antigua Yugoslavia
Milosevic:
a biography
Adam
LeBor Bloomsbury, 386pp, £20
ISBN
0747560900
"the
most revealing aspect of LeBor's "authoritative" account is what he
fails to reveal"
Reviewed
by Neil Clark
Slobodan
Milosevic. What are the first images that come to your mind on hearing this
name? Burning villages? Detention camps? Mass graves? If so, you are yet
another victim of one of the most brilliant and successful demonisation
campaigns of modern times, a campaign continued by Adam LeBor in his new
biography of the former Yugoslav leader.
The LeBor thesis is simple, and it is one we have all heard many times before.
Milosevic, an "archetypal Communist Party official", rose to power
by whipping up dormant Serb nationalism in the late 1980s. Through his desire
to create a "Greater Serbia", he provoked the break-up of his own
country and the "decade of war and misery" that followed. After the
benign (though belated) intervention of the western powers, Slobo is now in
his rightful place, a 9ft by 15ft prison cell in an old Nazi jail near The
Hague.
Despite fascinating details such as how Milosevic's son Marko liked to have
his swimming pool heated to 38C, the most revealing aspect of LeBor's
"authoritative" account is what he fails to reveal. Any evidence
that contradicts his central thesis is either omitted or sketched over in the
most cursory fashion.
There is just one oblique reference in the entire book to the meeting at The
Hague in October 1991 when, on being summoned to the negotiating table by the
European Community "arbitrators"- Lord Carrington, Jacques Delors
and Hans Van den Broek - the leaders of the constituent Yugoslav republics
were presented with a paper, "The End of Yugoslavia from the
International Scene". This document provided for the existing republic
boundaries to become the new international ones.
In effect the death certificate of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it was
accepted by all the delegates except the Serbs, with Milosevic returning to
Belgrade in disgust. "Yugoslavia was not created by the consensus of six
men and cannot be dissolved by the consensus of six men", pleaded the man
LeBor wants us to believe was responsible for the break-up and the carnage
that followed.
On tracing Yugoslavia's tragic descent into war, LeBor's omissions become more
frequent. He quotes Warren Zimmerman several times in the book, but fails to
inform readers of how the US ambassador to Belgrade intervened personally to
persuade the Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic to renege on the February 1992
Lisbon Agreement which provided for the peaceful reshaping of Bosnia.
No mention, either, of the way the US State Department sabotaged the efforts
at peacemaking by Cyrus Vance and David Owen when they neared success in order
to justify military action and the establishment of a de facto Nato colony in
Bosnia. Milosevic's support for the anti-separatist Bosnian politician Adil
Zulfikarpasic is recorded only as a footnote; while the malevolent
interventions of the German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher are
accorded just five lines. While Slobo is quite clearly LeBor's villain of the
piece, the leaders of the secessionist republics receive rather more
favourable appraisal. Milan Kucan, the leader of Slovenia, the first republic
to break away, is regarded as "sensible"; Izetbegovic (a man who
once wrote "there can be no peace or co-existence between Islamic and
non-Islamic institutions") is "well-meaning"; while the
Macedonian Vasil Tuporkovski is described as "American-educated" and
"pro-western" - LeBor shorthand for someone of whom he thinks we
should approve.
In Chapter 22, LeBor moves on to the Kosovo crisis, but once again tells only
one half of the story. He talks of the way the "Albanian diaspora"
provided funds for the up-and-coming KLA, but neglects to mention the enormous
role western security forces played in the funding, arming and training of a
terrorist group incontrovertibly linked to al-Qaeda. Predictably, LeBor blames
Milosevic's "obduracy" for not accepting the Rambouillet peace plan
in 1999, but does not mention appendix B to chapter 7 of the document which
provided for the "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access
throughout Yugoslavia, including associated airspace and territorial
waters" for all Nato personnel. Silly old Slobo for not signing up for
military occupation.
For all the fly-leaf boasts that LeBor had "unrivalled access to those
closest to Milosevic", time and time again he falls back on the same
discredited sources, either those with a personal axe to grind against
Milosevic, or more often than not the testimony of a "senior US
official". LeBor spends a whole page discussing the dastardly RAM plan,
"the geographical outline for the future Greater Serbia", allegedly
drawn out by Milosevic and high-ranking officers in the Yugoslav army, but
concedes in his footnotes that "no copy of the plan as yet has been
produced as evidence". He does, though, quote Louis Sell, the US
diplomat, who remembers being shown a "covertly obtained document that
revealed contingency plans by the military" that "may have been the
RAM plan or something similar". The ubiquitous Sell is also quoted as
saying that throughout the Srebrenica crisis Milosevic was "in direct
personal contact with [Ratko] Mladic", despite the official and
exhaustive Dutch government report into the massacre finding no evidence of
political or military liaison with Belgrade concerning the killings.
In the chapter "Toppling Milosevic from Budapest", LeBor at least
reveals how the US poured $70m into the Serb opposition coffers in their
attempt to oust Slobo. But he fails to explain why the most powerful nation on
earth believed a change of government in Belgrade was so important.
With Slobo now under lock and key and a "reform" government
installed in Belgrade, western hegemony in the Balkans is complete. Lord
Ashdown, who testified against Milosevic at The Hague, holds court as the new
King of Bosnia; while in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel, the US's biggest "from
scratch" military base since the Vietnam war, protects the route of the
$1.3bn trans-Balkan AMBO pipeline, guaranteeing western control of Caspian Sea
oil supplies. What John Pilger calls the west's "strategic concept"
- the destruction of Yugoslavia and its replacement with a series of weak and
divided protectorates - has been achieved in little more than a decade.
It was all, says Pilger, "based on a marriage of lies, thanks largely to
those journalists who acted as the handmaidens of great and murderous
power". In his one-sided account of the break-up of Yugoslavia and his
unjust vilification of the man who tried his best to hold his country
together, LeBor fails to challenge those journalists.
This review first appeared in the New Statesman.
Antiglobalización
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Convocatorias -
Correo recibido -
Chile - Cuba
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Documentos militante -
Ecología -
Empleo - Enlaces -
EE.UU. - Formación -
Fotografía - HUELGA
GENERAL - Literatura
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Insurgente - No
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Palestina -
Plan de trabajo -
Prensa - Problema
Español - Profesionales
y Comunistas - Resoluciones -
Software Libre -
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Congreso Federal y - VI Congreso de Madrid
Novedades
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