance with American support. However, the Russians stepped in on behalf of their Orthodox “little brothers” thwarting Clinton’s plans. The arrival of Russian UN “peacekeepers” to monitor the removal of Serbian weapons from around Sarajevo was greeted jubilantly by the Bosnian-Serbs. But it didn’t take long for the Serbs to realize that their Russian “big brothers” were present only to keep them inline in accordance with the demands of the imperialists. When the new Croat-Bosniak forces launched an offensive against the Serbs in Goražde, the Serbian counterattack beat the alliance back to the “safe area” which proved embarrassing to the Russians. Both Boris Yeltsin and his Balkan envoy Vitaly Churkin demanded the Serbs halt their attacks. The Russians gave their full endorsement of the NATO pinprick strikes, from the shooting down of four Serbian planes near Banja Luka to the attack on the Udbina airbase in Serbian Krajina.
Yeltsin carried out the counter-revolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, starved Soviet workers with free market shock treatment and was essentially an imperialist puppet. Therefore, the Russian role in Bosnia was to play the role of the “good cop” for the imperialists. As Yeltsin contributed to “peacekeeping” in Bosnia, in December 1994 he began his murderous campaign against the Chechen people on a much larger scale than Karadžić against the Bosniaks. The previous year, Yeltsin unleashed the tanks and troops against his own people nearly plunging Russia into civil war. As the widely cherished White Guard heir rained death and destruction on Chechnya, none of the imperialist leaders screaming for war against Serbia gave the slightest condemnation of Moscow. Clinton, Kok, Boutros-Ghali and the rest of the imperialists committed to preserving Russia’s “territorial integrity” refused to recognize Chechnya’s declaration of independence even after reports flooded the international media about atrocities and indiscriminate killings perpetrated by Russian forces who were for more brutal than their Serbian “little brothers.”
Meanwhile, in Serbia a combination of the imperialists’ starvation sanctions and growing conflicts with the Serb leaderships in Croatia and Bosnia, Milošević washed his hands of Karadžić as well as the Croatian-Serb leader Milan Martić. The Serbian strongman did nothing as the NATO-led Croatian Army drowned Serbian Krajina in blood cleansing the country of its entire Serb population from lands they lived in for centuries. At least 14,000 civilians were massacred. As a matter of fact, Milošević actually endorsed the attack. When Pavle, the then head of the Serbian Orthodox Church phoned Milošević demanding he respond to the offensive against the Krajina Serbs, the Serbian strongman responded, “Everything is going as planned.” The destruction of Serbian Krajina put the Bosnian-Serbs at a major disadvantage as they now had a freshly built and trained Croatian Army along the borders of the Serbian Republic in addition to the Croat-Bosniak alliance and the threat of NATO airstrikes acting as their air force.
On 30 August using the Sarajevo market shelling as a pretext in what was to be the imperialist alliance’s first combat operation in its history, NATO a massive terror bombing campaign against the Bosnian-Serb forces. Sold as a feigning of concern for the plight of besieged Bosniak and Croat civilians these airstrikes were meant to alter the balance of the multi-sided sectarian war in favor of the pro-imperialist Mujahideen-Ustasha alliance on the ground. The official objective was to force the Bosnian-Serbs to remove their weapons from around Sarajevo, but the reality is that the bombing was meant to give NATO’s clients on the ground the upper hand, thereby allowing the imperialists divide Bosnia in accordance to their plans. The Russians betrayed their Orthodox “little brothers” as both Yeltsin and Churkin gave their full endorsement to the NATO airstrikes. After three weeks of intense NATO airstrikes backed by naval Tomahawk cruise missiles from a U.S warship in the Adriatic Sea, the Serbian forces resisted as much as possible at the cost of much of their military hardware.
In fact, at one point NATO commanders became so frustrated that they demanded to be allowed to hit civilian targets as a means of forcing the Bosnian-Serbs to surrender. But it was from Belgrade that the force came to pressure the Bosnian-Serb leadership to capitulate. Karadžić was removed as leader, and Milošević took over as Pale’s representative in negotiating with NATO. Milošević ordered the Bosnian-Serbs to remove their weapons from around Sarajevo and comply with NATO demands as their airstrikes were called off on 20 September. About 25 Serbian soldiers had been killed by NATO, but their airstrikes had given the Croat-Bosniak alliance the advantage on the ground. Pushing the Serbian forces back, they took their wrath out on innocent Serbs killing hundreds of civilians causing a large exodus into both the eroding Serbian Republic and Serbia proper. But when the NATO airstrikes halted, the Croat-Bosniak alliance was forced to stop their attacks against the Serbs.
In Western Bosnia, the loss of Croatian support by the imperialist-brokered treaty was detrimental to its existence. Bosnian government forces overran the rebel republic killing many prisoners and civilians as traitors, while the Croats provided a corridor for Abdić and the Bosniak rebels to escape into Croatia. NATO airstrikes and the enlarged ground forces relieved much of the pressure on Sarajevo allowing them to overrun the rebel enclave. Tudjman, however, was not going to let his partner down. Izetbegović then made requests to Zagreb for Tudjman to extradite Abdić to face trumped up charges of “war crimes” that would become synonymous with the post-war imperialist domination of Bosnia.
DIVIDE AND RULE FINALIZED
The Dayton Accords was then signed in Ohio by Milošević, Tudjman, and Izetbegović ending the Bosnian War but agreeing on land swaps and creating ethnically pure areas divided by the same nationalisms that ignited the war. Hardly the peaceful multi-ethnic Bosnia the liberals claimed NATO and their peace-loving clients were trying to achieve, in fact it only set the stage for a future fratricidal war. In Mostar, the former capital of the Croatian Republic, the city remains segregated with Bosniaks on one side and Croats on the other divided by an old Turkish bridge. In gratitude Milošević cooperating with the imperialists they lifted the starvation sanctions, only to reinstate them 3 years later when the Kosovo War ignited. The Dayton Accords divided Bosnia-Herzegovina by two separate entities: a Bosnian Federation governed by Bosniaks and Croats and the Serbian Republic. The division remains to this day with Srebrenica ending up in the latter statelet. Bosnia’s presidency has since been a rotational triumvirate council (made up representatives of the Bosniak, Croat, and Serb communities) that is superseded by an imperialist viceroy, the High Representative, and true ruler of Bosnia that has been selected first by NATO, today the European Union.
The mediator for the Dayton Accords was Richard Holbrooke, who would build his “human rights” credentials on the imperialist domination of the Balkans beginning in Ohio. Holbrooke played a major role in the 1999 bombing of Serbia as well as the 2000 imperialist-backed coup that ousted Milošević. Holbrooke’s commitment to human rights was first demonstrated back in the late 70’s when he was assistant secretary of state for the Carter administration. Holbrooke had then been the overseer in charge of U.S support to Indonesia’s bloody dictator Gen. Muhammad Suharto as he waged his ethnic cleansing terror against ethnic-Chinese and the people of East Timor. When questioned of this by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Holbrooke brushed her off. Goodman had written about the incident in her 2004 book The Exception to the Rulers. As the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under Carter’s administration, Holbrooke was also responsible for U.S aid to Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge in their reactionary war against the Vietnamese and their Cambodian comrades.
The UN “peacekeepers” were replaced by two NATO “peacekeeping” missions: IFOR (Implementation Force) and later SFOR (Stabilization Force). NATO was replaced in 2004 by EUFOR (European Union Force) that remains in Bosnia to this day ensuring “peacekeeping”, i.e divide and rule. In fact, the only thing that flourished in Bosnia was the same thing that flourishes in every “peacekeeping” mission the imperialists undertake anywhere in the world. Not human rights, but human trafficking and sex slavery. Because UN personnel have immunity they cannot be prosecuted for rape and murder, and this privilege has allowed the “peacekeepers” to work with local gangs in trafficking young women including underage girls from Eastern Europe who were then raped and tortured by the “peacekeepers.” The woman who blew the whistle on the UN was an American police officer Kathryn Bolkovac who joined their police force for idealistic reasons for which she was dismissed from her post. The 2010 film The Whistleblower is based on Bolkovac who is played by Rachel Weisz. The 2004 Canadian miniseries Sex Traffic starring Wendy Crewson also deals with human trafficking by UN “peacekeepers” in Bosnia.
Despite NATO’s divide and conquer, the spirit of Brotherhood and Unity continues to live in the hearts of many people in Bosnia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia. In fact, just this last May amidst this global pandemic in Sarajevo, when a government-sanctioned public Catholic Mass was held in honor of the fallen soldiers of the murderous fascist Ustasha regime, thousands of Bosnians took to the streets and voiced their anger against the rotten mass being held at the Sacred Heart Cathedral. Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs marched together including elderly former Partisans, some held portraits of Tito and waved Yugoslav flags chanting anti-fascist slogans including Smrt Fašizmu! Sloboda Narodu! (Death to Fascism! Freedom to the People!) The protesters sang anti-fascist songs as well as the Yugoslav National Anthem and the Internationale. The Bosnian police being who they are prevented the protesters from approaching the Sacred Heart Cathedral protecting the fascist ceremony.
Unfortunately, there is no party in Bosnia or anywhere in the Balkans that can harness this spiritual Brotherhood and Unity and turn it into a revolutionary force that can oust the region’s mafia capitalist kleptocracies and their imperialist sponsors and educate people on the bankruptcy of Tito’s Stalinism. The left-wing parties throughout the former Yugoslavia are all rooted in Yugo-nostalgia, a political program of returning to the good old days ignoring that it was Tito’s misrule that laid the foundations for the capitalist counter-revolution. This exposure can be only accomplished by a Bolshevik party with an internationalist program that can foment a workers-led socialist revolution and create a workers democratic Balkan Socialist Federation as envisioned by early Balkan Marxists such as Kristo Rakovsky, Dušan Popović, and Dimitrije Tucović.
Clinton, Kok, and the other NATO heads along with the black African UN secretary-general Annan and the social-democratic NATO secretary-general Javier Solana flaunted “human rights” imperialism with the 1999 rape of Yugoslavia allegedly over the plight of the ethnic-Albanians. Primarily Serbia was bombed for three months nonstop killing over 5,000 people and reducing the country to a pre-industrial age. The outcome was the same as in Bosnia with the imperialists cementing divide and rule through walls and enforced separation but much firmer in Kosovo between the Albanian majority and the Serb minority. The Balkans were not the last example of imperialism’s profit-driven and leeching inability to create a prosperous and harmonious solution to any given geopolitical crisis. Why everyone the imperialists “help” always end up much worse than before they’re exposed to their cannibalistic “democracy.” When these countries don’t prosper, the imperialists and their mouthpieces to their usual chauvinistic slanders blaming the people for continuously electing kleptocracts and sectarians whom the imperialists employed as their henchman.
Unfortunately, it was only Kok whose “human rights” credentials would be tarnished by the Srebrenica skeletons in his closet. In 2002, Kok and his entire cabinet resigned in disgrace after a report commissioned by the Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies revealed Kok’s the in-depth involvement in allowing the Srebrenica massacre to transpire unopposed, and the aid provided by Dutchbat to the Serbs. Kok’s resignation was not out of any shame for allowing the largest massacre in Europe since World War II to happen, but rather to save the Dutch government from any public political retributions and keep imperialism’s face clean as they conducted their kangaroo court to prosecute Serbian “war criminals” while initially giving the Bosniaks and Croats who committed war crimes a free pass. To this day, neither Kok nor the Dutch government has never issued so much as an apology to the survivors and families of the Srebrenica massacre. As the Serbs were then main obstacle to imperialist interests in the region, the ICTY issued indictments to the Serbians above all. To feign impartiality indictments were also handed out to a few Bosniaks and Croats, most of whom only received a slap on the wrist at worst.
The first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was Canadian imperialist lawyer Louise Arbour. She eventually also headed the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda after initially refusing to investigate the genocide as a means of scratching French imperialism’s back. Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Middle East today have all proven that imperialist interventions and “solutions” have brought only misery and devastation, and ultimately laying the foundations for future conflicts. Many in the imperialist countries will write off these regions as primitive and uncivilized despite all the West’s best efforts to “civilize” (or as they say today to bring “democracy”) to them. When nations are dominated by an imperialist or regional power, and their local stooges are the only ones with any authority, these nations have little to no hope in gaining an era of peace and develop stability. This is why Bosnia remains divided, and why the Middle East remains deadlocked in endless wars.
Red October Goth 