The Srebrenica Massacre

Hi ,
I checked google.Herman's essay has climbed to 9th place in Google's version of Internet.
It is here,
http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q="srebrenica+massacre"&meta=
I agree ZNET Is badly cluttered. Sometimes it is difficult to understand how many new additions are made to ZNET Overall.
I would like to know what is the effect of Herman's essay. May be mainstream readers will think it is Pro Serb, Pro Milosevic.
People have been assaulted with so much propaganda it would be difficult to think otherwise.

Friends:

A quick Google search just a few minutes ago for mentions of the phrase 'Srebrenica Massacre' shows that Edward S. Herman's important "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre" (July 7) currently occupies the 23rd spot overall in Google's version of the Internet. (Though this will change, one way or the other.)

The bottom-line is that ZNet did us all a great disservice by burying Herman's essay in the near-anonymous midst of so much clutter the way that it did.

Anyone who doesn't believe me should click on ZNet's homepage and see what you find.

Maybe next time Herman should write his more important work for The Nation instead? At least that way, the chances that ZNet will feature it prominently will be much greater.

See Tony Judt in New York Review Of Books.
Here
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18113

Judt reviews David Rieff's Book very Favorably. Judt repeats all the conventional wisdom. like Srebrenica Massacre, Milosevic Bent on Genocide.etc.
See a piece of Judt's Great Intellect here.

"At Srebrenica, in July 1995, four hundred Dutch UN soldiers stood politely aside to let Ratko Mladic and his Bosnian Serb irregulars massacre seven thousand Muslim men and boys conveniently gathered together under United Nations protection in a "safe" area."

The very "group morality" David mentions. It seems that these folks have somehow self rewired their "inner voice" (a la MK Gandhi) to always be in sync with their idealized power's voice (a la 'His Master's Voice').

I was very interested in the post.The recent attacks on the London underground have a similar theme in that they have come at a perfect time for all the G8 especially USA and UK.

Is it coincidence that this happems just weeks after Bush's speech telling all Americans that Al - Qaeda is still a threat?

For Mr Blair it was a godsend. The attack took the pressure and focus away from the Africa debt relief fiasco and the planned march by thousands to the G8 summit meeting at Gleneagles.

The attack will be used by the UK goverment to push through national Biometric ID cards and even more restrictive terrorism legislation which were being challenged by many citizens. All major political party's have given their unanimous support to these measures after the bombing being too corwardly to seek the truth.

Was the attack a coincidence? If it was it came at the most opportune time for the G8 especially the USA and UK.

Whilst all decent people grieve for the victims of the terrible attack and their families, our goverment's will use this for further attacks on other countries and to erode our civil liberties. For our government's the situation could not have worked better had it been planned.

Friends:

Strongly urge you to take a look at:

"Srebrenica: Prolonging the Wounds of War," David Chandler, Spiked Online, July 20, 2005

Let me quote one passage for you:

It is no surprise that those least engaged socially with Bosnian life are most vocal about the war, either those who are émigrés living abroad, and therefore isolated from any attempts to reconcile after the war; or those who work for internationally funded NGOs, and least dependent on local connections. Those most socially excluded from Bosnian life have been able to dictate the political agenda and oppose the politics of reconciliation, because their social weight has been artificially reinforced by the international dominance over the politics of the tiny state. Without political, social and economic dependency on external actors that are legitimised by the idea of Bosnian victimhood, it is unlikely that the war would have remained so central to Bosnian life.

A little appreciated side of the politics of the "Srebrenica Massacre" in the States is how beautifully the existence of a massacre at this particular time and place in the history of the wars over the breakup of Yugoslavia fit into the larger narrative of Western (principally American, of course) "humanitarian" intervention and the utter reliance of the West on American military power.

Events such as the one held at Potocari on July 11, and even the memorial center there, the International Commission of Missing Person's labors to find and positively identify the Bosnian Muslim victims of Bosnian Serbs, and the obsessive search for mortal remains and the exhumation of "mass graves"---all of this exists not for the benefit of the people of the former Bosnia and Herzegovina, but for benefit of the neocolonial community (NGOs included), whose members have a critical stake in the idea of Bosnian victimhood, the idea of Serb criminality (i.e., the breakup of Yugoslavia wasn't a series of civil wars but one gigantic crime perpetrated by Belgrade), and, above all, in the sanctity of the "humanitarian" wars they waged over the course of the 1990s---if belatedly and insufficiently violently in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the reigning narrative tells it.

The "Srebrenica Massacre" (and this point is true, whether 800 or 8,000 men were executed in cold blood) is but a prop for these moral monsters and their missions beyond. No reconciliation is to be permitted, as long as the prop remains critical to these missions.

Friends:

Speaking of the World Wide Web (December 19 at 07:43 PM---a phenomenon which, these days, often is indistinguishable from a World Wide Circle-Jerk), the wars over the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and over the former Yugoslavian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular, Wikipedian allegations about a "Bosnian Genocide," and the Bosnian Genocide Affirmers and Bosnian Genocide Promoters who have lived and breathed the "Bosnian Genocide" for so long now, they'd rather suffocate than crack open the window and take a breath of fresh air, consider the following fragment from the World War 4 Report's Bill Weinberg ("More Mass Graves in Bosnia," Nov. 14, 2005):

An estimated 260,000 people were killed and 1.8 million driven from their homes in the 1992-95 war.

On the contrary. The number 260,000 represents a grotesque over-statement of the number of people believed to have been killed during these conflicts. No honest person cites an estimate anywhere near this number. Not today. Not ever.

As a matter of fact, the current estimate of the researchers of the Demographic Unit of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, is that war-attributable fatalities on all sides of the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina totaled 102,622 persons, out of which some 55,261 were civilian, and 47,360 members of the military. (See “War-related Deaths in the 1992–1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results,” Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, European Journal of Population, Volume 21, June, 2005, pp. 187-215. (As always, my sincerest apologies in case this particular weblink fails.))

Others have been advancing similar estimates linked to real-world evidence for the past ten years or longer---as opposed to fabricated evidence driven by political necessity or to the extravagant propaganda effusions of wartime. Approximately 100,000, according to the ongoing work of the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center. (For three wire-service reports about the Center's work, all drawn from the past month or so, see below.)

As for why the World War 4 Report's Bill Weinberg continues to cite the 260,000 figure at this late a stage, leaving himself open to devastating refutation on readily available counter-evidence, one can only speculate.

But---to hazard a guess: On all questions pertaining to the breakup of Yugoslavia, Weinberg has been grinding the same axe for so many years that he’d rather swing it to chop off his own legs, than drop it altogether.

Incorrigibility is the hallmark of the irrational mind.

FYA ("For your archives"): To the best of my knowledge, only one of these three wire-service reports has been published by any of the English-language print media (i.e., a fragment of Reuters' Nov. 23 report was picked up and printed in the Nov. 24 Irish Times). Certainly none of the major U.S.-based print media.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur
November 21, 2005, Monday
Bosnian war "claimed 100,000 lives"

The confirmed death toll in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia appears to be closer to 100,000 dead than the often- quoted figure of 200,000, a Norwegian news agency reported Monday, quoting the head of the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center (RDC).

"In October we had 93,000 names on our lists and the numbers are increasing slightly. But the final tally will likely be around 100,000," Mirsad Tokaca was quoted as saying.

The centre was set up in April 2004 "to investigate and gather facts, documents and data on genocide, war crimes and human rights violations, regardless of the ethnic, political, religious, social, or racial affiliation of the victims."

It has received funding from among others the Norwegian government.

A similar estimate has also been used by population statisticians at the United Nations war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

The estimate published by researchers Ewa Tabeau and Jacub Biljak was 102,000.

All of the casualties listed by Tokaca and his co-researchers have been identified by name.

"Our research suggests that about 70 per cent of those killed were Bosniacs (Bosnian Moslems), 25 per cent of the killed were Bosnian Serbs and 5 per cent were Bosnian Croats," Tokaca said.

Tokaca said the number of 250,000 or even 300,000 dead has "never been based on research".

Reuters
Wed Nov 23, 2005 12:07 PM ET
Research halves Bosnia war death toll to 100,000
By Nedim Dervisbegovic

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - The death toll from the Bosnian war, which ended 10 years ago this week, was half of the widely used figure of about 200,000, a leading Bosnian war crimes researcher said in an interview on Wednesday.

"Let me be clear, this is still an extremely high figure but there is a big difference now that people cannot irresponsibly use inflated numbers for their political goals," said Mirsad Tokaca, who heads the Sarajevo-based Investigation and Documentation Center (IDC).

He said work to establish the exact number of Muslims, Serbs and Croats killed in the 1992-95 war should be completed in early 2006.

Tokaca estimated the number of victims at between 100,000 and 150,000 a year ago.

"We are at 93,000 now and that should rise to 100,000, give or take," said the ethnic Muslim (Bosniak) who has headed the 450,000-euro project funded by the Norwegian government since early 2004.

"We should come out with full preliminary results by March after which the number could be changed ... but only slightly," he told Reuters.

The ethnic breakdown of the victims of the war, for which the term "ethnic cleansing" was coined to describe large-scale killings and expulsions of members of other ethnic groups, remained unchanged from Tokaca's estimate a year ago.

"It is about 70 percent Bosniaks, slightly under 25 percent Serbs, slightly under five percent Croats and about one percent of the others," he said.

He said the multi-ethnic team of 12 professionals and several volunteers combed military, civilian, non-governmental and a number of other records and sources throughout Bosnia.

The initial, computerized, database included about 300,000 names as many people appeared on several different records listed either as soldiers, police officers or civilians that were killed or missing.

Once it has established the full database, which will be made available on the Web, Tokaca's team will produce an analysis with ethnic, regional, age, sex and time breakdown.

"I can only say now that it will produce some stunning conclusions but it is too early for me to go into details," said Tokaca, who has investigated war crimes for 13 years and cooperated closely with U.N. investigators.

Tokaca has said the project is of invaluable importance for the Balkan country's reconciliation process.

IPS-Inter Press Service
December 6, 2005, Tuesday
HEADLINE: BALKANS: HOW MANY REALLY DIED IN BOSNIA WARS?
BYLINE: By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
DATELINE: SARAJEVO, December 6 2005

The death toll in the wars of the 1990s in Bosnia stands at about half the usually stated figure of 200,000, new research shows.

Head of the Sarajevo-based Investigation and Documentation Center (IDC) Mirsad Tokaca told local media that his inquiries show that the number "stands at 93,000 dead now and that it should rise to 100,000 victims."

Tokaca said this is "still an extremely high figure, but there's a big difference; people cannot irresponsibly use inflated numbers for political purposes."

IDC is a non-governmental organization financed by the Norwegian government. It was founded in April 2004 to determine the exact number of victims of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.

Tokaca expects his task to be finished by March 2006 when the exact number of Muslims, Serbs and Croats killed in the war will be published.

"Our research so far suggests that 70 percent of victims were Bosniaks (Muslims), some 25 percent Serbs, and 5 percent Croats," Tokaca said. He plans to make the database available on the Internet, with an analysis of ethnic, regional, age, sex and time data.

IDC has engaged a multiethnic team of 12 experts to search the available military, civilian and other records and sources across Bosnia-Herzegovina.

"In societies still gravely burdened with ideology, where ratio and facts are often neglected, we have either the complete negation of war crimes, or inflated figures in order to show who suffered the most," Tokaca said.

"The horrible and tragic character of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina does not change if we come up with the real number," he said. "We do not need lies and myths about victims."

One of the worst reported atrocities in the war was the execution of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serbs in July 1995, as their forces overran the United Nations protected enclave of Srebrenica.

Bosniaks call it the worst massacre in Europe after World War II. Serbs deny it happened, and say the story was an invention to paint a bad image of them.

The international community came down strongly on the Bosniak side through the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, when local Serbs backed by Belgrade and the regime of Slobodan Milosevic took to ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs. The Serbs held about 70 percent of what is now Bosnian territory at the time.

Atrocities against Bosniaks were widely presented in international media, and were also used for local propaganda purposes. No Bosnian official is willing to comment on the ICD findings.

"The use of exaggerated numbers was the habit on all sides involved in wars of disintegration of former Yugoslavia," international law professor from Belgrade Vojin Dimitrijevic told IPS.

"It had the aim of proving who suffered the most and who should be punished for extreme crimes. The implication is also that one side has the right of revenge if it suffered more. What history needs are only the facts. The figures should not serve as basis for retribution, demand for damages or for pure propaganda purposes," he added.

The claimed figure of 200,000 victims has become the basis for charges filed by the Bosnian government against Serbia before the International Court of Justice at The Hague in the Netherlands. The hearing is to start next February.

"The major problem with the abused numbers comes from the fact that no simultaneous census was held in all the nations -- Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo -- since the wars ended," Srdjan Bogosavljevic, head of the leading research agency Strategic Marketing, told IPS. "This leaves broad space for manipulation."

The last census in former Yugoslavia was held in 1991, just before the outbreak of the wars. Bogosavljevic was head of the Federal Statistics Office at the time.

Croatia and Serbia conducted the first post-war censuses in 2002, though they were due in 2001. Bosnia and Kosovo, which is the southern province of Serbia dominated by Albanian Muslims, have not conducted a census yet.

Natasa Kandic, head of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, a prominent independent institution, believes the new research is of invaluable importance.

"There will be no chance for people in the region to live as merely good neighbors again if real figures are not established," she told IPS. "Only then we'll have the new bottom line to start all over again, because we do share the region, a common heritage and the future."

Friends:

My thanks to Ajit for the link to Tony Judt's "The New World Order" (NYRB, July 14). We are in agreement about "Judt's great intellect."

Thus, Judt asks about the "propriety of 'preventive' military intervention." More precisely: "If the Iraq war is wrong...why, then, was the 1999 US-led war on Serbia right?" But this is question-begging, of course: Never for one second have I ever believed that the 1999 U.S.-led war on Serbia was right. Or that some comparable war, ca. 1992-1995, was what the people of the former Yugoslavia needed---ethnic Serbs especially. A conviction that only grows stronger with the passing of the July 11 memorial at Potocari. And the monstrous rhetoric employed that day in the name of the UN Secretary-General that "we made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality and non-violence which, however admirable, was unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia" (SG/SM/9993).

Notice how Judt continues (I'll excerpt here Judt's 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, and his closing three):

The apparent difference—and the reason so many of us cheered when the US and its allies went into Kosovo —was that Slobodan Milosevic had begun a campaign against the Albanian majority of Serbia's Kosovo province that had all the hallmarks of a prelude to genocide. So not only was the US on the right side but it was intervening in real time—its actions might actually prevent a major crime. With the shameful memory of Bosnia and Rwanda in the very recent past, the likely consequences of inaction seemed obvious and far outweighed the risks of intervention. Today the Bush administration—lacking "weapons of mass destruction" to justify its rush to arms—offers "bringing freedom to Iraq" almost as an afterthought. But saving the Kosovar Albanians was what the 1999 war was all about from the start.

And yet it isn't so simple. Saddam Hussein (like Milosevic) was a standing threat to many of his subjects: not just in the days when he was massacring Kurds and Shiites while we stood by and watched, but to the very end. Those of us who favor humanitarian interventions in principle—not because they flatter our good intentions but because they do good or prevent ill—could not coherently be sorry to see Saddam overthrown. Those of us who object to the unilateral exercise of raw power should recall that ten years ago we would have been delighted to see someone—anyone—intervene unilaterally to save the Rwandan Tutsis. And those of us who, correctly in my view, point to the perverse consequences of even the best-intentioned meddling in other countries' affairs have not always applied that insight in cases where we longed to see the meddling begin.

............

One implication of the shadow falling across the American republic is that the brief era of consensual international intervention is already closing. This has nothing to do with the contradictions or paradoxes of humanitarian undertakings. It is the con- sequence of the discrediting of the United States. Hard as it may be for Americans to grasp, much of the world no longer sees the US as a force for good. It does the wrong things and has the wrong friends. During the cold war, to be sure, the US also supported many unsavory regimes. But back then there was a certain logic to its choices: Washington propped up anti-Communist dictators in pursuit of an anti-Communist cold war: raison d'état. Today we align ourselves with the world's most brutal, terrorizing tyrants in a war ostensibly against brutal terror and tyranny. We are peddling a simulacrum of democracy from an armored truck at fifty miles per hour and calling it freedom. This is a step too far. The world is losing faith in America.

That, as David Rieff would be the first to acknowledge, is not good news. For there is a fundamental truth at the core of the neocon case: the well-being of the United States of America is of inestimable importance to the health of the whole world. If the US hollows out, and becomes a vast military shell without democratic soul or substance, no good can come of it. Only the US can do the world's heavy humanitarian lifting (often quite literally). We have already seen what happens when Washington merely drags its feet, as it did in Rwanda and is doing over Darfur today. If the US ceases to be credible as a force for good, the world will not come to a stop. Others will still protest and undertake good works in the hope of American support. But the world will become that much safer for tyrants and crooks—at home and abroad.

For the US isn't credible today: its reputation and standing are at their lowest point in history and will not soon recover. And there is no substitute on the horizon: the Europeans will not rise to the challenge. The bleak outcome of the recent referendums in France and the Netherlands seems likely to have eliminated the European Union as an effective international political actor for some years to come. The cold war is indeed behind us, but so too is the post–cold war moment of hope. The international anarchy so painstakingly averted by two generations of enlightened American statesmen may soon engulf us again. President Bush sees "freedom" on the march. I wish I shared his optimism. I see a bad moon rising.

I don't believe that Tony Judt, David Rieff (whose book At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention was one of several Judt reviewed in his article), and the rest of the Humanitarian Brigades (Harvard's Michael Ignatieff in particular) have ever had a leg on which to stand that wasn't fashioned from American Power. And while it is a good thing that among certain intellectuals and politicos the exercise of American Power has been somewhat discredited, this is only because of the success of the armed resistance that its unchecked exercise has generated in theaters such as Afghanistan and Iraq. (About which, see "Study Cites Seeds of Terror in Iraq," Bryan Bender, Boston Globe, July 17, 2005.) Had the American and NATO-bloc occupiers been able to kill at will within these theaters and there been no resistance to speak of, all of the cynical doubts expressed now by the likes of Judt, Rieff, Ignatieff and the Democratic leadership in the States would have been nowhere to be found. But for anyone who has paid attention to the record of its uses over the years, rather than to the slogans chanted on its behalf, American Power never had any credibility in the first place.

As for Edward Herman's "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre" (ZNet, July 7): Unquestionably, both the essay and its author will be slandered as mere "Serb apologetics" or "supports genocide" or both. For the critical stakeholders in a Srebrenica massacre, in which "Serbian forces slaughtered more than 7,000 Muslim men" in "Europe's worst massacre since the Second World War," and in the absence of any comparable reporting or concern over the still-missing Krajina massacre, the combatants in the wars over the breakup of Yugoslavia always wore white hats and black hats---with the Great Cowboy to the West wearing the biggest and the whitest hat of all.

Instead, you might check out:

"The real story behind Srebrenica," Lewis MacKenzie, Toronto Globe and Mail, July 14, 2005 (as posted to the Centre for Peace in the Balkans website)
"Srebrenica, Mon Amour: An Ostracized Narrative," Gilles d'Aymery, Swans, July 18, 2005
"Srebrenica: Prolonging the Wounds of War," David Chandler, Spiked Online, July 20, 2005

Friends:

Check out the madness published in this morning's Guardian:

"The Greatest Intellectual?" Emma Brockes, The Guardian, October 31, 2005

As has been true perhaps forever (certainly since those days when Satan and his cohorts woke up in hell, their limbs all tangled together, “Thick as Autumnal Leaves…” (Paradise Lost I, 302), the news media can't touch these topics without resorting to lies, smears---and more lies.

At least Satan rejected the chance to serve great and indeed ultimate Power. For this, we all should be eternally grateful. As far as I'm concerned.

The Guardian (London)
October 31, 2005
SECTION: Guardian Features Pages, Pg. 8
The Greatest Intellectual?

Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough: Emma Brockes interview Noam Chomsky

Despite his belief that most journalists are unwitting upholders of western imperialism, Noam Chomsky, the radical's radical, agrees to see me at his office in Boston. He works here as a professor of linguistics, a sort of Clark Kent alter ego to his activist Superman, in a nubbly old jumper, big white trainers and a grandad jacket with pockets designed to accomodate a Thermos. There is a half-finished packet of fig rolls on the desk. Such is the effect of an hour spent with Chomsky that, writing this, I wonder: is it wrong to mention the fig rolls when there is undocumented suffering going on in El Salvador?

Ostensibly I am here because Chomsky, 76, has been voted the world's top public intellectual by Prospect magazine, but he has no interest in that. He believes that there is a misconception about what it means to be smart. It is not a question of wit, as with no 5 on the list (Christopher Hitchens) or poetic dash like no 4 (Vaclev Havel), or the sort of articulacy that lends itself to television appearances, like no 37, the thinking girl's pin-up Michael Ignatieff, whom Chomsky calls an apologist for the establishment and dispenser of "garbage". Chomsky, by contrast, speaks in a barely audible croak and of his own, largely unsuccessful, television appearances has written dismissively: "The beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts." Being smart, he believes, is a function of a plodding, unsexy, application to the facts and "using your intelligence to decide what's right".

This is, of course, what Chomsky has been doing for the last 35 years, and his conclusions remain controversial: that practically every US president since the second world war has been guilty of war crimes; that in the overall context of Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge weren't as bad as everyone makes out; that during the Bosnian war the "massacre" at Srebrenica was probably overstated. (Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.)

While his critics regard him as an almost compulsive revisionist, Chomsky is more mainstream now than ever as disgust with the Bush government grows; the book he put out after the twin towers attacks, called 9-11, sold 300,000 copies. Given that until recently he worked full-time at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there remain suspicions over how he has managed to become an expert, seemingly, on every conflict since the second world war; it is assumed by his critics that he plugs the gaps in his knowledge with ideology.

Chomsky says this is just laziness on their part and besides, "the best scientists aren't the ones who know the most data; they're the ones who know what they're looking for."

Still, of all the intellectuals on the Prospect list, it is Chomsky who is most often accused of miring a debate in intellectual spam, what the writer Paul Berman calls his "customary blizzard of obscure sources". I ask if he has a photographic memory and Chomsky smiles. "It's the other way round. I can't remember names, can't remember faces. I don't have any particular talents that everybody else doesn't have."

His daily news intake is the regular national press and he dips in and out of specialist journals. I imagine he is a fan of the internet, given his low opinion of the mainstream media (to summarise: it is undermined by a "systematic bias in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people". I would argue individual agency overrides this, but get into it with Chomsky and your allocated hour goes up in smoke). So I am surprised when he says he only goes online if he is "hunting for documents, or historical data. It's a hideous time-waster. One of the good things about the internet is you can put up anything you like, but that also means you can put up any kind of nonsense. If the intelligence agencies knew what they were doing, they would stimulate conspiracy theories just to drive people out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions . . . There's a kind of an assumption that if somebody wrote it on the internet, it's true."

Is there? It's clear, suddenly, that Chomsky's opinion can be as flaky as the next person's; he just states it more forcefully. I tell him that most people I know don't believe anything they read on the internet and he says, seemlessly, "you see, that's dangerous, too." His responses to criticism vary from this sort of mild absorption to, during our subsequent ratty exchange about Bosnia, the childish habit of trashing his opponents whom he calls "hysterical", "fanatics" and "tantrum throwers". I suspect that being on the receiving end of lots "half-crazed" nut-mail, as he calls it (he gets at least four daily emails accusing him of being a Mossad agent, a CIA agent or a member of al-Qaida), has made his defensive position rather entrenched. Chomsky sighs and says that he has never claimed to have a monopoly on the truth, then looks merry for a moment and says that the only person who does is his wife, Carol. "My grandchildren call her Truth Teller. When I tease them and they're not sure if I'm telling the truth, they turn to her and say: 'Truth Teller, is it really true?'"

Chomsky's activism has its roots in his childhood. He grew up in the depression of the 1930s, the son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, Russian immigrants to Philadelphia. He describes the family as "working-class Jews", most of whom were unemployed, although his parents, both teachers, were lucky enough to work. There was no sense of America as the promised land: "It wasn't much of an opportunity-giver in my immediate family," he says, although it was an improvement on the pogroms of Russia, which none the less Chomsky can't help qualifying as "not very bad, by contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about 49 people were killed."

The house in Philadelphia was crowded, full of aunts and cousins, many of them seamstresses who weathered the depression thanks to the help of the International Ladies Garment Union. Chomsky was four years old when he witnessed, from a passing trolley car, strikers outside a textile plant being beaten by the police. At 10 he wrote his first political pamphlet, against the rise of fascism in Spain. "It was all part of the atmosphere," he says.

The Chomskys were one of the few Jewish families in an Irish and German neighbourhood, and Chomsky and his brother fought often in the street; he remembers there were celebrations when Paris fell to the Germans. His parents kept their heads down and until their deaths, he says, "never had an idea of what was going on outside".

Chomsky had a choice of role models. There was his father's family in Baltimore, who were "super-orthodox". "They regressed back to the stage they were at even before they were in the shtetl , which is not uncommon among immigrant communities; a tendency to close in and go back to an exaggerated form of what you came from." He smiles. "It's a hostile world."

Or there was his mother's family in New York, who crowded into a big government apartment and got by solely on the wages of a disabled uncle, who on the basis of his disability was awarded a small newsstand by the state. Chomsky chose the latter and his radicalism grew out of the time he spent, from the age of 12, commuting to New York at weekends to help on the newsstand.

"It became a kind of salon," he says. "My uncle had no formal education but he was an extremely intelligent man - he'd been through all the leftwing groups, from the Communists to the Trotskyists to the anti-Leninists; he was very much involved in psychoanalysis. There were a lot of German emigres in New York at the time and in the evening they would hang around the newsstand and talk. My uncle finally ended up being a pretty wealthy lay analyst on Riverside Drive." He bursts out laughing.

It was a time, says Chomsky, when no one knew what was going to happen. They discussed the possibility of a socialist revolution, or of the country collapsing entirely. Anything seemed possible. Compared with these sorts of discussion, he found high school and, later, college, "dumb and stupid". He was thinking of dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania when he met his second mentor, Zellig Harris, a linguistics professor who encouraged him to pursue his own academic interests. Chomsky had grown up in a household where language was important; his parents spoke Yiddish and his father wrote a PhD on 14th-century Hebrew, which the young Chomsky read with interest. And so he pursued a study of linguistics and many years down the line formulated a ground-breaking theory, that of "universal grammar", the idea that the brain's facility for language is innate rather than a function of behaviourism.It sounds to me as if he was an arrogant young man who thought, with some justification, that he knew more than his teachers. Chomsky bridles at the word arrogant and says: "No. I assumed I was wrong and took for granted that the standard approach (to linguistics) was correct."

Even though he went on to study at Harvard, he still, in a rare concession to the romance of outsidership, describes himself as "self-taught".

There were only a couple of years in the mid- 1950s when he gave up activism altogether. He had met and married Carol Schatz, a fellow linguist, and they had three young children. Chomsky had to choose whether to commit himself to activism or to let it go. The Vietnam war protests were getting under way and, if he chose the former, there was a real danger of a jail sentence, so much so that Carol re-enrolled at college in case she had to become the sole breadwinner. But Chomsky was not, he says, the sort of person who could attend the occasional demo and then hope the world would fix itself.

"Yeah, my wife tried to talk me out of it, just as she does now. But she knows I can be stubborn and that I'll carry on with it as long as I'm ambulatory or whatever."

These days, Carol accompanies her husband to most of his public appearances. He is asked to lend his name to all sorts of crackpot causes and she tries to intervene to keep his schedule under control. As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it?

"No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work."

How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?

"Look," says Chomsky, "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old- fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest work. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous."

They didn't "think" it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law.

But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong." It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. "And if they were wrong, sure; but don't just scream well, if you say you're in favour of that you're in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers."

Eh? Not everyone who disagrees with him is a "fanatic", I say. These are serious, trustworthy people.

"Like who?"

"Like my colleague, Ed Vulliamy."

Vulliamy's reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994. He was present when the ITN footage of the Bosnian Serb concentration camp was filmed and supported their case against LM magazine.

"Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."

But Karadic's number two herself (Biljana Plavsic) pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity.

"Well, she certainly did. But if you want critical work on the party line, General Lewis MacKenzie who was the Canadian general in charge, has written that most of the stories were complete nonsense."

And so it goes on, Chomsky fairly vibrating with anger at Vulliamy and co's "tantrums" over his questioning of their account of the war. I suggest that if they are having tantrums it's because they have contact with the survivors of Srebrenica and witness the impact of the downplaying of their experiences. He fairly explodes. "That's such a western European position. We are used to having our jackboot on people's necks, so we don't see our victims. I've seen them: go to Laos, go to Haiti, go to El Salvador. You'll see people who are really suffering brutally. This does not give us the right to lie about that suffering." Which is, I imagine, why ITN went to court in the first place.

You could pick any number of other conflicts over which to have a barney with Chomsky. Seeing as we have entered the bad-tempered part of the interview, I figure we may as well continue and ask if he finds it ironic that, given his views on the capitalist system, he is a beneficiary of it. "Well, what capitalist system? Do you use a computer? Do you use the internet? Do you take an aeroplane? That comes from the state sector of the economy. I'm certainly a beneficiary of this state-based, quasi-market system; does that mean that I shouldn't try to make it a better society?"

OK, let's look at the non-state based, quasi-market system. Does he have a share portfolio? He looks cross. "You'd have to ask my wife about that. I'm sure she does. I don't see any reason why she shouldn't. Would it help people if I went to Montana and lived on a mountain? It's only rich, privileged westerners - who are well educated and therefore deeply irrational - in whose minds this idea could ever arise. When I visit peasants in southern Colombia, they don't ask me these questions."

I suggest that people don't like being told off about their lives by someone they consider a hypocrite. "There's no element of hypocrisy." He suddenly smiles at me, benign again, and we end it there *

Brain power . . . Chomsky, academic and activist Photograph: Lisa Carpenter

(plus-or-minus)

Chomsky as a child ( top left ); with his parents ( above ) and as a student ( left In 1970, as an activist against the Vietnam war, he was in Laos ( right ) en route to Hanoi to give a speech to the North Vietnamese

(plus-or-minus)

Talking to journalist John Pilger ( left ), 1992; meeting Fidel Castro ( above ) in Havana, in 2003 - Chomsky is on the left, the Cuban president opposite; receiving an honorary doctorate last year ( right ) in Athens

I am writing with reference to Emma Brockes's article following her meeting with Prof Chomsky ("The Greatest Intellectual?" The Guardian, October 31, 2005).

Presumably Prof Chomsky's assertion that estimates of the number who died following the takeover Srebrenica are exaggerated was chosen as an excerpt because it was deemed a controversial claim that might arouse the reader's interest. One does not need to be a genius to see that it is quite plainly true: in July this year scores of dignitaries from all round the world solemnly bent their heads at the Potocari memorial park where 10,000 gravestones (mostly without names) have been erected. 10,000 is an exaggeration of at least 25% on the supposedly accurate estimates of 7,500 to 8,000 dead and missing.

Even if the 8,000 figure is correct (and after nine and half years of intensive forensic exhumations and four years of the largest DNA identification programme ever undertaken the International Commission of Missing Persons have identified 2,153) the accompanying suggestion that all of these men (and they are almost all men) were massacred is not true.

A common factor in all the accounts the largest number of missing are from the column of 15,000 men (5,000 of whom were armed) which attempted to force its way across minefields and through opposing Bosnian Serb Army lines. Even the Hague Tribunal accepts that those who died in the forest could not be the basis for criminal charges because they were part of an armed group who engaged and killed many Serbian troops.

On the other hand it is also true that there were summary executions of male Muslim prisoners, something which did not happen following the fall of the neighbouring Zepa enclave only a matter of days later to the very same troops. Gen Morillon testified at the Hague that the different behaviour could be explained by revenge for the 3,000 men, women and children killed by Bosnian Muslims in Serbian villages adjoining Srebrenica in the three years leading up to July 1995. The question is what were the proportions in either category: combat death or execution?

The Guardian, in common, it must be said, with almost every other Western newspaper, has not seen fit to be detailed and accurate about the complexities of the various tragic deaths comprised by the word "Srebrenica". What is certain is that by presenting a one-sided, "black and white" picture your paper contributes nothing to encouraging reconciliation in Bosnia Hercegovina and merely feeds the dangerous victim mythology which has radicalised so many young Muslims around the world to such appalling effect.

As for the infamous ITN libel case against LM this is how the end of the case was reported:

"The LM article, headlined The picture that fooled the world, accused ITN of deliberately misrepresenting an image that came to symbolise the horror of the Bosnian war. It showed an emaciated Muslim, Fikret Alic, apparently caged behind barbed wire at Trnopolje camp. In fact, the wire had surrounded the ITN reporters.

"Nevertheless, the jury accepted that the camp was - contrary to what LM had suggested - a prison, and therefore the ITN pictures had not misrepresented the truth."

Of course juries are entitled to their opinion but how many of the millions of people who saw that picture were aware that the photographers were the ones surrounded by barbed wire, not the men in the picture?

Perhaps the quote is inaccurate? Well it is from The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3980631,00.htm ) so it must be true!

If you want to do a hatchet job on someone as truly and openly intelligent as Prof Chomsky you'll need a lot sharper weapon than Ms Brockes!

Tim Fenton
Henley-on-Thames, U.K.

Friends:

For a very helpful look at the Wikipedia database, with obvious lessons for the entire World Wide Web (ZNet included), see below.

By the way, I recall the travails of some friends of mine over Wikipedia's entry for 'Srebrenica Massacre'. Also the entry for 'Bosnian Genocide'. And similar entries. And though I haven't checked whether Wikipedia carries an entry for 'Bosnian Genocide Denier'---who can say what Wikipedia has in store for the World Wide Web? 'Bosnian Genocide Affirmer', say? Or 'Bosnian Genocide Promoter'?

As the University of Richmond's James Rettig told the Chicago Tribune, "Anonymity should not be permitted in a work that purports to provide factual information."

Nor should we permit the biggest fists and the loudest voices to determine the historical record.

Much less the most craven politicians and the saviest P.R. firms.

Dinner with President Izetbegovic.

Potëmkin Tours, Inc.

* http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0512150209dec15,1,6311812.column

Chicago Tribune
December 15, 2005
Wikipedia: Raising perhaps more questions than answers
Steve Johnson, Tribune Internet critic

"If your mother says she loves you, check it out" stands as one of the most treasured journalistic maxims, a reminder that no assertion, no matter how likely it seems, should be taken at face value.

Now, thanks to a volunteer online encyclopedia, we can add another: "If Wikipedia says John Seigenthaler plotted to kill the Kennedys, check it out."

Wikipedia, the free digital reference book that has grown enormously in size and stature this year, was dealt a public-relations setback recently when Seigenthaler, a prominent Nashville newspaper editor in the Civil Rights era, told of a bogus Wikipedia biographical entry on him that seemed to have been crafted by an aspiring Oliver Stone screenwriter.

Or it could have been Buck Owens or Billy Crudup. For a couple of weeks after Seigenthaler's USA Today article explaining the situation, we didn't know, because one of the treasured values in the Wikipedia community is anonymity, or the possibility of anonymity, and the author of the Seigenthaler entry had held onto his.

On Monday, though, after being nearly tracked down from his computer's Internet Protocol ad-dress by a Wikipedia critic, confessing to Seigenthaler and then being exposed in The New York Times, the prankster was revealed as a Nashville man trying to tweak a member of a prominent city family to amuse a co-worker.

It shouldn't work like that.

Wikipedia, if it wants to achieve the "better-than-Britannica accuracy" that guru Jimmy Wales says he strives for, needs to become as good as the old-school reference tomes at making its authors stand behind their work.

This, I realize, puts me in the camp of the fusties, librarians and the like who prefer to steer people to sources that are trustworthy rather than quick-and-easy or, in the case of Wikipedia, trendy.

But I'm not one of the Wikipedia bashers, either. It's a good, often great, first reference, an amazing feat of predominantly quality work and a refutation to those who would argue that you can't coax good work out of people without paying them.

I'm impressed, too, by Wales' candor when he says, in an interview, "People definitely should not be using Wikipedia as a primary source. The real story there is, Why were they ever?"

But no matter whether it strives to be the last word on a subject or the first, authorial responsibility is the right and obvious place for Wikipedia to be.

"Anonymity should not be permitted in a work that purports to provide factual information,' says James Rettig, university librarian at the University of Richmond and the editor of "Distinguished Classics of Reference Publishing."

"Wikipedia's very good when it's good," Rettig says. "It's useless when it's not."

The Seigenthaler incident was the most prominent in the U.S., but hardly the first; in another high-profile case, the encyclopedia called Norway's prime minister a convicted pedophile before the lie was removed after about a day.

Fantastical falsehoods

Much lower in profile, librarian Gary Price, the editor of ResourceShelf.com and news editor for SearchEngineWatch.com, says he did his own test this past summer, inserting fantastical falsehoods into the entry about him.

"I said I was a roadie for Warrant and Megadeth and AC/DC in the '80s," he says. "I said, in addition to librarian, in my spare time, I'm also a stuntman," and he linked to an Internet Movie Database article on an actual stuntman named Gary Price.

"I wanted to see how long it would take for a little-known person like me to have that information removed," he says. "Kudos to Wikipedia: It took six to eight weeks."

Seigenthaler's entry was up for months, time for it to spread via the search engines (which tend to rank Wikipedia entries highly in their results), to make it into high-school and college papers, to be repeated in other online reference works that use Wikipedia material but aren't as good about updating.

In light of all this, the University of Richmond's Rettig was thinking about how Wikipedia might reform itself, and "it struck me as a no-brainer that you just cease the ability for people to edit it anonymously."

Rule change

But all Wikipedia did was tweak its rules. In the future, to create an entry you'll have to register with the site first, although you'll still be able to do that without giving your real name. Plus, you'll still be able to edit entries -- the source of most of the encyclopedia's info-vandalism -- without registering.

The encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.org) has built a base of more than 830,000 English-language entries (plus more than 1 million in its next nine most popular languages) by allowing users to create entries and to edit other ones as they see fit. People who are expert in certain areas, whether amateur or professional, keep watch on the entries in those areas and are notified when changes are made.

Although a prominent Wikipedia critic (at www.wikipedia-watch.org) calls the phenomenon a "hive mind," this self-policing model, not unlike eBay's, usually knocks down bad information quickly.

In terms of "vandalism," malicious changes made to entries, there can be as many as one a minute, Wales says, and once or twice a week, Wikipedia has to ban somebody from editing because his or her work is consistently or deliberately bad.

Those, he says, are generally easy to catch. "The tougher part is somebody comes in, and they're doing kind of good edits and kind of bad. If they seem reformable, we talk to them and encourage them to do better."

To Wales, whose title is chairman of the Wikipedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, all this sudden negative attention seems out of balance after a year of mostly positive press highlighted by Wikipedia's first-rate work in constantly updating and broadening background materials on such news events as the Asian tsunami, the London subway bombings and Hurricane Katrina.

"It's unfortunate that there's been this big media storm over one entry on the site, and that's not to say it's the only bad entry on the site," he says. "The big picture is this is a non-profit, charitable, humanitarian, volunteer effort to create and give away an encyclopedia to every person on the planet.

`A big mistake'

"And if people come away from this thinking that Wikipedia's some kind of crazed forum for trolls, that's unfortunate. At the same time we're fully prepared to accept criticism, and this was a big mistake."

But Wales, who got rich as a Chicago futures trader and for-profit Internet entrepreneur, insists that anonymity should not be the issue.

"It's difficult to not allow anonymity," he says. "The default setting of everything on the Internet is that people are anonymous."

Many Wikipedians do share their identities, he says, but to insist on universal author identification would require "onerous" procedures, and even then you wouldn't know for sure if they were telling the truth.

Which raises the question: If they're not, or might not be, telling the truth about who they are, should they be trusted to tell the truth about anybody or anything else?