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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan.25, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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On Jan. 12 Pentagon boss William Perry said that U.S. forces occupying Bosnia will "help" investigations into alleged war crimes. This is a threat of Gestapo-style raids by U.S. military forces against anyone who resists the occupying armies.
The charge of genocide in the former Yugoslavia has been made so many times that many believe it to be true even though it has never been proven. The lurid tales of mass slaughter actually have no basis in fact.
George Kenney, one of the framers of U.S. policy in the Balkans under the Bush administration, wrote in the Jan. 8/15 issue of The Nation: "The U.S. government doesn't have proof of any genocide. And anyone reading the press critically can see the paucity of evidence, despite interminably repeated claims and bloodcurdling speculation."
This is an admission from someone who was in a position to know if the U.S. government had anything to back up its claims of genocide. Kenney says that he was one of the authors of U.S. policy in the Balkans in the early 1990s. The current NATO intervention is along the lines of his original plan.
"But over time I've changed my mind substantially on the issues," he says.
How did the U.S. government and media redefine the civil war in the former Yugoslavia into a war of "genocide" by the Serbs?
A civil war, according to Webster, is "a war between factions or regions of the same country." Obviously the war in the former Yugoslavia fits this description.
Of course, part of the reason Washington and the media here refuse to call it a civil war is that the capitalist class of the United States and Europe never really accepted the victorious socialist revolution of the united Yugoslav working class after World War II.
The Yugoslav communists successfully united the peoples of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo. It was the unity of the oppressed against their oppressors--the very imperialist powers now returning to occupy the Balkans.
But another reason for not calling it a civil war is to bolster their claim of genocide by one people against another. The whole justification for imperialist intervention by the United States, Germany, France, Britain and Italy has been based on the claim that they are there to stop genocide.
Historically, imperialist powers never say they are entering a region in order to dominate and exploit it. They always claim their mission is humanitarian.
No one would deny that the civil war has been a horror. The whole population has suffered. But there has been no evidence of genocide.
The legal definition of genocide is "the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political or ethnic group." It's what the Nazis did to the Jews.
Detention camps are not the same as Nazi death camps. The U.S. media repeatedly show pictures from a makeshift prison camp in northwest Bosnia in 1992 where some people were allegedly brutalized, mistreated and underfed.
This was a temporary prison camp set up at the beginning of the civil war. It was shut down. The conditions were horrendous but it was no Auschwitz, a Nazi assembly line for systematic extermination.
The existence of the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague raises more questions than it answers. The tribunal was established at the instigation of the United States government. On Dec. 16, 1992, U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger declared Yugoslavia's leaders to be war criminals and practically dictated the agenda for the tribunal.
It was hand picked by the very imperialist powers now occupying the former Yugoslavia. And it has no authority to look into war crimes committed before Jan. 1, 1991. Yet it is the first war crimes tribunal set up by the big imperialist powers since the end of the Nuremberg trials in 1946 that put Nazis on trial.
That means that five decades of imperialist war crimes are not on the agenda. United States war crimes in Vietnam won't be investigated, nor French war crimes in Algeria. British war crimes in Ireland won't either. The decades of crimes against the Palestinians won't be investigated.
Nor will United States war crimes against the civilian population of Iraq.
In other words, it's not really a war crimes tribunal. It's a political show to further the aims of the imperialist powers.
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