Flashback 1999. International Piracy in Kosovo
Raphael Israeli. Jerusalem Post, March 26, 1999

Imagine an increasing Mexican population in southern California , or a growing Arab community in southern France , which would declare its will to secede from the American or the French heartland, and would use violence and terror to achieve its goal.

Would Mexico or Algeria be entitled to bomb Los Angeles or Marseille in support of the dissidents’ claim for independence? If they did, the civilized world would be unanimous in condemning this as an act of international piracy.

This is more or less what is happening in Kosovo today. The Serbs have considered Kosovo the cradle of their culture and ethnic identity, and as the stage where their history has unfolded, since the fourteenth century. Over the past decades, due to poverty and misery in neighboring Albania , tens of thousands of (mostly illegal) migrants have infiltrated into Kosovo to seek new opportunities. This is not unlike the process of illegal migration from Mexico to the southwestern states of the U.S. , or from North Africa to France .

And yet, those same countries which would not allow an illegal immigrant population to secede politically while tearing away part of the national turf, stand at the forefront of the western effort today not only to de-legitimize the legitimate Serbian endeavor to protect its national territory, but use force to achieve that morally and politically questionable goal.

NATO is not bombarding Yugoslavia because Serbia rejects peace in Kosovo, but because the West backs the Albanians’ demand for self-determination at the expense of their hosts, and insists on the presence of an international force on the sovereign territory under Belgrade’s lawful jurisdiction. This is something the proud Serbs reject, exactly as Washington and Paris would oppose any interference of outsiders in their internal matters.

True, there is the moral question of atrocities, and the international obligation to avert them. But, in addition to the proven inefficacy of the Western threats in this regard, there is also the factual question of presenting a true and balanced picture to the world.

The atrocities did not begin with the Serbs. They have an interest in maintaining peace and quiet in Kosovo, if only to ensure the livelihood of the Serb minority there.

Once the Albanians back up their demand for independence with violence and terror, what are the Serbs supposed to do? Bow out and withdraw from their sovereign territory? Under conditions of guerilla warfare, atrocities are bound to happen, on both sides, gory and inexcusable as they be.

If this new form of international piracy is allowed to continue, more foci of unrest will arise at the heart of the West. Instead of focusing the struggle against the rising threat of fundamentalist Islam (in which the Serbs have stood in the forefront, first in Bosnia and now in Kosovo), the West will make a grave error if it weakened itself in this exercise of self-immolation that is hard to understand, much less to condone.

The writer is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Truman Research Institute.

Mr Mecklenburg. “put up or shut up” in the English language is not a threat. If you know English.

First of all, I want to thank you for the interesting conversation we’ve had – it was quite civil and hopefully I conducted myself as well as you did.

I also want to thank Dr. Chessler for letting us have this exchange; I did write already that I have a great deal of respect for her intellectual honesty and courage which, by the way, have become quite rare nowadays especially in the academia.

I do hope you don’t just dismiss my arguments out of hand – I assure you that I have nothing to do with the pro-Stalin’s useful idiots and fellow travelers; I only refuse to duped by cheap, sensational propaganda and insist on using my own judgment.

One thing which marks the current rulers in Russia as true heirs of Stalinism is the ability to find others to justify their crimes. Stalin did of course mouth slogans of democracy, justice, peace and human rights in his time. He had a rather large echo chamber. On a side note perhaps, it is fascinating to see how the internet has been used to amplify Russian propaganda in the last few days. It’s the age of cyberwar.

Since you wish to distance yourself from the invasion of Georgia, it must be strange for you to hear your words in the mouths of the invaders and their cheering section. You must feel some cognitive dissonance there.

If you’re for real, you should learn from that, you should let it be the beginning of wisdom.

To sum up: You have never presented us with the slightest reason to doubt that mass atrocities occurred in Bosnia, and that Radovan Karadzic and his followers were the primary guilty parties. Nobody imagined that, nobody was taken in by any propaganda about it. It happened.

You have presented nothing to show that the Bosnian struggle was about “jihad,” rather than the fight to preserve a multi-ethnic society shared by Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Jews and Roma. It was a self-defense against the crimes primarily of Karadzic and his followers, and his state patron Milosevic. Not propaganda, but truth.

You refer to certain things without defining them. I’m not sure what a “do-gooder” is, or exactly who or what the “human rights establishment” is. Or how they could have “empowered Russian nationalists and smothered the democratic forces there.” Do they control other countries this way as well? Are they space lizards?

That’s like arguing about “wishful thinking,” there’s just no point.

Since you agree that the issue of Kosova has been falsely exploited by the Russians in the current crisis, there seems nothing else for us to argue about.

I’ll tell you that I do indeed accept absolute moral responsibility for my actions in support of Bosnia. Wish I could have done more than I did–it’s a cause I would have been willing to die for, then and now. Instead I try to live my life in support of those values.

Thanks to Phyllis Chesler for the opportunity to comment at such length. I stand by what I’ve said except for a few sleepy typos.

Thanks to you too.

“It’s the end, Clov, we’ve come to the end.”

You’re absolutely right that Kosovo was exploited by Russian leaders in order to start redrawing the borders of the post-Soviet Union settlement, but that doesn’t excuse the Western do-gooders who thoughtlessly encouraged the gross violations of international laws in order to dismember Serbia and now are hiding behind lofty, but completely insincere and meaningless chatter about human rights. It was these do-gooders who empowered Russian nationalists and smothered the democratic forces there. You’re right that the cynicism of Russian diplomats is boundless, but so was the cynicism of Albright, Clark, and Holbrooke. Of course, there should be no surprise here, but the outright hypocrisy of the Western human rights establishment was even worse. They knew perfectly well that there was no genocide there, and they were aware that Izetbegovic, Tudjman, and KLA leaders were despicable characters, but they’ve done their best whitewash these thugs.

There’s no question that Milosevic was a thug, but compared with the KLA thugs running Kosovo right now, he was an angel. Of course, the same do-gooders who shed crocodile tears over a “genocide” in Kosovo (which turned out to be fiction!), now modestly keep quiet about the real ethnic cleansing which has taken place there. Thanks to the Western intervention, thousands of innocent people died there, just like thousands of people are dying in Georgia because Russian leaders feel free to trample upon international laws the way it was done in the Balkans by the West.

The talk about “human rights” turned out to be a smokescreen in order for the Western countries to dismember Serbia, and Russian leaders took note – unlike the primitive Soviet leaders they are now spouting the same rhetoric the West used to push around a small defenseless country – after all, what’s good for the goose is good for the gender. It’s not easy to ask Russia to respect other countries sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbors when the enlightened West doesn’t believe it should abide by these rules.

It’s rather sad that the Western do-gooders don’t seem to learn – it would really behoove you to accept moral responsibility for the blind and unthinking support of thugs and jihadists in the Balkans – the defenders of human rights allowed themselves to be exploited and provided cover to the likes of Albright, Clark, and Holbrooke, and like them, they have blood on their hands.

It’s true that innocent people can suffer as a result of one’s well-intentioned actions. Perhaps I know this better than you.

But I haven’t lost any moral right to tell the Russians they’re wrong. (Putin, if you’re reading this…) Nor did anyone have to impart the cynicism of “might makes right” to the rulers of the former USSR.

The Russian rulers would have been doing exactly this regardless. As they have for a few hundred years. As they perfected under Stalin. The Kosova argument is a propaganda shell game for them, as false as the lie of the Bosnian (or Kosovar) “jihad.” It provides them cover among the credulous.

The cynicism of the Russian diplomats that you mention is boundless. I can only add that they mentioned South Ossetia specifically, months ago, which should give everybody some notion of the cause-and-effect sequence of this war.

While you may wish to distance yourself from the worst of them, there are a lot of people right now using your argument to justify the rape of Georgia.

If Moscow can use “human rights arguments” as you say, it is only because cynical realpolitickers have contrived to put those words in quotation marks. Like I said before, there was a genuine movement for human rights in Kosova before the breakup of Yugoslavia. The world ignored it, it wasn’t “realistic” to do otherwise.

The Bosnians asked for the embargo on arms to be lifted, but that wasn’t realistic either. It might have led to the end of Milosevic, the “man we can do business with,” as I remember him being called by someone in the Clinton administration.

During the first Gulf War the people of Iraq were encouraged to rise up against the regime of Saddam Hussein. They did, and the U.S. realists stepped back and watched them massacred in tens of thousands. Saddam remained in power. He was preferable to the Iraqi’s self-determination.

This is considered “realistic” because the known devil is preferable to the unforeseen events that can occur when populations start fighting for their freedom. So today, Robert Mugabe has been a preferable option in Zimbabwe for Mbeki and so many others.

When the people of Eastern Europe rose against their Communist masters in 1989 it was a great opportunity to change that whole equation. To put the real needs of people above cynical realpolitik. The events in the Balkans were a test of political imagination, perhaps above all. And that test the world failed.

Post-Communist Russia didn’t have to go the way it has, any more than Serbia did under Milosevic. But it takes ideas to battle ideas, and where were they? So the world looked at Bosnia and too many fell, lazily, disgracefully, for the myth of “ancient ethnic hatreds.” (The myth that has now been reformulated as “jihad in the Balkans.”) Rather than seeing the importance of the struggle to preserve a unique multi-ethnic society on the terrain of post-Stalinist society.

Bosnia should have been an occasion to come to terms with the experiences that defined the 20th century–the rise and fall of Communism, the meaning of civil society, and ethnic chauvinism, all things non-reducible to military terms. It was a tremendous missed opportunity and it looms larger as time passes.

Rather than forging needed human ties of solidarity and understanding, the situation was reduced to politicians and posturing and a narrow “realism” that cuts off in advance what an older time might call the angels of our better nature. Every time you announce the surrender of your right to speak I see that you are also a product of that great historic tragedy.

Well, in a sense we all are.

I’m not sure you realize that we live in a real world where actions have consequences and innocent people die as a result. Clearly, the Russian rape of Georgia and the stunned, impotent silence of the West haven’t done anything to wake you up because you still failed to grasp the connection between our actions in the Balkans and the Russian actions in the Caucasus.

The West solemnly promised to support the territorial integrity of the UN member states after the WWII, but after the KLA thugs provoked Serbs into an overreaction, we bombed the hell out of Serbia, killing hundreds (if not thousands!) of civilians there, and in a flagrant violation of the international laws dismembered Serbia and after ethnically cleansing Kosovo even recognized its independence w/out even bothering to go to the UN! The architects of the Serbia’s dismemberment, Albright, Clark, and Holbrooke had their own reasons for doing it, but I assure you, the welfare of the Balkan people was the last thing on their minds. Clark even ordered the British forces to attack the Russian paratroopers in Pristina, but thankfully, the British commander was rational enough to ignore the idiotic order. After all, it was no accident that the Secretary of DOD, William Cohen, together with the Pentagon’s top brass hastily engineered Clark’s early retirement after Kosovo was occupied by NATO. One should make no mistake about it: pious gibberish about genocide in the Balkans provided cover for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia – if you don’t believe me, you should re-read Danny Pearl’s reports.

When we were riding roughshod over Serbia, Russian diplomats kept warning us that our unilateral actions would justify Russia doing exactly the same thing to the newly independent former Soviet states, and this is what is happening in Georgia right now. And make no mistake about, it won’t stop with Georgia – every former Soviet Republic and Warsaw pact member is quaking in their boots because they may be next. They all have restless minorities which could be easily manipulated by Moscow, and Moscow will use exactly the same “human rights arguments” to come to their “rescue” we were so thoughtlessly using in the Balkans. We had ample warnings but we closed our eyes and buried our heads in the sand – the people of Georgia are paying an awful price for our arrogant stupidity.We could’ve and should’ve helped the people in Yugoslavia resolve their differences peacefully, but instead we chose to take sides. Even better – we marginalized Russians and did our best to ignore them.

We taught Russians that “might makes right”, and we lost any moral right to tell Russians that what they’re doing is wrong.

One can’t argue “wishful thinking.” For a critique of that I’ll read Beckett or Leopardi. It does sound like you’ve sobered up on the current war, though–your last post sounded almost pleased with the situation.

The role of the NKVD is Spain is a valid thing to raise. The internet the last few days has been full of the same kind of propaganda that attacked the Spanish anarchists and Trotskyists before their “liquidation” by the NKVD. The same kind of lies that declared the revolution in Hungary in 1956 was the work of “fascists,” and justified Russian invasion. The same kind of lies that smeared the Bosnians as “jihadists” and “fascists” and justified the atrocities of Karadzic.

It is an old, evil tradition. It is why I’m always trying to be careful not to “call Serbs fascist,” and I don’t. I do consider Karadzic, his militant supporters, and the state they attempted to set up as the fruit of “ethnic cleansing” fascist.

But the bombs now raining down on Georgia are still falling to the sound of your own false equivalences and revisionist historical arguments. You acknowledge this, and I guess that’s to your credit. I hope you do some serious thinking on that, and perhaps you’ll be more careful whose “wishful thinking” you care to ventriloquize.

You are certainly correct in that Putin’s drive isn’t intended to stop with Georgia and Ossetia. The current crisis–which is really between the U.S. and Russia, in the end–seems to me to be the most serious since the Cuban missile crisis.

If the arms embargo on Bosnia had been lifted, as many of us were requesting at the time, the Bosnians could have defended themselves. The U.S. and NATO would never have to have been involved. There would have been no arguments for you, or Putin, to make about equivalence in Ossetia today.

Instead after Srebrenica there was a minimum of U.S. air support followed by a strongarm “settlement” at Dayton. Which settled very little. It was a “realist” answer at the time. Those of us who opposed U.S. military action while supporting Bosnia’s right to self-defense were right.

Likewise by the way in Kosova. There was a decade long, non-violent movement among the Kosovars for the rights that they, the majority, were denied in their own homeland. (Long before the KLA existed.) The ideas that justified the atrocities in Bosnia were born from the suppression of this movement for freedom. That is the way Milosevic became the ultranationalist that he did, and it’s the way the Serbian Academy of Sciences became advocates of such policies as well.

The “realists” of the world should have paid heed to that idealistic movement in Kosova. (Once again, it had nothing at all in common with any religious “jihad.”)

Just as the world today should pay great heed to the many movements from within the “Muslim world.” Irshad Manji, for instance, is both hated by some, and deeply loved and respected by many young reform-minded Muslims. She has an audience and she openly asks for support.

By the same token, to say that labor activists in Iran shouldn’t be supported means to throw out every tradition of internationalism that has ever existed within the labor movement. “An injury to one is an injury to all” doesn’t stop at the border. It doesn’t mean, “except Muslims, or Catholics, or Vodoun…” And in Iran labor and student activists are hardly more marginal today than the widely disrespected mullahs or the hated basiji.

I could go on but I think you get the point.

By the way, there is no way at all to prevent human suffering. Job, life and Leopardi concur on that. But one way to lessen it is to be scrupulous about our political statements and actions. That should include not promoting the myth of “ancient ethnic hatreds” in the Balkans. Karadzic’s atrocities were so extravagantly depraved because the hatred had to be created almost ex nihilo.