SERBIA & YUGOSLAVIA

DIANA JOHNSTONE—In former Yugoslavia, and especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Western NGOs have found a justifying role for themselves alongside NATO. They gain funding and prestige from the situation. Local employees of Western NGOs gain political and financial advantages over other local people, and “democracy” is not the people’s choice but whatever meets with the approval of outside donors. This breeds arrogance among the outside benefactors, and cynicism among local people, who have the choice between opposing the outsiders or seeking to manipulate them. It is an unhealthy situation, and some of the most self-critical are aware of the dangers.

Perhaps the most effectively arrogant NGO in regard to former Yugoslavia is the Vienna office of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki. On September 18, 1997, that organization issued a long statement announcing in advance that the Serbian elections to be held three days later “will be neither free nor fair.”

Beginning with Belgrade, several Serbian cities saw big rallies in support of Russia’s campaign in Ukraine. For centuries the Serbian people, in peace and war, have felt close to the Russian people, and they too regard NATO an the US as a mutual enemy.

ANDREW KORYBKO—That said, while the arms trade between the two is excellent, Serbia nevertheless cooperates more closely with NATO than Russia ever since entering into the so-called “Partnership for Peace” framework in 2006. Furthermore, there are obvious limitations to what Russia could do to militarily support Serbia in practically any scenario, but the country’s patriotic masses are easily guided by ruling party-controlled media into exaggerating the importance of the Russian-Serbian Strategic Partnership and imagining that Moscow would directly intervene in the event of worsening clashes in Kosovo despite it remaining on the sidelines during the latest ones when even its own UN official there was attacked by the Albanians.

GAITEHR STEWART—The propaganda line was Milosevic conducted genocide in Kosovo. An enormous historical lie. President Milosevic and Serbia had to take the whole blame for the civil war. Serbia was excluded from its own Kosovo province and Milosevic was hauled off to the International Tribunal in The Hague and tried for war crimes … where he eventually died in his cell, at night. Enough to make you doubt all history books. If truth were the prime criterion, then most history books would have to be rewritten … Schopenhauer wrote back in 1851 that Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as is a street whore with syphilis.

STEFAN KARGANOVIC—The frightening thing is that the spiritual assassination of the Serbian people — because without its cultural cradle of Kosovo the nation is truly reduced to a zombified corpse — is being conducted without its input, awareness, or implicit, much less overt, consent. Of course, as in most contemporary “democracies”, the public’s consent for the resumption of the Kosovo talks, or for anything else of consequence for that matter, is entirely unnecessary.