[Thanks to the Congress of North American Bosniaks for this Press Release, Following is the text of an open letter; the original is here.]
Dr. Sharat G. Lin
President San Jose Peace and Justice Center
48 South 7th Street, Suite 101
San Jose, CA 95112
Protest letter on behalf of Congress of North American Bosniaks (CNAB), representing the interests of Bosnian American and Bosnian Canadian citizens, the Institute for Research Genocide, Canada (IGC), the Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (ACBH), Bosnian American Genocide Institute and Education Center (BAGI) as well as the Institute for Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Bosniak Cultural Association, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Dear Dr. Lin,
On behalf of survivors of the Genocide that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), we are deeply concerned with your decision to host Dr. Michael Parenti as a guest speaker for the May 31st fundraiser.[i] Dr. Parenti, a self-proclaimed “Balkan Revisionist” and author of To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia explicitly denies that genocide, systematic rape of women and girls and ethnic cleansing ever took place in BiH.
Dr. Parenti places the blame on Bosniaks for the Genocide in Srebrenica and other massacres that took place throughout the war of aggression on BiH. As a result of his denial, Dr. Parenti has publicly disregarded that approximately 50,000 Bosniak women were raped during the three year war of aggression on BiH.
The rapes were in fact used as an official Serb policy for ethnic cleansing. To this day, his outrageous claims have not been supported by internationally accepted evidence but only by other genocide deniers. His conspiracy theories are in direct conflict with the official rulings by the International Court of Justice, the International War Crimes Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, as well as various declarations from the United States Congress and the European Parliament. We acknowledge the importance of freedom of speech, however, falsifying facts and denying genocide is unacceptable and deeply traumatic for the survivors and their families who continue to suffer due to the physical and emotional trauma they underwent. Hundreds of thousands of Bosniaks who survived the genocide in BiH have made the United States and Canada their second home; most of them having lost someone as a result of genocide and aggression. Dr. Parenti uses his writing to purposely hurt those who have survived genocide, and having him attend this event will send the wrong message to all genocide survivors. In addition, it will send a message that San Jose Peace and Justice Center supports Parenti’s genocide denial. We hope that you will agree that having Dr. Parenti speak would be highly inappropriate and contrary to the mission of your organization which strives to promote peace and justice.
All genocide deniers directly undermine peace and justice because the only way to peace and reconciliation is to acknowledge the truth and punish those responsible. Dr. Parenti’s work and constant expression of denial is damaging to the healing process of the survivors of the genocide in BiH and we urge you to stand up for justice and truth and reject all affiliation with Dr. Parenti and his work.
Sincerely,
Haris Alibasic,
MPA President, Congress of North American Bosniaks (CNAB)
Professor Emir Ramic
Director, Institute for Research Genocide, Canada
Ajla Delkic, M.A. Executive Director, Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (ACBH)
Dr. Smail Cekic Director,
Institute for Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law, University of Sarajevo
Dr. Senadin Lavic President, Bosniak Cultural Association “Renaissance”, Sarajevo
Sanja Seferovic-Drnovsek, J.D., MEd
Director, Bosnian American Genocide Institute and Education Center
Showing posts with label Genocide Denial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Genocide Denial. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Balkan Revisionism meets Apocalyptic Christian Fundamentalism
One of these days, when I'm finished with graduate school and have more time to once again devote to this blog and Bosnia-related issues, one of the deeper questions/issues I'd like to dig into is to try and determine whether or not there is any cohesive ideological or psychological motivation behind the various, seemingly-incompatible strands of Balkan Revisionism and Bosnian Genocide Denial.
For now, though, I'll just pass along this piece of drivel I discovered, in which the theoretical basis for the Michael Parenti/Diana Johnstone post-Stalinist school of thought is embraced by Christian fundamentalist/prophetic end-of-times believers:
What Really Happened in Bosnia [Note: This is the title of the article, not my own take on the content--far from it].
It's the same nonsense we've all heard before, only this time is service to Rapture-believing right-wing Christian fundamentalists. The Z-magazine crowd must be so proud.
Sorry if you feel I'm wasting your time with this drivel, but I need to periodically touch base just to keep this blog on life support until I once again have the time to do more substantive work. Hope my regular readers are all fine.
For now, though, I'll just pass along this piece of drivel I discovered, in which the theoretical basis for the Michael Parenti/Diana Johnstone post-Stalinist school of thought is embraced by Christian fundamentalist/prophetic end-of-times believers:
What Really Happened in Bosnia [Note: This is the title of the article, not my own take on the content--far from it].
It's the same nonsense we've all heard before, only this time is service to Rapture-believing right-wing Christian fundamentalists. The Z-magazine crowd must be so proud.
Sorry if you feel I'm wasting your time with this drivel, but I need to periodically touch base just to keep this blog on life support until I once again have the time to do more substantive work. Hope my regular readers are all fine.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Diana Johnstone Shows Her Cards
In the comments section of this post on this blog, an anonymous poster passed along the following link:
"Why the French Hate Chomsky" By DIANA JOHNSTONE"; he or she also suggested that "I think some of her criticism is driven by emotional issues." I rather glibly agreed with him/her, intending only to suggest that her "analysis" is neither honest nor serious.
Frequent reader Owen countered, quite rightly, that there is nothing "emotional" about this latest screed from the well-known genocide denier; her work on such issues is rather deliberate and self-aware. As I noted several times in my lengthy deconstruction of her truly awful work on the Bosnian War, Johnstone clearly knows enough about the facts and information which would obliterate her painstakingly crafted arguments to avoid them completely; nobody can negotiate the minefield of contrary information and eyewitness testimony as successfully as she does if they are actually unaware of those inconvenient complications. Johnstone knows what she is doing.
But what, exactly, is it that she is doing? This rambling, open letter-turned-editorial screed doesn't address Bosnia except in passing, but it does reveal some of the larger ideological agenda that Johnstone and other advocates of a Red-Brown/anti-liberal democracy coalition are crafting. I no longer believe that these people are unconsciously stumbling into the embrace of petty fascists such as Hamas and the Serbian Radical Party; Johnstone, Chomsky, and others have concluded that the far right are their best allies in a fight to undermine the liberal order. Johnstone set out merely to scold the French media and intelligensia for being insufficiently deferential to Chomsky, but the scope of this open letter soon widens greatly. In order to make her case that Chomsky was a "victim" of a concerted Western ideological campaign to discredit him, she chooses to elaborate what the ideological underpinings of this supposed campaign are.
First off, though, the obvious needs to be stated--Johnstone is a terrible writer. She veers between addressing Chomsky directly ("Dear Noam"; "to see you in person") to referring to him in third person ("deep geopolitical significance that Chomsky has") in the same paragraph! Of course, the reasons why Johnstone is such a poor writer are easy enough to ascertain--good writing is clear writing, and clear writing is a product of clear thinking, a reasonable mastery of the subject material, and most of all of intellectual honesty. Johnstone seeks not to illuminate but to obscure and obfusticate; she does so through tortured logic, selective use of decontextualized facts, and a disingenuous misrepresentation of opposing viewpoints and contrary information. If she were a more effective demagogue or a crudely emotional populist, she might be able to somewhat transcend the feeble foundations of her arguments, but Johnstone is a drearily pedestrian propagandist and therefore her rhetoric is thoroughly hampered by her decision to dissemble, deceive, and mislead. She cannot write clearly because her ideas would not withstand the scrutiny which direct presentation would subject them to.
But while Johnstone cannot bluntly state the collectivist/anti-liberal ideology she espouses without setting off alarm bells, it's all there in this letter. And not by accident--Johnstone has rather neatly laid out the underlying rationale for the far-Left embrace of, and advocacy for, genocide denial.
Her assertion that the "the animosity you have aroused in certain circles in France may have less to do with linguistics than with your role as the most prominent American critic of US foreign policy" might be attempt at humor, but is also a neat summation of how Johnstone, Chomsky, and their comrades deflect any and all criticism of their ridiculous claims and dissembling--by dismissing all specific criticism of specifics as merely general attacks on the general idea of a critique at all. Chomsky, in other words, is not attacked for supporting Hamas, or the Khmer Rouge, or for making any of his many inaccurate, misleading, and/or dishonest statements about American foreign policy and history--no, all attacks on him are clearly simply a reaction to his status as a critic of American foreign policy, period. Of course, Johnstone is a little too shrewd to actually say that; but this standard defense gets used with such regularity, there is little need to give her the benefit of the doubt.
The rest of the paragraph after the above quote is worth noting:
"My own opinion is that this role as virtual symbol of systematic moral criticism of American foreign policy is the fundamental cause of the campaign against you that began over thirty years ago. To my mind the uproar first over Cambodia and then over the defense of Professor Robert Faurisson’s right to express his views freely was essentially a means to the end of discrediting the leading American critic of United States imperialism."
And there we have it--there is a "campaign" against Noam Chomsky, and the issues at the core concern his statements on the genocide of the Khmer Rouge and the Holocaust denial of Robert Faurisson. Fine--at least she does not ignore the elephant in the middle of the room. So what to make of this?
First, though, Johnstone needs "to put this argument in context". No doubt. The context, then, is the Cold War--specifically, American hegemony over the West during that period. Johnstone is not entirely incorrect to describe Europe at this time as being split between "the two victorious nations" (United States and USSR), but her analysis seems to reduce the situation to nothing but a division of spoils, with nothing to choose between the two. Citizens who lived under the two different systems might beg to differ with that.
But that is another issue. What is of interest here is how Johnstone, as she so often does, dresses a simplistic dichotomy up in the guise of nuanced, sophisticated analysis. Not very well, but she tries--French intellectuals were split between the elite who were secretly anti-American and the more pubilc (and presumably less qualified) intellectuals who were either pro-American or, as she prefers, "anti-French."
That is really the crux of the matter--Johnstone is truly a statist and a collectivist, who can only conceive of people as being part of a group of some kind. What "French interests" are or might be is something she doesn't feel needs to be be addressed. What is important to her is that far too many of these French intellectuals don't feel that they need to be lectured to by Noam Chomsky; the reason for this, as it turns out, is that "Chomsky's criticism is laden with facts", a statement as bland as it is questionable. But she runs with this idea for a full paragraph; it is striking how self-evident she believes this to be. Chomsky deals in a large volume of facts and clear analysis--evidently this is not up for discussion. If you disagree with Noam Chomsky or object to his general critiques, then you are clearly uncomfortable with facts and clear thinking. End of discussion.
It is quite tiresome to follow her plodding thought process by which she repeats Chomsky's standard defense of his activity on behalf of the Khmer Rogue and Robert Faurisson's Holocaust denial--that his activities did not constitute support for either, but rather for the rather vague notion of "free speech." This allows her to avoid the necessity to clearly state what she or Chomsky actually think about either "issue"; the notion that there is any validity to the charges in question is simply irrelvent to her. Yet she goes on to speak of the Holocaust ("Shoah myth" as she soon comes to refer to it as) as "dogma."
Now, I have serious objections to laws which criminalize such garbage as genocide denial, and if that was truly all that Chomsky and Johnstone are concerned with, there would be no argument. But that has never been the case; neither one of them has ever had the moral honesty to discriminate between Faurisson's right to spread his dishonest filth versus the legitimacy of his claims, which are of course complete nonsense.
Johnstone moves right along to the larger claim that the "Shoah cult" has had a sinister effect:
"Initially, Nazi crimes were taught as contrary to humanity in general, but as identification of victims has been increasingly centered on Jews, the effect is to implicitly divide school children between potential victims, namely the Jews, and everyone else, whose innocence is less assured."
This is complete garbage; the Holocaust was an actual historic event which actually happened at a certain time and place, and was carried out by actual people against actual people; it was not an abstraction which imposes a template on all people at all places and times.
Johnstone, however, assures the reader that this very template is now applied to situations which, she states without explanation, do not qualify as "genocide" (where have seen from the review of "Fools' Crusade" that Johnstone is in no position to lecture anyone on the meaning of the term). And yes, one of those places was Bosnia, where the Muslims eagerly accepted the role of "Victim" in order to play the proper role in order to curry American favor. Srebrenica, it turns out, was nothing more than a shrewd act of foreign policy.
There is really nothing more to be said. The rest of the article treats Chomsky's visit as if it were an event of immense geopolitical significance; Johnstone seems genuinely mystified that the entire French media didn't simply turn over their cameras and microphones to the cranky America-hating linguist to let him lecture the entire nation. As for her argument tying the Cold War to her implication that "genocide" is little more than an ideological tool by the West to divide and conquer the rest of the world, all that remains to note is this--many have noted that Bosnian genocide denial is incredibly similar to Holocaust denial. Yet it is no coincidence that so many of the people involved in the the former have also dabbled in the latter. Bosnian genocide denial is not, as it turns out, like Holocaust denial--it is Holocaust denial. We can thank Diana Johnstone for spelling that out.
"Why the French Hate Chomsky" By DIANA JOHNSTONE"; he or she also suggested that "I think some of her criticism is driven by emotional issues." I rather glibly agreed with him/her, intending only to suggest that her "analysis" is neither honest nor serious.
Frequent reader Owen countered, quite rightly, that there is nothing "emotional" about this latest screed from the well-known genocide denier; her work on such issues is rather deliberate and self-aware. As I noted several times in my lengthy deconstruction of her truly awful work on the Bosnian War, Johnstone clearly knows enough about the facts and information which would obliterate her painstakingly crafted arguments to avoid them completely; nobody can negotiate the minefield of contrary information and eyewitness testimony as successfully as she does if they are actually unaware of those inconvenient complications. Johnstone knows what she is doing.
But what, exactly, is it that she is doing? This rambling, open letter-turned-editorial screed doesn't address Bosnia except in passing, but it does reveal some of the larger ideological agenda that Johnstone and other advocates of a Red-Brown/anti-liberal democracy coalition are crafting. I no longer believe that these people are unconsciously stumbling into the embrace of petty fascists such as Hamas and the Serbian Radical Party; Johnstone, Chomsky, and others have concluded that the far right are their best allies in a fight to undermine the liberal order. Johnstone set out merely to scold the French media and intelligensia for being insufficiently deferential to Chomsky, but the scope of this open letter soon widens greatly. In order to make her case that Chomsky was a "victim" of a concerted Western ideological campaign to discredit him, she chooses to elaborate what the ideological underpinings of this supposed campaign are.
First off, though, the obvious needs to be stated--Johnstone is a terrible writer. She veers between addressing Chomsky directly ("Dear Noam"; "to see you in person") to referring to him in third person ("deep geopolitical significance that Chomsky has") in the same paragraph! Of course, the reasons why Johnstone is such a poor writer are easy enough to ascertain--good writing is clear writing, and clear writing is a product of clear thinking, a reasonable mastery of the subject material, and most of all of intellectual honesty. Johnstone seeks not to illuminate but to obscure and obfusticate; she does so through tortured logic, selective use of decontextualized facts, and a disingenuous misrepresentation of opposing viewpoints and contrary information. If she were a more effective demagogue or a crudely emotional populist, she might be able to somewhat transcend the feeble foundations of her arguments, but Johnstone is a drearily pedestrian propagandist and therefore her rhetoric is thoroughly hampered by her decision to dissemble, deceive, and mislead. She cannot write clearly because her ideas would not withstand the scrutiny which direct presentation would subject them to.
But while Johnstone cannot bluntly state the collectivist/anti-liberal ideology she espouses without setting off alarm bells, it's all there in this letter. And not by accident--Johnstone has rather neatly laid out the underlying rationale for the far-Left embrace of, and advocacy for, genocide denial.
Her assertion that the "the animosity you have aroused in certain circles in France may have less to do with linguistics than with your role as the most prominent American critic of US foreign policy" might be attempt at humor, but is also a neat summation of how Johnstone, Chomsky, and their comrades deflect any and all criticism of their ridiculous claims and dissembling--by dismissing all specific criticism of specifics as merely general attacks on the general idea of a critique at all. Chomsky, in other words, is not attacked for supporting Hamas, or the Khmer Rouge, or for making any of his many inaccurate, misleading, and/or dishonest statements about American foreign policy and history--no, all attacks on him are clearly simply a reaction to his status as a critic of American foreign policy, period. Of course, Johnstone is a little too shrewd to actually say that; but this standard defense gets used with such regularity, there is little need to give her the benefit of the doubt.
The rest of the paragraph after the above quote is worth noting:
"My own opinion is that this role as virtual symbol of systematic moral criticism of American foreign policy is the fundamental cause of the campaign against you that began over thirty years ago. To my mind the uproar first over Cambodia and then over the defense of Professor Robert Faurisson’s right to express his views freely was essentially a means to the end of discrediting the leading American critic of United States imperialism."
And there we have it--there is a "campaign" against Noam Chomsky, and the issues at the core concern his statements on the genocide of the Khmer Rouge and the Holocaust denial of Robert Faurisson. Fine--at least she does not ignore the elephant in the middle of the room. So what to make of this?
First, though, Johnstone needs "to put this argument in context". No doubt. The context, then, is the Cold War--specifically, American hegemony over the West during that period. Johnstone is not entirely incorrect to describe Europe at this time as being split between "the two victorious nations" (United States and USSR), but her analysis seems to reduce the situation to nothing but a division of spoils, with nothing to choose between the two. Citizens who lived under the two different systems might beg to differ with that.
But that is another issue. What is of interest here is how Johnstone, as she so often does, dresses a simplistic dichotomy up in the guise of nuanced, sophisticated analysis. Not very well, but she tries--French intellectuals were split between the elite who were secretly anti-American and the more pubilc (and presumably less qualified) intellectuals who were either pro-American or, as she prefers, "anti-French."
That is really the crux of the matter--Johnstone is truly a statist and a collectivist, who can only conceive of people as being part of a group of some kind. What "French interests" are or might be is something she doesn't feel needs to be be addressed. What is important to her is that far too many of these French intellectuals don't feel that they need to be lectured to by Noam Chomsky; the reason for this, as it turns out, is that "Chomsky's criticism is laden with facts", a statement as bland as it is questionable. But she runs with this idea for a full paragraph; it is striking how self-evident she believes this to be. Chomsky deals in a large volume of facts and clear analysis--evidently this is not up for discussion. If you disagree with Noam Chomsky or object to his general critiques, then you are clearly uncomfortable with facts and clear thinking. End of discussion.
It is quite tiresome to follow her plodding thought process by which she repeats Chomsky's standard defense of his activity on behalf of the Khmer Rogue and Robert Faurisson's Holocaust denial--that his activities did not constitute support for either, but rather for the rather vague notion of "free speech." This allows her to avoid the necessity to clearly state what she or Chomsky actually think about either "issue"; the notion that there is any validity to the charges in question is simply irrelvent to her. Yet she goes on to speak of the Holocaust ("Shoah myth" as she soon comes to refer to it as) as "dogma."
Now, I have serious objections to laws which criminalize such garbage as genocide denial, and if that was truly all that Chomsky and Johnstone are concerned with, there would be no argument. But that has never been the case; neither one of them has ever had the moral honesty to discriminate between Faurisson's right to spread his dishonest filth versus the legitimacy of his claims, which are of course complete nonsense.
Johnstone moves right along to the larger claim that the "Shoah cult" has had a sinister effect:
"Initially, Nazi crimes were taught as contrary to humanity in general, but as identification of victims has been increasingly centered on Jews, the effect is to implicitly divide school children between potential victims, namely the Jews, and everyone else, whose innocence is less assured."
This is complete garbage; the Holocaust was an actual historic event which actually happened at a certain time and place, and was carried out by actual people against actual people; it was not an abstraction which imposes a template on all people at all places and times.
Johnstone, however, assures the reader that this very template is now applied to situations which, she states without explanation, do not qualify as "genocide" (where have seen from the review of "Fools' Crusade" that Johnstone is in no position to lecture anyone on the meaning of the term). And yes, one of those places was Bosnia, where the Muslims eagerly accepted the role of "Victim" in order to play the proper role in order to curry American favor. Srebrenica, it turns out, was nothing more than a shrewd act of foreign policy.
There is really nothing more to be said. The rest of the article treats Chomsky's visit as if it were an event of immense geopolitical significance; Johnstone seems genuinely mystified that the entire French media didn't simply turn over their cameras and microphones to the cranky America-hating linguist to let him lecture the entire nation. As for her argument tying the Cold War to her implication that "genocide" is little more than an ideological tool by the West to divide and conquer the rest of the world, all that remains to note is this--many have noted that Bosnian genocide denial is incredibly similar to Holocaust denial. Yet it is no coincidence that so many of the people involved in the the former have also dabbled in the latter. Bosnian genocide denial is not, as it turns out, like Holocaust denial--it is Holocaust denial. We can thank Diana Johnstone for spelling that out.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Fantastic Critique of Diana Johnstone's Dishonesty
I highly encourage my readers to check out the following article from the New Left Review by Jasmin Mujanovic:
A Fool’s Account: Diana Johnstone, Yugoslavia and Her Delusion
In the comments section below the article, Muhanovic publishes a response from Johnstone; it is typically incoherent and borderline racist Muslim-baiting, and little else. Johnstone has long since abondoned any pretense of being open to easily verified information and well-documented fact, and so her response almost feels perfunctory. She will keep repeating the same tired lies over and over again in defiance of contrary information, or reality itself.
Mujanovic's reply to this rebuttal ends with this bold, clear statement:
"I invite Ms. Johnstone to detail her vision for the Bosnian people. As it stands right now, readers understand her as an active genocide-denier and continued supporter of an apartheid regime which has institutionalized in Bosnia a system of discrimination, revisionism, racism and, most of all, dispossession. I would certainly hope that she has more to offer the Bosnians than the provisions for comfort of their persecutors, exterminators and plunderers."
This gets at the heart of Johnstone's nihilism, and the ammorality of all Balkan revisionists. They have no positive vision for the region, no genuine committment to furthering peace, stability, and justice in the region. Her vision, and that of Michael Parenti and others, is all negative--they know what they don't like, and they seek to fit reality to fit that vision. The fate of the actual people who are the theoretical subjects of their intellectual exercise is of no concern to them.
A Fool’s Account: Diana Johnstone, Yugoslavia and Her Delusion
In the comments section below the article, Muhanovic publishes a response from Johnstone; it is typically incoherent and borderline racist Muslim-baiting, and little else. Johnstone has long since abondoned any pretense of being open to easily verified information and well-documented fact, and so her response almost feels perfunctory. She will keep repeating the same tired lies over and over again in defiance of contrary information, or reality itself.
Mujanovic's reply to this rebuttal ends with this bold, clear statement:
"I invite Ms. Johnstone to detail her vision for the Bosnian people. As it stands right now, readers understand her as an active genocide-denier and continued supporter of an apartheid regime which has institutionalized in Bosnia a system of discrimination, revisionism, racism and, most of all, dispossession. I would certainly hope that she has more to offer the Bosnians than the provisions for comfort of their persecutors, exterminators and plunderers."
This gets at the heart of Johnstone's nihilism, and the ammorality of all Balkan revisionists. They have no positive vision for the region, no genuine committment to furthering peace, stability, and justice in the region. Her vision, and that of Michael Parenti and others, is all negative--they know what they don't like, and they seek to fit reality to fit that vision. The fate of the actual people who are the theoretical subjects of their intellectual exercise is of no concern to them.
Monday, January 11, 2010
"Listening to Grasshoppers" by Arundhati Roy
The newest book from author Arundhati Roy is a collection of essays entitled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, a collection of essays on the political situation in her native India. The book is not directly concerned with Bosnia at all, nor has Roy herself had much to say on the subject; although I believe she did sign at least one petition in support of Slobodan Milosevic.
However, the essay "Listening to Grasshoppers" is of some interest here because it seems to be part of the larger campaign being waged by the anti-Western reactionaries of the far Left to redefine "genocide" in such a way as to make the term almost meaningless; at which point, of course, charges related to "genocide" would no longer be a viable tool of any agencies of international justice. Something petty tyrants and non-Western authoritarian regimes worldwide would welcome.
The first four pages of this essay concern Hrant Dink, who was murdered in Istanbul after being demonized by the Turkish courts for the "crime" of bringing up the genocide against the Armenians during World War I. This section is deeply felt and righteously moving. It acknowledges the reality of the Armenian genocide, the sinister consequences of continued Turkish denial, and is devoid of any of the sterile, amoral legalisms that Balkan revisionists like Parenti and Johnstone rely on.
Alas, things shortly turn sour. The next section starts off fine, with a consideration of the 2002 genocide against the Muslims of Gujarat. Roy immediately points out that labeling this atrocity as a genocide is in line with Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. She notes that the number killed is small compared to the numbers killed in the Congo, Rwanda, and (yes) Bosnia. She reiterates what Article 2 says, after noting that the term genocide was only defined in the mid-20th Century.
But then she begins to shift things. At first, this shift seems quite reasonable--she points out that the legal definition for genocide leaves out the "persecution of political dissidents". This is true. She argues that the definition given by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn is better:
"...a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator."
I have not read their book The History and Sociology of Genocide so I will hold off on making any judgment on this brief definition for now--although it does strike me as problematic, but not necessarily fatally so. She immediately moves on to suggest that extermination, as crude as it is, might be the better term. There is some validity to this, given the necessity of dehumanizing the victim group by the perpetrators of genocide prior to the actual campaign of genocide. But I fear she is moving the goalposts.
She then abruptly switches gears by bringing up genocide denial--and then immediately stating that genocide denial is
"...a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the nineteenth century, when Europe was developing limited by new forms of democracy and citizen's rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies."
And right there, in that jarring transition, she has suddenly completed her redefinition of the notion of genocide to simply mean any massive loss of life within one or more oppressed group(s). The notion of intent is suddenly absent. Genocide is now simply the worst-case scenario of racist colonization gone wrong.
The essay gets more bizarre:
"Of course, today, when genocide politics meets the free market, official recognition--or denial--of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do with historical fact or forensic evidence."
This remarkably brazen statement is backed up with nothing...nothing other than that Diana Johnstone-esque "Of course" at the beginning. But one must remember--this is an Arundhati Roy book, and if one is looking for war crimes one never need look farther than the United States.
In short--the absolutely horrifying and unjustifiable consequences of the American-led sanctions and no-fly zones against Iraq are now to be considered a "genocide", even though the intention of the (grossly misguided) American policy was not to eliminate or destroy the Iraqi people. It's worth noting that Roy felt the US-led invasion of Iraq was also a war crime--apparently, nothing short of leaving the Iraqi people to the continued mercies of the Baathist regime would suit her.
The horror of American slavery was also a "genocide" because so many died and so many cultures were disrupted--never mind that genocide was not the intention. The same with the "holocaust" against American Indians, as if the initial death of most of them from exposure to disease was a result of conscious, deliberate policy. These were human tragedies and cover a multitude of sins, atrocities, and human rights abuses. But if such events as these--and even the invasion of Mexico in 1848--are "genocides", then the term has no meaning.
But that is not so bad; the USA certainly has a great historical burden to deal with and if a lone writer wishes to stretch that point I won't complain overmuch. But she takes this argument too far when she goes on to claim that there is a world ranking of genocides, in which victims are ranked as "worthy" or "unworthy." She implies that there is something wrong with the Holocaust of the Jews being "number one" in this hypothetical world ranking (there are no footnotes to refer to; as a former fiction writer perhaps she feels that such prosaic devices are an ugly intrusion). She slyly points out that there were non-Jewish victims in the Holocaust as well, victims who receive less attention and validation. This on the heels of a paragraph in which she seems to hint that Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories amount to genocide--a charge I would hotly deny, even though I believe Israel's occupation, de facto annexation, and continued colonization of Arab Palestine is wrong.
And so on. She eventually returns to recent Indian events in the second half of the essay, and one wonders what the purpose of this digression was. But this is a woman who at least tacitly supported the organization working to free and exonerate Slobodan Milosevic. Like all far Left allies of the Balkan Revisionist project, she implicitly acknowledges in order for international justice to be meaningful, there must be some party able to hold war criminals accountable. Like many in her camp, Roy preaches international justice even while seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the admittedly quite imperfect institutions and national powers capable of enforcing it, however haphazardly.
However, the essay "Listening to Grasshoppers" is of some interest here because it seems to be part of the larger campaign being waged by the anti-Western reactionaries of the far Left to redefine "genocide" in such a way as to make the term almost meaningless; at which point, of course, charges related to "genocide" would no longer be a viable tool of any agencies of international justice. Something petty tyrants and non-Western authoritarian regimes worldwide would welcome.
The first four pages of this essay concern Hrant Dink, who was murdered in Istanbul after being demonized by the Turkish courts for the "crime" of bringing up the genocide against the Armenians during World War I. This section is deeply felt and righteously moving. It acknowledges the reality of the Armenian genocide, the sinister consequences of continued Turkish denial, and is devoid of any of the sterile, amoral legalisms that Balkan revisionists like Parenti and Johnstone rely on.
Alas, things shortly turn sour. The next section starts off fine, with a consideration of the 2002 genocide against the Muslims of Gujarat. Roy immediately points out that labeling this atrocity as a genocide is in line with Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. She notes that the number killed is small compared to the numbers killed in the Congo, Rwanda, and (yes) Bosnia. She reiterates what Article 2 says, after noting that the term genocide was only defined in the mid-20th Century.
But then she begins to shift things. At first, this shift seems quite reasonable--she points out that the legal definition for genocide leaves out the "persecution of political dissidents". This is true. She argues that the definition given by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn is better:
"...a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator."
I have not read their book The History and Sociology of Genocide so I will hold off on making any judgment on this brief definition for now--although it does strike me as problematic, but not necessarily fatally so. She immediately moves on to suggest that extermination, as crude as it is, might be the better term. There is some validity to this, given the necessity of dehumanizing the victim group by the perpetrators of genocide prior to the actual campaign of genocide. But I fear she is moving the goalposts.
She then abruptly switches gears by bringing up genocide denial--and then immediately stating that genocide denial is
"...a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the nineteenth century, when Europe was developing limited by new forms of democracy and citizen's rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies."
And right there, in that jarring transition, she has suddenly completed her redefinition of the notion of genocide to simply mean any massive loss of life within one or more oppressed group(s). The notion of intent is suddenly absent. Genocide is now simply the worst-case scenario of racist colonization gone wrong.
The essay gets more bizarre:
"Of course, today, when genocide politics meets the free market, official recognition--or denial--of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do with historical fact or forensic evidence."
This remarkably brazen statement is backed up with nothing...nothing other than that Diana Johnstone-esque "Of course" at the beginning. But one must remember--this is an Arundhati Roy book, and if one is looking for war crimes one never need look farther than the United States.
In short--the absolutely horrifying and unjustifiable consequences of the American-led sanctions and no-fly zones against Iraq are now to be considered a "genocide", even though the intention of the (grossly misguided) American policy was not to eliminate or destroy the Iraqi people. It's worth noting that Roy felt the US-led invasion of Iraq was also a war crime--apparently, nothing short of leaving the Iraqi people to the continued mercies of the Baathist regime would suit her.
The horror of American slavery was also a "genocide" because so many died and so many cultures were disrupted--never mind that genocide was not the intention. The same with the "holocaust" against American Indians, as if the initial death of most of them from exposure to disease was a result of conscious, deliberate policy. These were human tragedies and cover a multitude of sins, atrocities, and human rights abuses. But if such events as these--and even the invasion of Mexico in 1848--are "genocides", then the term has no meaning.
But that is not so bad; the USA certainly has a great historical burden to deal with and if a lone writer wishes to stretch that point I won't complain overmuch. But she takes this argument too far when she goes on to claim that there is a world ranking of genocides, in which victims are ranked as "worthy" or "unworthy." She implies that there is something wrong with the Holocaust of the Jews being "number one" in this hypothetical world ranking (there are no footnotes to refer to; as a former fiction writer perhaps she feels that such prosaic devices are an ugly intrusion). She slyly points out that there were non-Jewish victims in the Holocaust as well, victims who receive less attention and validation. This on the heels of a paragraph in which she seems to hint that Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories amount to genocide--a charge I would hotly deny, even though I believe Israel's occupation, de facto annexation, and continued colonization of Arab Palestine is wrong.
And so on. She eventually returns to recent Indian events in the second half of the essay, and one wonders what the purpose of this digression was. But this is a woman who at least tacitly supported the organization working to free and exonerate Slobodan Milosevic. Like all far Left allies of the Balkan Revisionist project, she implicitly acknowledges in order for international justice to be meaningful, there must be some party able to hold war criminals accountable. Like many in her camp, Roy preaches international justice even while seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the admittedly quite imperfect institutions and national powers capable of enforcing it, however haphazardly.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Society for Threatened Peoples International Open Letter to Noam Chomsky and Amnesty International
OPEN LETTER
To Noam Chomsky and Amnesty International (AI)
On the occasion of the Annual Amnesty International Lecture being given today,
Friday, in Belfast
Göttingen/Belfast, 30 October 2009
You are a genocide denier, Professor Chomsky!
Dear Professor Chomsky,
Dear Friends of Amnesty International,
Once again you find yourself invited to appear in a public forum, this time in Belfast. In the past, Belfast was a city with a long-standing reputation for discrimination against the Catholic population, but today those of us who are familiar with the city’s past history of conflict, crime and disorder are pleased and relieved that the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland have finally emerged from a long dark tunnel.
The focus of our human rights organisation’s work is the support that we give to minority groups who have been the victims of genocide and dispossession. The two guiding principles inspiring us are that firstly we work with the people "Von denen keiner spricht" - the people no-one talks about, and secondly we are "Auf keinem Auge blind" - never turning a blind eye. We believe that "persecution, extermination and expulsion, the establishment of concentration camps and rape camps are always and everywhere crimes, now just as they were in the past. Irrespective of which government is responsible and on which continent and in which country those crimes are being perpetrated. The legacy bequeathed to us by all the victims of yesterday is an obligation to come to the assistance of the victims of today".
You, Professor Chomsky, choose to ignore those precepts. You call genocide genocide when it suits your ideological purposes. Who could condone the murkier aspects of American foreign policy or fail to condemn the way that policy has supported and encouraged crimes against humanity? But you express your criticism of the crimes of the recent past in a perverse way, that makes genocide the almost exclusive prerogative of organisations with close links to the US. It is only then that you consider it to be genocide. And it is only your political/ideological friends who are apparently incapable of committing genocide.
That was the situation in Cambodia. While the international press was reporting how the genocide of the Khmer Rouge had eliminated one in every three or four of
that country‘s inhabitants, you were laying the blame for those crimes at the door of
the US. That was shameful and in any reasonable person stirred memories of
Holocaust denial elsewhere in the world.
In the same way you have denied the genocide perpetrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina by Serb forces who killed not only Bosnian Muslims but along with them Bosnian Serbs and Croats as well who had chosen to remain alongside them, in the besieged city of Sarajevo for example.
To deny the fact of genocide in Bosnia is absurd, particularly when both the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and the International Court of Justice, also in The Hague, have had no hesitation in confirming that that genocide was perpetrated in Bosnia, above all at Srebrenica.
For the benefit of the apparently unpolitical and ideologically uncommitted Friends of Amnesty International we are prepared once again to provide a summary of the facts of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And we should like to remind you of them, too, Professor Chomsky, in your denial of genocide:
1. 200,000 civilians interned in over one hundred concentration, detention and rape camps.
2. Many thousands of internees murdered in concentration camps including Omarska, Manjača, Keraterm, Trnopolje, Luka Brčko, Sušica and Foča.
3. Members of the non-Serb political and intellectual elites systematically arrested and eliminated.
4. Approximately 2.2 million Bosnians displaced, exiled and scattered to the four corners of the globe.
5. Many thousands of unrecorded deaths still missing from the official statistics, including children, the elderly and sick and wounded refugees.
6. 500,000 Bosnians in five UN so-called “safe areas” (Tuzla, Goražde, Srebrenica, Žepa, and Bihać) and other, fallen, enclaves such as Cerska besieged, starved, sniped at, shelled and many of them killed over a period of as long as four years in some cases.
7. A four year-long artillery bombardment of the sixth UN safe area, the city of Sarajevo, killing approximately 11,000, including 1500 children.
8. Massacres and mass executions in many towns and municipalities in northern, western and eastern Bosnia (the Posavina, the Prijedor area and the Podrinje).
9. Hundreds of villages and urban areas systematically destroyed.
10. The entire heritage of Islamic religious and cultural monuments, including 1189 mosques and madrassas, destroyed, and extensive destruction of Catholic religious monuments including as many as 500 churches and religious houses.
11. Remains of approximately 15,000 missing victims still to be found, exhumed and identified.
12. 284 UN soldiers taken hostage and used as human shields.
13. Over 20 thousand Bosnian Muslim women raped, in rape camps and elsewhere.
14. 8376 men and boys from the town of Srebrenica murdered and their bodies concealed in mass graves.
The history of Kosovo is familiar to people who know Southeastern Europe: After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Kosovo was annexed to the Serb-dominated Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenes (1918). Following the original occupation and then again in the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s Yugoslavian and Serbian governments expelled the Albanians to Turkey where well over one million people of Albanian origin live today. After the gradual dismantling of Kosovo's autonomy, proclaimed too late by Tito, Slobodan Milosevic's army and militia killed some 10,000 Albanians and forced half the population – roughly one million people - to flee. The NATO military intervention, some specific aspects of which must certainly be condemned, halted the killing and expulsions.
Someone like yourself, Professor Chomsky, who on various occasions has shown himself unwilling to acknowledge genocide and goes so far as to deny it forfeits all credibility. That is why we question your moral integrity and call on you to stand up before the public in Belfast and apologise for those hurtful comments of yours concerning the Cambodian, Bosnian and Kosovar victims of genocide.
Yours sincerely,
Tilman Zülch
President of the Society for Threatened Peoples International (STPI)
To Noam Chomsky and Amnesty International (AI)
On the occasion of the Annual Amnesty International Lecture being given today,
Friday, in Belfast
Göttingen/Belfast, 30 October 2009
You are a genocide denier, Professor Chomsky!
Dear Professor Chomsky,
Dear Friends of Amnesty International,
Once again you find yourself invited to appear in a public forum, this time in Belfast. In the past, Belfast was a city with a long-standing reputation for discrimination against the Catholic population, but today those of us who are familiar with the city’s past history of conflict, crime and disorder are pleased and relieved that the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland have finally emerged from a long dark tunnel.
The focus of our human rights organisation’s work is the support that we give to minority groups who have been the victims of genocide and dispossession. The two guiding principles inspiring us are that firstly we work with the people "Von denen keiner spricht" - the people no-one talks about, and secondly we are "Auf keinem Auge blind" - never turning a blind eye. We believe that "persecution, extermination and expulsion, the establishment of concentration camps and rape camps are always and everywhere crimes, now just as they were in the past. Irrespective of which government is responsible and on which continent and in which country those crimes are being perpetrated. The legacy bequeathed to us by all the victims of yesterday is an obligation to come to the assistance of the victims of today".
You, Professor Chomsky, choose to ignore those precepts. You call genocide genocide when it suits your ideological purposes. Who could condone the murkier aspects of American foreign policy or fail to condemn the way that policy has supported and encouraged crimes against humanity? But you express your criticism of the crimes of the recent past in a perverse way, that makes genocide the almost exclusive prerogative of organisations with close links to the US. It is only then that you consider it to be genocide. And it is only your political/ideological friends who are apparently incapable of committing genocide.
That was the situation in Cambodia. While the international press was reporting how the genocide of the Khmer Rouge had eliminated one in every three or four of
that country‘s inhabitants, you were laying the blame for those crimes at the door of
the US. That was shameful and in any reasonable person stirred memories of
Holocaust denial elsewhere in the world.
In the same way you have denied the genocide perpetrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina by Serb forces who killed not only Bosnian Muslims but along with them Bosnian Serbs and Croats as well who had chosen to remain alongside them, in the besieged city of Sarajevo for example.
To deny the fact of genocide in Bosnia is absurd, particularly when both the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and the International Court of Justice, also in The Hague, have had no hesitation in confirming that that genocide was perpetrated in Bosnia, above all at Srebrenica.
For the benefit of the apparently unpolitical and ideologically uncommitted Friends of Amnesty International we are prepared once again to provide a summary of the facts of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And we should like to remind you of them, too, Professor Chomsky, in your denial of genocide:
1. 200,000 civilians interned in over one hundred concentration, detention and rape camps.
2. Many thousands of internees murdered in concentration camps including Omarska, Manjača, Keraterm, Trnopolje, Luka Brčko, Sušica and Foča.
3. Members of the non-Serb political and intellectual elites systematically arrested and eliminated.
4. Approximately 2.2 million Bosnians displaced, exiled and scattered to the four corners of the globe.
5. Many thousands of unrecorded deaths still missing from the official statistics, including children, the elderly and sick and wounded refugees.
6. 500,000 Bosnians in five UN so-called “safe areas” (Tuzla, Goražde, Srebrenica, Žepa, and Bihać) and other, fallen, enclaves such as Cerska besieged, starved, sniped at, shelled and many of them killed over a period of as long as four years in some cases.
7. A four year-long artillery bombardment of the sixth UN safe area, the city of Sarajevo, killing approximately 11,000, including 1500 children.
8. Massacres and mass executions in many towns and municipalities in northern, western and eastern Bosnia (the Posavina, the Prijedor area and the Podrinje).
9. Hundreds of villages and urban areas systematically destroyed.
10. The entire heritage of Islamic religious and cultural monuments, including 1189 mosques and madrassas, destroyed, and extensive destruction of Catholic religious monuments including as many as 500 churches and religious houses.
11. Remains of approximately 15,000 missing victims still to be found, exhumed and identified.
12. 284 UN soldiers taken hostage and used as human shields.
13. Over 20 thousand Bosnian Muslim women raped, in rape camps and elsewhere.
14. 8376 men and boys from the town of Srebrenica murdered and their bodies concealed in mass graves.
The history of Kosovo is familiar to people who know Southeastern Europe: After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Kosovo was annexed to the Serb-dominated Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenes (1918). Following the original occupation and then again in the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s Yugoslavian and Serbian governments expelled the Albanians to Turkey where well over one million people of Albanian origin live today. After the gradual dismantling of Kosovo's autonomy, proclaimed too late by Tito, Slobodan Milosevic's army and militia killed some 10,000 Albanians and forced half the population – roughly one million people - to flee. The NATO military intervention, some specific aspects of which must certainly be condemned, halted the killing and expulsions.
Someone like yourself, Professor Chomsky, who on various occasions has shown himself unwilling to acknowledge genocide and goes so far as to deny it forfeits all credibility. That is why we question your moral integrity and call on you to stand up before the public in Belfast and apologise for those hurtful comments of yours concerning the Cambodian, Bosnian and Kosovar victims of genocide.
Yours sincerely,
Tilman Zülch
President of the Society for Threatened Peoples International (STPI)
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Open Letter from Ed Vulliamy to Amnesty International
[I am passing this open letter along. Please feel free to copy the entire text and post it in any forum you wish.]
Open Letter from Ed Vulliamy to Amnesty International
Noam Chomsky has been invited to give the annual Amnesty International Lecture in Belfast. This is second time in four years that Chomsky has been invited to give an Amnesty International Lecture (following Dublin in 2006). To celebrate Chomsky’s forthcoming Lecture appearance Amnesty gives him a respectful and uncritical platform for his views over three pages of the latest Amnesty (UK) Magazine.
Amnesty appears oblivious to the controversies that surround some of Chomsky’s views on human rights, and in particular the support that he has offered and continues to offer to polemicists who deny the substance, scope and authorship of the worst atrocities perpetrated during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.
In recent years Chomsky has caused particular controversy through his support for the author Diana Johnstone, known for her “revisionist” views on Bosnia concerning the Prijedor concentration camps, the Srebrenica genocide and the existence of the Bosnian rape camps. Chomsky salutes her “outstanding” scholarship and defends her “serious, honest work”.
He represents his support for Johnstone as a defence of her right to freedom of speech while at the same time he denigrates the eyewitness testimony of The Guardian's reporter Ed Vulliamy whose account of the reality of the Omarska and Trnopolje camps forced the horror of what was happening in Bosnia onto the attention of the rest of the world and in so doing saved the lives of many of the prisoners detained in them.
Without explanation Chomsky characterises Ed Vulliamy’s description of Omarska and Trnopolje as “probably” wrong while at the same time he endorses the claim by Thomas Deichmann and LM magazine that Vulliamy, Penny Marshall and Ian Williams gave a false account of the situation in the Prijedor camps as “probably” correct. Chomsky disregards the finding of a High Court libel action which - following the evidence of a doctor detained in one of the camps - confirmed that Vulliamy and his colleagues had told the truth.
When asked why Amnesty offers a platform to a man who challenges the reporting of human rights abuses that Amnesty itself substantiated and champions the seriousness and honesty of individuals who try to deny those abuses, Amnesty’s response was to observe that invitees are not representatives of Amnesty International nor expected to deliver an Amnesty International policy position within their lecture, but rather they have been invited as having something interesting and thought-provoking to say about human rights in the world today and Amnesty International does not necessarily endorse all their opinions.
When Ed Vulliamy was asked to comment on Amnesty’s invitation to Chomsky he wrote the open letter below. The language expresses his depth of feeling, not only on his own behalf but also on behalf of the friends forced to suffer “the ghastly, searing, devastating impact” of Chomsky’s denial of their experience.
Anyone who shares these concerns can express their views for the attention of Irene Khan, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, at
http://www.amnesty.org/en/contact
or Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK (AIUK), at sct@amnesty.org.uk
Open Letter to Amnesty International
To whom it may concern:
I have been contacted by a number of people regarding Amnesty International’s invitation to Professor Noam Chomsky to lecture in Northern Ireland.
The communications I have received regard Prof. Chomsky’s role in revisionism in the story of the concentration camps in northwestern Bosnia in 1992, which it was my accursed honour to discover.
As everyone interested knows, a campaign was mounted to try and de-bunk the story of these murderous camps as a fake - ergo, to deny and/or justify them - the dichotomy between these position still puzzles me.
The horror of what happened at Omarska and Trnopolje has been borne out by painful history, innumerable trials at the Hague, and - most importantly by far - searing testimony from the survivors and the bereaved. These were places of extermination, torture, killing, rape and, literally “concentration” prior to enforced deportation, of people purely on grounds of ethnicity.
Prof. Chomsky was not among those (“Novo” of Germany and “Living Marxism” in the UK) who first proposed the idea that these camps were a fake. He was not among those who tried unsuccessfully (they were beaten back in the High Court in London, by a libel case taken by ITN) to put up grotesque arguments about fences around the camps, which were rather like Fred Leuchter’s questioning whether the thermal capacity of bricks was enough to contain the heat needed to gas Jews at Auschwitz. But Professor Chomsky said many things, from his ivory tower at MIT, to spur them on and give them the credibility and energy they required to spread their poisonous perversion and denials of these sufferings. Chomsky comes with academic pretensions, doing it all from a distance, and giving the revisionists his blessing. And the revisionists have revelled in his endorsement.
In an interview with the Guardian, Professor Chomsky paid me the kind compliment of calling me a good journalist, but added that on this occasion (the camps) I had “got it wrong”. Got what wrong?!?! Got wrong what we saw that day, August 5th 1992 (I didn’t see him there)? Got wrong the hundreds of thousands of families left bereaved, deported and scattered asunder? Got wrong the hundreds of testimonies I have gathered on murderous brutality? Got wrong the thousands whom I meet when I return to the commemorations? If I am making all this up, what are all the human remains found in mass graves around the camps and so painstakingly re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons?
These people pretend neutrality over Bosnia, but are actually apologists for the Milosevic/Karadzic/Mladic plan, only too pathetic to admit it. And the one thing they never consider from their armchairs is the ghastly, searing, devastating impact of their game on the survivors and the bereaved. The pain they cause is immeasurable. This, along with the historical record, is my main concern. It is one thing to survive the camps, to lose one’s family and friends - quite another to be told by a bunch of academics with a didactic agenda in support of the pogrom that those camps never existed. The LM/Novo/Chomsky argument that the story of the camps was somehow fake has been used in countless (unsuccessful) attempts to defend mass murderers in The Hague.
For decades I have lived under the impression that Amnesty International was opposed to everything these people stand for, and existed to defend exactly the kind of people who lost their lives, family and friends in the camps and at Srebrenica three years later, a massacre on which Chomsky has also cast doubt. I have clearly been deluded about Amnesty. For Amnesty International, of all people, to honour this man is to tear up whatever credibility they have estimably and admirably won over the decades, and to reduce all they say hitherto to didactic nonsense.
Why Amnesty wants to identify with and endorse this revisionist obscenity, I do not know. It is baffling and grotesque. By inviting Chomsky to give this lecture, Amnesty condemns itself to ridicule at best, hurtful malice at worst - Amnesty joins the revisionists in spitting on the graves of the
dead. Which was not what the organisation was, as I understand, set up for. I have received a letter from an Amnesty official in Northern Ireland which reads rather like a letter from Tony Blair’s office after it has been caught out cosying up to British Aerospace or lying over the war in Iraq -
it is a piece of corporate gobbledygook, distancing Amnesty from Chomsky’s views on Bosnia, or mealy-mouthedly conceding that they are disagreed with.
There is no concern at all with the victims, which is, I suppose, what one would expect from a bureaucrat. In any event, the letter goes nowhere towards addressing the revisionism, dispelling what will no doubt be a fawning, self-satisfied introduction in Belfast and rapturous applause for
the man who gives such comfort to Messrs Karadzic and Mladic, and their death squads. How far would Amnesty go in inviting and honouring speakers whose views it does not necessarily share, in the miserable logic of this AI official in Belfast? A lecture by David Irving on Joseph Goebbels?
Alistair Campbell on how Saddam really did have those WMD? The Chilean Secret Police or Colonel Oliver North on the communist threat in Latin America during the 70s and 80s? What about Karadzic himself on the “Jihadi” threat in Bosnia, and the succulence of 14-year-old girls kept in rape camps?
I think I am still a member of AI - if so, I resign. If not, thank God for that. And to think: I recently came close to taking a full time job as media director for AI. That was a close shave - what would I be writing now, in the press release: “Come and hear the great Professor Chomsky inform you all that the stories about the camps in Bosnia were a lie - that I was hallucinating that day, that the skeletons of the dead so meticulously re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons are all plastic? That the dear friends I have in Bosnia, the USA, the UK and elsewhere who struggle to put back together lives that were broken by Omarska and Trnopolje are making it all up?
Some press release that would have been. Along with the owner of the site of the Omarska camp, the mighty Mittal Steel Corporation, Amnesty International would have crushed it pretty quick. How fitting that Chomsky and Mittal Steel find common cause. Yet how logical, and to me, obvious. After all, during the Bosnian war, it was the British Foreign Office, the CIA, the UN and great powers who, like the revisionists Chomsky champions, most eagerly opposed any attempt to stop the genocide that lasted, as it was encouraged by them and their allies in high politics to last, for three bloody years from 1992 until the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.
Yours, in disgust and despair,
Ed Vulliamy,
The Observer.
---
On the heels of its announcement of the Chomsky lecture Amnesty published a report on the ongoing search for justice by the victims of rape in Bosnia.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18431
Nicola Duckworth, Amnesty International's Europe Programme Director, acknowledges that "During the war, thousands of women and girls were raped, often with extreme brutality. Many were held in prison camps, hotels and private houses where they were sexually exploited. Many women and girls were killed. To this day, survivors of these crimes have been denied access to justice. Those responsible for their suffering - members of military forces, the police or paramilitary groups - walk free. Some remain in positions of power or live in the same community as their victims."
Alisa Muratcaus of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors, Canton Sarajevo, insists that people who deny that the mass rape of Bosnian women was a strategic element of the war are talking “nonsense”. Her Association, composed of Muslim, Croat, Serb, and Romani members, many of them victims in camps and prisons throughout Bosnia of atrocities including rape and other forms of sexual torture, works closely with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague which has established beyond doubt that rape was used in Bosnia as a weapon of war.
Open Letter from Ed Vulliamy to Amnesty International
Noam Chomsky has been invited to give the annual Amnesty International Lecture in Belfast. This is second time in four years that Chomsky has been invited to give an Amnesty International Lecture (following Dublin in 2006). To celebrate Chomsky’s forthcoming Lecture appearance Amnesty gives him a respectful and uncritical platform for his views over three pages of the latest Amnesty (UK) Magazine.
Amnesty appears oblivious to the controversies that surround some of Chomsky’s views on human rights, and in particular the support that he has offered and continues to offer to polemicists who deny the substance, scope and authorship of the worst atrocities perpetrated during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.
In recent years Chomsky has caused particular controversy through his support for the author Diana Johnstone, known for her “revisionist” views on Bosnia concerning the Prijedor concentration camps, the Srebrenica genocide and the existence of the Bosnian rape camps. Chomsky salutes her “outstanding” scholarship and defends her “serious, honest work”.
He represents his support for Johnstone as a defence of her right to freedom of speech while at the same time he denigrates the eyewitness testimony of The Guardian's reporter Ed Vulliamy whose account of the reality of the Omarska and Trnopolje camps forced the horror of what was happening in Bosnia onto the attention of the rest of the world and in so doing saved the lives of many of the prisoners detained in them.
Without explanation Chomsky characterises Ed Vulliamy’s description of Omarska and Trnopolje as “probably” wrong while at the same time he endorses the claim by Thomas Deichmann and LM magazine that Vulliamy, Penny Marshall and Ian Williams gave a false account of the situation in the Prijedor camps as “probably” correct. Chomsky disregards the finding of a High Court libel action which - following the evidence of a doctor detained in one of the camps - confirmed that Vulliamy and his colleagues had told the truth.
When asked why Amnesty offers a platform to a man who challenges the reporting of human rights abuses that Amnesty itself substantiated and champions the seriousness and honesty of individuals who try to deny those abuses, Amnesty’s response was to observe that invitees are not representatives of Amnesty International nor expected to deliver an Amnesty International policy position within their lecture, but rather they have been invited as having something interesting and thought-provoking to say about human rights in the world today and Amnesty International does not necessarily endorse all their opinions.
When Ed Vulliamy was asked to comment on Amnesty’s invitation to Chomsky he wrote the open letter below. The language expresses his depth of feeling, not only on his own behalf but also on behalf of the friends forced to suffer “the ghastly, searing, devastating impact” of Chomsky’s denial of their experience.
Anyone who shares these concerns can express their views for the attention of Irene Khan, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, at
http://www.amnesty.org/en/contact
or Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK (AIUK), at sct@amnesty.org.uk
Open Letter to Amnesty International
To whom it may concern:
I have been contacted by a number of people regarding Amnesty International’s invitation to Professor Noam Chomsky to lecture in Northern Ireland.
The communications I have received regard Prof. Chomsky’s role in revisionism in the story of the concentration camps in northwestern Bosnia in 1992, which it was my accursed honour to discover.
As everyone interested knows, a campaign was mounted to try and de-bunk the story of these murderous camps as a fake - ergo, to deny and/or justify them - the dichotomy between these position still puzzles me.
The horror of what happened at Omarska and Trnopolje has been borne out by painful history, innumerable trials at the Hague, and - most importantly by far - searing testimony from the survivors and the bereaved. These were places of extermination, torture, killing, rape and, literally “concentration” prior to enforced deportation, of people purely on grounds of ethnicity.
Prof. Chomsky was not among those (“Novo” of Germany and “Living Marxism” in the UK) who first proposed the idea that these camps were a fake. He was not among those who tried unsuccessfully (they were beaten back in the High Court in London, by a libel case taken by ITN) to put up grotesque arguments about fences around the camps, which were rather like Fred Leuchter’s questioning whether the thermal capacity of bricks was enough to contain the heat needed to gas Jews at Auschwitz. But Professor Chomsky said many things, from his ivory tower at MIT, to spur them on and give them the credibility and energy they required to spread their poisonous perversion and denials of these sufferings. Chomsky comes with academic pretensions, doing it all from a distance, and giving the revisionists his blessing. And the revisionists have revelled in his endorsement.
In an interview with the Guardian, Professor Chomsky paid me the kind compliment of calling me a good journalist, but added that on this occasion (the camps) I had “got it wrong”. Got what wrong?!?! Got wrong what we saw that day, August 5th 1992 (I didn’t see him there)? Got wrong the hundreds of thousands of families left bereaved, deported and scattered asunder? Got wrong the hundreds of testimonies I have gathered on murderous brutality? Got wrong the thousands whom I meet when I return to the commemorations? If I am making all this up, what are all the human remains found in mass graves around the camps and so painstakingly re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons?
These people pretend neutrality over Bosnia, but are actually apologists for the Milosevic/Karadzic/Mladic plan, only too pathetic to admit it. And the one thing they never consider from their armchairs is the ghastly, searing, devastating impact of their game on the survivors and the bereaved. The pain they cause is immeasurable. This, along with the historical record, is my main concern. It is one thing to survive the camps, to lose one’s family and friends - quite another to be told by a bunch of academics with a didactic agenda in support of the pogrom that those camps never existed. The LM/Novo/Chomsky argument that the story of the camps was somehow fake has been used in countless (unsuccessful) attempts to defend mass murderers in The Hague.
For decades I have lived under the impression that Amnesty International was opposed to everything these people stand for, and existed to defend exactly the kind of people who lost their lives, family and friends in the camps and at Srebrenica three years later, a massacre on which Chomsky has also cast doubt. I have clearly been deluded about Amnesty. For Amnesty International, of all people, to honour this man is to tear up whatever credibility they have estimably and admirably won over the decades, and to reduce all they say hitherto to didactic nonsense.
Why Amnesty wants to identify with and endorse this revisionist obscenity, I do not know. It is baffling and grotesque. By inviting Chomsky to give this lecture, Amnesty condemns itself to ridicule at best, hurtful malice at worst - Amnesty joins the revisionists in spitting on the graves of the
dead. Which was not what the organisation was, as I understand, set up for. I have received a letter from an Amnesty official in Northern Ireland which reads rather like a letter from Tony Blair’s office after it has been caught out cosying up to British Aerospace or lying over the war in Iraq -
it is a piece of corporate gobbledygook, distancing Amnesty from Chomsky’s views on Bosnia, or mealy-mouthedly conceding that they are disagreed with.
There is no concern at all with the victims, which is, I suppose, what one would expect from a bureaucrat. In any event, the letter goes nowhere towards addressing the revisionism, dispelling what will no doubt be a fawning, self-satisfied introduction in Belfast and rapturous applause for
the man who gives such comfort to Messrs Karadzic and Mladic, and their death squads. How far would Amnesty go in inviting and honouring speakers whose views it does not necessarily share, in the miserable logic of this AI official in Belfast? A lecture by David Irving on Joseph Goebbels?
Alistair Campbell on how Saddam really did have those WMD? The Chilean Secret Police or Colonel Oliver North on the communist threat in Latin America during the 70s and 80s? What about Karadzic himself on the “Jihadi” threat in Bosnia, and the succulence of 14-year-old girls kept in rape camps?
I think I am still a member of AI - if so, I resign. If not, thank God for that. And to think: I recently came close to taking a full time job as media director for AI. That was a close shave - what would I be writing now, in the press release: “Come and hear the great Professor Chomsky inform you all that the stories about the camps in Bosnia were a lie - that I was hallucinating that day, that the skeletons of the dead so meticulously re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons are all plastic? That the dear friends I have in Bosnia, the USA, the UK and elsewhere who struggle to put back together lives that were broken by Omarska and Trnopolje are making it all up?
Some press release that would have been. Along with the owner of the site of the Omarska camp, the mighty Mittal Steel Corporation, Amnesty International would have crushed it pretty quick. How fitting that Chomsky and Mittal Steel find common cause. Yet how logical, and to me, obvious. After all, during the Bosnian war, it was the British Foreign Office, the CIA, the UN and great powers who, like the revisionists Chomsky champions, most eagerly opposed any attempt to stop the genocide that lasted, as it was encouraged by them and their allies in high politics to last, for three bloody years from 1992 until the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.
Yours, in disgust and despair,
Ed Vulliamy,
The Observer.
---
On the heels of its announcement of the Chomsky lecture Amnesty published a report on the ongoing search for justice by the victims of rape in Bosnia.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18431
Nicola Duckworth, Amnesty International's Europe Programme Director, acknowledges that "During the war, thousands of women and girls were raped, often with extreme brutality. Many were held in prison camps, hotels and private houses where they were sexually exploited. Many women and girls were killed. To this day, survivors of these crimes have been denied access to justice. Those responsible for their suffering - members of military forces, the police or paramilitary groups - walk free. Some remain in positions of power or live in the same community as their victims."
Alisa Muratcaus of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors, Canton Sarajevo, insists that people who deny that the mass rape of Bosnian women was a strategic element of the war are talking “nonsense”. Her Association, composed of Muslim, Croat, Serb, and Romani members, many of them victims in camps and prisons throughout Bosnia of atrocities including rape and other forms of sexual torture, works closely with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague which has established beyond doubt that rape was used in Bosnia as a weapon of war.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Genocide Denier Allowed to Slander Bosniaks in University of Minnesota-connected Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies
As already noted by Daniel in this post at the always-excellent Srebrenica Genocide Blog, the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota has made a poor and disturbing choice--to allow a well-documented genocide denier to write at least one page of their website:
"Bosnia and the Holocaust is a very incomplete, disingenuous, and misleading article to be as generous as possible. While the decision to defer on this niche topic to an "expert" like Carl Savich, who possesses the requisite academic credentials, might be understandable, someone in an editorial capacity should have had second thoughts when the web "source" Savich links to were given the most cursory of examinations. Savich links to this article from the "Srpska Mreza" website. Put aside how grossly misleading and dishonest this article is--the writing is atrocious, and the style is far below the level expected of an undergraduate paper.
Someone at the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies has really dropped the ball on this. There are simply no standards of basic academic honesty or fundamental research to be seen--this is a disgrace to the Center and the to the University of Minnesota.
What is most troubling is that, after reading Daniel's account, I sent a rather detailed email alerting the Center to this problem, and to date have not even received a perfunctory acknowledgment of my concerns. Considering that I informed them they were allowing a genocide denier to use a pro-genocide, far-right website as a source in an article promoting propaganda as history, one would think someone at their end would want to address my concerns. So far, however, nobody there seems to care much.
More on this issue as it develops--or, so far, as it has sadly failed to develop.
"Bosnia and the Holocaust is a very incomplete, disingenuous, and misleading article to be as generous as possible. While the decision to defer on this niche topic to an "expert" like Carl Savich, who possesses the requisite academic credentials, might be understandable, someone in an editorial capacity should have had second thoughts when the web "source" Savich links to were given the most cursory of examinations. Savich links to this article from the "Srpska Mreza" website. Put aside how grossly misleading and dishonest this article is--the writing is atrocious, and the style is far below the level expected of an undergraduate paper.
Someone at the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies has really dropped the ball on this. There are simply no standards of basic academic honesty or fundamental research to be seen--this is a disgrace to the Center and the to the University of Minnesota.
What is most troubling is that, after reading Daniel's account, I sent a rather detailed email alerting the Center to this problem, and to date have not even received a perfunctory acknowledgment of my concerns. Considering that I informed them they were allowing a genocide denier to use a pro-genocide, far-right website as a source in an article promoting propaganda as history, one would think someone at their end would want to address my concerns. So far, however, nobody there seems to care much.
More on this issue as it develops--or, so far, as it has sadly failed to develop.
Friday, October 31, 2008
"Long Shadows" by Erna Paris
Once again, I have read the Bosnia-related section (in this case the penultimate chapter) of a book without taking the time to read the rest of it. While America Between the Wars was promising and seemed to develop a plausible thesis, I was hesitant to recommend the book since I only read the first hundred or so pages, and then skipped ahead to the section on the Kosovo war.
On the other hand, while I only read one chapter of Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, I feel fairly comfortable assuming that the rest of the book is as insightful and well-written as Chapter 7, "The Furies of War Revisit Europe: Yugoslavia and Bosnia." Paris is keen and sympathetic observer, a well-informed student of the crisis rather than a superficially knowledgeable voyeur like so many Westerners, and an excellent craftsman. While the book was published in 2000 and therefore
She also knows a telling quote when she hears it. Her portrait of Klara Mandic, a Yugoslav Jew who had been raised by a Serb Orthodox couple after her parents were deported in World War II, illuminates many facets of the bizarre mix of selective memory and historical revisionism that informed the revived Greater Serbia movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Mandic was one of the founders of the "Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society," the ersatz group created to bolster Serb nationalist propaganda about the ongoing "genocide" against the Serbs and to garner public support for Serbian claims in Israel.
Mandic was also a friend and admirer of Radovan Karadzic, and at one point in the interview she became very defensive and heated when Paris pressed her about the indictments against him. Her evasiveness and equivalence-drawing leads her to this telling statement:
"Besides, who speaks about other ethnic cleansing? Right after the Second World War Croatia wanted to be cleansed of Serbs. It took them fifty years, but they did it. And what about the United States? They fought a bloody war in Vietnam and I do not remember that the president was accused of being a war criminal! I ask you, who has the right to make accusations against anyone!"
Here, we have the Balkan revisionist mindset distilled to a single prevaricating paragraph. After a long string of praise for the Serb nationalist project, and some evasive avoidance of the topic of personal guilt on the part of the leadership of that project, she airily denied having personally "heard anything" or having been on the scene when any atrocities were alleged to have occurred. This is typical--we saw Diana Johnstone and Michael Parenti using the same tactic of endlessly questioning the evidence and implying that outsiders and non-participants are somehow unable to discern even an outline of reality from evidence. But Mandic takes this reasoning to the logical conclusion--nobody has the right to say anything about anybody.
The Balkan revisionist project is not only a defense of fascism in southeast Europe, it is an assault on the very foundations of internationalism and even on reason itself. The proponents of this ideology conceive of humanity as being forever trapped in static, isolated tribal pockets eternally suspicious of each other and utterly incapable of taking even the most tentative steps towards mutual understanding and tolerance. In their world, we are not allowed to trust anything but personal experiences within the confines of our own tribal domains. It is a bleak, static, and hopeless worldview, and those of us who are committed to a secular, reason-based, democratic, and cosmopolitan world must never give any ground to these reductionist troglodytes.
On the other hand, while I only read one chapter of Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, I feel fairly comfortable assuming that the rest of the book is as insightful and well-written as Chapter 7, "The Furies of War Revisit Europe: Yugoslavia and Bosnia." Paris is keen and sympathetic observer, a well-informed student of the crisis rather than a superficially knowledgeable voyeur like so many Westerners, and an excellent craftsman. While the book was published in 2000 and therefore
She also knows a telling quote when she hears it. Her portrait of Klara Mandic, a Yugoslav Jew who had been raised by a Serb Orthodox couple after her parents were deported in World War II, illuminates many facets of the bizarre mix of selective memory and historical revisionism that informed the revived Greater Serbia movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Mandic was one of the founders of the "Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society," the ersatz group created to bolster Serb nationalist propaganda about the ongoing "genocide" against the Serbs and to garner public support for Serbian claims in Israel.
Mandic was also a friend and admirer of Radovan Karadzic, and at one point in the interview she became very defensive and heated when Paris pressed her about the indictments against him. Her evasiveness and equivalence-drawing leads her to this telling statement:
"Besides, who speaks about other ethnic cleansing? Right after the Second World War Croatia wanted to be cleansed of Serbs. It took them fifty years, but they did it. And what about the United States? They fought a bloody war in Vietnam and I do not remember that the president was accused of being a war criminal! I ask you, who has the right to make accusations against anyone!"
Here, we have the Balkan revisionist mindset distilled to a single prevaricating paragraph. After a long string of praise for the Serb nationalist project, and some evasive avoidance of the topic of personal guilt on the part of the leadership of that project, she airily denied having personally "heard anything" or having been on the scene when any atrocities were alleged to have occurred. This is typical--we saw Diana Johnstone and Michael Parenti using the same tactic of endlessly questioning the evidence and implying that outsiders and non-participants are somehow unable to discern even an outline of reality from evidence. But Mandic takes this reasoning to the logical conclusion--nobody has the right to say anything about anybody.
The Balkan revisionist project is not only a defense of fascism in southeast Europe, it is an assault on the very foundations of internationalism and even on reason itself. The proponents of this ideology conceive of humanity as being forever trapped in static, isolated tribal pockets eternally suspicious of each other and utterly incapable of taking even the most tentative steps towards mutual understanding and tolerance. In their world, we are not allowed to trust anything but personal experiences within the confines of our own tribal domains. It is a bleak, static, and hopeless worldview, and those of us who are committed to a secular, reason-based, democratic, and cosmopolitan world must never give any ground to these reductionist troglodytes.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Genocide Denial Goes Dutch
Thanks to Daniel at Srebrenica Genocide Blog for the following update on a very troubling and offensive story:
MARCO VAN HEES AND ALEKSANDAR GAVRILOVIC: SREBRENICA GENOCIDE DENIERS
The story focuses on Marco Van Hees, who seems to be the ringleader of the "Dutchbat III" group of 15 Dutch soldiers involved in Srebrenica genocide denial. The fact that these men are willing to add further shame to their record is almost numbing; it's almost--not quite, but nearly--impossible to muster any outrage against such an irrational act of betrayal and contrariness.
Daniel covers the story thoroughly, so I have nothing to add about the specifics. I do wonder if anyone out there has any insights into the psychology of someone like Marco Van Hees. The fact that he was present in Srebrenica, yet is able to claim a distorted and dishonest version of events, is troubling yet not difficult to believe--people often lie, and they often convince themselves to beleive a version of events which contradicts their own personal experiences. While unfortunate (to put it mildly), there is nothing extraordinary about Van Hees' ability to deny a horrible reality he should be bearing witness to.
It's not the ability of 15 or so Dutchbat soldiers to lie to the world, and seemingly to themselves, about a horrible atrocity they were witness to--and passive participants in--which puzzles me; rather, it is the motivation to do so which I cannot understand. I do have a theory, however, and I welcome any input from readers with more expertise, knowledge, and/or insight into individual and group psychology to correct, elaborate, or refute my (admittedly half-baked) notion.
Simply put, I believe that these few Dutch soldiers who have chosen to side with the fascist mass-murderers of Srebrenica are motivated at least partially from a feeling of powerlessness. I acknowledge that the more obvious answer would be that they are motivated by shame, and a desire to rewrite history so that their actions (and failures to act) in August of 1995 might seem more reasonable and justified. No doubt this plays a part, but I have read that violence is often a reaction to a feeling of powerlessness--a primal urge to lash out and assert control over a situation or perceived status.
The Dutch soldiers at Srebrenica, by a combination of factors both imposed and self-created, were passive pawns in a much larger game, and one can easily imagine the humiliation they must have felt. I realize I am not giving any attention to the incident where frustrated Bosniak soldiers inflicted casualities on the Dutchbat battalion in an attempt to force them to take a stand--that incident most certainly fueled some resentment on the part of the Dutchbat soldiers. And the stresses of being trapped in the enclave with thousands of desperate people of a different culture, language, and faith cannot be discounted.
Even acknowledging all that, I still contend that the humiliation inflicted on the Dutch soldiers by the Bosnian Serb forces, by General Mladic personally, and by the untenable position the UN and their own government had put them in--all of this contributed to a sense of powerlessness, and the dirty, desperate, and not always "grateful" Muslims who were nominally in their care were the most obvious, and easiest, targets for that frustrated rage to focus on.
At any rate, this is a story worth following. These foolish and dishonorable Dutch men will certainly provide ample ammunition for the Balkan revisionist crowd. We must be vigilant and tireless in response.
MARCO VAN HEES AND ALEKSANDAR GAVRILOVIC: SREBRENICA GENOCIDE DENIERS
The story focuses on Marco Van Hees, who seems to be the ringleader of the "Dutchbat III" group of 15 Dutch soldiers involved in Srebrenica genocide denial. The fact that these men are willing to add further shame to their record is almost numbing; it's almost--not quite, but nearly--impossible to muster any outrage against such an irrational act of betrayal and contrariness.
Daniel covers the story thoroughly, so I have nothing to add about the specifics. I do wonder if anyone out there has any insights into the psychology of someone like Marco Van Hees. The fact that he was present in Srebrenica, yet is able to claim a distorted and dishonest version of events, is troubling yet not difficult to believe--people often lie, and they often convince themselves to beleive a version of events which contradicts their own personal experiences. While unfortunate (to put it mildly), there is nothing extraordinary about Van Hees' ability to deny a horrible reality he should be bearing witness to.
It's not the ability of 15 or so Dutchbat soldiers to lie to the world, and seemingly to themselves, about a horrible atrocity they were witness to--and passive participants in--which puzzles me; rather, it is the motivation to do so which I cannot understand. I do have a theory, however, and I welcome any input from readers with more expertise, knowledge, and/or insight into individual and group psychology to correct, elaborate, or refute my (admittedly half-baked) notion.
Simply put, I believe that these few Dutch soldiers who have chosen to side with the fascist mass-murderers of Srebrenica are motivated at least partially from a feeling of powerlessness. I acknowledge that the more obvious answer would be that they are motivated by shame, and a desire to rewrite history so that their actions (and failures to act) in August of 1995 might seem more reasonable and justified. No doubt this plays a part, but I have read that violence is often a reaction to a feeling of powerlessness--a primal urge to lash out and assert control over a situation or perceived status.
The Dutch soldiers at Srebrenica, by a combination of factors both imposed and self-created, were passive pawns in a much larger game, and one can easily imagine the humiliation they must have felt. I realize I am not giving any attention to the incident where frustrated Bosniak soldiers inflicted casualities on the Dutchbat battalion in an attempt to force them to take a stand--that incident most certainly fueled some resentment on the part of the Dutchbat soldiers. And the stresses of being trapped in the enclave with thousands of desperate people of a different culture, language, and faith cannot be discounted.
Even acknowledging all that, I still contend that the humiliation inflicted on the Dutch soldiers by the Bosnian Serb forces, by General Mladic personally, and by the untenable position the UN and their own government had put them in--all of this contributed to a sense of powerlessness, and the dirty, desperate, and not always "grateful" Muslims who were nominally in their care were the most obvious, and easiest, targets for that frustrated rage to focus on.
At any rate, this is a story worth following. These foolish and dishonorable Dutch men will certainly provide ample ammunition for the Balkan revisionist crowd. We must be vigilant and tireless in response.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [20]
CHAPTER NINE: DEMONIZING THE SERBS
This chapter is simply loathsome genocide denial of the basest sort. It's all here--the "Living Marxism" claim that the ITN footage was faked; bogus refutations of Roy Gutman's reporting; and, of course, claims that Muslim deaths at Srebrenica were highly exaggerated while the Western media ignored the "hundreds" of Serb civilians reportedly killed in the hills surrounding Srebrenica. Typically, Parenti demands impossible standards of accuracy as far as the Muslim deaths at Srebrenica are concerned, while he relays stories about supposed massacres of Serb civilians without bothering to provide any substantiation whatsoever.
After ten pages of this drivel, he ends the chapter with a dismissal of the public relations firm of Ruder & Finn (who represented both Croatia and Bosnia), human rights (or, in his telling, "human rights"--the quotes are the typographical equivalent of a contemptuous sneer)--groups such as Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders, and of the wide spectrum of leftists who chose to speak out against the Serbian genocide. That he derides people such as Salman Rushdie and Susan Sontag as "half-informed" is unconscious irony of the highest order.
This chapter is 14 pages long--the longest in this rather flimsy book so far--and there is absolutely nothing of merit in it to discuss. The 'charges' he makes in this book have long since been refuted; or rather, they were refuted by reality before he ever wrote them. Confronted with the truth, Parenti merely clamps his hands over his ears and screams louder.
This tedious compendium of lies and misinformation is nothing but hateful garbage. Refuting the completely discredited accusations in this chapter would be to dignify them with a response. I won't do it. We will move on.
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