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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 4/11, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Can the U.S.-NATO military occupation of Bosnia be justified?
With U.S. troops on the ground in the former Yugoslavia, there is still overwhelming opposition to the operation across the United States. The sentiment remains, "Bring the troops home."
If the facts were to become known and understood, there would be a movement actively demanding withdrawal of U.S. troops.
In light of this, what can only be described as a propaganda war has been launched in the monolithic big- business-controlled media.
A fair example of this is the five-part series shown on the Discovery cable-TV channel Dec. 26 to Dec. 30. "Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation," with CNN's Christiane Amanpour as narrator, was promoted as a documentary that would reveal "the start of the war in Bosnia."
The series lacked the crudeness of many television reports on the civil war in Yugoslavia. But no one familiar with the events it covered could call the documentary even-handed or objective. In the end, it conveyed a simple "good guys" versus "bad guys" theme.
The good were those who opposed the central Yugoslav government, for whatever reason. The bad were the Serbs.
On the whole, the documentary effectively presented images of events. Many of the region's leaders were interviewed.
Participants' voices accompanied dramatic news footage. It left an impression that the viewer was learning everything that happened from 1990 to the introduction of NATO forces in 1995.
The documentary may be powerful visually, but it is misleading and even dishonest.
History told as a series of details or events is neither useful nor honest. It does not help in understanding what has happened, and is often misleading. Of course, the documentary never makes clear that it is told from a class perspective that is hostile to socialism.
Overwhelming details and descriptions of events with accompanying dramatic footage serve to obscure what is behind these events. They do not clarify the roots of the civil war.
To understand a person's action it is not essential to get a description of what is happening to their body's individual cells. To understand a war it is not necessary to get a physical description of the battles and other events. Even knowing all there is to know about the different events that have transpired, if that were possible, might shed no light on the causes of the civil war--it would not reveal the "start of the war in Bosnia" as the documentary claims it does.
For instance, there is not one mention of imperialism throughout the documentary. Yet imperialism has been the defining force behind almost every war and conflict around the world for the last century.
And to talk about the Balkans in particular--with its long history as a central crossroads for European imperialist rivalries, including the opening shots of World War I-- without talking about the role imperialism played is outright fraud.
Even the documentary's seeming attention to detail is highly selective. Much is left out. No mention is made of the role played by the U.S. military and CIA. Yet this role has been widely reported.
The CIA played a role in secretly training and arming the paramilitary forces that led the attacks on the Yugoslav central government. Also on Oct. 15, 1995, the London Sunday Telegraph reported that for at least the previous year-and- a-half the U.S. military had been behind the training and arming of the Croatian military.
This was done through a Pentagon-run "consulting agency" called Military Professional Resources Inc. based in Alexandria, Va. The Telegraph says that MPRI "has more four- star generals than the Pentagon itself." Reports on activities of MPRI in Croatia have appeared in almost every major European and U.S. journal.
U.S. military officers such as Maj. Gen. John Sewall and former NATO supreme commander John Galvin were "advisers" to the military forces tied to Bosnia's Alija Izetbegovic.
Yet none of this was mentioned throughout the documentary.
The Croatian counter-revolutionary forces were presented as being solely home-grown. Yet these forces were led and trained by U.S. citizens. And the ruling groups around Franjo Tudjman in Croatia and Alija Izetbegovic in Bosnia included U.S. and Canadian citizens, most of them long-time right-wing extremists with ties to the CIA and the Pentagon Cold War machine.
Knowing the role of external forces is the key to understanding the civil war in Yugoslavia. It is the often hidden role of the Western imperialist powers that's really behind it. That has never been fully exposed or reported in any of the big Western media, including this documentary.
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