YOU
REMEMBER BILJANA
So
what's up with Biljana
Plavsic, the once
highly-touted "moderate" Bosnian Serb leader, hailed
by William Shawcross in the pages of the Washington
Post for her "brave demarche," and endorsed by none
other than Madeleine Albright – why did she turn
herself into The Hague to face charges of war crimes?
You remember Biljana, the Serbs' "Iron Lady" who, alone
among her nationalist compadres, accepted the Dayton Accord
and won the fulsome support of secretary of state Madeleine
Albright. The US pumped millions into Plavsic's political
campaign, and, two weeks before the Bosnian Serb election,
Albright paid a visit to Banja Luka, the Bosnian Serb capital,
where the two of them toured an electrical substation. As
the PBS News Hour reported
[September 25, 1998]:
"The
power plant had been rebuilt with U.S. aid money –
part of millions of dollars in reconstruction aid funneled
to the moderate Plavsic leadership by the West. The message,
Albright said, was that 'Dayton pays.' But the hard-liner
elected instead – the former paramilitary leader Poplasen
– had openly campaigned against Dayton's goal of an
undivided, multi-ethnic Bosnia."
THE
PAYOFF
Dayton
pays, all right – you get airfare to The Hague and
a nice warm cell. How quickly friends turn into enemies
in the Balkans: one day the American secretary of state
is practically pleading with the Bosnian Serbs to elect
Biljana Plavsic their president, and openly promising cold
hard cash in return for their votes, and the next thing
you know she's being indicted, hunted down, and paraded
in a show trial as the epitome of human evil. Why, it seems
like only yesterday when Senator
Joe Biden showed up in Banja Luka to encourage Plavsic
to stick with it. In a meeting with Plavsic, Biden said
he came there in order to give full support to "Mrs. Plavsic's
persistence in the implementation of the Dayton agreement."
A
MARKED WOMAN
This
bizarre turnabout began last summer, when it became clear
that Plavsic, once touted as a "moderate" worthy of Western
support, had been secretly indicted by the UN International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The
suspicion arose when, according
to reports in the local media, four to six armed men
in uniform tried to get into the Banja Luka apartment building
where Plavsic resides. Having arrived on the scene in either
"green vehicles" or "a jeep with dark windows and diplomatic
license plates," the men told Bosnian Serb police on guard
that they were there to "visit a friend." With "friends"
like that, Plavsic doesn't need any enemies. A few weeks
prior to this incident, the Grand Inquisitor of the ICTY,
Carla del Ponte, had announced that it was time to come
up with more "creative" ways of dealing with alleged war
criminals who were out of the Tribunal's reach.
LAST
TANGO IN BANJA LUKA
Thus
was born "Operation Tango," launched by British special
services, in which Serbs under secret indictment in The
Hague were kidnapped and bundled off to the nearest NATO
base. Dragan Nikolic and Stevan Todorovic, among others,
were seized by gangs of paid thugs, reportedly Serbian ex-paramilitaries.
The price for Nikolic was 30,000 Deutschmarks, according
to the Central
Europe Review, while Todorovic went for 20,000.
Before the last tango in Banja Luka, Plavsic voluntarily
turned herself in, personally shepherded to the airport
by the American ambassador. All very suspicious, especially
given Plavsic's history as a US sock puppet.
DEMOCRACY
IN ACTION
You
have to remember that the US went all out to elect Plavsic
president of the Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb component
of the UN's Bosnian protectorate – and that US officials
were stunned
when, in spite of all their machinations, Plavsic was trounced.
The response from our champions of "democracy" and "pluralism"?
Western officials in occupied Bosnia at first delayed announcing
the election results for two solid weeks, claiming "technical
reasons" for the long wait, and then promptly disqualified
a good deal of the opposition after they had won election
to the regional assembly. As Newsweek
put it, "Western officials in Bosnia are now in the process
of destroying democracy in order to save it." While the
magazine assured us that "Western officials had the best
of motives," they noted with baffled dismay that
"The
zeal of the international community seems only to have provoked
an extremist backlash. The Serb part of Bosnia voted out
a moderate, President Biljana Plavsic, even after US Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright vowed that jobs and development
money would dry up if Plavsic lost. Instead, the Bosnian
Serbs elected Nikola Poplasen, who is considered even more
radically nationalist than [Radovan} Karadzic."
BACKLASH
The
candidates' speech was stringently regulated – virtually
the whole of the opposition's nationalist platform was deemed
inadmissible "hate speech" – and millions
were poured into Plavsic's campaign coffers. Naturally,
the Bosnian Serbs turned out in record numbers to vote for
the nationalist parties, as would any people with the least
amount of backbone. One can only hope that Americans would
react similarly in the same circumstances – or is that
too much to hope for these days?
MORALITY
PLAY
The
indictment of Plavsic ought to be a lesson to Serb collaborators:
Zoran Djindic, please take note. Apparently the NATO-crats
decided that, with the prospect of a US withdrawal from
the Balkans staring them in the face, it was time to ratchet
up the "war crimes" propaganda – and Plavsic, unlike
Dr. Karadzic or General Mladic, was available. The indictment
and trial of Plavsic will serve as a backdrop for the coming
debate on the US role in the Balkans, retrospectively justifying
the NATO intervention and implicitly making the argument
that yet more intervention is required. It will also set
up the trials of Karadzic and Mladic, once the Tribunal
gets its hands on them. This docudrama and morality play,
seemingly modeled after the Moscow Trials of the 1930s,
will all lead up to the big production number: the trial
of Slobodan Milosevic, whose fate is the subject of ongoing
negotiations between the NATO-crats and the government of
President Vojislav Kostunica.
BLACKMAIL
That
a leading US client is being held up as the ICTY's prime
example, so far, of a Serbian war criminal is a development
that the US government can only look on with chagrin. This
indictment is directed, first of all, against the US: it
is the European response to the incoming administration's
professed desire to steer clear of Balkan shoals. It is
a direct shot across the bow, and how George W. Bush reacts
to this challenge will set the tone for our policy in the
region for the next four years. That decision may have already
been made, as Senator Levin makes all too clear, in which
case the blackmailing of the US is sure to continue into
the indefinite future. For what is bound to come out at
the trial, aside from the usual propaganda about how the
Serbs are the modern-day equivalent of the Nazis, is the
role of the US in supporting Plavsic after the Bosnian civil
war had somewhat subsided. Did Madeleine Albright endorse
a war criminal?
DIALOGUE
WITH A MONSTER
Well,
why not? Albright is, after all, herself a war criminal.
Wasn't it Madame Albright, the Madame
duFarge of the New World Order, who engaged in the following
badinage with Leslie Stahl of CBS on Sixty Minutes
[May 12, 1996]?:
Lesley
Stahl: "Speaking of US sanctions against Iraq: We have
heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's
more children than died in Hiroshima. And – and you
know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine
Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the
price – we think the price is worth it."
IN
THE NAME OF GOD
Not
even the Nazis at Nuremberg tried to justify their crimes
in this brazen a manner: for the most part they either claimed
not to have known, or asserted that they were only following
orders: although I could be wrong on this, I can't recall
the name of a single Nazi official who claimed that the
Holocaust was "worth it." But what in the name of God could
possibly be worth 600,000 lives, most of them children and
the elderly – what "policy objective" could justify
their deaths, and by what standard? By the standards of
moral monsters like the outgoing US secretary of state,
it is worth it – because, to her and her ilk,
individual lives are nothing, and power – American
power – is all. This is what it really means
to be a war criminal.
REMEMBER
OHIO
If
Bush and his advisors think they can forge an artificial
"unity" around war hysteria and the demonization of the
Iraqis, they are bound to run into the same opposition that
Albright & Company ran
into in Ohio, in 1998, when the Clintonians were threatening
Iraq with military force in a desperate effort to distract
the public from the President's satyriasis.
At that famous "town hall meeting" televised by CNN, Albright
and her minions were confronted with outright hostility
from outraged Americans who wanted to know why we were sending
"messages" to Saddam with the "blood of the Iraqi people,"
as one questioner put it. "How," he wanted to know of Albright,
"can you sleep at night?"
CALL
ME INDISPENSABLE
Mad
Madeleine was ready for him, however, and came right back
with a declaration of US foreign policy that defines the
basic assumption of Republican as well as Democratic policymakers:
"What
we are doing is so that you all can sleep at night. I am
very proud of what we are doing. We are the greatest nation
in the world and what we are doing is being the indispensable
nation, willing to make the world safe for our children
and grandchildren, and for nations who follow the rules."
THE
RULES OF DEATH
This
theory – or, rather, conceit – of American indispensability
underlies the most basic tenets of US foreign policy, whether
carried out by Democrats or Republicans. We let you sleep
at night secure in the knowledge that America makes the
rules – and disobedience is not an option. Our
children and grandchildren, the children of the West, will
be safe – but it's open season on the rest of humanity,
i.e., the Iraqis, the Serbs, perhaps the Russians, and almost
certainly the Colombians. Their children are doomed
to starve from the effects of murderous sanctions, or die
of poisoning from "depleted" uranium or defoliation sprays
used in the "war on drugs." Them's "the rules" – and
the policymakers of both parties fully intend to
enforce them.
CHECK
OUT CHAD NAGLE
I
am pleased to announce the addition of a new columnist to
the Antiwar.com stable: Chad Nagle, whose work has
appeared in these pages before: he is a professional
writer and lawyer licensed in the District of Columbia,
and has been published in the Wall Street Journal Europe,
the Washington Times, and several other periodicals.
Mr. Nagle traveled extensively throughout the ex-USSR from
1992-97 as a research consultant. Since mid-1999, he has
traveled widely in the former Communist bloc on behalf of
the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. His first column
is a first-person account of his recent trip to the former
Yugoslavia, and it is fascinating. By all means, check
out Chad.
