Western journalists and politicians have portrayed his arrest and extradition to the Tribunal as a great triumph. They have spent the last sixteen years promoting the thesis of Serbian guilt and Muslim victimization in the Bosnian war and in their minds Karadzic’s arrest validates their politics.

Ever since Karadzic’s arrest was announced early last week our political establishment has engaged in an orgy of childish name-calling. Karadzic has been portrayed as evil incarnate; various journalists and political figures have called him a “monster”, a “demon”, and a “butcher”. Former Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke called him “Europe’s Bin Laden”. While this kind of name-calling might give self-important journalists and politicians the opportunity to portray themselves as virtuous crusaders for international justice, it does very little to shed light on what actually happened in Bosnia.

The people who cheer Karadzic’s capture today might regret it tomorrow. These people built their professional careers on the premise of saving “innocent” Bosnian-Muslims from Karadzic’s “genocidal Serb aggression”. Their credibility and professional reputation depend on his guilt. Until now, they’ve been able to accuse him with impunity because he was in hiding and couldn’t defend himself. Now that he’s in the Tribunal’s custody, he will be given a high-profile public trial where he will have the opportunity to challenge their accusations and present his own evidence. The odds of him getting a fair trial are slim to none, but the spectacle of a trial, even a show trial, will make it harder to silence him.

One of the most famous “crimes” that Karadzic is accused of is the Siege of Sarajevo. Most of us can remember the scenes of pockmarked apartment blocks in Sarajevo and the images of Muslim civilians maimed and killed by Serbian artillery fire. Karadzic’s trial promises to give much-needed context to that imagery.

Without a doubt the Serbs laid siege on Sarajevo, what the Karadzic trial will reveal is why they did it. The evidence has already been presented during other trials at the Tribunal, but the Karadzic trial will be the highest profile presentation of that evidence.

The Serbs laid siege on Sarajevo because the Muslims were in the city shooting at them. The siege began as an operation to rescue soldiers that the Muslims were holding hostage and threatening to kill in the Marshal Tito Barracks. It continued because the Muslims wouldn’t agree to a cease-fire and they wouldn’t stop shooting at the Serbs.

Muslim troops in Sarajevo deliberately attacked the Serbs from built-up civilian areas of the city in order to increase the likelihood that civilians would be hit when the Serbs returned fire. UN military observers stationed in Sarajevo have already testified at the Tribunal that they witnessed this practice many times.

David Harland, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping in Bosnia, is on record testifying at the Tribunal. He said, “The Muslims certainly understood that when they fired out of the city that [it] would provoke incoming Serb fire, which would make normal life in the city impossible.” According to his testimony the Muslims violated 514 attempts by the UN to implement a cease-fire.

Philippe Morillion, the French general who commanded the UN force in Bosnia from 1992 to 1993, is on record testifying that the Muslims “very frequently used mortars at Kosevo (the main hospital in Sarajevo) for provocation purposes”.

Morillion’s protest letters to the Bosnian-Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic are already exhibits on file at the Tribunal. One letter dated January 11, 1993 says: “[an] 82-milimeter mortar had been set up on the western side of the Kosevo Hospital within the hospital grounds. This mortar and its crew then proceeded to fire nine rounds using the hospital as a screen. The direct consequence of this disreputable and cowardly act was that shortly afterward the hospital came under fire from anti-aircraft gunfire, artillery fire, and mortar fire … You will, I’m sure, be aware that the firing of weapons from the hospital is against the Geneva Convention.”

The siege of Sarajevo wasn’t a genocidal Serb attack on defenseless peace loving Muslims like our news media led us to believe. The Muslims deliberately put their civilian population in the crossfire so that NATO would intervene against the Serbs on “humanitarian” grounds.

NATO took the bait because the news media shamelessly shilled for the Islamic cause. Our journalists dutifully reported that Muslim civilians were killed in Sarajevo by Serb artillery fire, but they deliberately failed to report that the Serbs were provoked by Muslim artillery fire emanating from the city.

The story of Srebrenica is similar. We’ve been told the half-truth that the Serbs over-ran a UN safe area and killed thousands of Muslims, but we weren’t told that the Muslims of Nasir Oric’s 28th Infantry Division used that safe area as a base to launch attacks from. They massacred the Serbian villages surrounding Srebrenica and they fled back into the warm bosom of the UN Safe Area when they were done – safely behind the UN’s skirts and out of reach of Serb retaliation.

In July 1995, when a column of 15,000 Muslim men from Srebrenica ventured out of the safe area to attack the Bosnian-Serb frontlines and break-through to Tuzla, the Serbs got even. The Serbs shot and managed to kill about half of their Muslim attackers and now we’re being told that they committed genocide.

One has to wonder what kind of “genocide” it was when most of the bodies being pulled from the mass graves around Srebrenica are military aged men. Thousands of bodies have been exhumed and there isn’t a single woman among them. Can you think of any other “genocide” that spared women and children? If exterminating the Muslims was their goal, why didn’t the Serbs kill the women and children? The story of Srebrenica doesn’t make sense until you realize that it is a lie. Srebrenica wasn’t genocide at all. What happened in Srebrenica is simple: the Muslims attacked the Serbs so the Serbs shot them. That’s how war works: attack and counter-attack.

Only a fool would believe that the Bosnian-Muslims were striving for a multi-ethnic democratic Bosnia. Alija Izetbegovic, the leader of the Bosnian Muslims, was seen in the company of Osama bin Laden by Der Spiegel’s Balkan correspondent Renate Flottau and by London Time’s war correspondent Eve-Ann Prentice in 1994. According to the 9/11 Commission report, four of the 9/11 hijackers, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were veterans of the Bosnian jihad against Radovan Karadzic and the Serbs.

A report published in 1996 by the US House Committee on International Relations says, “Iran ordered senior members of its Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (“IRGC”), the elite force used to advance militant Islam, to travel to Bosnia to survey the military needs of the [Izetbegovic] government. IRGC trainers taught the Muslims how to use anti-tank missiles and helped with troop logistics and weapons factories. The IRGC also incorporated religious indoctrination into military training. Iran used this leverage to urge Hizballah to send foreign fighters to the region as members of the Mujahideen. The effort was successful and a force of thousands drawn from several pro-Iranian groups and other Islamic Opposition movements assembled in Bosnia.”

Radovan Karadzic was fighting the good fight in Bosnia. He was fighting to keep his people free from the rule of an Islamic regime in Sarajevo that had ties to Osama bin Laden and the Iranian government. Anybody who believes that the Muslims invited Osama bin Laden and the Iranians to Bosnia for the sake of multi-ethnic democracy is hopelessly delusional.

The Bosnian-Serbs had every right to break away from Bosnia and re-join what was left of Yugoslavia. To call the Serbian war effort an aggression for “Greater Serbia” is grossly dishonest. The Bosnian-Serbs had the same right to leave Bosnia and re-join Yugoslavia that West Virginia had to break away from Confederate Virginia and re-join the Union during the civil war.

Just for fun, let’s use “Bosnia talk” to describe the American civil war: “In 1861 Abraham Lincoln committed an aggression against the Confederate States of America. Over the course of the war, Lincoln’s thugs systematically seized Confederate territory in a genocidal quest for ‘Greater America’. Lincoln’s war killed more than 600,000 people and left millions homeless. Lincoln, better known as ‘the butcher of Gettysburg’, was not brought to justice for his crimes until he was slain by a Confederate loyalist named John Wilkes Booth in 1865.”

The tendentious description of the American civil war that you just read is one of the most intellectually dishonest things ever written. Unfortunately, our news media and our politicians describe what happened in Bosnia in precisely that fashion. It is time to call these people out, the next bleeding hart that bemoans “Karadzic’s genocide in Bosnia” and smugly applauds his capture as “a victory for international justice” needs to be put in their place.

No matter what you’ve been told, there was nothing especially evil about the 1992-95 war in Bosnia compared to other wars. The war killed about 100,000 people including the civilians and soldiers from each side. That’s a lot of people, but it’s not a remarkable death toll for a war. It certainly isn’t indicative of genocide or anything even close.

When the United States firebombed Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945 we killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in that one night of bombing alone. Does that mean Franklin Roosevelt was a genocidal monster? Coalition forces estimate that they killed 100,000 Iraqi troops during Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91. Does that make George H.W. Bush guilty of genocide? If it’s absurd to accuse Bush and Roosevelt of genocide, then it’s equally absurd to accuse Radovan Karadzic.

Radovan Karadzic’s fight to keep his people from being subjugated by Islamic extremists is no less valid than the U.S. war against Imperial Japan or the U.S. campaign to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. If anything, Karadzic had more of a right to stand and fight on the territory where his people lived than the United States had to take the fight halfway around the world to Japan and Iraq.

If Radovan Karadzic marshals the evidence already on record at the Tribunal, and if he supplements it with the documents and evidence that undoubtedly came into his possession as the President of the Bosnian Serbs he will burry his opposition. The people who are pointing their smug, self-righteous, fingers at him today could very well regret the day they ever put him on trial. Then again, his accusers have been dishonest from day one they will probably keep repeating their story no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary. They’ve been lying to us for sixteen years and there’s no reason to believe they’ll stop now. It is time to call these people out and start applying some common sense to our understanding of the Bosnian war.

Who is Dr. Radovan Karadzic, the man for whom one could hardly think of a more unlikely disguise than bioenergy guru?

A psychiatrist-physician and recognized poet, a man from the mountains far more educated than his admirer, the late Vladimir Volkoff, described and disguised in his fictionalized accounts*, he was elected the head of the political party of the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina shortly before the president of the Islamic party asked the European Community to recognize the independence of Bosnia (December 20, 1991), subsequently proclaiming its secession (March 3, 1992) in violation of the constitutions of both the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SRBH) and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ).

With Jose Cutileiro, he was one of the chief proponents of the Lisbon Agreement (accepted by the three parties on February 23, denounced by the Muslims, renegotiated thanks to Karadzic on March 16, ultimately signed on March 18) constituting a Swiss-type Bosnia and Herzegovina confederation of three cantons, Muslim, Serb and Croat, a pre-constitutional agreement intended to avoid the war. Upon the instigation of U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmermann, for whom the Muslims had more to gain from war than from peace, Islamist president Alija Izetbegovic (who had authored an Islamic manifesto as early as 1972) withdrew his signature from the Lisbon Agreement on March 28, followed on April 4 by his decree mobilizing Islamist militias (prepared secretly beforehand) and ordering them to take control of all town centers, which sparked the beginning of the war. This occurred with the encouragement of the USA, which recognized the independence of Muslim Bosnia and Herzegovina on April 6 and was followed the same day by the European Community, which wanted to avoid independent recognition by Germany, as had been the case for Croatia and Slovenia. Therefore, the next day, April 7, 1992, Karadzic proclaimed the independence of the Republic of Srpska, while his Croat counterpart Mate Boban would wait until August 28, 1993 to declare the independence of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia.

Most importantly, President Karadzic founded the last Christian theocracy in Europe. He was among the first to return properties confiscated under Communism to the Church (since then all former Communist countries have followed suit; only France still refuses to return what had been confiscated during the Revolution). He drafted a constitution according to which Christianity was the official religion of the state, and instituted universal catechism in the public schools, which quickly became the favorite subject of the students, who were proud to bring home teachings denied their parents under Communism. At the same time, Karadzic ensured a decent existence not only for the Muslims who remained in the territory of his Christian republic but also for the thousands who sought refuge there after fleeing from the Islamic republic of central Bosnia. And he welcomed the Orthodox Serb refugees expelled from Croatia (some of whom first went to Serbia, which was bigger and at peace, but they were so poorly received there that they came to the Republic of Srpska, which was at war). Considering the Muslims to be “misled brothers” (Serbs converted to Islam during the Turkish occupation), Karadzic was nevertheless cautious of opportunistic false conversions and “prohibited” the Church from baptizing Muslims during the war, while ensuring these would be possible after the war. This resulted in some Muslims going to Serbia or Germany to be baptized before returning as Christians to the Republic of Srpska. A devout believer himself, Karadzic recommended his army and his people to the Church. One recalls how the Bishop of Tuzla and Zvornik was deemed a “war criminal” by the so-called international community (OSCE, OHR, UNHCR, SFOR, etc.) after he was reported by the Muslims to have “blessed Serb guns” during the war when, of course, his only “crime” was to have blessed soldiers going to the battlefront and perhaps to their deaths. Karadzic believed that the Serb people had sinned horribly (by its materialism) and had to suffer to redeem itself of this sin. A monarchist, Karadzic restored the royal Serb coat of arms, re-crowning the double-headed eagle which made his flag and seals easily distinguishable from those of neighboring Serbia, and the currency of Yugoslavia. But as he wrote in “The Awakening of the Crushed Soul”, he believed that the Serbs would not be reunified for a long time, perhaps for decades, and that the suffering of the Serbs west of the Drina River would contribute to the redemption of all Serbdom. But Serbia, plodding slowly from socialist to capitalist materialism, which had just abandoned the Bosnian Serbs by withdrawing Yugoslav Army troops was not yet mature for such as reunion. President of a community that officially came under attack on April 4, 1992, Karadzic waited until May 12 to create an army; like his Croat counterpart Mate Boban, Karadzic accepted (and even proposed) every attempt to negotiate a peace agreement (except one), and he respected every agreement he signed, unlike their Muslim counterpart Izetbegovic. At the same time quite humane but also a responsible head of state, Karadzic decided that the Republic of Srpska would not issue passports because if it did so, the entire population would leave (a bitter saying was “would the last one to leave please turn off the light”), unlike the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, which was still issuing passports two years after its official dissolution, and the Islamic republic of central Bosnia, which gave Osama bin Laden, a leader supplier of fighters and funds, a passport in 1993. Karadzic is also accused of tolerating black market activities, though these may have been inevitable and necessary in a country emerging from Communism, subject to a strict embargo and without access to the sea, abandoned by its mother state of Serbia, and forced to barter agricultural goods with neighboring Croatia to get the fuel that both the army and the farmers needed.

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which U.S. propaganda sought to hide was of a religious nature (presenting it as a national conflict instead) can be roughly divided into two periods. When what was left of Yugoslavia (Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia) withdrew Yugoslav Army troops after the declaration of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s secession, the Bosnian Muslims launched a military conquest of all of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Bosnian Croats (who had initially accepted the idea of independence, believing it might result in union with Croatia, already independent since the previous year) understood, as did the Bosnian Serbs, that the ultimate goal of the Bosnian Muslims was not secession but islamization. This first phase of the war, which lasted about six months, was the most brutal, because it was a real civil war. It saw very few clashes between Serbs and Croats, who lived in different regions according to the old demarcation of zones of influence of Rome and Byzantium (but they made the mistake of not forming an alliance, and thus today they are dominated by the Muslim minority). Both the Serbs and the Croats, in their respective areas of population, were farmers who had retained their Christian tradition despite the Ottoman occupation, while the Muslims throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina were typically city dwellers, craftsmen, merchants or public servants whose ancestors had converted to Islam. The first phase of the war, therefore, was one where, in the best case, people who felt they were in the minority in one area moved to another area where their community was in the majority; in the worst case, they were expelled or simply executed by their neighbors. Intimidation, murder, a sense of impunity and settling of accounts between neighbors raged throughout the summer of 1992 (after the Yugoslav Army’s withdrawal at the end of May). With autumn the war entered its second phase, which was to last three years, with regular armies (now constituted and wearing distinct uniforms) representing four, and later three, communities confronting each other. A quick parenthesis here: in addition to the Serbian Orthodox Republic of Srpska, the Croat republic (which was secular but predominantly Roman Catholic) and the Islamic republic, a fourth entity emerged, Muslim-dominated but secular and resolutely anti-Islamic, in the northwest, the so-called Bihac pocket. Maintaining good relations with its immediate Christian neighbors, the Republic of Srpska in Bosnia, the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, and the Serb Republic of Krajina in Croatia, this small autonomous Muslim region was eventually cruelly crushed by the Islamic republic of central Bosnia. From the autumn of 1992 to the end of the summer of 1995, a conventional war between warring nations and their constituted states was fought with their regular armies along relatively fixed front lines, a war of positions (and trenches) between armies which, born from the reservists militia of the former Yugoslav self-defense system, had most defensive tactics and weapons, and would have had to get used to an armed but balanced coexistence. This equilibrium was disrupted when the US sent offensive weapons to the Bosnian Muslims (in violation of the embargo imposed by the United Nations), as it has repeatedly acknowledged without qualms. The Bosnian Muslims also recruited mujahedeen (”soldiers of Allah”) from across the Muslim world, especially the Arab countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, who were armed and financed by all the Islamic powers (Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan, Iran, etc.) with, of course, strong support from the USA. The second part of the war, in comparison with the civil war that had preceded it, was far more civilized, in the sense of the concept cultivated by the different societies: the Bosnian Croats behaved like a professional army with leadership closely patterned on the German model; the Bosnian Serbs behaved like Christians following the Gospel and as worthy successors of the Crusades; and the Bosnian Muslims behaved like Islamist practitioners of the raid (razzia) and systematic rape taught in the Koran, as heirs of such medieval Turkish techniques as the impalement of civilian “infidels” and the collection of severed heads, and fans of all types of fellagahs that have made Algeria and Lebanon what they are today.

A major event marked this war and its history, the takeover of Srebrenica in July 1995. A predominantly Muslim town enclaved in a mainly Serb countryside, it had been designated by the UN a “demilitarized safe area” but was never demilitarized (the same was true of Gorazde, which had an arms and ammunition factory). Instead, it served as the base of an Islamist brigade of 5.000 fighters that terrorized the whole region, burning hundreds of villages and hamlets and killing some 3.000 Serb peasants. The chief of that brigade, Naser Oric, was recently acquitted by the “tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” – despite the existence of videos in which he boasts of his exploits to foreign journalists and pulls from a box several still identifiable heads of Serbs. Having asked for Srebrenica’s demilitarization by the UN, and waited for several years in vain, the Republic of Srpska decided, after the destruction of the village of Visnjica and the massacre of its entire Serb population, to attack Srebrenica and remove this canker. After concentrating their troops, the Muslim fighters in Srebrenica were called on to surrender in order to avoid an attack that could potentially harm the civilian population. This call was rejected outright, and the Serbs prepared to attack the Muslim brigade entrenched in the city. They called on the civilian (also Muslim) population to leave, and this was forcibly prevented by the Islamist fighters keeping them hostage, knowing their presence would deter the Christians from attack. The Serb general in charge of the operation (a hero and a great man) brought in dozens of buses and trucks. He told the civilians they had the choice of staying after Srebrenica had been cleaned of fighters or they could be taken to a Muslim area. He asked the UN to observe the takeover of the town and to oversee the subsequent sorting of the population. When attack became imminent, the 5.000 Islamist fighters fled into the night and hid in the forest hoping to rejoin Muslim lines. They were pursued by the Serb troops: a quarter were killed (in combat), some were taken prisoner (and later exchanged), and the rest arrived in the Muslim-held town of Tuzla a few days later. The remaining population was sorted into locals who wanted to stay, refugees from other regions who wanted to be transferred to a Muslim area, and non-local men of fighting age without families, who were suspected of being fighters who stayed and therefore forcibly taken to Muslim lines. For a non-conventional and semi-police operation of its kind(extracting enemy fighters hiding among a civilian population), it was a great success, well done and cleanly carried out by military personnel. Unfortunately, it also became a great success of US pro-Muslim propaganda. Different reports on the columns that fled into the forest were added together (thus, if the same column was reported by three different organizations and there were three different reports, the total number in the column would be multiplied by three). Reports of the Muslim fighters’ arrival in Tuzla and elsewhere were strangely omitted; what was broadcast to the world was that the Serbs had massacred tens of thousands of Muslims (the figure has now been reduced to 8.000), who suddenly all became unarmed civilians. Lists of “missing persons” were subsequently tacked on where some of the names were repeated as many as three times; many of these “missing persons” would reappear (miraculously) one year later to vote in the 1996 elections. In short, if one adds the numbers of the remaining population, the columns of fighters who arrived in Tuzla and the captured combatants, one gets just about the same figure as given by the UN as the total population of Srebrenica (44.000) a few weeks before the conquest of Srebrenica. The difference amounts to just over 1.000 Islamists who may have been actually killed (as were some Serbs) when they chose to fight rather than surrender. This propaganda-based version of events has been used to justify the NATO attack against the Republic of Srpska. It was followed by a specious search for the mass graves the USA claimed to have detected by satellite; when they were not located, it was explained that the bodies had been dug up and transferred. Thereafter, any corpse found within a two hundred kilometer radius around Srebrenica (including the 3.000 Serbs who had been slaughtered by Oric’s men in the surrounding countryside for the three previous years) automatically became “Muslims massacred by Serbs in Srebrenica”.

But one cannot say or write any of this without risking the accusation of “revisionism” and “negation of a war crime”.

Radovan Karadzic withdrew from public life after the signing of the Peace Agreement initialed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton, Ohio, USA and signed in Paris (December 1995) after being assured by the USA that his withdrawal would ensure that he would not be pursued by the extraordinary “tribunal” created to vilify the Serbs and justify NATO intervention on the side of the Bosnian Muslims. On Saturday, July 26, at noon, the population of the Republika Srpska gathered peacefully and lit candles for the hero of its resistance to the Islamic conquest.

* Vladimir Volkoff, La Crevasse (1996) and L’enlèvement (2000).

You must first view the video: The Pictures That Fooled The World – Yugoslavia Death Camp Hoax. The death camp of Karadcic was fake it was staged by a western left camera team, from England.

Link : http://www.guba.com/watch/3000055895

And read Media Cleansing, Dirty Reporting: Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia by Peter Brock and David Binder

The capture of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has unleashed a torrent of historical distortions echoing the propaganda used to justify US-NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia and to obscure the role of the Western powers in the federation’s break-up.

Karadzic was president of the Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska—RS), head of the Serbian Democratic Party and supreme commander of the Bosnian Serb army. He was indicted in 1995 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on 13 counts of genocide and other war crimes allegedly committed during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992-1995. Included in the charges are his responsibility for the 44-month shelling of the capital Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica.

Karadzic disappeared following the signing of the November 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia and partitioned the former Yugoslav republic into two ethnically based entities—the RS and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (the Moslem-Croat alliance).

He was arrested on Monday, July 21, in the Serbian capital of Belgrade where he was disguised as Dragan Dabic, a doctor of alternative medicine. The circumstances surrounding his capture remain unclear. His attorney says he was arrested on the previous Friday on a bus near the capital and held incommunicado over the weekend.

Reports indicate that Western intelligence services may have played a role and that the capture of former Bosnian Serb police chief Stojan Zupljanin in June revealed new information. Others suggest his whereabouts were known for some time, but his arrest only went ahead after the removal of the Security Intelligence Service chief Rade Bulatovic by the new pro-Western coalition led by President Boris Tadic’s Democratic Party. Interior Minister Ivica Dacic, who is also the head of former President Slobodan Milosevic’s Socialist Party, denied that officials from his ministry took part in the arrest.

The arrest of all those indicted by the ICTY, including Karadzic and Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic, has been a precondition of Serbian accession to the European Union, which was the main platform on which the new government campaigned.

All eyes have turned on Karadzic following the failure of the ICTY to produce any real proof of the direct responsibility of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for the terrible crimes carried out during the civil wars that erupted in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

“This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade,” said chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz. “It is also an important day for international justice, because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law and that sooner or later all fugitives will be brought to justice.”

Secretary of State and special advisor on Yugoslav Affairs between 1989 and 1992 to President George H.W. Bush, Lawrence Eagleburger, said, “I think he’s one of the last of a really miserable bunch that is still at large. He’s not the only one but he’s probably, with the arrest and then later the death of Milosevic, I think he’s probably the man who most deserves to be caught and punished.”

Former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who oversaw the Dayton Accord, singled out Karadzic as someone “whose enthusiastic advocacy of ethnic cleansing merits a special place in history.”

Former Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, said of Karadzic’s arrest, “Well, I think it is a huge event, a watershed event. It should have happened a long time ago, but the fact that it has in fact happened is very important for the Bosnian people and those who suffered as a result of Karadzic’s policies.”

There is no doubt that Karadzic played a major role in the political developments that sparked off the civil war in Bosnia, but for the Western media and politicians to portray him as the all-powerful “Butcher of Bosnia,” who masterminded the destruction of the delicate ethnic balance in the country, is absurd.

What is entirely absent from this version of recent Yugoslav history is the decisive role of the major imperialist powers, particularly the US and Germany, which deliberately engineered the country’s break-up, with a complete indifference to the inevitable tragic consequences of their intervention. Neither is there mention of the nationalist and communalist politicians they cultivated, such as Croatian President Franjo Tudjman or the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, who were culpable along with Karadzic.

Yugoslavia as it emerged from World War Two was the product of a popular movement against the Nazi occupation and Serbian royalist Chetnik forces, led by Josip Broz (Tito) and the Yugoslav Communist Party. Tito established a delicately balanced federation of disparate ethnic groups and regions. Under the specific historical circumstances provided by the Cold War, Tito was able for a number of years to manoeuvre between the US and the Soviet Union, while maintaining a unified federation based on constitutional guarantees to the various ethnic components—Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanian Kosovars, etc.

Karadzic was born in Montenegro in June 1945, but he grew up without seeing his father who had been jailed by the Tito regime for fighting with the Chetniks. In 1960, Karadzic studied at the Sarajevo University of Medicine and attended New York’s Columbia University from 1974 to 1975 to do advanced psychiatric work. In 1985, he was sentenced to prison along with close friend Momcilo Krajisnik (later to be speaker of the Serb Assembly) for embezzling state funds in order to build houses for themselves.

Karadzic increasingly came under the influence of the Serb writer Dobrica Cosic, a propagandist for Tito’s regime turned leader of the Serbian national revival movement and lauded as the “Father of the Serbian Nation.” Karadzic became Dobric’s political protégé, but he would probably have played a minor role in politics had it not been for the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation.

The origins of its break-up in the late 1980s and early 1990s are directly linked to the impact of policies dictated by the Western powers and imposed through International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment programmes. The aim of the West was to dismantle the state-run economy and restore the economic domination of international capital over Yugoslavia.

Pressure from the West contributed to soaring inflation and huge job losses, which sparked strikes and other mass protests by the Yugoslav working class. Seeking to divert the class struggle, ex-Stalinist bureaucrats promoted nationalist sentiments, while vying for support from Western governments.

By the time of multiparty elections in Bosnia in November 1990, three ethnically based parties had been formed. Alongside the Serbian Democratic Party set up by Karadzic, Krajisnik and Biljana Plavsic, who was to become RS vice-president, were Izetbegovic’s ethnic Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA) and the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ). The SDA won most seats in the Assembly, followed by the SDS and then the HDZ. The remaining seats were split between other parties, including the former Communist Party.

The ethnic tensions that had developed were to explode with the collapse of the USSR and the reunification of Germany in 1991. The geopolitical position of Yugoslavia as a bulwark against a Soviet thrust into the Mediterranean fundamentally changed. A resurgent German imperialism saw its interests in the Balkans—historically a German sphere of influence—best served through the promotion of secession by Slovenia, the most prosperous Yugoslav region, and then Croatia.

It was inevitable, given the history and politics of Yugoslavia, that the piecemeal break-up of the federation would lead to civil war. The secession of provinces would suddenly deprive ethnic minorities of the constitutional protections they had enjoyed under the federation. The creation of new nation states based upon ethnic nationalism led to “ethnic cleansing.”

The US administration, after first opposing the break-up of Yugoslavia, changed its strategy in order to further its goal of hegemony over the former Eastern bloc countries newly opened to capitalist exploitation. It became the chief sponsor of Bosnian and then Kosovan independence and targeted Serbia, which defended the unitary state as its most powerful component, as its enemy. The US opposed ethnic cleansing only when the Serbs carried it out, while supporting Croatia, Bosnia and the Kosovo Albanians when they pursued identical aims through the same bloody methods.

In April of this year, the former Kosovo Liberation Army leader and ex-prime minister of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, was acquitted of war crimes committed against Serbs in Kosovo during 1998. The ICTY prosecution, which is seeking a retrial, claimed that two crucial witnesses did not come to The Hague to testify against the accused because they felt it unsafe to do so, and the trial chamber itself said that the trial was conducted “in an atmosphere where witnesses felt unsafe.”

Last month, the US envoy in Croatia from 1993 to 1995, Peter Galbraith, denied that the 1995 offensive known as Operation Storm, which drove 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina area of Croatia, constituted “ethnic cleansing.” Galbraith was appearing at the ICTY in the trial of Croatian generals, including Ante Gotovina, indicted for war crimes against Serbs committed by troops under their command during the military operation. Galbraith revealed that the US government had taken an “understanding attitude” towards Operation Storm, but insisted he would not have asked Washington “to give it the green light” if he had believed Tudjman intended to remove the Serbs. Earlier in his testimony, Galbraith admitted Tudjman and his associates wanted an “ethnically clean country”.

As a result of the June 1991 war that broke out in Slovenia and Croatia after the two republics declared independence, chaos engulfed Bosnia. The SDA increasingly agitated for Bosnian independence whilst the SDS wanted Bosnia to remain a part of Yugoslavia. Within months, Izetbegovic had held a referendum on independence, which was approved by two thirds of the population but boycotted by the Serbs. For their part, the Serbs had formed a separate Bosnian Serb Assembly, which proclaimed the “Serbian republic of Bosnia” and created an army commanded by Ratko Mladic. Civil war was all but inevitable.

Srebrenica was the scene of the killing of an estimated 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in July 1995 by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of Mladic—officially the largest mass murder in Europe since World War Two.

Srebrenica was designated as a “safe area” by the United Nations and was protected at the time by 200 Dutch troops. It became a base for the Bosnian Muslim Army (ABiH) to attack Serb forces. When Mladic’s forces entered the town on July 11, they slaughtered a column mainly comprising men trying to escape to Tuzla with no distinction made between ABiH soldiers and civilians.

The ICTY prosecution will now have to prove Karadzic’s command responsibility for the crimes that occurred during the civil war. Last year, the International Court of Justice found RS forces had committed genocide, but only in reference to Srebrenica, not elsewhere in the Bosnian war. So far, the tribunal has only proven genocide against two Bosnian Serbs for direct involvement in the Srebrenica massacre. It was unable to prove genocide against Karadzic’s co-defendant Krajisnik.

What about the Muslims who enacted atrocities against Serbs in those same Balkan wars? Where’s the condemnation of the U.S.- and German-backed Albanian terrorists, the kla, for atrocities committed by them against ethnic Serbs and especially their overt ethnic cleansing of Serbian Kosovars?

Why must Phyllis Chesle single out Karadzic as one “whose enthusiastic advocacy of ethnic cleansing merits a special place in history?

It’s simple. It all fits an overarching agenda to which the greater public remains oblivious.With such overt manipulation of public opinion having been promulgated by the mass media, Karadzic is hung, drawn and quartered well before he sets foot in the dock.

Placing these falsehoods into their proper perspective. Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels said if you tell a monstrous lie people will believe you because they cannot imagine anyone making up such an outrageous falsehood. Then if evidence is shown to contradict the lie, you dismiss it as irrelevant or misguided. Finally, when the truth is disclosed it is too late. Nobody cares or wants to know. That has undoubtedly been the case with the mass condemnation of the Serbs.

White House has stated that Karadzic arrest had demonstrated Serbia is “honoring its promises”, while charging the former RS president of failing to prevent “rapes of thousands of Muslim women in detainment camps and the setting up of concentration camps in Bosnia” (?!). How convincing this Hollywood indictment really is, is best proven by Alija Izetbegovic in person, in his confession to Bernard Kouchner, when he admitted that the story about the rape and concentration camps was a marketing trick, to win over the international public (B. Kouchner, Les guerriers de la paix).

Since he was arrested in Belgrade last week, there have been miles and miles of newspaper commentary on Radovan Karadzic: on his bloody past; his role in Srebrenica; his bouffant; his limp handshake; his transformation from war leader to bearded hippy therapist. Yet perhaps the most interesting article – or at least the most unwittingly revealing – was a 374-word piece that appeared on the website of the UK Guardian on 25 July.

It was written by Inayat Bunglawala, Assistant Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and bête noire of Britain’s left-leaning “humanitarian militarists.” Pro-war commentators despise Bunglawala because he supports Hamas, sympathizes with Iraqi suicide bombers, and, just prior to 9/11, he was disseminating the writings of Osama bin Laden, whom he described as a “freedom fighter.”

In the ever-shrinking world of British dinner-party spats between humanitarian militarism on one hand and Islamism on the other, Bunglawala is considered the arch enemy of Britain’s laptop bombardiers, who believe you can liberate Third World countries by writing a few outraged newspaper columns and dropping a few hundred bombs.

Yet in his Guardian comment on Karadzic, Bunglawala found himself siding with one of his staunchest critics amongst Britain’s “muscular left.” Under the headline “Lessons from the past,” Bunglawala wrote: “I [have] finally managed to find something written by Martin Bright that I wholeheartedly agree with.” Bright is the political editor of the New Statesman and is associated with Britain’s liberal interventionist writers; he is also the author of a pamphlet titled “When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries,” which attacked the British government for having links with Bunglawala’s apparently “extreme” organization, the MCB.

What could Bunglawala and Bright possibly agree on? In Bunglawala’s words, they agree that British schoolchildren should be taught about Srebrenica “in the same way that they are taught about Auschwitz,” that Karadzic is evil, and that the Bosnian war was a lethal explosion of the Bosnian Serbs’ “deadly hatred” which followed their “relentless vilification of entire communities” (presumably the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats).

In short? Both Bunglawala, the anti-Western political Islamist, and Bright, the leftish sympathizer with Western military intervention, see the Bosnian conflict in precisely the same way: not as a bloody civil war in which all sides committed atrocities, but as an episode of Nazi-style Serbian rampaging against vilified communities, which was comparable in its horror to Auschwitz.

Bunglawala’s article was a fleeting but powerful reminder of a truth that is too often brushed under the carpet these days: namely, that both contemporary Western interventionism and contemporary radical Islamism have their origins in the Bosnian war. But back then, the “arch enemies” of the interventionism-vs-Islamism debate were allies. They took the same side (that of the Bosnian Muslims), propagandized wildly against the Serbs (whom they denounced as thugs, gangsters, dogs and even monkeys), demanded Western military assaults on Serb positions, and described the actions of the Serbs as uniquely barbaric, even Nazi-esque.

And both the Western militarists and radical Islamists were re-energized and moralized by their joint crusade against the Serbs in Bosnia. One might even argue that both of the major curses in international affairs today – the militaristic meddling of Western governments that pose as humanitarian and the occasional bloody attacks launched by al-Qaeda and others – spring from the anti-Serb hysteria of 1992-1995.

This goes way beyond a rare and polite agreement between Bunglawala and Bright. The capture of Karadzic is something that everyone from Bush to bin Laden will celebrate. Pretty much the only consensus that exists between the American military machine and the al-Qaeda network is that the Serbs are evil and deserving of punishment.

Following Karadzic’s arrest, Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat who negotiated the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, described him as “one of the worst men in the world, the Osama bin Laden of Europe.” This is darkly ironic, since in the early and mid-1990s Holbrooke and bin Laden were on the same side, united in a violent campaign against Karadzic and the rest of the Bosnian Serbs. Holbrooke must remember this; in an interview in 2001 he said the Bosnian Muslims “wouldn’t have survived” without the help of al-Qaeda militants.

Today’s humanitarian militarists and Islamic radicals are cut from the same cloth. In Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, they were close allies – propagandistic, moralistic and militaristic allies. During the Bosnian war, anywhere between 1,200 and 3,000 Arab Mujahideen, many of them veterans of the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s, descended on Bosnia to fight alongside the Bosnian Muslims. And their movement into Bosnia was facilitated by the new “humanitarians” in Washington.

In 1993 and 1994, the Clinton administration gave a green light to Iran, Saudi Arabia and various highly dubious radical Islamic charities to arm the Bosnian Muslims. Despite having denounced Iran as “the worst sponsor of terrorism in the world,” the Clinton administration told both Croat and Bosnian Muslim leaders that they should accept shipments of weapons, ammunition, antitank rockets, communications equipment and uniforms and helmets from Iran.

Washington also allowed “Islamic charities,” which really were radical Mujahideen-based organizations, to supply money and arms to the Bosnian Muslims. As the Washington Post reported in September 1996, US officials on the ground in Bosnia, who were motivated by “sympathy for the Muslim government and ambivalence about maintaining the arms embargo,” instructed other Western officials to “back off” and “not interfere” with these shipments from radical Islamists. One of the “charities” whose provision of funds and arms to the Bosnian Muslims was protected by American diplomats was run by Osama bin Laden.

The US-protected supply line between the Middle East and Bosnia, through which both Iranian elements and radicals sent money and guns, also encouraged Mujahideen to make their way into the Balkans. Along with the flow of radical Islamist weaponry, there followed the movement of radical Islamist warriors.

Once inside Bosnia, these Mujahideen, many of them fresh from the bloody battlefields of Afghanistan, fought with the Bosnian Muslim Army at a time when it was being supported politically and militarily by Washington and vast numbers of Western liberal commentators. In 1994 and 1995, Washington surreptitiously supplied the Bosnian Muslim Army with weapons and training, even though it had hundreds of Mujahideen in its ranks. The Mujahideen formed a battalion of holy warriors which was, according to Evan Kohlmann, author of Al-Qaeda’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network, directly answerable to then Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic.

In other words, America armed and trained a military machine that was using Mujahideen as “shock troops.” As the United Nations said in a communiqué in 1995, the period of America’s secretive arming, the Mujahideen were “directly dependent on [the Bosnian Muslim Army] for supplies.” Washington helped to create the gateway between the Middle East and Bosnia, protected the supply of funds to Bosnia by bin Laden and others, and secretly armed a Bosnian army that kept the Mujahideen in paid employment (otherwise knowing as warmongering) after the Afghan-Soviet war came to an end.

If the radical Islamists who flooded Bosnia were militarily backed by Washington, they were propagandistically inspired by the Western liberal media.

The similarities between the positions of the liberal hawks in newsrooms across America and Europe and the line taken by al-Qaeda militants were striking. As the British author Philip Hammond argues, hawkish journalists in the Western press depicted the war as “a simple tale of good versus evil.” Likewise, Kohlmann describes how Mujahideen who fought in Bosnia believed there was a “clear divergence between good and evil” and understood the conflict “in terms of an apocalyptic, one-dimensional religious confrontation between Muslims and non-Muslims.” Western journalists labeled the Serbs “thugs” and “gangsters”; the Independent newspaper in Britain even published a cartoon showing them as monkeys. The Mujahideen labeled them “dogs” and “infidels.”

Indeed, many of the Mujahideen who fought in Bosnia were inspired to do so by simplistic media coverage of the sort written by liberal-left journalists in the West. Many of the testimonies made by Arab fighters reveal that they first ventured to Bosnia because they “saw US media reports on rape camps” or read about the “genocide” in Bosnia and the “camps used by Serb soldiers systematically to rape thousands of Muslim women.” Holy warriors seem to have been moved to action by some of the more shrill and unsubstantiated coverage of the war in Bosnia.

In his book Landscapes of the Jihad, Faisal Devji argues that contemporary jihad “is more a product of the media than it is of any local tradition or situation and school or lineage of Muslim authority… [The] jihad itself can be seen as an offspring of the media, composed as it is almost completely of preexisting media themes, images and stereotypes.” The jihad in Bosnia was in many ways a “product of the media” – many Mujahideen were inspired to fight by media “images”, and they executed their violent attacks against media “stereotypes”: wicked Serbs.

Most strikingly, perhaps, both Western liberals and the Eastern Mujahideen ventured to Bosnia in response to their own crises of legitimacy, and in search of a sense of purpose. As Adam Burgess says of sections of the Western left in his book Divided Europe: “Deprived of the traditional staples of left-wing politics, the search for an alternative became increasingly pronounced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The left embraced new causes such as environmentalism, which were traditionally associated with a more conservative orientation. It is in this context that sense can be made of the readiness of the left to embrace the anti-Serbian ’cause’ with less restraint and qualification than even the rest of society.”

Similarly, the Mujahideen embraced the anti-Serbian “cause” because they too had lost direction. In the early 1990s, Afghanistan was becoming bogged down in civil war after the withdrawal of the Soviets, and governments in the Middle East and north Africa were persecuting veteran Mujahideen returning from Afghanistan and wiping out radical Islamic groups. For both Western liberals (governments and thinkers) and the Mujahideen, Bosnia became a refuge from these harsh realities, a place where they could fight fantasy battles against evil to make themselves feel dynamic and heroic instead of having to face up to the real problems in their movements and in politics more broadly.

Bosnia had a key transformative effect on both the Western liberal establishment and the Arab Mujahideen. It was the conflict that made many in the West pro-interventionist, convincing them that the “international community” must ignore sovereign norms and intervene around the world to save people from tyranny. And it transformed the Mujahideen from religious nationalists – who during the Afghan-Soviet war possessed “no global blueprint transcending their individual countries” – into global warriors against “evil,” who also, like their humanitarian paymasters, began to care little for old-fashioned ideas about sovereignty. It is after Bosnia that we see the emergence of international networks of Islamic militants.

In Bosnia, both Western elements and radical Islamists became super-moralized, militarized, internationalized. As a result of their joint war against the “evil” of the Serbs, they began to conceive of themselves as warriors for “good” who did not have to play by the old rules of the international order. Post-Bosnia, Western governments, backed by numerous commentators, launched “humanitarian” wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq – and Islamic militants who trained in Bosnia were involved in the African Embassy bombings of 1998, the 9/11 attacks and the Madrid train bombings of 2004.

There is nothing so bitter as a conflict between former allies. We should remind ourselves that much of today’s bloody moral posturing between Western interventionists and Islamic militants – which has caused so much destruction around the world – springs from the hysterical politics of “good and evil” that was created during the Bosnian war. No doubt Karadzic has a great deal to answer for. But the West/East, liberal/Mujahideen demonization of Karadzic and the Serbs, and through it the rehabilitation of both Western militarism and Islamic radicalism, has also done a great deal to destabilize international affairs and destroy entire communities.

On December 10 we were finally told by a “mainstream” media outlet that the facts of the Bosnian case may not be quite as clear cut as we had been led to believe. “The death toll from Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, widely estimated at being at least 200,000, was considerably lower,” a Reuters report announced on that day. According to Reuters, a Bosnian Muslim investigator by the name of Mirsad Tokaea, head of a team of researchers working on a Norwegian government grant, has established that the true number is closer to 100,000; but even that figure is yet to be verified: “After cross-referencing, we have whittled down the number of those killed to about 80,000 right now.”

A similar assessment had come some months earlier from an unexpected source. According to the research done by The Hague Tribunal (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY), “the number of people killed in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was around 102,000.” Since the Tribunal’s continued existence is critically dependent on the continued exaggeration of all Yugoslav war crimes, even that figure should be taken with a grain of salt. The research project was conducted by the two population experts, Ewa Tabeau and Jacub Bijak, who work for the Office of the Prosecutor at The Hague. They were nevertheless deemed so explosive that the findings were presented at a conference for demographers in Norway a year ago “but they have not been revealed to the wider public.”

This extremely interesting report has been ignored by all English-language media outlets that have embraced and propagated the myth of “250,000 dead in Bosnia.”

“The ‘Bosnian Holocaust’ story was fabricated by the Muslim side as part of a wide-ranging and effective PR campaign. In December 1992, the Izetbegovic authorities first claimed that there were 128,444 dead on the ‘Bosnian’ side (including Croats and “Serbs loyal to the Bosnian Government”). According to [ex-State Department official george] Kenney, this figure was cooked by adding together the 17,466 confirmed dead until that time, and the 111,000 that the Muslims had already claimed as missing.”

Kenney recalled the precise moment-on June 28, 1993-when Izetbegovic’s deputy minister of information, Senada Kreso, told journalists that “200,000 had died.” He regarded that assertion as “an outburst of naive zeal,” and was taken aback when “the major newspapers and wire services quickly began using these numbers, unsourced and unsupported.” The figure eventually grew to 250,000 fatalities by 1994, and has been peddled ever since without serious challenge.

In reality, after an initial bout of heavy fighting (summer-fall 1992), from 1993 to mid-1995 there was a period of relative calm on most fronts in Bosnia, interrupted by brief outbursts in isolated localities (Gorazde, Bihac). Stories of mass murder and grand-scale atrocities, such as “Srebrenica,” have never been independently substantiated. On the basis of different sources (ICRC, British military intelligence etc), conclusion is that the war in Bosnia is unlikely to have resulted in more than 70,000 deaths. Including Croatia/Krajina, the Yugoslav wars of 1991-95 have killed up to, but not more than, 100,000 people.

Over the past 12 years there is had no reason to make any radical alteration to this overall assessment. Even if Mr. Tokaca’s current figure of 80,000 “verified” names of individual victims is accurate, after almost a decade I stand corrected by 14 percent. President Clinton et al were wrong by more than 300 percent. If the lie of the “Bosnian genocide” is eventually unmasked in the coming year or two, by the same token we can expect the lie of the “Kosovo genocide” to follow suit not too long thereafter . The truth will out eventually, even if the political consequences of the lie-such as dozens of destroyed Christian shrines, and hundreds of thousands of Christians expelled or murdered by Muslims-are irreversible. The truth exists; it is the lie that needs inventing.

Perhaps it was also appropriate that he had apparently spent his years in hiding since the civil war in the former Yugoslavia practising as an alternative therapist. The moral crusade to turn the Serbs into the new Nazis, pursued after the Yugoslav civil war through the hunt for Karadzic on charges of genocide, has served as a strange sort of therapy for many in the West. By branding the Serbs as evil, they have found a way to make themselves feel righteous. In the process, they have distorted the realities of Yugoslavia’s civil wars, risked diminishing the history of the Nazi Holocaust, and paved the way for further disastrous Western interventions.

That last point makes the Western crusaders even more determined to hang on to their anti-Serb banners today. The Balkan wars of the 1990s marked the high tide of the liberal left’s new moral case for international intervention in the affairs of nation states. The notion that they were taking a stand against the new Nazis in Bosnia and Kosovo has become just about the only thing the pro-interventionists can hold on to as proof that they are on the side of right.

That is why, after the capture of Karadzic this week, the new Nazi-hunters are cock-a-hoop, with Paddy Ashdown, former United Nations overlord of Bosnia, announcing that he was off to celebrate with his Bosnian friends. Whether they find it quite so comforting when they have to deal with the man rather than the monster in court remains to be seen. The trial of Milosevic should remind them how such carefully staged showpieces can turn into embarrassing debacles.

During the war in Bosnia Karadzic acted as a self-important petty nationalist with a romantic dream and a ruthless streak. And he was far from alone in that. The campaign to demonise Karadzic and nail him for genocide before an international war crimes tribunal, however, has been a politically motivated circus that serves interests other than justice. The fact that he has been arrested as a diplomatic stunt to help the new Serb government gain entry to the European Union is in keeping with a campaign that has been politically loaded from the start.

There has always been a strong air of double standards around accusations of war crimes. The very notion of a war crime is questionable, since it suggests that there is a way of waging war that is somehow civilised and done according to the rules of cricket. When a participant in a war is singled out to be accused of war crimes, it is generally a safe bet that it will be one of Them rather than Us – the barbarians of the developing world rather than the gentlemen of the West.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was voted into being by the United Nations Security Council in 1993, during the Balkans war. It was the first war crime tribunal to be set up since the Second World War. Why was that? There had hardly been a shortage of wars in the intervening half century, many of them bloodier than the Balkans conflict. From the first, the tribunal was a political tool set up in response to the crisis of authority within the West in the post-Cold War era. Its primary aim was to establish the right of the UN Security Council to sit in judgement on the rest of the world. Its political role was most blatantly revealed when it indicted President Milosevic for war crimes during the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999.

But the most striking feature of the crusade to Nazify the Serbs was the role of liberal-left journalists. It was these ‘laptop bombardiers’ who demanded that Britain and the West intervene more forcefully against the Serbs, first over Bosnia and then Kosovo. This, too, was more a product of events within the West. The collapse of traditional left-right politics at the end of the Cold War had left many bereft of a clear mission or cause. Some sought salvation and a new sense of moral purpose via a foreign crusade in the Balkans. Journalists and politicians talked about Bosnia as ‘our Poland’ or even ‘our generation’s Holocaust’, the battle against the Serbs as ‘our Second World War’, a chance to emulate their fathers’ noble fight against the Nazis.

To justify this cause they had to turn the complex civil war in the former Yugoslavia into a simple act of genocide by Serb neo-Nazis. There were certainly terrible atrocities committed by Serbs, as well as by Croats and Muslims. Such is the nature of civil wars. But many of the atrocity stories, as in other wars, were distorted to get the required message across. The events in Srebrenica, over which Karadzic has now been charged with genocide, were a case in point. It was a bloody, complicated and prolonged battle, concluded in murky circumstances, at the end of which Bosnian Serbs massacred an unknown number of Bosnian Muslims in cold blood. But there is little to support the assertion that it was an act of pre-meditated genocide (see How did Srebrenica become a morality tale?, by Tara McCormack).

The upshot of this propaganda war was to distort perceptions of both the past and the present. Endlessly comparing the Yugoslavian civil war to the Holocaust risked denigrating the unique historical crime of the killing of six million Jews. At the same time, the myth was born that here was a new Holocaust that the West had refused to intervene against. The lesson of Bosnia was said to be that earlier and stronger intervention would be needed in the future. In fact, the problem in the former Yugoslavia was that the West had interfered far too much; as always, such interference served to intensify and perpetuate the conflicts. There was no civil war until the tensions were exploded by Germany’s recognition of the breakaway republic of Croatia, and America’s recognition of Bosnia. Having never fired a shot throughout its Cold War stand-off with the Soviet Union, NATO’s first military action was to bomb the Bosnian Serbs in 1995 – and then Serbia itself in 1999. At the end of the war, Bosnia became a divided UN protectorate under the effective dictatorship of an imposed official such as Ashdown.

That was why some of us opposed the moral crusade over Bosnia and the wars against the Serbs. Not because we were in some way ‘pro-Serb’ – what reason would there have been to take anybody’s side in the destructive Balkan civil wars? No, it was because we saw the dangers of international intervention, of historical revisionism, and of trying to resolve the problems of Western politics and society on somebody else’s battlefield.

It has been barely written about these issues since then, because I presume American public have little interest in Balkan politics. However, the Western reaction to the arrest of Karadzic might remind us that there are still some important arguments about issues such as international intervention, justice and war reporting to be had over here.

The first indictment against Karadžić was issued by the ICTY prosecutor R. Goldstone in November, 1995. The charges included 36 counts such as genocide, complicity in genocide, killings, persecutions, deportations, inhumane acts, terror against civilian population, and the taking of hostages. However, the new ICTY prosecutor Carla Del Ponte subsequently changed the indictment leaving only 11 counts.

Interestingly, the ICTY had in fact pronounced a judgment on Karadžić already in July, 1996. When the ICTY rules were drafted at the early phase of its existence, controversy arose over the procedure allowing for trials in absentia, that is, without the accused being physically present before the Tribunal. A number of judges strongly objected to the option while others deemed it necessary. Rule 61, formally regarded as the procedure of reviewing charges by the Tribunal, was adopted as a compromise. In reality, the procedure is a lot more unfair than the previously proposed trials without the accused being present, as the latter would at least provide for the participation of defense in the process. On the contrary, Procedure 61 does not imply any involvement of defense even formally. Karadžić was indicted on July 11, 1996 on all counts in accord with Rule 611. The hearings took only 7 days, and the decision was made in just 2 (!) days.

Indicting Karadžić was a matter of enormous importance to the ICTY due to the fact that the Tribunal’s interpretation of responsibility was based on the theory of “a joint criminal enterprise”. According to it, the guilt of the accused could be assumed proven in case there allegedly existed the enterprise and the individual was involved in it. The concept was introduced by a US judge in the beginning of the Tribunal’s activity to make it possible to prove cases lacking any kind of supporting evidence. Thus Karadžić, who was not only portrayed as a kind of demon by mass media but also had been indicted by the Tribunal without a trial, turned into “evidence” against other accused individuals. It may be hard to imagine, but bracketing Karadžić with “a group of criminals who acted in concert” was presented as evidence proving the guilt of Yugoslavian President Milosevic!

The allegation that over 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed in Srebrenica in July, 1995 by the forces of Republika Srpska which were under the command of Karadžić as the Republic’s President, was the main charge against him. Though several trials related to the events in Srebrenica have taken place at the Tribunal between 1996 and 2008 and, due to vigorous media campaigns, the very word Srebrenica became a synonym of the “Serbian atrocity”, the trials actually failed to confirm the version of the events. Of course, the ICTY did “establish” that genocide against Muslims had been committed in Srebrenica and laid the guilt for it on the leaders of Republika Srpska, but a review of the evidence on which the conclusion was based easily reveals that the resulting sentences are unfair and rely on hypotheses, guesswork, and in some instances on downright falsifications. Even the fact of mass killings of civilians in the form in which it has been “established” by the ICTY remains unconfirmed. Though the notion that over 7,000 Muslim men and boys have been killed in Srebrenica is now commonly accepted, no evidence to the effect has been presented to the Tribunal! Only 1,500 of the mythic 7,000 burials were found, but some 1,000 of the people died in combat and could not be counted as civilians. As for the extent of responsibility of particular individuals, the situation is even obscurer. A number of people, particularly Gen. R. Krstic and V. Blagojevic, were found guilty solely on the basis of testimony given by other individuals who initially had been tried together with them. For example, somebody, Miroslav Deronjic agreed to testify against others and said they planned genocide, but did so in return for dropping genocide charges against himself! Deronjic also testified against Milosevic who was charged with genocide in Srebrenica. The centerpiece of Deronjic’s testimony was his statement that Karadžić “told to kill them all”. That was all the evidence available, but it was deemed convincing enough to find Milosevic guilty of genocide as it was concluded earlier that Milosevic had been in the same “criminal enterprise” with Karadžić. As for Deronjic, upon having played his role he was sentenced to 10 years and died last year in jail in Holland.

The case of Drazen Erdemovic, who had personally executed over a hundred civilians, was no less absurd. Murder charges against him were dropped as a reward for his saying that he killed people on the orders issued by the leaders of Republika Srpska! Milosevic completely disproved Erdemovic’s testimony during a cross-examination, but the Tribunal has no concerns over the truthfulness of witnesses’ testimonies as it is fully aware that those are actually false. No doubt, Erdemovic is going to be the key witness in case Karadžić is tried by the ICTY.

The defense phase of another trial related to Srebrenica – the Popovic case involving a total of 9 people – continues, but it is already equally clear that the Tribunal failed to prove the guilt of any of the accused and that they are not going to be acquitted. The purpose of the Tribunal is not to serve justice but to legitimize the falsified version of history written with the blood of the victims of the forces which had destroyed Yugoslavia, that is, the US and other NATO countries.

A circumstance that should not be overlooked is that Karadžić was arrested at the time when, as planned by the UN Security Council, the Tribunal is about to close. According to the plan, all trials must be completed by the end of 2008, and all appeals must be processed by the end of 2010. It is obvious at the moment that the schedule will not materialize. Some of the trials are at the very early phase (for example, the trial of Serbian Radical Party’s President Vojislav Šešelj) and others have not even commenced nor are going to open in the nearest future. Russia addressed the situation by suggesting not to extend the Tribunal’s mandate and to transfer the currently open proceedings to national jurisdictions. It is clear in the context that the arrest of Karadžić can benefit the ICTY. Notably, the Tribunal is the costliest institution run by the UN. The salaries of its judges are orders of magnitude higher than those of the presidents of Western countries. The exact salaries of the ICTY judges and prosecutors are kept secret, but one can guess a lot from the fact that minor ICTY attorneys are paid Euro 30,000 a month. The end of the Tribunal would be a personal drama for its employees. Russia’s suggestion to transfer incomplete cases to national courts is not a problem-free solution either. Does Karadžić have a chance to stand fair trial in Bosnia where the case would belong as the alleged crimes were committed in its territory? No doubt, no fair trial of Karadžić can be expected in the Hague either, but there at least the process would be watched by the whole world.

In case the trial of Karadžić takes place, it is going to be a serious challenge for the ICTY. Until recently, the Tribunal was not exactly eager to see him arrested and brought to trial. Carla Del Ponte’s recent scandalous book has overshadowed the no less interesting one written by her former press-secretary Florence Hartmann, in which she describes “strange” developments related to Karadžić’s and Mladic’s cases. For example, she claims that Jacques Chirac has brokered a deal to never try Karadžić in return for the release of French officers. A lot of things referred to in this book, if presented at a trial, could hurt high-ranking politicians in the US and other NATO countries. It appears likely that the trial will either never start or never be completed. The destiny that awaits Karadžić, considering how much he knows, can be the same as that of Yugoslavian President S. Milosevic and Serbian Krajina’s President M. Babić – doctors in the Hague jail are known to easily declare that the deaths of inmates have been natural.