3. Bosnia and Kosovo

Tito’s authoritarian response to a nascent democratic revolution facilitated the growth of ethnic nationalism in the former Yugoslavia. The conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s, driven by Slobodan Milošević’s drive to build a Greater Serbia, was the earliest post–Cold War example of sections of the left supporting right-wing ethnoreligious nationalism. After Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence in 1992, it was surrounded and invaded by the Serb army and militias as well as by Croatian militias, all pursuing an agenda of ethnic cleansing and genocide, in which the UN and NATO colluded. Pseudo-anti-imperialists covered up the mass rape, torture and murder carried out by Serb nationalists, and instead of criticising the US and NATO for failing to protect Bosnian Muslims, attacked them when they belatedly stepped in to halt the genocide.

Socialist Yugoslavia

Unlike the Soviet Union under Stalin, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito was not an empire but a voluntary federation; and unlike Stalin, Tito was not an ethnic nationalist. So why did Yugoslavia disintegrate?

In the early 1970s, both ethnic nationalism and pressure for democratic political reforms began to surface in Yugoslavia. Instead of democratising, Tito carried out a number of political purges of those who wanted reform: ‘In Serbia, after 1972, more than 6,000 people lost their jobs in politics, the economy, the media and the cultural institutions. Their places were quickly filled with party apparatchiks loyal to old-fashioned communist values … Tito’s second move was to create a new federal economic structure for Yugoslavia based on workers’ self-management’ (Guzina 2004, 18). However, ‘Ethnic nationalism continued to gain ground while the only “success” proved to be a very effective prevention of the rise of democratic social movements that might cut across regional borders’ (Guzina 2004, 18).

These changes were formalised in the 1974 Constitution, which designated Yugoslavia as a federation of the Republics of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. As Roland Rich (1993, 38–39) outlined,

The first Basic Principle listed in the Constitution begins with the formulation ‘the nations of Yugoslavia, proceeding from the right of every nation to self-determination, including the right of secession’ … A distinction was made between the ‘nations’ of Yugoslavia and the ‘republics’ of Yugoslavia, the former being peoples like the Croats, Macedonians, Serbs and Slovenes without any necessary geographic connection and the latter being the six geographically defined federal units without any necessary ethnic connection. A second distinction was made between ‘nations’ and ‘nationalities’ with the latter being defined as ‘members of nations whose native countries border on Yugoslavia’ like the Albanians of Kosovo and the Hungarians of Vojvodina (both in Serbia), who were given autonomy but not the right to secede.

Thus, in principle, it was not the multiethnic republics that were given the right to secede but the ‘nations,’ which conform to what are today called ethnic groups. This formulation encouraged ethnic nationalism, which continued to gain ground.1

The decentralised workers’ self-management system had a great deal of potential but was beset with problems because interests differed between constituents at different economic levels (federation, republics, communes, enterprises and Basic Organizations of Associated Labour or BOALs), as well as between different organisations at the same level. For example, an agreement with Czechoslovakia that around twelve thousand Yugoslav workers in that country would get health insurance there, provided that a much smaller number of Czech tourists in Yugoslavia got free health coverage, fell through because the communes where the tourists wanted health care did not want to supply it to foreigners who did not contribute to the local funds (Comisso 1980, 199). Again, it would have made sense for producers of household appliances, which suffered from low capacity utilisation and low profitability due to the fact that they were all producing the same wide range of products, to specialise in complementary product lines instead, but this never happened (Comisso 1980, 200). The contribution that individual firms might have made to overall planning was hampered by their narrow perspectives: ‘Thus, while it was beyond the capacity of any individual firm to think in terms of a general solution to inflation, few collectives could resist seeking approval for price increases to combat inflation’s effect on their own operations’ (Comisso 1980, 205). Arriving at the plethora of agreements required to coordinate production was so cumbersome that most collectives charted their own course; common goals like raising productivity and reducing inflation fell by the wayside.

Consequently, self-management failed to boost the economy. ‘Between 1974 and 1980, Yugoslavia borrowed 16,433 million US dollars from the IMF, western governments and a great number of western commercial banks. Inflation reached an annual rate of 45 per cent and unemployment rose to 800,000. Beyond the unemployment figures, nearly two million people became so-called technological surplus’ (Guzina 2004, 19). While Tito was alive, his prestige as the leader of a multiethnic partisan force which had fought successfully against the Nazis, and as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, counteracted the centrifugal forces pulling the Federation apart. But after his death in 1980, the decentralised character of decision making ‘deprived the last pro-Yugoslav federal government of [prime minister] Ante Marković the capacity to act in any legitimate fashion. Even though enjoying a great popularity at the time in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia, Marković’s government soon fell prey to the orchestrated campaign of the republican elites of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia to topple the government’s program of economic and political reforms’ (Guzina 2004, 19). The IMF imposed its usual austerity conditions for the loans it gave. As living standards plummeted, ethnoreligious nationalism took over.

Ethnoreligious Nationalism

Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks2 are all Slavs with variants of the same language, differentiated mainly by the religion of the majority: Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism and Islam respectively. Kosovar Albanians are not Slavs, have a completely different language, and are mostly Muslims. Islam came to the Balkans mainly with the Ottoman conquest of the fourteenth century, and at the centre of Serb nationalist mythology is the battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which the Serb army led by Prince Lazar was defeated by the Ottoman Turkish forces of Sultan Murat, although both were killed in the battle. ‘During the nineteenth century, Serbian nationalist writers transformed Lazar into an explicit Christ figure … In this story, the Ottoman Turks play the role of the Christ killers. Vuk Branković, the Serb who betrays the battle plans to the Ottoman army, becomes the Christ killer within’, who ‘represents any Slavs who converted to Islam … and any Serb who would live with them or tolerate them’ (Sells 1998, 31).3 These nationalists propagated three myths – that conversion to Islam was based only on cowardice and greed, that there were stable ethnoreligious groups down the centuries, and that Ottoman rule was completely depraved – which ‘became the foundation for a new religious ideology, Christoslavism, the belief that Slavs are Christian by nature and that any conversion from Christianity is a betrayal of the Slavic race’ (Sells 1998, 36). Serb nationalism is linked to Orthodox Christianity. Contempt for Muslims is shared by Croatian nationalists, with Croatian president Franjo Tudjman wishing ‘to eradicate what he sees as contamination by the “Orient”’ (Sells 1998, 95). 

By the twentieth century, Christoslavism had put down deep roots. ‘During the Balkan war of 1912, Leon Trotsky was a war correspondent for a group of liberal Russian and Ukrainian newspapers. He understood that pan-Slavic and Christian Orthodox chauvinism was a crucial element in Russian tyranny … and he wrote of the atrocities committed in Kosovo that Russian indulgence made it much easier for Serbian and Bulgarian gangs “to engage in their Cain’s work of further massacres of the peoples of the Crescent in the interests of the ‘culture’ of the Cross”’ (Hitchens 1999). Christoslavism might have been repressed during Tito’s rule, but it was not rooted out; on the contrary, many self-professed ‘communists’ like Milošević made a seamless transition to Christoslavism in the 1980s and 1990s. Another example is Biljana PlavŠiĆ, former dean of the Faculty of Natural Science and Mathematics in Sarajevo, who claimed that ‘it was genetically deformed material that embraced Islam. And now, of course, with each successive generation this gene simply becomes concentrated’ (cit. Sells 1998, xiv–xv). It is notable how similar this is to Nazi ideology, with Christoslav supremacism and demonisation of Muslims substituted for ‘Aryan’ supremacism and demonisation of Jews.

Kosovo had been part of the Ottoman Empire and was inhabited primarily by Albanians for around three hundred years. In 1912, most of it was conquered by Serbia, which pushed out Albanians and settled Serbs in it during the interwar years. Serbian nationalists protested when Tito came to power and abandoned Serb colonisation, and were even more enraged at the enhanced autonomy granted to Kosovo by the constitution of 1974. By 1986, Serb nationalists were accusing the Albanians of engaging in ‘genocide’ against the Serbs, the main ‘evidence’ for this being their high birthrate, although this was easily explained by the fact that Kosovo was the poorest region of Yugoslavia, and birthrates of the poor are usually higher than those of the wealthier. Serb women were alleged to have been targeted for rape, while the Serb cultural heritage of Kosovo was allegedly being destroyed – charges that collapsed when set beside actual police records. That did not deter the nationalists, however: in January 1986, two hundred Belgrade intellectuals signed a petition to the Yugoslav and Serbian national assemblies that ‘condemned the autonomy and majority rule in Kosovo, established in the constitution of 1974, as national treason’ (Sells 1998, 56).

In 1987, at a meeting in Kosovo, an elderly resident complained to Slobodan Milošević that the Albanian-dominated police were beating Serbs in the crowd. ‘“These people will not beat you again!” The response by Milošević was shown throughout Serbia on all the major television networks. What the viewers were not shown was how the incident was staged. Serb nationalists, with Milošević’s approval, had supplied the crowd with truckloads of heavy stones. At a given moment the crowd threw the stones directly into the face of police who had been standing by.’ On June 28, 1989, at the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Milošević stood before a crowd of between one and two million Kosovo Serbs and ‘consolidated three years of effort to instigate and appropriate radical nationalist sentiment’ (Sells 1998, 67–68). The agenda of transforming Yugoslavia into Greater Serbia was out in the open.  

The Slovenes and Croats, in 1991, were the first to declare independence from Yugoslavia, after their proposals for a looser federation were blocked by Milošević and his supporters. The Yugoslav army invaded Slovenia but soon retreated, since there were few Serbs living there. However, Croatia – where the new president, Franjo Tudjman, pursued an equally aggressive Croat nationalism and refused to acknowledge the atrocities against Serbs committed by the fascist Ustashe during World War II – was a different matter. There were around 600,000 Serbs in Croatia, and Milošević strongly opposed Croatian independence unless parts of Croatia like Krajina, where Serbs predominated, were annexed by Serbia. Tudjman’s government absolutely refused to agree (Sudetic 1991). War broke out between the Yugoslav army and Serb militias on one side, and the new Croat army on the other. Bosniaks were caught in the middle, threatened with being regarded as traitors if they did not fight in the Yugoslav army, and threatened with reprisals by the Croatian army if they did. This was the context in which Bosnians voted for independence in a referendum conducted on April 6 and 7, 1992, while Serb nationalists in Bosnia, armed and backed by Milošević, declared their own ‘Republika Srpska’ with Radovan Karadžić as president.

In March 1991, the warring Serb and Croat nationalists came to an agreement to partition Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia (Silber and Little 1997, 131–32). ‘Tudjman helped overthrow the moderate Bosnian Croat leader, Stjepan Kljuić, who had been elected Bosnian representative of the HDZ [Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica, or Croatian Democratic Union]. Kljuić was replaced with nationalist warlord Mate Boban. In May 1992, Boban had met with Radovan Karadžić in Graz, Austria, to draw up plans for dividing Bosnia between Croat and Serb nationalists’ (Sells 1998, 96). Serb militias and the Yugoslav army, by this stage completely dominated by Serbs, invaded, and by August they occupied around two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Silber and Little 1997, 205–56).

The Genocide of Bosnian Muslims

The first journalist to reveal the horror of what was going on in the Serb-
occupied parts of Bosnia was Roy Gutman, who had been covering Yugoslavia since 1991. Hearing stories of Muslims being deported in cattle cars to camps where terrible things were happening, he asked the Serb authorities for permission to visit one of these camps, Omarska. Instead, he was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Manjača, where his photographer ‘managed, despite the fact that … he was surrounded all the time, to get some superb photographs which just showed the degradation that they were subjecting Muslim prisoners to’ (Kreisler 1997). Still unsatisfied, on August 2, 1992, Gutman published a story entitled ‘Death camps: survivors tell of captivity, mass slaughters in Bosnia’, based on interviews with two survivors of camps at Omarska and Brčko:

The Serb conquerors of northern Bosnia have established two concentration camps in which more than a thousand civilians have been executed or starved and thousands more are being held until they die, according to two recently released prisoners interviewed by New York Newsday. […]

In one concentration camp, a former iron-mining complex at Omarska in northwest Bosnia, more than a thousand Muslim and Croat civilians were held in metal cages, without sanitation, adequate food, exercise or access to the outside world, according to a former prisoner who asked to be identified only as ‘Meho.’ The prisoners at the camp, he said, include the entire political and cultural elite of the city of Prijedor. Armed Serbian guards executed prisoners in groups of 10 to 15 every few days, he said. ‘They would come to a nearby lake. You’d hear a volley of rifles. And they’d never come back,’ said Meho. […]

In a second improvised camp, in a customs warehouse on the bank of the Sava River in the northeast Bosnian city of Brčko, 1,350 people were slaughtered between May 15 and mid-June, according to Alija Lujinovic, 53, a traffic engineer who was imprisoned at the camp. Guards at Brčko executed prisoners by slitting their throats or with firing squads, he said.

On August 6, a report by Penny Marshall and Ian Williams of ITN, whose crew was given a conducted tour of the canteen at the Omarska camp and allowed to film prisoners at the Trnopolje camp by the Serb authorities, was aired. These were sanitised images, released in order to counteract the even more damning reports of thousands of prisoners, almost all civilians, being starved, beaten and tortured to death in these camps; but even so, a still from their film, which was reproduced widely, was so strongly reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps that it created an international outcry (Iconic Photos 2009; Silber and Little 1997, 244–56).

The account of a survivor who was released in a prisoner exchange, Rezak HukanoviĆ (who tells it in the third person, calling himself ‘Djemo’), is all the more nightmarish because it starts with the elements of a normal life: a wife and two sons, a home in Prijedor, a job as a journalist, evenings in a bar, and occasional soccer games. When Serb nationalists took over in April 1992,

all the Muslims – along with the few Croats who lived there – were dismissed from their jobs. The schools were closed. The Serbs took control of all the radio and television transmitters and began broadcasting their own programs. The newspapers, except for the Serbian ones, stopped appearing or, at any rate, could no longer be found in town … The local radio station announced that Prijedor had – as the announcers put it – been attacked by ‘Muslim extremists.’ This item was repeated a number of times. … Djemo knew very well that, in a war such as this one, truth had to be killed first … Every Friday the newsstands sold fresh lies. (Hukanovic 1996, 24–25)

HukanoviĆ goes on to describe the sadistic treatment meted out to the prisoners: denial of food, water and sanitation, overcrowding to the point where they had to sleep standing up, constant humiliation and beatings, gruesome torture, and absurd confessions extracted under torture: an almost blind man forced to confess he was a sniper, a doctor without a basement forced to confess he had hidden stolen medicines in his basement. ‘In the course of two days, more than 3,000 inhabitants of Prijedor and its outlying villages were arrested in their homes in these inconceivable raids and brought to the Serb prison at Omarska. Among the prisoners, whose only fault was being Muslim or Croat, were intellectuals, teachers, engineers, police officers, craftsmen. Djemo recognized the mayor of Prijedor, the Honorable Mr. Muhamed Cehajic’ (HukanoviĆ 1996, 28).

Numerous similar accounts of mass killings, with an emphasis on exterminating the intellectual and political elites, have been documented. The actions that accompanied these murders were equally chilling:

Since April 1992 the Serb army has targeted for destruction the major libraries, manuscript collections, museums, and other cultural institutions in Sarajevo, Mostar, and other besieged cities. What the Serb artillery missed, the Croat nationalist militia known as the ‘Croatian Defence Council’ (HVO) took care of.

Where the Serb and Croat armies have been able to get closer than shelling range, the destruction has been even greater. The Croatian Defence Council dynamited mosques and Orthodox churches throughout the regions controlled by the Croat military. Serb militias have dynamited all the mosques (over six hundred) in areas they have occupied, some of them masterworks of European architecture such as the sixteenth-century Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka and the Colored Mosque in Foça built in 1551. Between them, the Croat and Serb nationalists have destroyed an estimated fourteen hundred mosques. In many cases the mosques have been ploughed over and turned into parking lots or parks; every evidence of their existence has been effaced. Graveyards, birth records, work records and other traces of the Bosnian Muslim people have been eradicated. (Sells 1998, 3)

All these actions, along with the killings, constitute elements of genocide as defined by Lemkin: they were not just massacres but an attempt to wipe out a whole people. A new element was the rape camps, where Muslim women and girls were held and subjected to continual rape and other physical violence. Given the culture in traditional Mediterranean societies, where women who have been raped are often not accepted as wives, ‘the organized rapes were meant to destroy the potential of the women as mothers’ even if they survived (Sells 1998, 21–22; 32). Many did not. The Serbian Guard boasted of gang-raping a 13-year-old Muslim girl in the Bosnian town of Gacko, attaching her to a tank, and riding around until there was nothing left of her but the skeleton (Sells 1998, 172 n.33).

The neo-fascist character of the Serb nationalists was underscored by the way in which they treated dissenters. Often, the punishment was death:

In a Serb-army occupied area of Sarajevo, Serb militants killed a Serb officer who objected to atrocities against civilians; they left his body on the street for over a week as an object lesson. During one of the ‘selections’ carried out by Serb militants in Sarajevo, an old Serb named Ljubo objected to being separated out from his Muslim friends and neighbours; they beat him to death on the spot. In Zvornik, Serb militiamen slit the throat of a seventeen-year-old Serb girl who protested the shooting of Muslim civilians. (Sells 1998, 73)

It is testimony to the courage and humanity of these dissidents that despite the risk of torture and death, many Serbs resisted by evading military service, helping Muslims to escape, or sheltering fugitives in their homes. ‘Bogdan Bogdanoviç, the Serb former mayor of Belgrade, has spoken out courageously against the systematic annihilation of mosques and other cultural monuments … In Bosnian government areas, the Serb Civic Council was formed to work for a multireligious society and to articulate the concerns of those Serbs loyal to a multireligious Bosnia-Herzegovina … The council criticized the international community for treating the religious nationalist faction as the sole representative of the Serb people’ (Sells 1998, 78–79). Indeed, the Serb Civic Council’s criticism applies equally to the reaction of pseudo-anti-imperialists to the genocide in Bosnia.

International Complicity

The UN Security Council resolution of September 1991, which put an embargo on the delivery of all weapons and military equipment to Yugoslavia, locked in place a huge imbalance between the heavily armed Serb nationalists and the extremely lightly armed Bosniaks, effectively preventing the latter from being able to defend themselves and their communities. In May 1992, trade, political and financial sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro were passed, but, as Economic and Political Weekly argued, ‘there is no escaping the harsh fact that the western powers, who dominate the UN, are disinclined to intervene in any meaningful way to protect the Bosnian Muslims’ (1992). Without any efforts to enforce compliance, or any monitoring of goods entering Serbia on the Danube River, the sanctions against Serbia ‘were evidently intended to fail’ (Economic and Political Weekly 1992). 

In 1993, Cyrus Vance, representing the UN, and David Owen, representing the European Community, formulated a peace plan dividing Bosnia into ten cantons, designating a dominant ethnic group in nine of them. The Croats and Bosniaks accepted it, but the Serb nationalists did not. After Vance was replaced by Thorvald Stoltenberg as UN negotiator, the Owen-Stoltenberg proposals, based on a map drawn by Croatian president Tudjman and Serbian president Milošević, were presented. ‘The proposals, which were heavily loaded against the Bosnian Muslims, blatantly rewarded the militarily stronger and more aggressive parties, mainly the Serbs who now control 70 per cent of the territory. According to these proposals, the Serbs were under no obligation to return most of the ethnically-cleansed territories which they had taken by force’ (Economic and Political Weekly 1993).

In an interview in 1993, Gutman expressed satisfaction that his stories had led to the release of thousands of Muslim prisoners, but immense frustration at the failure of the UN, the European Community, presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and NATO to halt what he called ‘the worst genocide in Europe since the Holocaust’ (Ricchiardi 1993). He was not the only Jewish commentator to make the comparison. The last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, Marek Edelmann, at an event in 1994 at the former Buchenwald concentration camp attended by around three thousand people including Bosnian concentration camp survivors, said, ‘Europe has learned nothing from the Holocaust. Nothing has been done to put an end to this slaughter. What is happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a posthumous triumph for Hitler.’ Holocaust survivors Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel both urged action to stop the slaughter. Jewish-American writer Susan Sontag, who lived in Sarajevo during the years of starvation and bombardment that began in 1992 and ended only in 1995, declared: ‘I have lost my faith in the ideals of the West. What is happening here in Bosnia is a stab in the back for western democracy and for my soul’ (GFBV 2012).

By contrast, Western leaders persisted in referring to what was happening as a ‘civil war’, and refused to accede to the desperate pleas of Bosnian president Alia Izetbegović that the arms embargo be lifted. In fact, the UN distinguished itself by failing spectacularly either to protect Muslims or to allow them to defend themselves, and can therefore be seen as complicit in the genocide. Muslims fleeing Serb forces sought refuge in Goražde, Žepa and Srebrenica, which were designated ‘safe areas’ for Muslims by the UN, but were, like Sarajevo, allowed to be besieged, starved and shelled by Serb nationalist forces. British general Michael Rose of the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) – photographed sharing a laugh with Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić in 1994 (Srebrenica Genocide Blog 2010) – accused the beleaguered people of Goražde of ‘“exaggerating” their plight’, even as its inhabitants ‘struggled to find food, to stay warm, and to survive the constant Serb shelling’ (Tanner 2000). Meanwhile, the UN special representative for former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi, refused to grant permission to NATO troops preparing to undertake punitive airstrikes (Economic and Political Weekly 1994). It was only after thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica were exterminated in one fell swoop in 1995, while civilians in Sarajevo continued to be massacred, that action was finally taken (Hansen 2006, 107–8). 

More than two decades later, the horror of what happened in Srebrenica has not diminished. It was one of the enclaves in which Muslim survivors of ethnic cleansing from other parts of Bosnia had fled because the Bosnian republican army in Srebrenica had resisted the relentless bombardment by Serb nationalist forces. In 1993 it was placed under the protection of UNPROFOR, and the Security Council passed a resolution that peace in Bosnia ‘must be based on withdrawal from territories seized by the use of force and “ethnic cleansing”’, while tabling a report warning of a potential massacre if Serb forces were to enter. Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadžić promised that if his army entered Srebrenica, there would be ‘blood up to the knees’, while General Mladić declared that his intention with respect to Bosniaks in the enclaves was to ‘have them vanish completely’. Instead of protecting the Bosniaks, UNPROFOR became a liability for them, because its presence – especially after its members were taken hostage by Serb nationalists – led to the UN ruling out airstrikes that might have helped to save the lives of the threatened population. Knowing that airstrikes would not occur, the Serb militias proceeded with their planned massacre. Florence Hartmann and Ed Vulliamy (2015) recount the events of July 1995:  

The UN’s envoy, Akashi, sent a cable: ‘The Bosnian Serb army is likely to separate the military-age men from the rest of the population, an eventuality about which Unprofor will be able to do very little.’ Indeed, Dutch soldiers watched Mladić’s troops separate women and young children (for expulsion) from men and boys (for killing).

[…] Early on 12 July, the Dutch commander in Srebrenica, Colonel Ton Karremans, met Mladić, with orders to ‘let the Serbs organise the transport’ of civilians out of Srebrenica. But, says General Onno van der Wind of the Dutch defence ministry, the UN then provided 30,000 litres of petrol which proved necessary for the genocide. ‘After Unprofor approval,’ says Van der Wind, ‘the fuel was delivered in Bratunac [the Bosnian Serb HQ outside Srebrenica] after the arrival of a logistical convoy.’ The UN petrol was used, he says, to fuel transport of men and boys to the killing fields, and bulldozers to plough the 8,000 corpses into mass graves.

The mass murder was later described at The Hague by Judge Fouad Riad as ‘written on the darkest pages of history’. A sole ‘executioner’ to turn prosecutor’s evidence at the trials, Dražen Erdemović, described how death squads asked to sit down – they were so tired, killing wave upon wave, busload after busload, of men and boys.

Unbelievably, despite this incontrovertible evidence that UNPROFOR was not protecting the Bosniaks from genocide, the UN still refused to lift the arms embargo to allow them to defend themselves. In the US, outrage at what was happening led to overwhelming support for lifting the arms embargo in both houses of representatives, with several Democrats joining the attack on the Clinton administration’s Bosnia policy, including Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, who argued that it amounted to tolerating genocide (Hosler and Matthews 1995). It was popular pressure and the lethal shelling of a marketplace in Sarajevo in late August that eventually pushed the Clinton administration and NATO into providing air support to a Bosniak-Croat ground offensive that successfully reduced Serbian territorial gains from 70 per cent of Bosnia to less than 50 per cent. This was followed by the Dayton peace negotiations led by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, which resulted in an accord in November dividing Bosnia into a Bosniak-Croatian federation on 51 per cent of its territory and the Serb Republika Sprska on 49 per cent, which were associated in a loose confederation with an internationally backed high representative to oversee it. Effectively, in violation of the UN Security Council resolution in 1993, the perpetrators of genocide were rewarded with a Serbian statelet which included Srebrenica. EU special envoy Carl Bildt later wrote in his memoirs that the Bosnian leadership ‘knew that the peace settlement would mean the loss of the enclave. So from this point of view what happened made things easier’ (Hartmann and Vulliamy 2015). The Clinton administration saw the massacre as ‘a blessing in disguise’, because it terrified the Bosnians into parting with almost half their territory (Hitchens 1999). Both saw the slaughter of around eight thousand Muslim men and boys, and rape and expulsion of the rest of the population, as a blessing!

One explanation for the reluctance of Western leaders to help the Bosnian Muslims was the fact that such an action ‘promise[d] no visible economic, political or even strategic dividends’ (Economic and Political Weekly 1994); by contrast with the Bush Sr. administration’s alacrity in bombing Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, the US was moved to action in Bosnia only when accused of complicity in genocide. Anti-Muslim bigotry, too, was clearly evident among many Western peacekeepers, including the Dutch soldier who handed over Muslims in Srebrenica to be slaughtered by Serb nationalists and ‘expressed contempt for Muslims because they were “smelly.” It evidently did not occur to him that people living in concentration-camp conditions are not able, as part of a deliberate policy, to practice normal hygiene’ (Sells 1998, 186 n.13).

The UN was also hamstrung by the fact that support for Serbian nationalism from Russian nationalists blocked any decisive action (Economic and Political Weekly 1994). In February 1994, Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky visited Bosnia. As the Washington Post reported at the time,

To resounding cheers from a crowd of several thousand, who stood for several hours in [the] freezing rain to see him, Zhirinovsky praised the Serbs for waging war to ‘save Orthodoxy’. ‘Don’t worry brothers,’ he told the applauding throng, ‘we will protect you … If a single bomb falls on Serbia, we will consider that an attack on Russia.’ … Ultranationalist Serbs and Russians say that traditionally their two peoples have been allies, sharing the same religion and what they both call ‘the great Slavic soul’. (Pomfret 1994)

Not only were there volunteers from Russia fighting alongside Serb militants in Bosnia, but there were also supporters of the Serbian cause among the UN peacekeeping forces. One was the Russian colonel Vicktor Loginov, who used his position to smuggle fuel and supplies to the Serb Volunteer Guard, the paramilitary unit supporting the army. In a 1992 interview, Loginov avowed, as Sells reports, that ‘Russia and Serbia were brothers in a Christian Orthodox war’ (Sells 1998, 195 n.18).

Only some combination of these elements can explain a botched UN operation that allowed its peacekeepers to be taken hostage by Serb nationalists and repeatedly handed over Muslim civilians it was supposedly protecting to be massacred by Serb militias. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, established by the UN in May 1993 in response to reports of large-scale atrocities, did subsequently bring people of all ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia to trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, but the complicity of the UN in these crimes was never acknowledged. 

A Ticking Time Bomb

The Dayton Accord, which sacrificed justice in the interests of peace, could only be a stopgap solution. In the short term, it did indeed bring peace, the rebuilding of state institutions and incipient democratic reforms. However, almost immediately after High Representative Christian Schwartz-Schilling took over in 2006 and announced a more hands-off approach, things began to unravel. As James Lyon (2015) recounts, ‘Sensing weakening international resolve, [Milorad] Dodik, then-prime minister of Republika Srpska, began using virulent nationalist rhetoric, speaking derogatorily of Bosniaks and the Bosnian state, and announcing that the state established at Dayton was temporary.’ This was followed by a series of measures over the next nine years devised to weaken Bosnian state institutions, so as to systematically ‘hollow out the Bosnian state that had been so painstakingly crafted by the international community’. Included in these institutions was the judiciary, Dodik’s opposition to which, Lyon suspects, is related to ‘his distaste for an independent judiciary and his personal fear of being indicted for corruption’ (Lyon 2015).

The twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre brought all these tensions to the fore. When Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vučić tried to join the commemoration ceremony in 2015, mourners hissed and shouted, some even throwing bottles and stones at him, as 136 victims, who continue to be found so many years later, were buried (Hanna et al. 2015). The US Embassy condemned the incident, but is it surprising that Vučić, who, in the wake of the Srebrenica massacre, gave an inflammatory speech pledging that ‘for every Serb killed, we will kill 100 Muslims’ (Lynch 2015), might have aroused the ire of those who had lost their loved ones? Meanwhile Russia vetoed a resolution in the UN Security Council condemning the Srebrenica massacre as an act of genocide, leading Munira Subašić, head of the Mothers of Srebrenica, to say, ‘We are not surprised by such a decision … Russia is actually supporting criminals, those who killed our children’ (Al Jazeera 2015a).

Most ominously, Dodik, supported by Russia, threatened a referendum on independence from Bosnia. A few months later, High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko, received death threats ‘written on postcards that were distributed to the public by the party of Milorad Dodik … [who] has long called for the departure of the [high representative] and other international officials’ (Bosnia Today 2016b). These moves, potentially leading to a resumption of war, expose one of the fatal flaws of the constitution established by the Dayton agreement, which, as Borger (2015) argues, ‘froze in place the ethnic politics that had fuelled the war. To this day, places at all levels of government are allocated according to affiliation to the three principal groups: Bosniak, Serb or Croat. If you are identified in any other way – Jewish, Roma, or “other”, just Bosnian with no specific ethnic label – political leadership in Bosnia and Herzegovina is out of your reach, by law.’ If war does break out, it is likely that support for ISIS – already threatening Bosnia’s predominantly secular Muslim leaders with decapitation (Bosnia Today 2016a) – would expand.

James Lyon (2015) suggests that ‘if Dodik moves ahead with the referendum, it will be a blatant violation of the Dayton agreement, upon which Republika Srpska’s only legal legitimacy lies. If it chooses to renege on Dayton, then Republika Srpska legally loses all legitimacy and becomes a rogue entity founded on genocide. The international community should then act accordingly and abolish Republika Srpska, which, while extreme, would be enforceable via administrative and financial means.’ This would allow Bosnia to become a republic in which all citizens have equal rights in all parts of the country, regardless of ethnicity. It would also help to reverse a situation in which, as Ed Vulliamy (2017) observes, Ratko Mladić is still adored despite having been convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. As Lily Lynch (2015) puts it, ‘Those responsible for mass murder and the forced displacement of entire populations are celebrities, their faces inescapable on billboards, television and posters. Having refused to kill often means the opposite: being labeled a traitor, testifying under a pseudonym at The Hague, your face obscured.’ A genuine peace would enable ‘Balkan Schindlers’ like ‘Srdjan Aleksić, a Bosnian Serb who was beaten to death in 1993 for attempting to defend a Bosniak friend in the town of Trebinje in southern Bosnia’ to be honoured as they deserve (Lynch 2015).4

Kosovo

Shortly after his speech in Kosovo in 1989, Milošević revoked the autonomy granted to it by the 1974 Constitution. He followed this with various measures denying Kosovar Albanians the liberty to use their language and develop their culture. This was at first countered by non-violent resistance:

When the University of Pristina personnel were fired, the administration quickly threw together buildings for classes to be held for some 20,000 students in defiance of Milošević’s move. The Belgrade regime then went a step further, determining the curricula for primary and secondary schools throughout Kosovo and forbidding ethnic Albanian personnel from entering the buildings. Albanian-language schools moved into garages, basement floors, barns and so on. At the same time, the Albanian-language press went into overtime, secretly printing and distributing opposition voices. When 38 state clinics in the Kosovo health system were forcibly shut down by Belgrade, it led to the birth of a parallel system run by the Saint Theresa Foundation, meeting the needs of some 350,000 Kosovars.

By 1992 there were two stark political blocs in Kosovo. The first was one imposed by Belgrade, driven by the belief that force should be used when necessary to break down the political will of the Kosovars and push for the ‘Serbification’ of Kosovo. The other bloc was the separatist political movement, driven by the belief that Kosovo was in essence under occupation by Serbia. Throughout the 1990s, the country was to witness two separate but parallel political and social structures.

The illegal Kosovar administration of that decade – referred to in political writings of the time as a ‘parallel state,’ ‘shadow state’ or even a ‘parallel society’ – wound up electing Ibrahim Rugova as its state president. It was now a substantial governmental structure led by Rugova, with his Democratic League of Kosovo; it included not only an education system but also culture, health and social security networks, political parties, financial institutions and a constitution. It was a collective and pacifistic political movement that had the support of 2 million Kosovo Albanians and which successfully brought civil disobedience to a functioning level. And so it was no surprise when the independence referendum in 1992 elicited an overwhelming ‘yes’ from society. (Aktar 2015)

Of course Serb nationalists were not prepared to recognise this non-violent independence movement; police repression continued to be used against the Albanians. Impatient young men began to feel, as one Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) soldier interviewed by Frontline put it, that ‘the so-called pacifist way failed, and finally Albanians were convinced that they had to organize armed resistance … Under the permanent repression of Serbs, Albanians protested in a civilized way by protests … conferences, cultural events and [so on], but it was not enough to resist Serb repression. It had to be more than that, which is why KLA had to be born.’ Movements critical of Rugova’s non-violent approach emerged from around 1996, eventually giving rise to the KLA. It began a guerrilla war targeting Serb security forces, knowing, as KLA leader Hasim Thaçi admitted, that ‘any armed action we undertook would bring retaliation against civilians. We knew we were endangering a great number of civilian lives’ (Little 2000). 

He was right. Serb security forces responded to the guerrilla attacks with indiscriminate massacres of civilians. One of the earliest attacks was in Likosane, in the Drenica region. Chris Hedges (1998) reported on the event:

The dead, some of the 24 people killed during the weekend in the most brutal sweep to date by the Serbian police and paramilitary units against armed members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, bore the signs of torture and summary execution, the hallmarks of the Serbian forces in Bosnia during the war there. The testimony of the survivors, many of whom were badly beaten, add weight to charges that the Serbian police and paramilitaries in black uniforms went on a rampage after four of their officers were killed over the weekend in two ambushes, lashing out with a blind fury at ethnic Albanians who live in areas where the rebels operate. … ‘I saw most of the bodies,’ said Dr. Bajram Gashi, who works at the small village clinic run by the Sisters of Charity, ‘and many of them had powder burns suggesting point-blank executions.’

In Prekraz, eleven-year-old Basorta Jashari was the only survivor in an attack that killed all the other members of her family, including her little sisters aged ten, eight and seven (Colvin 1998). Eighty-three people were killed throughout Drenica, most of them civilians (Krieger 2001, 93).

According to Human Rights Watch, ‘The police attack in Drenica was a watershed in the Kosovo conflict; thousands of outraged Albanians who had been committed to the non-violent politics of Ibrahim Rugova decided to join the KLA … there is no question that the brutal and indiscriminate attacks on women and children greatly radicalized the ethnic Albanian population and swelled the ranks of the KLA’ (cit. Krieger 2001, 92–93). The massacres of Albanians multiplied, and hundreds of thousands fled. At the same time, Human Rights Watch reported that the KLA also ‘committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, including the taking of hostages and extrajudicial executions’, leaving 138 Serbs and an unknown number of Albanians and Roma unaccounted for (Krieger 2001, 92).

As the death toll and numbers of displaced Albanians mounted, NATO members, fearing a repeat of the Bosnian genocide, told Milošević that unless he pulled his forces back, they would bomb. Milošević complied, and international monitors moved in to verify implementation of the agreement. Seeing the KLA advance, however, Milošević resumed the war in January 1999. The NATO forces invited the warring parties to peace negotiations at Rambouillet near Paris, where the proposal was that Kosovo would regain the autonomy it enjoyed under the 1974 constitution, and that NATO forces would enforce implementation. At first, Thaçi refused to agree because he wanted full independence for Kosovo, but the threat of being abandoned by NATO finally persuaded him to accept. However, the Serbs refused to agree to the NATO implementation force.

As the fighting resumed, NATO leaders found they had been wrong to believe that the mere threat of force would deter the Serb security forces. International monitors were pulled out as the prospect of bombing loomed, leaving Albanians even more vulnerable when Serb forces attacked them. NATO did carry out bombing raids, but they were largely unsuccessful. It later turned out that prior information about them was being leaked to the Serb forces, allowing them to evacuate the military targets before they were bombed. Meanwhile, on the ground, ‘[commander of the Yugoslav army in Kosovo] General Pavković’s units were in fact organising the biggest programme of forced deportation in Europe since the second world war.  It was bound by the sheer force of the image to evoke memories of Nazi Germany … The reality was stark – the air campaign could not stop this’ (Little 2000). When the bombing was extended outside Kosovo, first to military and then to civilian targets, the motivation was as much to preserve the credibility of NATO as to rescue the Albanians, but this led to international condemnation. It was only after a Russian emissary told Milošević that they would not intervene on his side, and persuaded him to accept a joint NATO-Russian peace plan that left Kosovo in Serbia but put it under the administration of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), that there was a cessation of hostilities in mid-1999, albeit marred by revenge attacks on Kosovar Serb civilians (Little 2000). 

A year later, Richard Falk, a professor of international law, wrote,

During my recent visit to Kosovo two strong impressions emerged. The first is that the curse of Serbian oppression has been definitively lifted from the majority-Albanian population. The NATO campaign achieved the removal of Yugoslav military forces from Kosovo and, even more significant, the departure of the dreaded Serbian paramilitary units and police. This should be acknowledged by critics of the US/NATO war strategy, among whom I include myself. … That is not a vindication of the NATO bombing campaign, but it is a tangible benefit to the Kosovars.

The unexpectedly rapid return of the Kosovar Albanians who had fled Serbian terrorism during the war, and their undisguised gratitude for the NATO intervention, further confirm such an interpretation. … After decades of abuse, this de facto emergence of an Albanian Kosovo seems a reasonable outcome of the war, bringing relief to 90 percent of the Kosovar population, a result in accordance with the right of self-determination. […]

The second strong impression I took away from Kosovo is that the UN Security Council has assigned UNMIK a mission impossible: establishing a multi-ethnic Kosovo subject to the sovereignty of Yugoslavia. … At this point, an overwhelming majority of Kosovars are committed to full independence as a sacred cause. To deny this aspiration is to insure a return to violence in Kosovo. (Falk 2000)

As if to confirm Falk’s analysis, the Kosovo parliament unanimously endorsed a declaration of independence at a session on February 17, 2008 which was, however, boycotted by the parliament’s ten Serb MPs. The declaration promised to respect the rights of all communities, and despite Serbian and Russian objections, was accepted by several other countries on condition that it was supervised by an international presence. Subsequently, the Serbian government, backed by a majority in the UN General Assembly, appealed to the International Court of Justice on the legality of the declaration. The Court ruled that the declaration was legal, and in 2012 Kosovo moved to full independence: not an ideal outcome, given the human rights record of the new rulers, but probably the best that was possible after the withdrawal of Kosovo’s 1974 status and the aggressive campaign of Serbification. 

Genocide Denial by Pseudo-anti-imperialists

While pseudo-anti-imperialists easily acknowledged the fascist character of Croatian nationalism, Serb nationalism was measured by a completely different standard. Michel Chossudovsky (1996) claimed, ‘It was not President Milošević but NATO that started the war in Yugoslavia,’ an assertion that flies in the face of all the evidence. Shortly afterwards, in February 1997, LM (formerly Living Marxism), edited by Michael Hume, published an article by Thomas Deichmann alleging that Marshall and Williams had fabricated the images in their ITN News report on the camps at Omarska and Trnopolje in order to give the impression that these were concentration camps similar to those in Nazi Germany. ITN sued them for libel and successfully established that their footage was genuine, yet the allegations continued to circulate in pseudo-anti-imperialist circles. In the ensuing debate, Deichmann dismissed the testimony of US Congressman Tom Lantos, himself a Nazi concentration camp survivor, that the Bosnian camps were ‘Nazi-style concentration camps, minus the gas chambers’ as ‘surely a contradiction in terms’ (Campbell 2002, 151). According to this logic, as David Campbell (2002, 151) notes, ‘the vast majority of the Nazis’ concentration camps could not be so easily described, as only six were extermination centres with gas facilities’. Apart from their ignorance about Nazi concentration camps, Deichmann and Hume failed to understand that it was in the context of what was happening around them – rape camps for women and the destruction of homes, libraries, museums, mosques, and all evidence that Muslims had ever inhabited Bosnia – that these concentration camps gained their meaning. ‘In this respect, the role the Bosnian Serb camps played as part of a systematic targeting of non-Serbian communities as a collectivity they intended to destroy conforms to the international legal understanding of genocide’ (Campbell 2002, 157).   

According to James Petras, former professor emeritus at Binghamton University, ‘Most European and US progressives supported US-backed Bosnian fundamentalists, Croatian neo-fascists and Kosova-Albanian terrorists, leading to ethnic cleansing and the conversion of their once sovereign states into US military bases, client regimes and economic basket cases – totally destroying the multinational Yugoslavian welfare state’ (Petras 2009, 117). The grotesque injustice of designating the Bosnian Muslims targeted for extermination as ‘fundamentalists’ and the Kosovar Albanians being expelled and murdered as ‘terrorists’, along with his deafening silence on the genocidal ethnic cleansing campaigns by Serb nationalists, makes it very clear where Petras stands. He also alleges that ‘the break-up of Yugoslavia was initiated by Germany following its annexation and demolition of East Germany’s economy. Subsequently it expanded into the Slovenian and Croatian republics. The US, a relative latecomer in the carving up of the Balkans, targeted Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosova’ (Petras 2009, 125). All the evidence, on the contrary, points to a shameful failure of the Western powers to rein in Serb nationalists until they had effectively torn Yugoslavia to shreds.

The foregoing articles are worthy attempts at covering up the Bosnian genocide, but Edward S. Herman, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, surely takes the prize. In ‘The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre,’ published by ZNet in 2005, Herman starts by warning that claims of a massacre in Srebrenica were ‘extremely helpful to the Clinton administration, the Bosnian Muslim leadership, and the Croatian authorities’, and therefore must not be taken at face value. He goes on to dismiss reports of concentration camps for Muslims run by Serb nationalists as ‘propaganda lies’, using arguments similar to those of LM, but goes even further than LM in accusing Muslims of ‘the ruthless bombing of Sarajevo civilians in three massacres: in 1992 (the “Breadline Massacre”), 1994 (the Markale “Market Massacre”) and a “Second Market Massacre” in 1995’. He follows up by questioning the numbers killed at Srebrenica and the claim that the men and boys were civilians, even while admitting that Bosnian Muslim soldiers had already left Srebrenica (he doesn’t mention the fact that it was supposedly under the protection of UNPROFOR). He alleges one-sidedness and bias of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in concentrating on Serb perpetrators, despite the fact that it also indicted Croat and Muslim war criminals. He concludes by saying, ‘The “Srebrenica massacre” is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars … But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent’ (Herman 2005).

Herman seems unable to comprehend that extraction of false confessions under torture, monopolisation of the media, and the killing of Serb dissidents might have been potent means by which Serb nationalists manufactured consent for their policies. Julie Wornan (2005) analysed his method:

Herman likes to put forth a highly questionable statement and then tell us that nobody else is talking about it. For example, ‘even though only rarely discussed there is a major issue of how many were executed…’ … Z-Mag readers are sensitive to media bias, and so Herman imagines that they will swallow anything he cares to serve up, if he can say that the media are ignoring it. You can use this method to plant the idea that the moon is made of pineapple pudding: just say ‘this question is rarely discussed…’ … This sort of pseudo-reasoning takes a particularly macabre turn when Herman turns his attention to the Bosnian Muslims: ‘A remarkable feature of the Bosnian Muslim struggle to demonize the Serbs, in order to get NATO to come to Bosnian Muslim aid with bombs, was their willingness to kill their own people…’ Of course it is ‘not easy’ to believe that the Bosnian Muslims would kill their own people – those allegations are simply preposterous. But Herman would have us think that because such a grotesque accusation is ‘not easy to believe’, we must believe it.

Times journalist Oliver Kamm argues that such denials of the Bosnian genocide use many of the same techniques as Holocaust denial: ‘Jewish campaigners immediately recognised in 1992 what was happening in the former Yugoslavia and appealed to the conscience of the world. Bosnia was no intractable civil war: it was a campaign of genocidal aggression launched by the Serb leader, Slobodan Milošević. Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel interrupted his own speech at the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington to implore President Clinton to protect Bosnian civilians. Tragically, it wasn’t enough. The least we can do is ensure that the victims’ stories are told’ (Kamm 2015). Among the genocide deniers Kamm lists are right-wing extremists Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller (who alleged Obama is a ‘muhammadan’ who wants ‘jihad to win’ among other claims [Southern Poverty Law Center n.d.]); right next to them comes Herman.

Although less extreme than outright support for Serb nationalism, calling for ‘working class opposition to all the main nationalist leaderships,’ including the Bosnian leadership (Blackie 1995), was not a principled anti-imperialist position, because it allowed the genocide, ethnic cleansing and annexation of the victims’ land to continue unchallenged; it is equivalent to calling for working-class opposition to the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and the Israeli state when Gaza is being bombed, Palestinians are progressively being driven out of their land, and the land is being annexed by the Israeli state. We can certainly criticise Islamists in Bosnia and Palestine, but that should not preclude recognising the imperialist character of the land grab by Serb nationalists and the Israeli state.

In a review of several books that touch upon the disintegration of Yugoslavia by people he calls ‘left revisionists’, Marko Attila Hoare exposes how the authors cite Western imperialist and Serb nationalist sources, use each other as sources, censor contrary evidence, are ignorant of Yugoslav history, support Hitler’s policy of partition of Kosovo while opposing Tito’s policy, and use double standards, half-truths and outright lies. He concludes his review, tellingly titled ‘Nothing is Left’, by saying, ‘This, then is the face of the Western far left – with a few honourable exceptions – in the twenty-first century: intellectually superficial; morally bankrupt; callous about the suffering of foreign peoples; and cynical and hypocritical in its use of both facts and arguments’ (Hoare 2003). This may be an exaggeration, but the problem he identifies is real.

The desire to condemn the West cannot explain the way in which pseudo-anti-imperialists acknowledge atrocities by Croats but only against Serbs, and refuse to acknowledge either atrocities by Serbs against Croats or the genocide of Bosnian Muslims: all the sources quoted above, who have stood firmly with victims belonging to all ethnicities, have been scathingly critical of Western leaders. What makes the reaction of the deniers even harder to explain is the fact that all three categories that they discriminate between so sharply are Slavs, and all were citizens of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Anti-Muslim bigotry, expressed in sweeping assumptions that all Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo are ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘terrorists’, seems to be one of the reasons; the abhorrent doctrine of collective guilt, used to such devastating effect by the Nazis, also comes into play when characterising all Muslims as terrorists, and all Croats as fascists. Another motive for taking the side of Serb nationalists against their Muslim victims appears to be uncritical support for anyone supported by Russian imperialism. This is the first time in the post-Soviet world that such a clear convergence between neo-Stalinism and neo-fascism is discernible. If we specify that ‘neo-fascism’ refers to any variety of extreme right-wing ethnoreligious nationalism, and if ‘neo-Stalinists’ continue their uncritical support for Russian nationalism – regardless of the fact that it has by this stage abandoned all pretence of having anything to do with Marx or Lenin and openly flaunts its extreme right-wing Christoslavism à la Zhirinovsky – then this would account for the fact that Pamela Geller and Edward Herman are bedfellows on the issue of the Bosnian genocide.