Picture: Serbian human rights activist and patriot Sonja Biserko - the sort of opponent that Serbian fascist thugs are brave enough to take on physically.

On Saturday evening, Sarah Franco, Max Spencer-Dohner and I paid a visit to our dear friend and comrade Sonja Biserko, a Serbian human-rights activist and patriot who has, perhaps more singlemindedly than any other individual, spent the past two decades fighting to free her country from the darkness that has engulfed it, and to drag it out of the Hell that its political classes have pushed it into. The warmth and gentleness of that evening has been in my mind, as this heroic woman has been the target of yet another act of physical harrassment by the dregs of the Serbian fascist movement that has started and lost four wars in the past two decades.

The previous Tuesday, the office of Sonja's organisation, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Belgrade, was attacked by a gang of about a hundred hooligans belonging to the neo-Nazi sect 'Movement 1389', who shouted threats, daubed a swastika on the door of the building and were prevented from doing worse only by the police.

The door of the building in Belgrade housing the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, after it was vandalised by neo-Nazi thugs.

The day after we visited her, two more thugs turned up at Sonja's flat; one stood outside her front door, the other at the entrance to her building, and threatened and abused her. This kind of harrassment has been made possible by the lynch-campaign waged against her by the Serbian gutter-press. Her address, as well as the address of her parents, was published in the rag-sheet Tabloid, in an article about her entitled 'A lesbian who is seeking revenge'. Three days ago, a letter attacking her was published in another rag-sheet, Kurir, written by the imprisoned gangster Milorad Ulemek, murderer of former Serbian president Ivan Stambolic and Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic. This delightful individual described Sonja as a 'maggot' who had 'attacked my Church, my army; she attacked everything that I love, honour, respect and value. She attacked everything for which I am ready to give my life to protect in order to protect that which I love' [sic].

Although the actual acts of violence and harrassment to which Sonja has repeatedly been subjected are the work of scum on the margins of society, the lynch-atmosphere has been created by more mainstream and 'respectable' nationalist political and 'intellectual' figures. When, following international recognition of Kosova's independence in February, the Serbian government of Vojislav Kostunica and his allies from the far-right Radical party orchestrated an orgy of vandalism in Belgrade directed against Western embassies and intended to intimidate democratic and pro-European elements, the overrated nationalist film-director Emir Kusturica denounced Serbia's human rights' activists as 'mice' hiding in 'mouseholes' who 'lie for money' and 'denigrate the Kosovo myth'. The former Serbian footballer Dusan Savic recently accused Sonja of having been given 'the task from Washington and Brussels' of 'destroying the Serb identity' and 'killing the Serb nation'. Serbian pulp novelist Momo Kapor, meanwhile, wrote that 'theoretically I, as a Serb nationalist, can become a mondialist, but Biserko can never, from an exceptionally ugly woman, become beautiful.'

Of course, one can understand why physically harrassing and intimidating a sixty-year old woman might be appealing for the fascists in Serbia. They have shown themselves to be amongst the most cowardly fighters in the history of modern warfare. Unwilling to fight the Germans or even the Italians in World War II, then routed by the Yugoslav Partisans; beaten by the Slovenes in ten days of fighting in 1991; beaten by the underarmed Croatian Army in 1991-92, and rescued from defeat by the hated 'Western imperialists'; driven from the whole of central Croatia in a mere few days in 1995; beaten by the Bosnians and Croatians again in the autumn of 1995, despite their massive superiority in weaponry, then rescued from defeat by the 'Western imperialists' for the second time; and beaten by NATO in 1999 without having managed to kill a single NATO soldier - the Great Serb chauvinists have shown time and time again that they flee before any opponent who actually fights back against them.

Consequently, bullying unarmed women is about as far as their bravery will stretch. Indeed, they have shown themselves more than capable when it is a question of raping women and killing children, old people and other unarmed civilians, or torturing prisoners in concentration camps. The Serbian fascist politician Vojislav Seselj himself told Irish journalist Maggie O'Kane in 1993 that, had his paramilitary forces really raped all the Bosnian Muslim women they were accused of raping, they would really have to have been supermen. Indicatively, Seselj and his fellow chauvinists stand openly in the tradition of the Chetniks of World War II, who collaborated with the Nazis. Sonja's father, by contrast, was a Partisan from a Serb Orthodox family in Knin in Croatia, who came to Belgrade in 1945. Inevitably, the heirs of the Nazi collaborators denounce Sonja as a 'traitor', a 'Croat' and a 'lesbian' for the crime of dedicating her life to fighting the same enemy her father fought in World War II.

There is no greater evil than misogyny, and misogynistic abuse or actions are among the best indicators of the evil of a cause. The degeneration of the French Revolution - in its origins, progressive and emancipatory - into an orgy of bloodshed and intolerance was starkly symbolised by the brutally misogynistic trial of Marie-Antoinette; Edmund Burke had been more than a little justified when he lamented a few years earlier that 'little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her [Marie-Antoinette] in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.' According to the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's proto-fascist ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ of 1909, published in a journal edited by a friend and mentor of Mussolini, 'We want to glorify war - the only hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the anarchist’s destructive gesture, the fine ideas that kill, and the scorn of women. We want to destroy museums, libraries, fight against moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian cowardices.'

Of course, misogynists do not necessarily hate all women; they often respect those who conform to their ideals of what a woman should be: 'chaste', 'virtuous', respectful of the patriarchal order, etc. Indeed, there is nothing the chauvinist mind hates more than a woman who refuses to conform: e.g. one who is sexually liberated; or a feminist; or a lesbian. Fascists and bigots from the Islamic world target 'un-Islamic' women with particular viciousness: gang-raping them; throwing acid in their faces; stoning them. One of the young Islamic terrorists who planned to attack the London nightclub 'Ministry of Sound' in 2004 expressed his belief that the 'slags dancing around' would deserve what they got. Fascists take a particular delight in targetting the weak and vulnerable, whether Jews, gypsies, disabled people, homosexuals, immigrants or anyone else; their hatred of women falls into this category.

Violent misogyny has its own inglorious tradition in Serbia. The roots of Serbia's twentieth-century disasters can be traced back to a psychopathological misogynistic crime: the murder of King Aleksandar Obrenovic and Queen Draga in 1903. Chauvinistic hatred focussed on the fact that Queen Draga was older than her husband; that she was incapable of having children; and above all that she had a sexual history before her marriage; the king was despised for marrying this supposedly 'immoral' woman. The army officers who murdered them in May 1903 stripped their corpses naked and mutilated them before throwing them out of the window. In place of the relatively civilised Obrenovic regime, this coup brought to power in Serbia ultranationalist elements whose expansionist adventures dragged Serbia, first into a genocidal war of conquest against the Ottomans in 1912, then into war with Bulgaria, then into the disaster of World War I, which claimed the lives of perhaps a quarter of Serbia's population. As one eminent anti-nationalist Serbian historian told me, Serbia still has not healed itself of the murders of 1903.

The promotion of women's emancipation by the Communist-led Partisans in Yugoslavia during World War II, and the presence of women in the Partisans, provided the occasion for misogynistic propaganda on the part of both Croat and Serb fascists and collaborators. According to one Croatian Ustasha source, the Partisans 'are in many places bloodthirsty, particularly the female persons in their ranks'. For his part, the Nazi-collaborationist Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic complained: 'Communist women are recognisable by the fact that they are immoral; using free love they approach and seduce our men, particularly those who place fun above duty.' The Partisan victory over the Ustashas and Chetniks in 1945 represented a massive step forward for women's emancipation. Conversely, when the Great Serb chauvinists attempted - largely successfully - in the 1990s to destroy the modern, multiethnic Bosnian republic and society established by the Partisans and Communists and to replace it with an ethnically pure Great Serbian state, their campaign involved the mass rape of Bosnian women.

So when we stand in solidarity with Sonja Biserko against her attackers, we are not merely speaking up for a principled and heroic individual, and for a free and democratic Serbia. We are speaking out against the very lowest form of scum that the human race is capable of producing.

Kadijevic was a traitor to Yugoslavia. In his memoirs, published in Belgrade in the 1990s, he admits that his policy from the spring of 1990, when non-Communist regimes came to power in Slovenia and Croatia, was to bring about the 'peaceful' exit of these republics from the Yugoslav federation - with appropriate territorial concessions on Croatia's part, of course. This policy has been confirmed in the published diary of his ally, Borisav Jovic, the former Yugoslav president, Serbian representative on the federal presidency and president of Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia, who admits that he and Kadijevic planned 'forcibly to expel' Slovenia and a dismembered Croatia from Yugoslavia. So Kadijevic's war in Croatia had nothing to do with preserving Yugoslav unity. Nor was he motivated by loyalty to the Yugoslav constitutional order. In 1991, he travelled to Moscow to seek the support of his Soviet counterpart, Dmitry Yazov, for a projected military coup in Yugoslavia (Yazov was, it will be remembered, an equally treacherous conspirator involved in the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev later that year).

Thus, Kadijevic saw his job as ‘defence minister’ as defending ‘Yugoslavia’ from its own government and presidency. Although he vacillated between support for military dictatorship to keep Yugoslavia united, and support for the break-up of Yugoslavia and establishment of a Great Serbia, it was the latter policy for which he eventually opted. Yet Kadijevic was, at all times, a close ally of Milosevic’s regime in Serbia and enemy of the other Yugoslav republics (except for Serbia’s satellite Montenegro), ready to violate his duties toward the Yugoslav presidency, which was constitutionally his supreme commander, in the interests of this alliance. Before Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian nationalists had even had a chance to take over the reigns of power in Croatia, in the interval in 1990 following their electoral victory over the former Croatian Communists and during the handover of power, Kadijevic carried out the disarmament of Croatia’s Territorial Defence, in close consultation with Jovic, who was then Yugoslav president. Thus did Kadijevic begin the Serbian war of aggression against Croatia, before Tudjman’s regime had even had a chance to be guilty of anything whatsoever. Yet subsequently, when Croatia’s Stjepan Mesic became Yugoslav President, Kadijevic simply ignored Mesic’s instructions to the Yugoslav army, as he gloatingly recalls in his memoirs. In other words, his ‘obedience’ to his supreme commander, the Yugoslav presidency, was entirely dependent on whether the latter was pursuing Serbia’s policy or not. The war Kadijevic and the Yugoslav army waged against Croatia was totally illegal and unconstitutional; it was not authorised by the Yugoslav presidency (partly because there was no functioning presidency - Serbia having blocked the election of a Yugoslav president in May 1991, effectively leaving the country without an executive).

Kadijevic's enmity was not, however, limited to Yugoslav politicians such as Mesic who supported Croatian independence; he was a sworn enemy also of Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante Markovic, a man who - unlike Milosevic, Jovic and Kadijevic himself - actually supported a united Yugoslavia. And although Kadijevic was sacked by the Belgrade regime before full-scale war in Bosnia was launched, he was instrumental in preparing the ground for the destruction of Bosnia - the one Yugoslav republic aside from Macedonia that actually wanted to keep Yugoslavia together (Milosevic's Serbia declared its independence from Yugoslavia back in September 1990 - before Alija Izetbegovic was even elected to power in Bosnia - then formally announced its secession for the second time in March 1991, when Milosevic stated that Serbia would no longer be bound by the authority of the Yugoslav presidency).

Kadijevic is himself a native of Croatia, from near the town of Imotski, and despite his support for the Great Serbian war-drive in 1990-91, is of ethnically mixed background, with a Serb father and a Croat mother. He was, nevertheless, the man responsible for destroying the Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991; in his published diary, Jovic describes Kadijevic's policy in Croatia as one of 'destroying cities'. Not surprisingly, therefore, Croatia issued an Interpol warrant for Kadijevic's arrest. Now, however, Russia's award of citizenship to Kadijevic definitely stymies any possibility for Kadijevic's extradition, as Russian law forbids the extradition of Russian citizens.

Russia's sheltering of this Yugoslav traitor and mass murderer is, of course, what one would expect from the regime of Vladimir Putin, a man who is, in many ways, a kindred spirit of Kadijevic's. One would, indeed, have been stunned if Moscow had respected Kadijevic's international arrest warrant; Putin's regime has not exactly been notable for its respect for international law. Yet Moscow might not, at least, have been able to get away with this quite so easily had the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague itself indicted Kadijevic.

The sad truth is, however, that neither Kadijevic nor his former deputy Adzic has been indicted by the Hague tribunal. The two top military officers of the army that was formally Yugoslav but de facto Serbian, who presided over the planning and launching of the wars against Croatia and Bosnia, were ultimately not considered worthy of prosecution by the ICTY's prosecutors.

The same cannot be said for the two top military officers of the army that defended Bosnia. Sefer Halilovic and Rasim Delic, chief of staff and commander of the Bosnian army respectively, were both indicted by the Hague tribunal, despite the cases against them being extremely weak. While Halilovic was wholly acquitted by the judges, Rasim Delic was last month acquitted of most of the charges against him, including murder, but found guilty only of 'cruel treatment' of prisoners at the village of Livade and the Kamenica camp in the period July-August 1995. He was sentenced to three years in prison which, given that he has already spent nearly half that time in custody, means that he will be out soon.

Delic was, unlike Kadijevic, a professional officer who played no role in politics until full-scale war in Bosnia broke out in the spring of 1992. Up till that time, he had been simply a loyal soldier of the Yugoslav army, but he then joined Bosnia's defenders. Given his lack of political ambition and his readiness to serve President Izetbegovic unquestioningly, he was promoted to the top post in the Bosnian army in 1993 in place of the self-willed Halilovic. During the last two years of the Bosnian war, 1993-95, he quietly allowed the Izetbegovic regime and the ruling Party of Democratic Action to assume full control over the Bosnian army, turning it into a politicised instrument of their own rule.

For all that, it is remarkable - given the degree of the brutality to which Bosnia and its population were subjected by the forces of Milosevic's Serbia and Radovan Karadzic's Bosnian Serb rebels - just how small-scale were the war-crimes carried out by the Bosnian army. Despite being Bosnia's top commander for over two years, Delic was convicted only of failing to prevent or punish the cruel treatment of twelve captured Serb soldiers in a single village and camp in July and August 1995. The troops responsible for these abuses, furthermore, were not regular Bosnian soldiers, but foreign mujahedin, whose agenda was not that of the Bosnian army as a whole and over whom Delic's authority was uncertain. Although two of the members of the ICTY's three-judge panel felt that Delic could have punished the mujahedin for the abuses in Kamenica, presiding judge Bacone Moloto argued in a dissenting opinion that Delic 'did not have effective control over the EMD at any time from the time of his assumption of duties as the Commander of the Main Staff of the ABiH…until the EMD was disbanded' (the 'EMD' or 'El Mujahed Detachment' being the Bosnian army's unit of foreign mujahedin). Be this as it may, there is no suggestion that Delic ordered the abuses. His crime may be compared in scale to the largest crime carried out by Serb forces in the same period, under the direction of Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic himself: the genocidal massacre of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica.

So there we have it: the contrasting fates of generals Kadijevic and Delic. The first was an orchestrator of the war and of the destruction of Yugoslavia, who ordered the conquest of Croatia, presided over the destruction of Vukovar and siege of Dubrovnik, and laid the ground for the attack on Bosnia. The second was a professional officer who avoided politics until his country was attacked, and then led a military campaign notable for abuses that were small and few enough that the prosecution had difficulty pinning anything at all on him. The second was indicted by the ICTY; the first was not. This is the work of what some would have us believe is an 'anti-Serb tribunal'.

While we are on the subject of the 'anti-Serb bias' of the ICTY - all part of the global German-American-Vatican-Comintern-Zionist-Islamist conspiracy to frame Milosevic, Karadzic and their lovely, merry men as bad people - it is worth comparing the treatment of the crimes at Livade and Kamenica with those at Vukovar. The top Bosnian commander was indicted for crimes carried out by irregular forces in a particular locality, while for the much larger-scale crime carried out at Ovcara following the capture of Vukovar, only middle-ranking Yugoslav officers were indicted. For the murder, torture and cruel treatment of 194 patients taken from the Vukovar hospital following its capture by the Serbs, Mile Mrksic was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. Veselin Sljivancanin received five years imprisonment for aiding and abetting the torture of the victims, while Miroslav Radic was acquitted of all charges.

Yes, that's right - the 'anti-Serb tribunal' at which Naser Oric and Sefer Halilovic were acquitted, and at which Rasim Delic received only a three-year sentence, also acquitted one of the three Yugoslav officers accused over the massacre of Vukovar hospital patients at Ovcara, and sentenced one of the others to only five years.

And if that's evidence of 'anti-Serb bias', then I'm Sarah Palin.

In fairness, the ICTY's shocking, disgraceful record in prosecuting the top military leaders of the Bosnian people's struggle against genocide while failing to prosecute the top military leaders of the side carrying out the genocide should be seen in context. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) last year found Serbia guilty of failing to prevent and punish genocide at Srebrenica, but acquitted it of graver genocide-related charges that might have involved financial compensation for the plaintiff. Despite its indisputable role in organising, arming and financing the Bosnian Serb army responsible for Srebrenica, Serbia got away scot free. Likewise, Dutch courts recently ruled that neither the United Nations nor the Dutch state could be held responsible for the failure to prevent the Srebrenica massacre; the Dutch because their soldiers ('peacekeepers') who failed to defend the enclave were under UN command; the UN because it enjoys immunity. So the ICTY's record, poor though it is, is probably no worse than the record of international justice and the courts in general.

Justice for genocide victims ? Just ask General Kadijevic...

I apologise to my readers for the absence of posts recently. I have been on holiday, and am currently attending a conference abroad. Normal blogging activity will hopefully resume after I return home on Sunday.

Karadzic faces fresh indictment

Mr Karadzic has said the court is biased against him

UN war crimes prosecutors at The Hague are due to file a revised indictment against Bosnian Serb ex-leader Radovan Karadzic by Monday.

The announcement was made during a hearing which ended without setting a date for Mr Karadzic's trial. A new hearing could be held within a month.

Mr Karadzic faces 11 counts relating to the Bosnian civil war in the 1990s.

A not-guilty plea to all charges was entered on his behalf after he refused to enter any plea himself.

Mr Karadzic was arrested in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, in July after 13 years on the run and living under a false name.

The charges against Mr Karadzic include what is regarded as Europe's worst massacre since World War II - the killing of up to 8,000 men and youths in the enclave of Srebrenica.

Addressing the tribunal, prosecutor Alan Tieger said the revised indictment would be filed by Monday, without giving details.

'Intimidation'

At the hearing on Thursday, Judge Iain Bonomy said a new pre-trial "status conference" - or hearing to set a trial date - would be held within a month.

THE EXISTING INDICTMENT Eleven counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities Charged over shelling Sarajevo during the city's siege, in which some 12,000 civilians died Allegedly organized the massacre of up to 8,000 Bosniak men and youths in Srebrenica Targeted Bosniak and Croat political leaders, intellectuals and professionals Unlawfully deported and transferred civilians because of national or religious identity Destroyed homes, businesses and sacred sites

Mr Karadzic confirmed that he planned to conduct his own defense, which he said he was doing on behalf of Serbs who had suffered in the former Yugoslavia, and for the leaders of small states who could also find themselves in court in future.

He also said again that he doubted he could get a fair trial, and complained of intimidation by court officials.

He asked for permission to put together a legal team to help him, saying at least one of them should be present in court at all times.

"I'm not prepared to be passive and to have other people decide on matters that concern me," he said.

'Nato court'

Mr Karadzic also repeated his argument that the trial was illegal because, he said, the terms of a deal made with former US peace envoy Richard Holbrooke had offered him immunity from prosecution.

The remains of those killed at Srebrenica continue to be found

The claims have been ridiculed by Mr Holbrooke.

At the 29 August hearing, Judge Bonomy entered the plea of not guilty in accordance with tribunal rules.

The current indictment includes genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The alleged crimes include Mr Karadzic's involvement in an attempt to destroy in whole or in part the Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) and Bosnian Croat ethnic groups.

That included the killings at Srebrenica and the shelling of Sarajevo, killing and terrorizing the city's civilians.

The indictment says Mr Karadzic knew about the crimes that were being committed by Bosnian Serb forces, but failed to take action to prevent them.

Some of us, however, suspected that this 'multilateralist' viewpoint was, more often than not, expressed insincerely by those who were much more interested in opposing the US than they were in upholding international law. We have only had our suspicions confirmed by the tepid international reaction to the Russian assault on Georgia. This unilateral invasion of a sovereign state, occurring without UN Security Council authorisation, has provoked rather less left-liberal outrage than the US invasion of Iraq, though it represented by any standards a much greater violation of the principle of state sovereignty - involving, as it did, territorial dismemberment and the unilateral redrawing of international borders - and though it was directed against a state that, unlike Iraq, represented no threat to its neighbours and was a democracy, albeit highly flawed. There has been no million-strong demonstration in London against the Russian invasion of Georgia. Still more pointed has been the support for the Russian aggression expressed most strongly by the very states, left liberals might have argued, that are most in need of the UN as a safeguard against the US.

The defection of the Libyan regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi from the 'Axis of Evil' has often been cited as one of the achievements of the Bush Administration and its tough policy on rogue states. Yet Libya has welcomed the Russian assault on Georgia. 'What happened in Georgia is a good sign, which means America is no longer the sole world power setting the rules of the game,' Seif al Islam al-Gaddafi, son of the Libyan leader and head of the Gaddafi Foundation, has been quoted as saying; 'There is a balance in the world now. Russia is resurging, which is good for us, for the entire Middle East.' Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who in the 1980s successfully sued the US at the International Court of Justice, is the first head of state apart from Russia formally to recognise the 'independence' of the break-away Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, denouncing as he did so 'political hegemonies' that were 'trying to surround Russia'. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has blamed the US, Georgia and 'Zionists' for the war in the Caucasus: 'In our opinion, if Georgian officials had acted properly and not allowed outside forces to interfere, the situation wouldn’t have taken on its current dimensions'. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, too, supports Russia's dismemberment of Georgia: 'Russia has recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. We support Russia. Russia is right and is defending its interests.' Chavez has announced that Venezuela will host Russian troops and warships and carry out joint military exercises with Russia. According to Cuba's Raul Castro, 'It's false that Georgia is defending its national sovereignty'; he went on to claim that the 'Autonomous Republic of South Ossetia historically formed part of the Russian Federation'. Syria's Bashar al-Assad, in the course of offering to host Russian missiles on Syrian territory, stated 'I think that after the crisis with Georgia, Russia has become only stronger'; furthermore, 'It's important that Russia takes the position of a superpower, and then all the attempts to isolate it will fail.'

Thus, far from seeing the UN and international law as desirable safeguards against 'US imperialism', those states - one or two of them headed by left-liberal icons - that are actually most in conflict with the latter are rushing to demolish these supposed safeguards. Russia is providing a banner behind which the West's enemies can unite, even if this means tearing up the UN Charter and colluding in the invasion and dismemberment of a UN member-state.

Yet if the closing of ranks of the West's enemies behind a nuclear-armed aggressor is a reason for consternation, we can draw comfort from a definite success story: one former rogue state, at least, appears definitely to have reformed. In Serbia, pro-Western parties emerged successful from parliamentary elections this spring; the new government appears to be cooperating with the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, and has arrested the fugitive former Bosnian Serb warlord Radovan Karadzic; the leading Serbian anti-Western political force, the neo-Nazi Radical party, has imploded. The Serbian case is particularly significant because it is over Serbia that the Western alliance has frequently been condemned for acting 'unilaterally'; i.e., without UN authorisation. That is, NATO went to war with Serbia in 1999 without UN sanction, then the US and most NATO and EU countries recognised the independence of Kosovo this year, again without UN sanction.

It is NATO and the EU, rather than the UN, than have proved the motors of change in Serbia; the promise of a European future has been the bait that has lured Serbian voters away from the nationalist parties, and the Serbian government toward collaboration with The Hague, while it was the question of whether to support Serbia's Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU that occasioned the split among the Radicals. Far from the recognition of Kosovo's independence driving Serbia into the arms of the nationalists, it has hastened the nationalists' political decline. True, Serbia is still seeking to have the International Court of Justice rule the recognition of Kosovo's independence illegal. But while we may deplore this move, it nevertheless represents a civilised way of conducting a dispute; a tremendous step forward from the rioting and attacks on foreign embassies that took place in Belgrade in February in response to international recognition of Kosovo's independence.

The Western approach to Serbia has therefore proved a successful one: stick and carrot; military firmness combined with economic incentives and democracy promotion - mostly conducted independently of the UN. An approach of this kind is often stereotyped by its critics, whether from conservative-isolationist or left-liberal schools of opinion, as amounting simply to military aggressiveness. Yet the military-deterrent aspect of the Western policy that has guided Serbia toward Europe has ultimately proved less decisive than the economic carrot of EU integration. That this is so is highlighted by the failure of Western policy regarding a coutry that should, logically, be firmly in the Western camp but that may be slipping away: Turkey. Although Turkey is a loyal NATO member of long-standing; although it has long been committed to joining the EU; although it has responded relatively well to diplomatic and economic incentives to democratise; and although it historically fears Russian imperialism, yet Turkey is developing increasingly friendly relations with both Russia and Iran. Ahmadinejad visited Istanbul last month, and Ankara and Tehran reached agreements on a number of areas, though a full energy pact was not signed on account of US objections.

Heavily dependent on Russian trade and energy supplies, Ankara has meanwhile refused to support Georgia's membership of NATO, resisted talk of modifying the Montreux Convention limiting naval access to the Black Sea by the US and other outside powers, and barred two US warships from entering the Black Sea in support of Georgia. Ankara is meanwhile promoting a 'Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Pact' that would group together Turkey, Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan - its essential purpose is to enable Turkey to establish a working regional collaboration with Russia that bypasses the US. Ankara's drift toward friendship with two of the Western alliance's most dangerous enemies is an all-too-predictable consquence of the declining attraction of the EU option for Turkey, resulting from open French and German opposition to Turkey's EU membership. Given events in Georgia, the Franco-German alienating of Turkey appears increasingly short-sighted. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, that goes through Turkey, is the only pipeline transporting Caspian crude oil that does not go through Russia. Turkey's strategic importance is increasing exponentially just as Franco-German cold-shouldering is having its negative effect.

Events on the world stage this summer have shattered the multilateralist, soft-liberal dream of a post-Cold-War world presided over by the UN, in which UN members live harmoniously according to its rules. Instead, the UN is resuming its Cold War role as merely one, ineffectual forum in which the conflict between the Western alliance and the anti-Western bloc is played out. In these circumstances, there is no point in believing in illusions about a UN-governed world that our enemies do not share. As the Serbian example shows, democratisation and integration into the democratic family of nations are the best way to remove the threat from a rogue state; even when not overtly hostile, dictatorships - from Pakistan to Libya - make unstable, unreliable allies. We should be foolish indeed if we were to abandon our support for democracy and human rights abroad, through diplomatic, economic and where necessary military means. The enemies of liberal democracy will always play by their own rules; we should play by ours.

This article was published today on the website of the Henry Jackson Society.

ICTY to assess Serbia assistance

Mr Brammertz will report on Serbia's efforts at co-operation to the UN

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Serge Brammertz, is due to visit Serbia later on Wednesday.

Mr Brammertz will spend two days assessing Belgrade's efforts to find remaining suspects wanted by the court.

His priority is the arrests of former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic and Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic.

The European Union has said Serbia's bid for membership depends on its full co-operation with The Hague tribunal.

Belgrade received widespread international praise in July following the arrest of the wanted former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic.

Mr Brammertz will present his report on the extent of Serbia's co-operation to the UN Security Council at the end of the year.

Efforts 'intensified'

This is the first time that the ICTY's chief prosecutor will visit Serbia since the arrest of Mr Karadzic.

The former Bosnian Serb leader was caught in Belgrade on 21 July, 13 years after he was indicted by the UN tribunal.

Mr Hadzic and Gen Mladic are believed to be hiding somewhere in Serbia

Serbia is now hoping for positive signals from the prosecutor on its co-operation with the court.

While the extradition of Mr Karadzic has been praised by both the ICTY and the EU, it is still not enough.

Serbia has to arrest the two main remaining fugitives, Gen Mladic and Mr Hadzic, if it is to move closer to Europe. It is widely speculated that the men are hiding somewhere in the country.

Gen Mladic, who commanded the Bosnian Serb army, was indicted by the ICTY in 1995 on 15 counts of of genocide and other crimes against humanity in Bosnia-Hercegovina - including the massacre of at least 7,500 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in 1995.

Mr Hadzic was a central figure in the self-proclaimed Serb republic of Krajina from 1992 to 1993.

In 2004, he was indicted by the ICTY on 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his involvement in atrocities committed by Serb troops in Croatia during the 1991-95 civil war.

Belgrade has been criticized for years for its failure to capture some of the most wanted war crimes suspects.

But Serbian officials have said that since a pro-western government came to power in July, the hunt for Mr Mladic has intensified. ]]> http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/?p=556 Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:50:31 +0000 Marko Attila Hoare http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/is-the-socialist-workers-party-about-to-join-the-war-on-terror/ Picture: British imperialist general Sir Michael Rose, described by the SWP's Richard 'Lenin' Seymour as 'certainly no sympathiser with the Bosnian Serb forces', carrying out imperialist intervention against his sworn enemy, the leader of the Bosnian Serb anti-imperialist resistance, General Ratko Mladic.

The internal politics of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), spearhead of British opposition to imperialism and Zionism, may be thrown into turmoil by revelations made on Friday by leading SWP blogger Richard 'Lenin' Seymour. In a comment on his blog Lenin's Tomb, Seymour challenged the prevailing SWP wisdom that it is Western imperialism that is attacking and oppressing the Muslim world, and that the Left should be supporting the Muslims. According to Seymour's iconoclastic claims, it is actually the other way round.

Citing a former senior official of Western imperialism (Philip Corwin, former UN chief political officer in Sarajevo), Seymour argued that Serb shelling of Sarajevo civilians and hospitals during the war in Bosnia was all deliberately provoked by the Muslims in the first place, furthermore that the Muslims were oppressing the Western imperialist forces: 'Philip Corwin's memoir recalls that BiH provocations weren't just intended to draw Serb fire. They were also aimed at coercing UNPROFOR. Thus UNPROFOR troops were repeatedly shelled by BiH [Bosnian army] forces, more or less each morning. And UNPROFOR's attitude, given that its role was to be co-belligerents with the US and the local clients, was to refuse to mention these in its situation reports or even protest too vigorously.'

With this radical challenge to prevailing SWP orthodoxy, Seymour claimed: 1) that the imperialist forces were the victims and the Muslims were the oppressors; 2) that all accusations made by Western imperialist officials against Muslims should be assumed to be true; 3) that the Bosnian army was shelling the UN forces every day, because they were allies against the Serbs; 4) that the UN was on the side of the Muslims against the Serbs, so never mentioned the fact that it was being oppressed by the Muslims - except in the published memoirs of its leading officials, available for purchase at Amazon.co.uk; and 5) that this UN-Muslim conflict renders UN officials the most objective judges of Muslim wrongdoing. 

Seymour goes on to argue that the popular belief that Sarajevo in the 1990s was shelled and besieged for three and a half years by Serb forces was a myth cooked up by the Western imperialist media, and that it was actually the Muslims who were shelling and massacring themselves in order to blame it on the Serbs. To prove this, he cites the testimony of the Western imperialists, who were engaged in a campaign to demonise the Serbs and who are therefore best placed to testify that the Muslims were really to blame for everything. Responding to a critic who argued that the Markale massacre of Sarajevo civilians in 1994 was the work of a Serb shell, Seymour cut him down: 'your sense of who was responsible is curiously at odds with the views of UNPROFOR, which accused the Bosnian government forces of "firing to provoke the Serbs, and of using hospitals and public buildings as cover for such fire".' These imperialist accusations against the Muslims support the view, argues Seymour, that the Muslims were clients of the imperialists and that the two were working hand-in-glove againt the anti-imperialist Serbs. 

In addition to Corwin, Seymour cites a second Western imperialist official, British UN commander Sir Michael Rose (pictured above) in support of his argument that the Markale massacre was carried out by the Muslims: 'UN experts had determined, according to General Sir Michael Rose (no Tory as far as I am aware, and certainly no sympathiser with the Bosnian Serb forces), that the shot came from the Bosniak side. UNPROFOR itself openly declared that the Bosnian forces repeatedly engaged in "false flag" operations to provoke Serbian attacks on civilian buildings.'

Picture: Dutch UNPROFOR troops carrying out imperialist intervention against Mladic and his Serb anti-imperialist forces at Srebrenica, July 1995. Thanks to Western imperialism's support for the Muslims against the Serbs, the 'safe area' of Srebrenica was successfully defended from Serb anti-imperialist assault, and eight thousand Muslim men and boys were not massacred, left-wing sources say.

Sir Michael was unavailable for comment. However, he is known as a leading scholarly expert on Islamic culture and civilisation. In his published memoirs, Fighting for Peace, Rose argued that Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic was probably incapable of appreciating Mozart because he was a Muslim. Having attended a performance of Mozart's Requiem in besieged Sarajevo alongside Izetbegovic, Rose wrote, 'I wondered if he understood the Christian sentiment behind the words and the music'. Despite this demonstrated sympathy for Muslims and Islam, it is notable that Rose agrees with Seymour on the nefarious character of the Izetbegovic regime; Rose writes that Izetbegovic's 'talk of creating a multi-religious, multi-cultural State in Bosnia was a disguise for the extension of his own political power and the furtherance of Islam.'

Seymour's allegations are likely to prove controversial among SWP members, who have spent the past several years supporting the jihad of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iraqi insurgents against Western imperialism, under banners such as 'We are all Hezbollah now', and were thus under the impression that radical Islamists were the good guys and Western imperialists the bad guys. SWP supporters have also tended to argue that while it is acceptable to support anti-Semitic Muslim groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah out of principled opposition to Zionism, it is unacceptable to support anti-Semitic Croats such as the late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman because Tudjman and the Croats are reactionary nationalists, and socialists are not supposed to take sides in disputes between reactionary nationalists. Yet this SWP attitude, too, may change in light of Tudjman's consistent opposition to Izetbegovic, multiethnic Bosnia and the Bosnian Muslims - an opposition that closely mirrors that of Seymour, Rose and UNPROFOR. Tudjman also shared the anti-imperialist left's opposition to Israel, which he described as a 'Judeo-Nazi hijack state', to the imperialist war-crimes tribunal in the Hague, and to US imperialism in general, even taking steps to rehabilitate the World War II Ustasha fascist 'Independent State of Croatia', which declared war against the US in 1941.

As one left-wing opponent of imperialism and Zionism said yesterday, 'We are all Ustashas now'.

Greater Surbiton News Service

Update: In response to this post, Seymour has accused me of being a 'demented stalker'. For the record, I have posted about him fewer times than he has posted about me. Before I had ever written a word about him, he was libelling me on his blog. Five days ago, he launched an open thread on his blog so that his weird anonymous cronies could post defamatory comments about me and my family. So the question of who is a 'demented stalker' is probably not one that Richard should be raising. My advice to Richard is: if you can't take it, then don't dish it out. And as for which one of us needs, as he puts it, to 'get a fucking life'... :-)

'Georgia has lost South Ossetia and Abkhazia for good'—one can almost taste the relish in the Guardian’s editorial of 15 August, as it argued against even peaceful, diplomatic measures to punish Russia for attacking Georgia. For a significant strand of left-liberal opinion in the UK, the default position on the Russia-Georgia conflict is that it is payback for earlier western sins in Iraq and Kosovo; that US, not Russian, warmongering is the problem. Yet none of this is true. Russia’s intervention in Georgia and recognition of Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s 'independence' are not equivalent to western action over Kosovo or Iraq, and we allow them to go unpunished at our peril...

[The rest of this article can be read at Prospect]

Hartmann is the first Western citizen without roots in the former Yugoslavia, and the first former ICTY official to be indicted by the Tribunal. As she points out, her book was published a year ago, while the Bosnian Institute article was published in January, making the delay in the issuing of her indictment peculiar. The charges refer to a case that is no longer actual, and cannot be motivated by any desire to ensure the proper functioning of the proceedings. The indictment appears, indeed, to be an attempt to muzzle a whistleblower who has revealed information about the internal politics and incompetence within the Tribunal, and a warning to other former Tribunal officials who might be tempted to reveal more such information.

The ICTY is a highly flawed institution with a very patchy record; badly organised, filled with many incompetent apparatchiks alongside some committed professionals, riven with internal factionalism and corrupted by political pressures both external and self-induced, it has failed to deliver justice to the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. I am myself a former official of the Tribunal, and my biggest criticism of it has been its failure to indict most of the principal Serbian and Montenegrin war-criminals, a failure that, on the basis of my eyewitness experience, I attribute in large part to the poor strategy of del Ponte as Chief Prosecutor. But a perhaps even more shameful failing on the Tribunal's part was the one about which Florence writes: the decision of the judges in the Milosevic case to allow Serbia, when submitting to the Tribunal the minutes of the 'Supreme Defence Council' of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to censor parts of it in the version that was made public. As Florence argues, it was thanks to the Tribunal's collusion with Serbia in the suppression of this crucial piece of evidence, that Bosnia was not able to draw upon the latter in its case against Serbia for genocide at the International Court of Justice, leading to Serbia's unjustified acquittal. Far from punishing the perpetrators of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, the Tribunal has helped to shield them (NB to date, only one individual, a lowly deputy corps commander of the Bosnian Serb army, has been successfully prosecuted for a genocide-related offence by the ICTY, while not a single official from Serbia has yet been convicted of any war-crime in Bosnia whatsoever).

The Tribunal may or may not have a legal case against Hartmann. What is certain, however, is that Hartmann was acting in the public interest in revealing the information she did. The people of the former Yugoslavia have a right to know why they have not received much in the way of justice from the ICTY, while the citizens of the world have a right to know why this UN court, funded by their taxes, has produced such poor results. Public interest would best be served if more former Tribunal officials showed as much principle and courage as Florence, and came forward with more insider information so that we can better understand this whole, sorry story. This would help to ensure that other international courts could avoid the ICTY's mistakes. But we are all aware that there is a risk: I myself, after being interviewed about the ICTY by the Croatian journalist Domagoj Margetic last year, received a threatening letter from the Tribunal, warning me that I had, when taking up the post back in 2001, signed a declaration promising to respect the Tribunal's confidentiality (Florence, too, apparently received such a letter when she first began publicly to speak about the ICTY). Although I did not take this threat seriously at the time, it appears my complacency has been misguided.

Florence is a brave, principled and committed individual who has done more than anyone to reveal the extent to which the international community and the international courts have betrayed the cause of justice for the former Yugoslavia. Although I disagree with some of what she says in her book, it is nevertheless a splendid, daming critique of this betrayal, and her accusations of Western complicity in Radovan Karadzic's evasion of arrest for thirteen years have been essentially vindicated; I would recommend anyone interested in the subject to read it. Florence is fighting the battle for truth on behalf of all the victims of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and all present and future historians. We are 100% on her side.

In May I wrote about my trip to Banja Luka to see the restoration of the 16th century Ferhadija mosque.   My story about the project airs on PRI's The World  today.   Here's the link to the audio, slideshow and script.  Huge thanks to Andras Riedlmayer for planting the idea and helping with contacts.  You can see his own account here.  Let me know what you think.

Yet if they took a closer look, they could see that in essence nothing had really changed in the halls of power within the Kremlin. Sixteen years ago, on December 14 1992, Andrei Kozyrev, the foreign minister of the newly-fledged Russian “successor state”, made a speech in Stockholm - in connection with the then newly developing Balkan crisis - which outlined the true nature of Russia’s foreign policy. Though Kozyrev treated his audience to a theatrical turnaround in which he claimed that his statement was a “rhetorical device”, intended to show the power of those who opposed the supposedly “liberal” tendency of the new government, experienced observers realized what was afoot. The speech went as follows:

I am obliged to introduce corrections in the general direction of Russian foreign policy. I wish to inform you briefly about these to the extent that they concern CSCE problems.

First: While fully maintaining the policy of entry into Europe, we clearly recognize that our traditions in many respects, if not fundamentally, lie in Asia, and this sets limits to our rapprochement with Western Europe.

We see that, despite a certain degree of evolution, the strategies of NATO and the WEU, which are drawing up plans to strengthen their military presence in the Baltic and other regions of the territory of the former Soviet Union and to interfere in Bosnia and the internal affairs of Yugoslavia, remain essentially unchanged.

Clearly, sanctions against the FRY were dictated by this policy. We demand that they be lifted, and if this does not happen, we reserve our right to take the necessary unilateral measures to defend our interests, especially since the sanctions cause us economic harm. In its struggle, the present Government of Serbia can count on the support of the great Russia.

Second: The space of the former Soviet Union cannot be regarded as a zone of full application of CSCE norms. In essence, this is a post-imperial space, in which Russia has to defend its interests using all available means, including military and economic ones. We shall strongly insist that the former USSR Republics join without delay the new Federation or Confederation, and there will be tough talks on this matter.

Third: All those who think that they can disregard these particularities and interests – that Russia will suffer the fate of the Soviet Union – should not forget that we are talking of a state that is capable of standing up for itself and its friends. We are, of course, ready to play a constructive part in the work of the CSCE Council, although we shall be very cautious in our approach to ideas leading to interference in internal affairs.

It’s time now to go back to the history of those early years of the Yeltsin government and to discover what really happened in them.

“Even though we’re forced to become the refugee, in the first moments, you were running into something better – because of what you were running from – the war itself – you just want to get out of the war. Then, later on, you start realising that that is the point of your life. There is no turning back…

no turning back”. The tone in Al’s voice changes, as though he regrets himself and his family being thrown into this dire situation. Sad, regretful, even though it simply wasn’t their choice.

“It took us a long time to grieve for everything we lost, because the entire time, you were struggling to survive, you had no time to sit down and cry “Oh my god! Oh my god!” – there was no point. Al pauses. “So the entire time we were refugees, we encountered danger upon danger, which made you think constantly: how where you going to get through? How could you make it? Its only after time do you acknowledge that fear, and it goes away.” “You relax and think about these things – the circumstances that you feel you can control – but the entire time you’re really thinking about survival, so you don’t think about loss. - its not that you don’t, you just know that there’s no point. That would only hold you back”.

“Things change when you’re moving. In a camp you begin to realise that you’re gonna spend a year here, or another year in that centre, which is no better than the other, you realise that that’s what some refugees think they’ll do forever!” “They start killing themselves or getting depressed”. Did you ever think that way? I ask: “No, I didn’t think that way”. So, once you realised this, did it lead you to take the next step (towards rising above it): “Most of what im telling you now” explains Alen “I didn’t take any steps. Im only realising all of this now”. - “I couldn’t do much – you’re a refugee in a centre, you have certain privileges and that’s it. You have no opportunity to become something or someone, the only steps to take, the only ones you have are don’t get killed, don’t die and hope for (a) better tomorrow”…

excerpt from a biography i am currently writing called "The Bosnian Way".

Copyright Carlos Hurworth

see also previous blogs

Now, for the first time since World War II, the democratic West is faced by a brutal, neo-fascist, expansionist regime in command of an imperial state whose military might is comparable to that of Hitler's Third Reich. Putin is an aggressive despot who came to power determined to reverse the defeat and perceived humiliation of Russia in the Cold War, much as Hitler aimed to reverse Germany's humiliation in World War I (Putin even employed a stunt to cement his power that was highly reminiscent of the 1933 Reichstag fire - the stage-managed 'terrorist' bombing of Russian cities by his security services, that could be conveniently blamed on the Chechens). He then used weapons of mass destruction against his own Chechen civilians, destroying the European city of Grozny. He has waged campaigns of persecution against Jewish magnates ('oligarchs') and Caucasian ethnic minorities. He has established a fascist-style youth movement ('Nashi'). He has suppressed the free Russian media, murdered independent journalists and effectively abolished Russian democracy. He has threatened and bullied his neighbours - even NATO-member Estonia. His state assassins are the likely culprits in the murder of his critic, the British citizen Alexander Litvinenko. And now he has invaded a sovereign state in an attempt both to overthrow its democratically elected government and to annex part of its territory. His own supporters view this act of military aggression as a strike against the US; The Independent's Matt Siegel quotes one Russian volunteer: 'This war is absolutely a war between Russia and America. The biggest mistake was in underestimating us. Now you'll see what happens.'

At this moment of danger, democratic Europe is paralysed by the same kind of political, intellectual and moral malaise that brought our continent to ruin in the 1930s. Today, fashionable left-liberal hatred of the liberal-democratic order expresses itself not merely in opposition to military intervention abroad and to our own governments, but frequently in a readiness to solidarise with anyone with whom our governments come into conflict - be they Iraqi and Afghan Islamist rebels, Sudanese genocidal murderers, Iranian and Venezuelan demagogues, Chinese Communist apparatchiks, Serb nationalists, Lebanese Shia fundamentalists, and so on. All this is filtered through a self-indulgent anti-Americanism of unparalelled virulence - naturally, the concerns about invading a sovereign state without UN Security Council authorisation that have so fired our left-liberal intelligentsia over Iraq are not being manifested quite so strongly over Russia and Georgia. Meanwhile, our armies are stretched in Iraq and Afghanistan and our publics are war-weary.

This already toxic brew contains another dangerous ingredient - the most likely candidate for a twenty-first century Neville Chamberlain in the form of France's Nicolas Sarkozy. With France holding the EU presidency, Sarkozy travelled to Moscow to reassure the Russians: 'It's perfectly normal that Russia would want to defend the interests both of Russians in Russia and Russophones outside Russia.' No doubt the French president would have been equally tactful if Putin had invaded France to protect 'Russophones' in Marseilles or Nice, but this kind of language highlights the EU's unreadiness to oppose Russian aggression. This is particularly so given Sarkozy's disgraceful record of pursuing narrow French national interests at South East Europe's expense, which involved, among other things, denying Georgia a NATO Membership Action Plan in order to appease Moscow. Sarkozy has joined with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to impose a six-point plan on Georgia, that requires Tbilisi to 'agree to the start of international talks on the future status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia', as the Moscow Times puts it, but which makes no reference to Georgian territorial integrity. With Medvedev openly advocating the dismemberment of Georgia, Sarkozy may be preparing the ground for a new Munich Agreement.

Some may ask whether we have any choice but to acquiesce in Russia's geostrategic coup, given our existing military entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our concerns with Iran, North Korea, Zimbabwe, etc. Some may ask why we should care about distant Georgia and its territorial integrity. The best way to respond is to turn this question around, and ask whether we can afford not to care, and not to respond to Russian aggression. If we cannot afford to defend Georgia because of our existing military commitments, we presumably cannot afford to defend Ukraine, or NATO-member Estonia, should Putin decide to build upon his success by moving against one of these countries - something which, given his past record, is not unlikely. At what point do we decide that, however costly it may be, we cannot afford to stand idly by as Russia rampages across Eurasia ?

As was the case in the late 1930s, the longer democratic Europe waits before responding to the aggressor, the more difficult and costly the eventual confrontation will be. Putin has successfully crushed and humiliated a staunch Western ally that contributed two thousand troops to Iraq. We cannot legitimately expect our allies to stand by us in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, if we do not stand by them when they are under attack. The states of Eastern and South Eastern Europe - both those inside NATO, and those wanting to join it - are closely watching the Russian operation against Georgia. They may decide that a NATO unable or unwilling to protect a country whose desired future membership it has itself loudly declared is a NATO it cannot rely on, and which is not worth joining or upholding. The Balkans are finally drifting toward stability, as the dominant elements of the Serbian political classes appear finally to have turned away from destructive nationalism - a turn spectacularly demonstrated by the arrest of Radovan Karadzic. Some of them may now feel, as they witness the West's weak response to the crushing of Georgia, that their turn has been premature, and that they can afford to be a bit more aggressive than they had thought until a week ago. In which case, we may be faced with another front opening up against us in the Balkans.

I write these words, not with any confidence that democratic Europe is likely to take an appropriately firm stance against Russian aggression in the immediate future, but with full confidence that the attack on Georgia is only the beginning, and that we will see further acts of Russian aggression in the months and years to come. Putin is an unreconstructed product of the Soviet intelligence services; a sworn enemy of the liberal-democratic order at home and abroad; an autocrat whose mission it is to reverse Moscow's defeat in the Cold War.

Let there be no mistake: we are in for the long haul. It is time to prepare a long-term strategy of resistance to the new Russian imperialism so that, if we were caught unprepared this time, we will not be unable to respond next time. Britain must join with the US in sending troops to Georgia, even if these troops at the present time have a purely symbolic deterrent value. We must massively increase our financial and military assistance to our beleaguered ally, and reassure it that it is not being abandoned. Georgia's accession to NATO and the EU must be accelerated - as, indeed, must the EU accession of Turkey, which will be a crucial ally in the coming confrontation; one that we cannot afford not to have on our side. We must insist that the precondition for any negotiations over the disputed territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is an acceptance by Moscow of Georgia's territorial integrity. But this conflict is not just about Georgia, and it will not just be played out over Georgia.

Cold War II has begun. Western leaders must begin to prepare their publics for this reality, which means countering the defeatist and anti-Western currents of thought that are popular among wide sections of the chattering classes, and preparing the publics for the consequences of economic warfare with an enemy that supplies a large part of our energy. Full-scale sanctions against Russia may soon be necessary, and though this will hurt Moscow more than it will hurt us, it will hurt us too. Western leaders must state very loudly and clearly that any further military attack by Moscow against any other state in Eastern or South Eastern Europe will invite a military response from us.

There are several ways in which Moscow's aggression can be immediately punished. We should expel Russia from the G8 group of industrialised nations, veto its accession to the World Trade Organisation and the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, suspend the EU's Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with Russia, abandon all negotiations for a new EU-Russia agreement, suspend the NATO-Russia Council and announce a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. Given Moscow's shameless promotion of the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia, it is time to raise openly the question of Chechnya which, in terms of size, national homogeneity and viability as an entity, has a much stronger case for independence than either of Georgia's enclaves. Since Moscow is demanding 'self-determination' for South Ossetia, let us openly challenge it to recognise the same right for the much larger Ossetian population in North Ossetia. Finally, our strategy vis-a-vis Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and other trouble-spots must be modified to take account of the new geopolitical front-line; this does not mean we should surrender the battle on any of these fronts, but we cannot continue to fight them as if the Russian threat did not exist.

Dangerous ? The real danger will come from burying our heads in the sand and hoping Putin will go away and leave us alone. It is better to adopt a tough but non-violent stance against Moscow now, than to encourage further Russian expansionism that will compel us to adopt more drastic measures in the future, measures that we may not be able to limit to the non-violent. Toughness in 1938 might have stopped Hitler without war; appeasement in 1938 led to war in 1939.

This article was published today on the website of the Henry Jackson Society.

See also John McCain's excellent article, We are all Georgians

Indict the imperialist aggressors!

Radovan Karadzic was brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on August 1, marking the beginning of yet another show trial in the aftermath of the U.S.-led breakup of the former socialist federation.

Radovan Karadzic will face a show trial before the imperialist-controlled International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

The ICTY hearing followed Karadzic arrest in mid-July and his extradition to The Hague. Karadzic, a leader of the Serbian Democratic Party, became president of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina May 13, 1992. After vanishing for over a decade, he is now to face charges of war crimes stemming from the civil war that took place in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992 to 1996.

The trial, much like that of former President of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic, is a pretense of due process meant for public consumption. Appearing before Judge Alphons Orie, Karadzic was prevented from reading a four-page account of his grievances and handing the document over to the court. A conviction by the imperialist-controlled court is guaranteed.

The court has good reason to fear an open hearing of the events of the civil war and the U.S./NATO role. The court remembers the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. Proceedings were to be broadcast globally, but when Milosevic was able to use the forum to expose the machinations and crimes of imperialism, the transmissions quickly ended.

The motives and objectivity of the Karadzic indictment are already being challenged in the media. A French Press Agency story out of Yugoslavia reports Richard Holbrooke made a deal in which Karadzic would not face any criminal prosecution as long as he abstained from political activity—a version of events similar to Karadzic’s own account. Holbrooke was a key U.S. negotiator of the Dayton Accords, which formally ended the civil war in Bosnia.

The story reads: "… Radovan Karadzic was protected by the United States until a CIA phone bug caught him breaking the terms of his ‘deal,’ the Serb newspaper Blic reported. ... The newspaper claims Karadzic was secretly granted immunity in return for keeping a low profile."

According to the story, Karadzic violated the agreement by engaging in political activity. When the U.S. government learned of his actions, Karadzic quickly became a target of the ICTY.

When news of Karadzic’s arrest became known in Serbia, militant demonstrations immediately broke out against the request for extradition. On July 30, over 15,000 protesters clashed with police, fighting back against tear gas and rubber bullets. Forty-six people were sent to the hospital, including 25 police.

Imperialists fuel nationalist divisions

Stoking the fire of nationalism within Yugoslavia had been a cornerstone of imperialist strategy in the 1990s, aimed at breaking up the multinational state in a classical divide-and-conquer ploy.

Karadzic and other Serbian leaders appealed to Serbian nationalism as a way to stop the carving up of Yugoslavia and to assert some control over the resources and territory that were up for grabs at the time. Civil war engulfed socialist Yugoslavia, where integration across national lines had been predominant during the four decades of the republic’s existence. The result was a particularly bloody conflict that had neighbors fighting neighbors along newly exacerbated national and religious lines.

The 1999 war and invasion of Yugoslavia by the United States and the dominant European imperialist powers, carried out under the NATO umbrella, was portrayed by the big-business media as an effort to stop the civil war. In fact, it was a war crime, an attack on a country which posed no threat to the United States or any other country.

While feigning concern for the different nationalities of the region, the imperialists’ real objective was to carve up Yugoslavia so that it could be easily exploited by the U.S., French, German, Italian and British imperialists.

To achieve the victory over the Yugoslav people, the imperialists encouraged the break-up of the formerly socialist federation into separate nation-states. The U.S., Germany, Britain, France, Italy and other western European capitalist governments supported the most right-wing nationalist and pro-capitalist governments, which privatized their economies and rolled back much of the gains that remained from the socialist period.

In an ongoing effort to imprint on history the imperialist version of this tragic dismemberment, those who resisted imperialism have been pursued, arrested, convicted and jailed by U.S./NATO forces. Predictably, the same "international court" that has tried a number of figures from the former Yugoslavia and will try Karadzic has rejected any and all charges against U.S. and NATO leaders.

Once the civil wars broke out, the conduct of the contending forces on all sides was based on narrow nationalism. As a result, people of all nationalities in Yugoslavia became victims of war. The imperialist exploiters, then and now, shed crocodile tears for the people of the Balkans while hiding their role in promoting and exacerbating any divisions that would help tear apart the country and lead to civil war.

In the early 1990s, Germany and Austria encouraged and funded bourgeois separatist movements in Slovenia and Croatia. The Croatian government, led by Franjo Tudjman, adopted the flag of the Nazi puppet state that existed between 1941 and 1944—the only independent Croatian state that had existed in modern times prior to 1991. The Croatian fascists, in their brief existence, murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Roma and Jewish people.

The U.S. government initially opposed German efforts, but not out of concern for the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia. Washington was focused on the war in Iraq and not in a position to struggle with Germany and other imperialist rivals over the breaking up of Yugoslavia.

With the downfall of the Soviet Union, Washington’s focus shifted and it joined Germany in encouraging other capitalist separatist movements that led to the civil war and destruction of Yugoslavia. Washington backed Alija Izetbegovic as the leader in Bosnia, the Yugoslav republic where no national or religious group accounted for a majority of the population. Izetbegovic, who had been a Nazi officer as a young man, called for making Bosnia a strictly Islamic state.

The Serbian people and their leaders became the focus of a particularly racist imperialist campaign prior to the 1999 U.S./NATO war. The Serbian population represented the greatest single obstacle to the imperialist goal of dismemberment. The demonization of Slobodan Milosevic, then President of Yugoslavia, thus became the centerpiece of the propaganda campaign that laid the basis for "saving" the different peoples of the Balkans from themselves.

The governments and militaries from the United States and NATO should be the ones on trial. It was their deliberate planning that encouraged, aided and abetted the centrifugal forces of bourgeois nationalism that led to the civil war. They are to blame for the thousands of deaths, the displacement of entire peoples and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia for imperialist exploitation.

The Ustashas - Croat fascists - were a movement of traitors and murderers who have been disgracing and undermining Croatia ever since they emerged at the end of the 1920s. Their treason culminated in the 1940s, when they established and ran the NDH on behalf of Hitler - a colonial master who had supported a unified Yugoslavia up until March 1941, who then offered his Hungarian ally Miklos Horthy the option of absorbing Croatia, and who only after this was rejected opted to establish a Croatian puppet-state as a fall-back solution. In May 1941, the Croatian puppet-dictator Ante Pavelic ceded a large part of the Croatian coast to Fascist Italy - his genocidal policy toward the NDH's Serb population was, in part, an attempt to distract the outraged Croatian public from this unprecedented act of treason. Under Pavelic and the Ustashas, puppet Croatia (which included all of Bosnia) was ruthlessly economically plundered and exploited by Germany and Italy both for its natural and industrial resources and for its labour power - tens of thousands of Croats worked in the Reich during the War, either a slave labourers or 'voluntarily'; those in the latter category were assigned the most menial forms of work by the German masters, and many of the women became prostitutes.

The NDH's armed forces were almost wholly devoted to internal repression of the domestic resistance movement. Germany and Italy divided puppet Croatia down the middle into respective zones of influence; the Italians expelled the quisling Croatian armed forces from their zone in the autumn of 1941, while the Germans in 1942 placed the Croatian armed forces in their zone under their command. From early 1943, German commanders in the NDH enjoyed the right to alter Croatian legislation at will - prompting Eugen Dido Kvaternik, Pavelic's former security chief one of the architects of the Ustasha genocide, to admit later that by this stage there was nothing left of the NDH's 'independence' except the 'N' in its name [for 'Nezavisna' - 'Independent'] . The soldiers of the NDH's conscript army, the Home Guard, were among the most unenthusiastic of all collaborators and were treated as untermenschen by the German army; they increasingly defected to the Partisans in large numbers; in battles with the Partisans during the war's later stages, many Home Guards would turn their guns against the Germans and Ustashas. Finally, the Ustasha regime during 1942 signed a series of pacts with the Serb-extremist Chetniks, for collaboration against the Partisans - despite the fact that the Chetniks periodically carried out massacres of Croat civilians (and above all of Muslims, whom the Ustashas considered Islamic Croats).

The history of the Ustasha movement, in other words, was utterly shameful - not only from the moral, but from the patriotic Croatian perspective. Nevertheless, ever since the Communist regime in Croatia fell in 1990, there have been those Croats who have sought to perpetuate the disgrace by their loud statements upholding the legacy of the former Ustasha regime. Croatia had been the largest bastion of the Partisan movement and had one of the most powerful and successful wartime resistance movements; Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslav resistance leader - Europe's greatest - was himself a Croat. The contemporary Republic of Croatia was itself originally established by the Croatian Partisans who defeated and destroyed the NDH. Yet despite this proud record, and despite the popularity which the Partisans enjoyed among the liberal intellectual classes in the West, right-wing Croat nationalists in the early 1990s worked - at the very moment when Croatia was fighting a life-and-death struggle for survival and independence against the militarily superior forces of Milosevic's Serbia, and desperately needed a positive international image - to wreck Croatia's international standing through their pro-Ustasha manifestations.

The ideological mission of the Croatian nationalist regime of Franjo Tudjman and the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) was to 'reconcile' the two former warring sides of the Croatian civil war of the 1940s - the Partisans and the Ustashas. Characteristic of this was the statement of Croatia's current president Stjepan Mesic in the early 1990s, that Croatia had won twice in World War II - when it was 'recognised' by the Axis power in 1941, and when it ended the war as part of the Allied coalition. The Croatian constitution promulgated under Tudjman in 1990 formally upheld the Partisan tradition of Croatian statehood in opposition to the Ustasha tradition, but Tudjman balanced this formal Croatian identification with the Partisans with various statements that went some way to re-legitimising the NDH. Over and above the purely nationalistic ideological motive for doing this, Tudjman and the HDZ wanted to secure their support among the pro-Ustasha Croats, both at home and in the emigration, as well as among the pro-Partisan Croats who made up the majority of Croatia's population and represented the political mainstream.

Ever since then - as in so many other ways - Croatia has paid an enormous price for Tudjman's policy. Ustasha manifestations were ruthlessly exploited by the Milosevic regime and its supporters in the West to justify the Serbian assault on and occupation of Croatia. In this way, pro-Ustasha Croats - quite apart from their utter moral bankruptcy - continued to undermine Croatia in the 1990s, as they had in the 1940s. Some came from pro-Ustasha families who were persecuted or marginalised under the Communists, but others have simply been right-wing ideological nationalists who put their shameful, discredited and universally reviled ideological agenda before even the most basic considerations of national interest.

Upholding the Ustasha tradition in contemporary Croatia amounts to rejection of the liberal-democratic mainstream and the path of European integration - a rejection that is a manifestation of the global ideological current that Ian Buruma and Avisha Margalit refer to as 'occidentalism'. It has blended together with opposition to the deportation of indicted Croatian war-crimes suspects to the UN tribunal in The Hague, something that once manifested itself in large demonstrations. It is the counterpart to Serb-nationalist opposition to the Hague tribunal, European integration, Kosova's independence and 'Western imperialism' in general. But just as the number of Serbs ready to demonstrate for such an unworthy cause is dwindling, so pro-Ustasha outbursts in Croatia are now little more than a wart on the face of Croatia - exhibited mostly loudly in the form of the infantile, obnoxious rock-band Thompson.

The battle against the heirs of the Ustashas in Croatia has been won; the battle against the supporters of Karadzic in Serbia is being won. But strong international reaction to every manifestation of these poisonous dregs is always welcome to remind the world, and the people of the former Yugoslavia, that such behaviour is a disgrace and an embarrasment for every self-respecting nation.

This attempt to bully democracy is taking place in an EU candidate country with the seventh-largest economy in the Council of Europe and the fifteenth-largest in the world, and which has pursued a for-the-most-part highly progressive foreign policy in recent years. Under the AKP, Turkey has been attempting to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Syria. The Turkish government has attempted to restrain the hawkish voices favouring an onslaught against the Kurds of Northern Iraq. Turkey was one of the first countries to recognise Kosova, and was alone among the larger NATO countries in staunchly supporting a Membership Action Plan for Macedonia at the April NATO summit in Bucharest. It has sincerely worked for a resolution of the Cyprus dispute and for rapprochement with Armenia.

The AKP government has also pursued a reformist policy at home, improving Turkey's democratic and human rights credentials to the point where the EU, despite strong opposition from some of its members, was compelled to start accession negotiations. And it has presided over an unprecedented expansion of the Turkish economy. All the more poignant, therefore, that the court's move to ban the democratically elected party of government appears to have been triggered by the latter's attempt to push through a democratic freedom for Muslims that is already enjoyed across Christian Europe: the right of women students to wear headscarves while attending university. The readiness of the Turkish Kemalist establishment to wreck its country's democracy and economy and to plunge it into constitutional chaos, and possibly civil war, simply in order to maintain its exclusive grip on state power at the expense of the new Muslim middle class represented by the AKP, indicates the difficulties Turkey faces in its journey toward full democracy.

Turkish democracy is not under attack only by the secular establishment, but by fascist terrorist elements - both from the ranks of the secular ultra-nationalists and from the ranks of the Islamists. Earlier this month, Turkish police foiled preparations for a violent coup d'etat by members of the Ergenekon clandestine organisation; those arrested included three retired Turkish Army generals. This was followed by an Islamist terrorist attack on the US consulate in Istanbul, and then days ago by a terrorist bomb attack on a civilian target in Istanbul that the government and police have blamed on Kurdish PKK separatists but which some observers suggest was more likely to have been the work of Ergenekon. There have been credible suggestions that the apparently antithetical Kemalist and Islamist extremists have, in fact, been coming together on the basis of the values they share: opposition to the West, the US, 'Zionism', democracy and liberalisation. As Mustafa Akyol writes in the Turkish Daily News: 'I can't say anything about whether there are indeed criminal links between these groups, but the ideology they share is all too similar. Their aim is simply to keep Turkey as a closed society cut off from the world and ruled by an authoritarian state. What they fear and abhor is democratization and liberalization.'

With the constitutional court's verdict, Turkish democracy has been shaken but not toppled, but the dangers facing the country remain, as do the dangers facing the Western alliance in relation to Turkey. Turkey's political classes have been increasingly disillusioned in recent years, both with the EU and with the US. The slowness of Turkey's EU accession process, coupled with the apparent outright refusal of some EU countries such as France and Germany ever to allow Turkey to join, have reduced the EU's appeal among Turks. Meanwhile, Turkish relations with the US have been strained by the apparently 'distabilising' policy being pursued by Washington in the Middle East and the former Soviet Union: the war with Iraq; the possibility of an attack on Iran; support for regional democratisation and 'colour revolutions'; and above all the US's alliance with the Iraqi Kurds. Conversely and consequently, Turkish relations with both Russia and Iran have been improving. Indeed, the Kurdish issue has strained Turkey's relations not only with the US, but also with Israel, which is also unhappy with Turkey's broadening cooperation with Iran in the field of energy.

In the current Turkish political constellation, it is the AKP that is the EU's and US's best friend. Indeed, Turkey's Public Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, responding to Western criticisms of his attempt to close down the AKP, denounced the EU and US as 'imperialists' seeking to erode Turkey’s national sovereignty by using 'collaborators' such as the 'fundamentalist' AKP and Turkish liberals who 'claimed to be intellectuals'. While we may wish to retain good relations with Ankara irrespective of which regime holds power there, our inability to remain silent in the face of assaults on democratic freedoms, coupled with the inevitably anti-Western outlook and rhetoric of those launching such assaults, will ensure that a potential future replacement of the AKP regime with a more authoritarian Kemalist one will inevitably damage Turkey's relationship with the Western alliance. Conversely, a more authoritarian Turkey will find authoritarian Russia, Iran and even China as increasingly congenial partners.

The lingering threat to Turkish democracy is a threat to the West's relationship with a crucial member of its alliance; indeed to positive stability in the Middle East, Balkans and Black Sea region in general. The failure of the constitutional court to ban the AKP has averted a still worse danger - that the suppression of the democratic, moderate Islamic political option would have driven disillusioned AKP supporters into the arms of the Islamists, laying the basis for an Algerian-style civil war in Turkey. But so long as the secularist establishment remains determined to curb the AKP, this is a danger that has been kept at bay, not ended permanently.

Turkey resembles Serbia, in that it is a Balkan country undergoing a long-drawn-out transition to full democracy, in which there can be no quick or easy success. But Turkey's size, strength, geographic location and geostrategic importance make it much less amenable to pressure than Serbia. Indeed, with Turkey at the height of its power as a country, but with its internal divisions stretching it to breaking point, the Turkish Kemalist establishment may increasingly feel rather like the Serbian Communist establishment under Milosevic in the late 1980s and early 1990s: ready to gamble on an extreme solution, on the assumption - probably correct - that the West would lack the will to resist it. In this context, although Brussels was correct to indicate that Turkey's EU accession process would be halted in the event of the ruling party being banned, nevertheless the carrot may prove more effective than the stick in advancing the cause of Turkey's democratisation. This, however, cannot mean unprincipled concessions over the Kurdish or Cyprus questions that would damage the West's moral standing.

Keeping Turkish democracy alive requires keeping Turkey's EU accession process alive, for it is EU membership that has provided the crucial motor to Turkey's democratisation. But at present, it is Turcophobic EU leaders such as France's Nicolas Sarkozy who are dominating public discourse in Europe over the Turkish issue. If Turkey is to be saved for democracy and for the West, the UK has to fight back in the arena of public opinion - both at home and in Europe. The UK has traditionally supported Turkey's EU accession; quite apart from the geostrategic arguments in favour preserving Turkey's pro-Western alignment, an EU containing Turkey would be less dominated by the Franco-German axis and more resistant to centralisation, therefore more congenial to the inclinations of both Britain's political and its popular classes - and indeed to the inclinations of some other EU members - than an EU without Turkey.

The British government must fight a sustained public campaign in favour of Turkey's EU membership, to persuade the Turkish people that they have a European future, to bolster the fortunes of our friends in the AKP, and to convince the British and European publics of the crucial importance of the Turkish connection. Sarkozy is pursuing a thoroughly unprincipled and damaging policy toward South East Europe, but to his credit, he is not afraid to be outspoken and assertive in pursuit of what he perceives to be France's national interests in this region. We must not be afraid to be similarly outspoken and assertive. If the present trends in EU politics continue, we shall lose the battle for Turkey. And with it, we shall suffer a major defeat in the battle for both the Balkans and the Middle East.

This article was published yesterday on the website of the Henry Jackson Society.

After all, I am not the one who [would have] supported the logic of secessionism in the first place, and therefore I would have no problem explaining why the construction of separate states based on ethnic exclusivity would be no solution. It is Hoare who, considering Croatia's secession legitimate and worthy of full-throated support, has to answer why the Krajina Serbs were not entitled to independence from Croatia (and political union with Serbia if they wished). This is particularly the case since the Serbs living in Krajina were, like other Serbs living throughout Croatia, genuinely victims of repression and ethnic hatred by a state whose early gestures included the rescuscitation of fascist symbolism. But if there is going to be secession, ought there not be negotiations as opposed to a unilateral military take-over of the territory? Might there not be a concession of territory by both parties, or are the borders of some states eternal and inviolable, like the Holy Mother's virginity?

This is, of course, the same argument that Slobodan Milosevic made at the time of the war in Croatia. In an interview to British Sky Broadcasting TV on 7 August 1991, Milosevic argued:

We are not opposing the Croatian people's right to self-determination. If they want to establish their own independent, national state, there is no reason for us to oppose that. However, if they want to leave Yugoslavia, they cannot take a section of the Serbian people with them. This right to self-determination belongs to the Serbian people as well... The people of Krajina have, first of all, decided to remain within, that is, a part of Yugoslavia and that is all.

(Text of recorded interview with Slobodan Milosevic, President of the Republic of Serbia, by Arnot Van Linden for British Sky Broadcasting television, Belgrade TV 1833 gmt 7 Aug 91, via BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 9 August 1991).

The central controversy of the wars in the former Yugoslavia revolved around this point: whether, given Yugoslavia's break-up, the right of national self-determination should belong to the individual republics or federal units, in their Titoist borders - as I and others argued - or whether these borders should be redrawn to give Serbia a significantly larger share of the territory - as Milosevic, Seymour and various Serb nationalists and their apologists argue (there is also a Tudjmanite Great Croatian variant on this argument, which is that the borders should have been redrawn to give both Serbia and Croatia a larger share of the territory, but we'll come to that later).

The Milosevic/Seymour demand for 'self-determination' for the 'Krajina' in a euphemistic way of saying that Serbia should be, or should have been, allowed to annex part of Croatia's territory as the price for Croatia's secession. As I pointed out in my last post (a point which Seymour did not respond to, because there isn't really a counter-argument):

1) Roughly half of the pre-war population of the territories encompassing the 'Serb Republic of Krajina' was comprised of Croats and other non-Serbs; even the territory of 'Krajina' in the narrower sense, i.e. the crescent-shaped stretch of Serb-occupied land in central Croatia, had a substantial Croat population; the Milosevic/Seymour call for 'self-determination of Krajina' simply treats these people as if they don't exist;

2) Roughly half of all Croatian Serbs lived outside the territory of the 'Serb Republic of Krajina', in Zagreb, Split and other large Croatian cities and elsewhere; the overwhelming majority lived outside the territory of the 'Krajina' region narrowly defined; the Milosevic/Seymour line, again, treats these people as if they don't exist.

It should not be necessary - but apparently is - to add to this the truism that 'Krajina' was neither a nation, nor a country, nor a historic region, nor any form of legitimate entity, but was simply the name given by the Serb extremists to part of Croatia that they occupied.

So if the Milosevic/Seymour call for 'self-determination for Krajina' cannot be justifed on the grounds of self-determination for the inhabitants of the Serb-occupied areas, and cannot be justified on the grounds of self-determination or even minority protection for the Croatian Serbs, what precisely is its justification ?

The answer is this: 'self-determination for Krajina' is simply a euphemism for part of Croatia to be annexed to Serbia. Seymour used a slightly less dishonest euphemism in his comments on his own earlier post, when he wrote of 'border rectifications'. He means the annexation of part of the territory of a smaller, weaker state (Croatia) by the larger, predatory state that is attacking it (Serbia).

How else does Seymour's attempt to justify his support for Milosevic's land-grab in Croatia ?

After all, I am not the one who [would have] supported the logic of secessionism in the first place, and therefore I would have no problem explaining why the construction of separate states based on ethnic exclusivity would be no solution.

Seymour is an Irishman, so I am confident that, given his retrospective opposition to the 'logic of secessionism', it is only a matter of time before we read a post by him explaining why Ireland should have opposed the 'logic of secessionism' and remained in the UK. I hope so, otherwise people might suspect that he was a shameless, lying hypocrite.

As for his straw man 'I would have no problem explaining why the construction of separate states based on ethnic exclusivity would be no solution' - this is rather rich coming from a member of a party, the SWP, that did everything possible to sabotage the international campaign in defence of a united, multiethnic Bosnia. And it is particularly amusing that Seymour makes this claim while simultaneously arguing for Croatia's dismemberment into separate 'Serb' and 'Croat' areas. No, Einstein, a 'separate state based on ethnic exclusivity' is not a good thing, that is why genuine anti-fascists opposed the ethnic partition of both Bosnia and Croatia and supported their self-determination as multiethnic wholes - unlike the SWP, which did not.

Seymour continues:

But if there is going to be secession, ought there not be negotiations as opposed to a unilateral military take-over of the territory? Might there not be a concession of territory by both parties, or are the borders of some states eternal and inviolable, like the Holy Mother's virginity?

'Concession of territory by both parties' !! Yes, he said that. Now he appears to be arguing that not only some parts of Croatia should be annexed to Serbia, but that some parts of Serbia should be annexed to Croatia ! But since Croatia had no territorial claims on Serbia, and since there were no large Croat-inhabited areas in Serbia, it is completely unclear which territories he has in mind, and the suspicion must be that he has simply inserted the phrase 'by both parties' in order to retreat from his earlier position of supporting 'territorial rectifications' solely in Serbia's favour and at Croatia's expense. He can, of course, prove me wrong by simply explaining which parts of each state should have been annexed to the other. We're all waiting, Richard...

There is, of course, another possibility: that Seymour believes Serbia should have been allowed to annex part of Croatia's territory, while Croatia should have been compensated with part of Bosnia's territory where Croats lived. This would make sense: given Seymour's support for the 'self-determination of Krajina'; he presumably would also have supported the 'self-determination of Herceg-Bosna' - the Croat statelet carved out of Bosnia by Tudjman.

This is, after all what Tudjman himself essentially advocated. Tudjman, in fact, spent the best part of the 1990s engaged in 'negotiations' of the kind Seymour favours - for territorial exchanges and the redrawing of borders between Serbs and Croats. This began in March 1991, with the Karadjordjevo talks between Milosevic and Tudjman for the partition of Bosnia. They continued with the Graz agreement in May 1992 between the Serb and Croat extremists, for the delineation of spheres of control in Bosnia. And they culminated in the Dayton Agreement in November 1995, when Tudjman did indeed negotiate the handing over a portion of Croat-held (Bosnian) territory to Republika Srpska. Tudjman appears to have believed what Seymour argues today: that Milosevic and the Serb extremists were essentially reasonable, and would have called off the war if only the Croats would agree to 'negotiations' on 'border rectifications'.

So unless I am much mistaken, on the key points - support for 'negotiations' to determine the borders between Serbs and Croats; support for 'border rectifications'; and denial of the legitimacy of a unified Bosnia - Seymour is entirely in agreement with the politics of the late President Franjo Tudjman.

This is an irony, but for those of us who have watched the SWP's moral degeneration over the past two decades, it is hardly a surprise...

The protests, in which people brought in from around Serbia wielded stones and burning flares, were no surprise. What puzzles me, however, are the comments of Karadzic's brother Luka, who claimed the protests would be "Gandhi-like".

Ghandi-like?

Presumably the non-violence bit was lost in translation.