A Place to Stand

Unlike most articles on Yugoslavia assessing the motivation of the various players in the destruction of Yugoslavia is not really a matter of finding facts & is bound to remain speculative. Whatever happens we can be sure that all parties will continue to insist that they had only good intentions & sincerely believed in whatever they said at the time.

The most useful article I have found on the subject is German & US involvement in the Balkans.
Another one which draws on the above is here & I thoroughly recommend it.

The main players were:

GERMANY - Germany has demonstrated a deep racial antipathy for the Serbs going back before the World Wars, where Serbia/Yugoslavia played crucial roles to the pan-Germanic & pan-Slavic movements of the 19th Century. Though Hitler displayed various prejudices they were all ones deeply rooted in German culture. Germany has always supported particularly Croatian Nazism on the spurious ground that they were racially a bit Teutonic & the better ground that they were more culturally akin.

Beyond this we must remember that in 1990 Germany was reunited, had a healthy economy & was expected & expected itself to be the powerhouse rather than the ball & chain of the EU. They intended to become regional hegemon of eastern Europe & to a lesser extent of all Europe. Demonstrating the ability to destroy countries & kill Slavs there did that.

It also seems clear from the Carr article that Germany was secretly funding Tudjman's Nazi party (possibly aided by the CIA) & therefore probably also Izetbegovic's Moslem Nazis. Certainly both parties quickly rose from nothing & had no shortage of money. The same has since been done in Serbia to overthrow Milosevic & in the orange & rose revolutions in Ukraine & Georgia respectively where similar financial resources were available.

VATICAN - The Vatican gave massive diplomatic support to anti-Yugoslav forces & provided both money ($2 billion from the Knights of Malta to Tudjman) & weapons (Caritas was caught smuggling mortars & ground to air missiles allegedly stolen from NATO to the KLA). Their motivation was purely religious. Their ancient conflict with the Orthodox Church. They have succeeded, through the Krajina Holocaust in driving the border between the religions about 50 miles nearer Constantinople, at the mere cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives. To the leaders of the Catholic Church that is clearly a price worth paying.

THE EU - The EU opposing Germany was & is unthinkable, so they didn't. In December 1991 Germany (& the Vatican) used all its political cards to move the EU from 11 to 1 in favour of international law & our treaty obligations not to support secession to 12 nil the other wat. I suspect the unlimited support the LibDems have given to wars of genocide have owed a lot to the fact that it was endorsed by the EU. The same applies to the BBC, an organisation clearly wholly supportive of the EU.

BRITAIN & OTHER EU MEMBERS - Shortly after Britain did a 180 turn on maintaining Yugoslavia (Douglas Hurd the foreign secretary had written a newspaper article supporting unity ac few days earlier) Germany decided to make no waves about Britain keeping the £. Genscher, the German foreign Minister has said this was not a coincidence. At the time all independent experts agreed that an "independent" Bosnia under a fundamentalist Moslem leader would inevitably lead to a war in which hundreds of thousands could be killed. Like His Holiness John Major clearly decided that hundreds of thousands of lives was a small price to pay not for God but for the £. Denmark got the same deal & presumably other countries got other quids pro quo.

THE US - The US initially was rather in favour of maintaining the unity of Yugoslavia since it has been a self interested principle of US governments since the civil war, that substates do not have a right of secession. There were 2 reasons the US government supported destruction. Firstly they wished to prove that they had won the cold war not merely by force of arms but because communism had been proven an inherently unworkable system. Unlike the others Yugoslavia had not, since 1948, been a Soviet satellite & had been practicing the reforms & limited free marketism that had made their economy work, with a standard of living approaching that of parts of Italy. They were visibly going from a communist system to a popular democracy that was still convinced of the values of socialism. It was clearly not going to collapse of itself as the other communist states had done so it had to be made to fail.

Secondly one of the problems of being a leader is that if your followers all want to go in one direction you have to lead them there. Once the EU countries had decided to support the Nazi statelets the US had to display its can do leadership by producing the biggest guns & bombers.

On occasion the US has been accused of supporting war because they wanted to build a pipeline from Russia which would bypass the EU & come out in Albania or Montenegro. I think if that had been the case it could have been negotiated more cheaply. The case of Milan Panic, American millionaire of Serb extraction, supports my thesis. He stood against Milosevic for the Presidency in 1992 with obvious US support (technicallyly he should at least have lost his citizenship for standing). It is only after they had failed to defeat socialism at the ballot box that the US turned wholeheartedly to murder.

THE MEDIA & THE BILDERBERGERS - One of the most surprising things is the almost total unanimity of the western media in censoring the Nazi antecedents of Tudjman, Izetbegovic & the KLA & their openly genocidal commitments while accusing Milosevic (a man whose parents were Resistance heroes) & the Serbs generally (whose heroism in WW2 in both fighting Germans & hiding Jews is unmatched anywhere) as "new Nazis". The media have clearly & overwhelmingly deliberately lied to support murderers & this requires some explanation. A little of it can be put down to the herd instinct in all humans & journalists. While many countries have the power to control their own media who has the power to control outside their borders. Some of it can also be put down to hiring lobbyists, such as Ruder & Finn whose greatest achievement was, in the words of their CEO to get Anerican Jewish groups to come out for the Croatians not knowing of their Nazi heritage or that, in his words, Tudjman had been "very careless in his words about the holocaust" (eg "Hitler's new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews" etc)

My opinion is the Bilderbergers censored the media. The Bilderberg group is an organisation of world movers & shakers (founded by the CIA, MI6 & Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a former SS officer on Himmler's personal staff among others). So far as we can tell it consists in roughly equal numbers of politicians, media moguls & financiers. Officially they meet annually only for schmoozing & not to sort out the world for us at all. However since their formation they have been very much in favour of a new world order including a united Europe. Thus if Germany is taken as essential for a European super state, which it is, the Bilderbergers would have to support them. This seems to me to be the only meeting place for those who control most of the world's papers & TV, either directly or through news agencies such as Reuters (on any Google news search you will find the same story, often with the same headline, in papers across the world - all supplied by the same agency).

AND SO ON - Once you have done horrible things & justified it by demonising the people you did it to, all human beings & by a herd effect all societies have a deep incentive to continue the demonisation. Journalists & politicians who had helped Izetbegovic to commit genocide while praising him as a "multiculturalist" cannot then denounce the KLA merely because they are genocidal sex slavers & drug lords. In this they are merely the logical endpoint of the entire process. In the same way Nazis who had demonised the Jews & in the 1930s could much more easily gas them in the 1940s, indeed, even excluding the risk, what sort of person could live with himself if he admitted the early murders were wrong. Thus John Major, as grey & colourless man as Himmler, having decided that he was willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands in Bosnia so as not to have to fight to keep the £, cannot admit that Milosevic & the Serbs are innocent & good people because to do so means he must admit his own guilt, at least to himself. Thus, for example, the so-called Srebrenica massacre which started as a largely disproven claim from Izetbegovic & at the very worst not worse than the undisputed but unreported prior genocide of 3,800 Serb civilians by these troops is visibly edging towards a government "fact" which it will be illegal to doubt.

The same applies to us all which is why you will see people twist themselves into the most outrageous contortions to say that while invading Iraq (which did not have EU support) is a war crime what we did to Yugoslavia was "humanitarian". You will find this view common even among people who consider themselves opposed to both Nazism & Europeasn union.

thanks to Dearieme for suggesting this article