by Alvin Dorfman and Heather Cottin
Printed in Jewish
Currents - April, 1996
Reproduced with the permission of the authors.
Alvin Dorfman is a contributor to Jewish Currents and has had a long
association with the magazine. Heather Cottin is a new contributor.
She is a public high school social studies teacher.
There is at present widespread
support in American public opinion for the policies of the U.S.
government in the Balkans. It is a striking and dark paradox that
Jewish opinion has played an important role in helping to mobilize
that support.
U.S. policy in the Balkans has
now carried the United States into direct intervention in two civil
wars, one between Croatian Serbs and the new proto-fascist
state of Croatia, and one between the Bosnian Serbs and a Bosnian
Muslim government which has become increasingly fundamentalist.
In the first case, the U.S. helped the new Croatia to plan, organize
and carry out the invasion of the Krajina
region in Croatia, which led to the uprooting of more than a quarter
of a million Serbs and the slaughter of thousands who tried to
remain in their ancestral homes there. In the second case, the U.S.
used NATO, against the advice of many of its allies, to destroy the
military infrastructure of the Bosnian Serb army and to shift the
balance of power in favor of a minority Muslim government in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. This, too, has led to the flight of well over
100,000 Bosnian Serbs.
In intervening in this manner,
the U.S. has not just taken sides in an internal European war; it
has allied itself with the most reactionary elements in Europe,
including a newly expansionist, racist and increasingly
militaristic German government. Worse still, the U.S., in order to
create what it thinks will be a more favorable atmosphere for the
re-election of Pres. Bill Clinton, is now seeking to impose an
unworkable overall peace "settlement" in Yugoslavia and to enforce
it with a 60,000-man NATO task force, which will include some 25,000
U.S. troops. Even Richard Holbrooke, the Assistant Secretary of
State for European Affairs, admits that this could well lead to
another Vietnam.
To anyone who lived through
World War II and who still understand the meaning of Nazism - and
this applies especially to Jews - all of this should be not just
astonishing, but repulsive. The
United States, in alliance with the German government, is now
pursuing policies very similar to those pursued by the Nazis who
wished to splinter the Balkans in order to dominate the area. It was
the Nazis who unleashed clerical fascism in Yugoslavia during World
War II. And it was the Nazis who displayed a pathological hatred of
the Serbs, as well as of Jews and Gypsies.
It is difficult to understand how U.S. policy
toward the Balkans could have taken such a turn in any reasonably
democratic country. Unfortunately, a large part of the explanation
is that public opinion in this matter has been driven into something
like a frenzy by what seems to be an officially inspired and large-scale
campaign of propaganda. No foreign policy can succeed without
public support. And U.S. policy in the Balkans is clear testimony to
that fact. Although as recently as four years ago, the American
public did not even know the location of the regions known as
Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, the Krajina and Montenegro -
and perhaps many Americans still don't - key
individuals and groups in this country were targeted for a
propaganda barrage designed to demonize the Serbs, to hide the
reality of Croatian fascism and to canonize the Bosnian
Muslims.
Several groups received special
treatment by the government and the media in the course of this
propaganda campaign. Since they, like many other Americans, were for
the most part ignorant of the history of the region, they were
relatively easy to convince. The groups which were singled out were
liberals, women and Jews. And government spokesmen and the
media have been hammering at them for years now. To take but one
example: in Washington the public relations firm of Ruder/Finn
mounted a campaign to get American Jews to associate the civil war
in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the Holocaust. This campaign, according
to Justice Department documents, was paid for by the governments of
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, although the head of Ruder/Finn
later explained these governments had not paid for all the costs of
the campaign. What other governments were passing money to
Ruder/Finn? Was the C.I.A. helping to subsidize the campaign through
traditional means, the usual kinds of "front" companies, or
"proprietaries," as insiders like to call them? Every effort was
made by Ruder/Finn to reach the leading Jewish organizations in the
United States at an early stage. Facts were
distorted. Lies were reiterated so many times that they became
"facts." In an interview with the well- known French TV
journalist Jacques Merlino, James Harff, director of Ruder/Finn
Global Affairs, boasted that the achievement he was most proud of
was "to have put Jewish opinion on our side." He said, "We out
witted three Jewish organizations - the Anti-Defamation League, the
American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress..." Harff
called getting these organizations to publish a pro-Bosnian Muslim
ad in the N.Y. Times, and to organize demonstrations outside the
United Nations "a tremendous coup." He crowed, "By a single move we
were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which
would hereafter play itself...We won by targeting the Jewish
audience..." He explained, "Our work is not to verify information,
our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favorable
to us. We are not paid to be moral."*
It should be remembered that Jews have also been
singled out as targets of official propaganda in the not-too-distant
past. When the Reagan administration was secretly trying to
overthrow the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua, it used the same
techniques that Ruder/Finn used in demonizing the Serbs. And some
Jewish leaders allowed themselves to be used to discredit the
Nicaraguan government. They helped to promote the idea that the
Sandinistas were anti-Semitic. There was not a grain of truth to the
claim. But some Jewish leaders signed a full-page ad in The N.Y.
Times, The Washington Post and The L.A. Times which referred to the
Contras as the moral equivalent of American revolutionaries and as
"freedom fighters."
Today American Jewish organizations are being used
in a similar way. It is important to contrast
what has happened in America with what has happened in Israel. The
Israeli public has proved much harder to deceive than the American
public. Jews are people of the Book, and very aware of their
place in history. Israelis are, not surprisingly, much more aware of
history in general than American Jews, and especially of European
history. Israeli Yugoslav Jews were therefore more immune to media
manipulation during the world-wide campaign against the Serbs.
American Jews jumped on the anti-Serb bandwagon rolling through the
American media. In Israel, Yugoslav Jews knew
very well that the Serbs had been their strongest allies during the
Holocaust, carried out in Yugoslavia primarily by Croatian fascists.
They remembered that the Croatian Ustashi had murdered hundreds of
thousands at the Jasenovac death camp. They remembered that the
Croatian president, Franjo
Tudjman, had declared that "only 1,000,000 Jews had died in the
Nazi Holocaust." They knew that Tudjman had proclaimed proudly that
his wife "was neither a Serb nor a Jew."
Israel may have recognized Croatia - under
pressure. But it is no secret that Israeli arms have ended up in
Serb hands. Israel has still not recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina. It
would be a near-suicidal step for any Israeli government to support
a Bosnian Muslim regime whose president (Izetbegovic)
has written that "There can be no peace or coexistence between the
Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies..."
In the United States, the process of rehabilitating
Croatia has been incredibly successful. Croatian fascists, who still
provide the model of ideal nationalism for the
Croatian government today, killed 60,000 Jews in World War II.
They recently destroyed Jewish synagogues as well as Serbian
churches.
If one can ignore such things, it is hardly
surprising that there was little international protest in August,
1995 when 250,000 Serbs living in the Krajina
region of Croatia were driven off the land on which their families
have lived for 300 years. How could such "ethnic cleansing" have
been carried out without international opprobrium?
The Croatian campaign in the
Krajina was the largest and most violent attack on European soil
since the end of World War II. And much
of it, because the Croatian Serb Army was quickly shattered, was
directed at unarmed civilians. The international media called the
Serbs "rebels" even though this region was recognized as Serb by the
Croatian government during World War II. No CNN horror films
catalogued the Croatian air force strafing of Serb refugees, the
destruction of their churches, the cold-blooded assassination of old
people, the burning of more than 16,000 homes and other
properties. No American refugee organization concerned
themselves with the hundreds of thousands of Serbs, from Croatia and
Western Bosnia, streaming into Yugoslavia. And since, by the summer
of 1995, American Jews had been properly
brainwashed and made anti-Serb, no Jews spoke out about a
horror which should been chillingly familiar. Somehow the fact that
Croatia expelled more than 40,000 Serbs when it declared its
independence in 1991 has been ignored. Somehow the fact that Croatia
has denied its population basic human rights such as freedom of
speech and freedom of the press and that it operates a repressive
police state has been hidden. In fear of their lives and
livelihoods, some Croatian Jews extol the virtues of the Croatian
government. When Croatian fascists commit
atrocities, people seem to respond with the familiar refrain, "We
didn't know."
Things have not been very different with respect to
Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the U.S. media and among senior American
officials, Bosnian Muslim spokesmen are taken at
their word where Serbs are not. Jewish leaders have been trotted out
to make condemnatory anti-Serb pronouncements. Even when
UNPROFOR (UN Protection Force) spokespersons denied or raised doubts
about stories of questionable veracity, the Bosnian Muslim position
or claim has been taken as truth.
Feminists in the U.S. were
treated to a propaganda blitz about rapes
allegedly carried out by Serbs. It had an electrifying
effect. In the end, the radical group "Madre," which previously
supported Central American women, launched an emotional campaign to
save thousands of Bosnian Muslim women allegedly raped by Bosnian
Serb soldiers. Gloria Steinem lent the story respectability in Ms.
Magazine. The N.Y. Times wrote that 20,000 to 50,000 Bosnian women
had been raped, despite the fact that there was no substantiation
for such numbers - except, of course, from the Bosnian Muslim
"Ministry of Information." Despite doubts expressed by Helsinki
Watch, Human Rights Watch and respected individuals such as Simone
Weil, the president of the European Parliament, the American media
relied on the Bosnian War Crimes Commission and Caritas, the
Catholic charity connected to the Croatian government, for
verification of these outrageous claims. The
German media promoted the rape hysteria for their own reasons, which
British historian Nora Beloff ascribed to the German need "to
Satanize the Serbs in order to cover their own responsibility for
pitching Yugoslavia into war."
In the U.S., from the beginning of the conflict,
there was never any attempt to see the civil wars in Yugoslavia from
a position of neutrality. Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were simply
"new states" welcomed into the brotherhood of nations, with seats
quickly obtained for them at the UN. They were never pictured, as
any briefing on history and politics would demand, as the fruits of
the most extreme, exclusivist nationalism, the kind of nationalism
which turned Central Europe upside down in the 1930s and led to
World War II. But Yugoslav Jews in Israel, understanding what was
really happening in the Balkans, actively opposed any government
support of Croatians or Muslims, despite Croatian public relations
efforts directed at Israel. Jews in Israel knew
that Hamas members trained in Bosnia. They remembered that the
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem organized two Bosnian Muslim divisions
for Hitler's army during World War II.
It is distinctly peculiar that
so many Americans, and more curious still that so many American
Jews, should have taken the side of the Bosnian Muslim government.
Of course, the USA has backed Muslim fundamentalism before, in
Afghanistan, for instance, where it was a useful tool for ending
Russian aid to the Afghan government. But these are European Muslim
fundamentalists. That is perhaps why the theocratic ideas of Mr.
Izetbegovic and his colleagues have received so little attention
here. Jews might wince if they learned that the Bosnian president
has said, "The struggle for Islamic order and the fundamental
reconstruction of Muslim society can be successfully waged only by
battle-tested and hardened individuals...The Islamic order should
take power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough
not only to overthrow non-Islamic rule but to develop new Islamic
rule." Are these the heroes of the West? It is strange that
Americans and American Jews, as a people who believe in
multicultural diversity and freedom of religion, have embraced the
Bosnian Muslim's struggle as their own.
The Horror of the last four
years was brought upon the Balkans primarily by Germany and the
United States for geopolitical reasons. Yugoslavia might
already in 1991 or 1992 have begun to break up as a result of
internal disagreements. But, in the absence of German and U.S.
interventions, it is unlikely that there would have been civil wars
there. By the end of 1992, however, Germany, throwing its weight
around as an economic power, was able to force the international
community to recognize Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as
independent states. It was quietly but effectively assisted by the
Bush administration, which, almost immediately after the Yelstin
takeover of 1991 in the Soviet Union, publicly abandoned its support
for the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia. By their joint
maneuvering the two great powers created a situation which reduced
the stature of more than two million Serbs outside Serbia and
Montenegro to that of "ethnic minorities" in hostile
states.
When Croatia denied Serbs all
political standing, the Krajina Serbs declared their independence
from Croatia - with as much right as the Croatians had in declaring
their independence from Yugoslavia. In Bosnia, where under
Izetbegovic Serbs were denied all political and economic rights, the
Bosnian Serbs also embarked on a struggle for self-determination.
They had no wish to be dominated by a repressive fundamentalist
regime. But Germany and the U.S. were determined to succeed
in their efforts to break up Yugoslavia. Germany poured millions of
deutschemarks into the Croatian military, and it trained and armed
Bosnian Muslims, with help from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and other
Islamic governments. Weapons, money and men poured into Bosnia for
the jihad. And the Muslim government opposed every peace agreement
that would have given anything of value to the Bosnian Serbs. The
U.S. has provided finance, political support and covert military
assistance to both the Bosnian Muslims and the Croatians. Thus,
there had to be a battle to win the hearts and minds of the American
people. Their support was needed if these policies were to succeed.
The support of American Jews became a key to moving public opinion.
Their major organizations carried weight, both in terms of resources
and in terms of moral leadership. Jewish support underwrote the
morality of the German-American policies in the Balkans. It also
followed that a great deal had to be hidden. Germany's pursuit of
divisive and expansionist policies in the Balkans for the third time
in the century had to be hidden. The fundamentalist values of
government leaders in Bosnia had to be kept hidden. And the role of
Germany and the U.S. in building up extremist nationalist movements
so that Yugoslavia could be torn apart had to be hidden: Widespread
information about any of these would have made it very difficult to
win the prize of Jewish opinion. The time has come to question our
position on this issue. Progressives in the country, and Jews
especially, have been inundated by a tidal wave of poisonous
falsehoods. We must ask ourselves, "Since when were aggressive,
anti-democratic foreign policies worthy of support?" We need to
establish why Yugoslavia broke up. We need to understand the meaning
of the U.S. German alliance after the Cold War. And we need to
question why we have deserted the Serbs, our only friends in
Yugoslavia, the only people who stood with us against the Nazis and
who died with us at the death camp Jasenovac. Serbs in Belgrade, to
whom we have spoken by phone, are appalled by what American Jewish
organizations have done. Jews of Yugoslav origin in Israel are
mortified. One has only to read the Israeli press to realize that.
We must see our shame. If it comes from not knowing, or being
misled, we need to atone for it. Jews have nothing to gain and
everything that we morally stand for to lose by continuing to turn
our backs on the Serbian people.
