Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

David Gibbs

In the latest issue of Class, Race and Corporate Power, a scholarly and eclectically leftist open access journal launched by Ronald Cox in 2013, there is an article by David Gibbs titled How the Srebrenica Massacre Redefined US Foreign Policy that generated some interesting feedback from a wide range of scholars, including Kees van der Pijl. Gibbs responds to his interlocutors here.

When I first heard about these exchanges, I fully expected an angry attack from  people such as Marko Atilla Hoare who wrongly accused Gibbs of being a genocide denier in an underhanded campaign that was the subject of a 2011 post on this blog. As it turns out, the commentary was civil and thoughtful even when it took a position at odds with the article.

In essence Gibbs argues that the killing of 8,000 Muslim residents of Srebrenica was certainly a war crime but not a genocide, an analysis I agree with. In general, I find Gibbs’s scholarship on the Balkan Wars to be informed, cogent and well-researched as I indicated in a 2009 review of his First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. Indeed at the time I was taking the Serb side to such a degree that some of Gibbs’s more critical statements about Milosevic got me hot under the collar. While I would not disown anything I wrote about the Balkan Wars, I certainly would be much more open to the arguments of the other side. Specifically, I had a tendency to demonize the Muslims because of the presence of foreign fighters. For me, fighting against the Russians in Afghanistan was prima facie evidence of being on the side of the Devil. But if there is anything I have learned from five years of writing about Syria, it is the need to avoid Islamophobic demagogy of the sort found in both electronic and print media from a cast of thousands.

Gibbs’s article is very much reading in its entirety but one passage really made me realize once again how the truth is the first casualty in war:

The idea that genocide was occurring seems to have originated with the issue of Serb-run detention centers in Bosnia, which housed Muslim and Croat prisoners, where major atrocities and abuses undoubtedly occurred. Beginning in 1992, the Bosnian government promoted the idea that these detention centers were Nazi-style extermination camps, similar to Auschwitz or Treblinka. New York’s Newsday helped publicize the idea of Serb extermination camps. In reality, the detention camp atrocities had been deliberately exaggerated by the Bosnian government, and President Izetbegović confessed this exaggeration shortly before his death, in a 2003 interview with former French official Bernard Kouchner. This confession was later reported in Kouchner’s memoirs:

Kouchner: You claimed the existence in Bosnia of “extermination camps.” You repeated this journalists… [Kouchner then notes he visited one of the main camps.] Conditions there were terrible but there was no systematic extermination. Did you know this?

Izetbegović: Yes, I thought the claims would help trigger a bombing campaign by the Western powers… I tried but my claims were false. There were no extermination camps in Bosnia, even though conditions were terrible. [emphasis added]

This exchange resonated with me especially since the anti-Baathist town of Madaya is now literally being starved into submission. Stephen Lendman, a supporter of the dictatorship in Damascus, writes that Syrian rebels are killing any of the townspeople trying to escape–a totally fabricated business not even cropping up on RT.com. While I would be the last person to describe what is happening in Syria as genocidal, I do know mass murder when I see it. I also know that things have reached a grievous state on the left when people speaking in its name can simply make things up to defend their support for the Syrian dictatorship that uses the same “anti-al Qaeda” rhetoric I used from time to time in the late 1990s.

With respect both to Lendman’s yellow journalism and Izetbegović’s cynical use of the big lie, the left has to draw a line over the need for journalistic integrity. It is a slippery slope from bending (or breaking) the truth and becoming a hired gun for any state pursuing a narrow path of self-aggrandizement as the sorry history of the USSR would indicate. When people like Lendman (and those with a much more elevated status such as Slavoj Zizek) can so easily write lies, we are in trouble.

Let me turn to some comments made by Jean Bricmont, the Belgian physicist who collaborated with Alan Sokal in a book that basically expands on the famous Sokal hoax. One of Bricmont’s other avocations besides trashing postmodernism is promoting the reputation of dictators who are regarded as enemies of the West, a stance that I was far too accommodating to in my pro-Serb phase. Bricmont complains that Gibbs cedes far too much to the other side of the debate, an error in his eyes that objectively suits the needs of the imperialist war-machine. He writes:

As Gibbs points out, the Srebrenica myth has been a standard pretext for justifying US attacks against one country after another. It was used against Serbia to detach the province of Kosovo, where a huge US military base was immediately installed. It was cited to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was used in Libya to kill the country’s leader and destroy the country. It is currently being used to justify efforts to overthrow the government of Syria.

The idea that the USA is trying to overthrow the government of Syria is widely accepted on the left, probably even by Ronald Cox and David Gibbs. However, the truth is that Obama never had George W. Bush “regime change” ambitions.

In fact there was zero interest in a large-scale intervention in Syria in either civilian or military quarters. All this is documented in a NY Times article from October 22nd 2013, written when the alarums over a looming war with Syria were at their loudest, that stated “from the beginning, Mr. Obama made it clear to his aides that he did not envision an American military intervention, even as public calls mounted that year for a no-fly zone to protect Syrian civilians from bombings.” The article stressed the role of White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough, who had frequently clashed with the hawkish Samantha Power. In contrast to Power and others with a more overtly “humanitarian intervention” perspective, McDonough “who had perhaps the closest ties to Mr. Obama, remained skeptical. He questioned how much it was in America’s interest to tamp down the violence in Syria.” In other words, the White House policy was and is allowing the Baathists and the rebels to exhaust each other in an endless war, just as was White House policy during the Iran-Iraq conflict.

In conclusion let me say a word or two about how I went through an attitude adjustment that led me to break with the “anti-imperialist” mindset of people like Jean Bricmont. During the war in Kosovo, I was contacted by a 1960s radical named Jared Israel who had been a leader of the Progressive Labor Party wing of SDS called the Worker Student Alliance. After years of inactivity, Israel had been stirred into partisan journalism on behalf of Milosevic. For obvious reasons, Israel saw me as a kindred spirit and sought my advice on how to spread the word.

I suggested that he start a website (these were the days before the blog had been invented) to promote his views. The fruit of that suggestion was something called the Emperor’s Clothes that had the same relationship to the Serb cause that CounterPunch or Global Research have to the Baathists today. What Jared Israel and people like Mike Whitney had in common was a visceral Islamophobia that was actually a counterpart to what Christopher Hitchens was writing in 2004 except on behalf of the Kremlin rather than the White House.

Not long after the war in Kosovo wound down, Jared Israel took up a new cause—the war on the Chechens who he regarded as a jihadist threat to the peace-loving and diversity-minded Russian people. When I heard this nonsense, I began to rethink my positions immediately since I regarded Putin as a malevolent figure dedicated to enriching himself and his cronies no matter who got in the way—Russian reporters or people living in Grozny being bombed into oblivion.

I felt vindicated in my course redirection when about a year later, Jared Israel’s Islamophobia went full-tilt boogie. He became an ardent Zionist and began writing for ultraright Israeli newspapers since it was obvious to him that the Muslims wanted to exterminate the Jews. To my knowledge, Jared Israel has since retired from political life—a benefit to himself and to the rest of humanity to say the least.

(This appeared originally at http://monthlyreview.org/mrzine/proyect300309.html)

The Lessons of Yugoslavia
by Louis Proyect

David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia(Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, forthcoming, June 2009).

As a rule of thumb, there is an inverse relationship between the success of American foreign policy adventures and the amount of scholarly critiques they generate.  When they fail, as they did in Vietnam and Iraq, a mass market will be created for books like David Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era or Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco.  But when they succeed, publishers will not rush to the door of a scholar who questions such victories, especially if the main criterion of questioning is the impact on the lives of those whose lands were attacked.

Perhaps the most obvious recent example of this is the wars in Yugoslavia, which have generated very little in the way of serious analysis except from Diana Johnstone or Edward Herman.   As a measure of their isolation, both have been attacked as “holocaust revisionists” for making essentially the same kinds of points that have been made with respect to Iraq.

Thus, it is of some importance that David Gibbs, a respected professor of history and political science at the University of Arizona, has weighed in on the Balkan wars through the publication of First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.  Using his background in the two disciplines, Gibbs has written one of the few chronicles of the wars in Yugoslavia designed simply to tell the truth about what happened.  Since so many mainstream accounts are content to recycle propaganda, it is no small accomplishment to present the facts without fear or favor.  With a twenty-five page bibliography, First Do No Harm is a substantive contribution to the scholarly literature, one that will have to be engaged with whatever your perspective on the Balkan wars.

Just as importantly, Gibbs has provided one of the few book-length analyses of the political economy of the wars’ origins.  With the exception of Sean Gervasi’s “Why Is NATO in Yugoslavia?” a paper delivered to a conference in Prague in 1996, there have been very few attempts to understand the implosion of Yugoslavia except in terms of a “great man” theory of history, in which an Evil Slobodan Milosevic gets blamed for everything that went wrong.  In that paper, Gervasi raised the question:

Why are the Western powers pressing for the expansion of NATO?  Why is NATO being renewed and extended when the “Soviet threat” has disappeared?  There is clearly much more to it than we have so far been told.  The enforcement of a precarious peace in Bosnia is only the immediate reason for sending NATO forces into the Balkans.

Gervasi died only six months after this paper was delivered, so he never really had a chance to give a fully elaborated, book-length treatment on U.S. ambitions clashing with one of the few remaining socialist strongholds in Eastern Europe.  In describing American foreign policy as a “Great Game,” not that much different from imperial ventures in the past, Gervasi dared to go against the liberal consensus.

David Gibbs’s study answers the questions first raised in Gervasi’s article, while contributing a new explanation that might appear controversial to those who regard inter-imperialist rivalries as ancient history.  In general, even among Marxists, including me, there is a tendency to regard the First and Second World Wars as confirmations of Lenin’s writings on imperialism but to look at the post-Second World War period as fundamentally different.  While there were obviously clashing interests between the United States and Europe or Japan over this or that trade agreement or foreign policy dispute, the consensus view tended to overlap with either “globalization” theories that posited a disappearance of the nation-state or a view that most nation-states were content to operate as subhegemons in the U.S. orbit.

For Gibbs, the key to understanding the trajectory of the Balkan wars was rivalry over what was considered a ripe plum.  Germany had its own imperial interests and was actually the first capitalist power to begin the process of tearing apart a social system that had proven quite viable until economic contradictions began to make it vulnerable to outside powers in the 1970s.  In chapter four, titled, appropriately enough, “Germany Drops a Match,” Gibbs reveals the extent of German support for Croatian and Slovenian secessions:

German support for the secessionists is noted by several other sources.  French Air Force general Pierre M. Gallois asserts that Germany began supplying arms to Croatia, including antitank and antiaircraft rockets, in early 1991 — before the war began.  Off the record, US officials also acknowledged German intervention.  An investigative article in the New Yorker cites an anonymous US diplomat who alleged that German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher “was encouraging the Croats to leave the federation and declare independence.”  It is difficult to fully assess this allegation, given the anonymity of the source.  However, the New Yorker allegation is supported by the memoirs of US ambassador Warren Zimmermann, which note “Genscher’s tenacious decision to rush the independence of Slovenia and Croatia” (emphasis added).

Although the United States and Germany shared hostility toward Milosevic, who was perceived as a Titoist holdover standing in the way of converting the Yugoslav economy into one more favorable to Western economic ambitions, they by no means saw their own interests as coinciding.  Like dogs fighting over a bone, the United States sought to push its rivals aside and viewed NATO in particular as a means toward that end.  Sharing Gervasi’s emphasis on the role of NATO, Gibbs makes a strong case for seeing this military alliance as a bid to enhance the US hegemonic power at the expense of what became known as “Old Europe” in the early stages of the war in Iraq.

As a latecomer to the new areas for investment in the former Titoist republics, the United States understood the need for armed might, arguably the sine qua non for its continuing role as a hegemonic power in a period of economic decline.  As Thomas Friedman once put it, “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.  McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.”  While it was clearly beyond the bounds of U.S. hegemony to impose its will directly on Yugoslavia as it has now attempted in Iraq, it saw NATO as a useful surrogate.  Indeed, the pretext for a full-scale NATO intervention was the slaughter of Muslim men at Srebrenica, an event that, horrible as it was, should not have provided an excuse for even greater bloodletting.  Under the rubric of “Operation Deliberate Force,” U.S. power was put on full display as Gibbs relates:

Deliberate Force was technically a multinational NATO campaign, but it was conceived and conducted largely by the United States.  Shortly before the strikes were launched, US officials met with their European counterparts and, in essence, demanded their support.  According to Chollet, who interviewed many key figures: “The Americans would go to explain what they were doing, not ask for permission.  The message would be ‘part invitation, part ultimatum.'”  Though European leaders resented this US diktat, they reluctantly went along with the plan.  After the Srebrenica massacre, the Europeans were under pressure to take action, and they did not wish to appear obstructionist.  NATO member states thus supported Operation Deliberate Force.

Gibbs fully intended First Do No Harm as a critique of both successful interventions such as the one that took place in Yugoslavia and the one that still lurches unsteadily in Iraq.  Despite the perception (albeit growing dimmer day by day) that Obama is anxious to pull out of Iraq, it should have been clear to everybody committed to world peace that his opposition to war was based on pragmatism rather than principle.  Even during the period when he was perceived as a courageous opponent of an unpopular war, Obama maintained that he was not opposed to all wars, only those that were “dumb” or “rash.”

Therefore, it is a cause for great worry that Obama has retained the services of a number of foreign policy operatives who do not believe that NATO’s wars in the Balkans were “dumb” or “rash,” especially journalist Samantha Powers who became persona non grata with the Obama team during the primaries when she blurted out that his plans for withdrawal were only a “best case scenario.”   She was subsequently reinstated, apparently because Obama shared her cynical attitude all along, despite his dovish reputation.

It is essential for those committed to world peace to become familiar with the sorry history of so-called humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia, since the same characters who orchestrated American strategy in the period are now in the driver’s seat.  Not only do we face escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we are likely to hear the same kinds of “human rights” rhetoric that accompanied the Balkan wars.  This is not to speak of Darfur, a region that Powers has likened repeatedly to Yugoslavia as a candidate for a NATO-style rescue.

Gibbs indicates what the movement must be prepared for in his conclusion:

[T]he Iraq war has gone badly indeed, and the humanitarian effects of this particular intervention must be regarded as negative.  In this context, some recall the earlier interventions in Yugoslavia with nostalgia.  To state the matter simply, Yugoslavia is remembered as the “good war” — which achieved genuinely humanitarian outcomes — and it thus offers a welcome contrast with the Iraq fiasco.  The Balkan nostalgia also results from electoral politics: Democratic politicians are drawing attention to the “successful” US bombing campaigns in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina as examples of how intervention should be undertaken.  By emphasizing the positive aspects of these campaigns, Democrats are trying to show that they too are capable of using military force (with the implied additional claim that they can do so more effectively, more competently, and more humanely than their Republican opponents).  But the benign image of the Balkan interventions extends well beyond Democratic circles, and it is bipartisan to a significant degree.  The main purpose of this book has been to debunk this benign image, and to argue that it relies on a series of myths.

Where was James Bond when we needed him?

While some elements of the left such as Counterpunch, Monthly Review and ZNet have not succumbed to the enormous pressures of the bourgeois press and well-funded NGO’s and think-tanks to demonize the Serbs, others have. Workers Liberty in Great Britain, a state capitalist sect and one such group, has politics that can be described as rightist social democratic across the board with an affinity for the Shachtmanite journal New Politics in the U.S.A. New Politics is co-edited by Joanne Landy who is perpetually circulating petitions calling attention to the alleged crimes of the Cubans, Iranians or the Serbs. Alan Johnson, a former leader of Workers Liberty, was on the editorial board of New Politics but eventually broke with the left entirely. Nowadays he writes for Democratiya, an online publication of the Eustonite “left”.

In what can only be described as a kind of cognitive dissonance, the Democratic Socialist Perspective group in Australia argues from the same angle as Workers Liberty even though its politics are much more akin to Counterpunch et al on just about every other question. This has led to some rather schizoid outbursts. Michael Karadjis, their rather febrile “expert” on Yugoslavia, has denounced the Counterpunchers of the world for genocide denial even though John Pilger-one of their most cited leftist personalities-signed an open letter defending Diana Johnstone from exactly the charges that Karadjis levels against her.

I have no idea what most DSP’ers think about Yugoslavia since Karadjis is their designated batter on the topic. My guess is that early on during the conflict in the Balkans, after they formed close ties with a left-nationalist Croatian group in Australia, they developed a line on Yugoslavia which bought into Serbophobia. Things being what they are in “Marxist-Leninism”, they essentially painted themselves into a corner. It is impossible for them to renounce this shitty analysis in the same way that it was impossible for the American SWP to admit that the “turn” was not working. Fortunately for the DSP, the impact of having a stupid position on Yugoslavia is not as grievous.

In the latest issue of Links, Karadjis holds forth on the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the Serb warlord who is held to be qualitatively worse than all the other warlords in Yugoslavia, including the Muslim Naser Oric whose anti-Serb pogroms near Srebrenica unleashed Karadzic’s bloodlust revenge. Oric was just freed of all charges by the ICTY in The Hague in keeping with its tendency to judge Serb killers as more unequal than other killers.

While acknowledging the hypocrisy of the imperialist powers that have done nothing about war crimes in Iraq, Palestine or Afghanistan, Karadjis advises that it would be a mistake to come to Karadzic’s “defence”. It is a bit difficult to understand what he means by defending Karadzic. Does it mean calling attention to the clearly illegal basis of the ICTY, including the use of naked bribery (opening up the door to European Union membership specifically)? This matter appears to be of zero interest to our intrepid radical journalist.

Karadjis buys in completely to the Susan Sontag/Christopher Hitchens/Paul Berman version of the Bosnian war in which a multicultural socialist country is despoiled by the Chetnik Karadzic who was the proverbial turd in the punch bowl:

From the outset, Karadzic planned to destroy Bosnia, so rudely based on coexistence between peoples rather than ethnic purity, root and branch and had agreement from his Bosnian Croat chauvinist counterparts.

What was needed, of course, to deal with such naked evil was somebody like James Bond who could have penetrated deep into the stronghold of the archfiend and dispatched him straight to hell with a Walther P99.

In this version of history, the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic is as pure as the driven snow. In 1970, Izetbegovic wrote an Islamic Declaration that stated: “Pakistan constitutes the rehearsal for introduction of Islamic order in contemporary conditions and at the present level of development.” Now maybe I am missing something, but I had always considered Pakistan to be a reactionary, pro-imperialist bastion but perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Taking inspiration from the breakaway republics of Croatia and Slovenia, Izetbegovic pushed for a secessionist referendum in 1992 that the Serbs boycotted. With the Croatian ethnic cleansing of Serbs having already begun, one can understand why the Serbs would be on edge, especially since the Croats in Bosnia backed secession.

All of the three nationalities in Bosnia were involved with ethnic cleansing. The Counterpunch left has never tried to prettify Karadzic. Why the DSP would want to lie about Izetbegovic and destroy their credibility on the left is something of a mystery, although I understand how difficult it is for such propaganda groups to admit that they are wrong.

Trying desperately to maintain the DSP’s sorely tested anti-imperialist credibility, Karadjis insists that the West backed Karadzic:

But imperialism helped destroy Bosnia, because its heartland cities and industrial centres represented a multi-ethnic working class containing the last embers of socialist Yugoslavia.

Even before the war began, European powers put together plans drawn up by the Serb and Croat chauvinists for the ethnic partition of Bosnia into three states, despite the intermingling of populations – directly encouraging ethnic cleansing.

The one thing that Karadjis is unable to explain is this. If the West was so hostile to the socialist and multicultural government of Bosnia, why did the bourgeois media not reflect this? Anybody who read the Washington Post, N.Y. Times, Guardian et al during the 1990s would be hard-pressed to find evidence of support for the Serb militias, even in a backhanded way. Maybe DSP members do not read the bourgeois press, but others of us do. Here’s a reminder:

By taking United Nations peacekeepers hostage and using them as human shields, Dr. Radovan Karadzic and the other Bosnian Serb leaders have defined themselves as outside law and civilization. But then that should not have been a surprise to anyone who knew their works.

Dr. Karadzic and his colleagues, after all, presided over the first attempted genocide in Europe since Hitler: the systematic murder, torture and rape that constituted ethnic cleansing. Their idea of reprisal showed up recently when Bosnian Serbs responded to Serbian defeat in neighboring Croatia by blowing up Catholic churches in the town of Banja Luka, killing a priest and a nun.

–Anthony Lewis, N.Y. Times, May 29, 1995

All in all, the bizarre affinity between the DSP and the forces of Serbophobia beating within the heart of Western imperialism, its media and kangaroo courts should not be held against the comrades. As I have tried to point out, they have painted themselves into a corner. Given a choice between admitting that you are wrong and lining up with the Paul Berman’s and Michael Ignatieff’s of the world, it is apparent that the latter choice is a lesser evil for them. Some day, if the left can break its grip on the “democratic centralist” nonsense that forces small propaganda groups or mass parties to defend indefensible positions, we will all be better off. The sooner, the better.

Marshall Tito: far bloodier than Radovan Karadzic

In news coverage of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, there are constant references to the 8,000 dead at Srebrenica as the greatest massacre in Europe since WWII. For example, an article that appeared in the July 22nd Independent starts off:

The massacre of around 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995 stands out as the worst carnage of the Bosnian war and the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War.

As an amateur historian, my curiosity was piqued. Was this really true? As it turns out, this very region was the scene of a far bloodier massacre that occurred in the town of Bleiburg in May 1945, just after the formal end of WWII. Bleiburg was on the border between Austria and Slovenia and a hub for Croatian Nazi collaborators, mostly Ustashe members. There were 30,000 POW’s who would be joined by another 60,000 Croats fleeing Tito’s advancing Partisans. Many of these were civilians who had absolutely no record of working with the Nazis.

When the Partisans reached Bleiburg, they wreaked bloody vengeance on the refugees, even though Tito himself was a Croat. As indicated from the wiki entry on Bleiberg, there are varying estimates of the casualty figures by respected historians but even the lowest estimate far exceeds whatever happened at Srebrenica.

For example, Croatian historian Vladimir Žerjavić estimates the numbers killed during the Bleiburg massacre at between 45,000 and 55,000 while British journalist Misha Glenny came up with the figure of 50,000 soldiers and 30,000 civilians executed.

Clearly the bloodbath was meant as retribution for Ustashe crimes at the Jasenovac death camps during WWII. A wiki entry on the Ustashe states that around 32,000 Jews, 40,000 Romas and between at least 300,000 and 700,000 Serbs died there.

Tito’s Partisans were not the only Communist-led soldiers who carried out war crimes. Anthony Beevor, whose book on the Stalingrad siege I found most useful in a survey of films about the pivotal WWII event, also wrote “Berlin: The Downfall 1945” that alleges that Red Army soldiers raped two million German women.

One imagines that if the left adopted the approach of Human Rights Watch, it would look at Bleiburg as just another Srebrenica type mass murder, with the perpetrators deserving to be put on trial at a place like Nuremburg or The Hague.

Yet Marxists have always used a different criterion. It is less focused on “evil” in the abstract, preferring to look at violence through the prism of history. While wars of liberation are often led by men and women who would disdain the kind of “collateral damage” associated with Bleiburg, there are notable exceptions.

For example, the FLN in Algeria often resorted to extreme violence against noncombatants, so much so that a liberal intellectual like Albert Camus decided to condemn them in numerous articles that have been the inspiration for Eustonian type declarations against the dastardly Serbs.

But unlike Algeria, Bosnia involved no such clear class distinctions. (Kosovo does involve these kinds of distinctions but that is a matter best taken up separately.) Perhaps the best analogy is with the communal riots associated with the creation of the modern states of India and Pakistan that resulted in over 10,000 deaths and 28,000 injuries by some accounts. Since both conflicts had nothing to do with social or economic emancipation, there was little point in trying to put a Marxist spin on a human tragedy except to point to the role of imperialism as Tony Cliff did at the time:

The power mainly responsible for communal clashes is British imperialism. It is she, who is responsible for the preservation of feudalism, which is the social background for the influence of religion on the masses. It is she who is responsible for the introduction about a century ago and preservation of the zamindar system, whereby permanent large landowners were put to lord over big estates in place of the former system of tax farmers. The British rulers put Hindus to rule over Moslem peasants and vice versa, thus sowing the seeds of communal discord. It is British imperialism, which is responsible for the competition of the clerks and members of the free professions, which receives a, communal colouring. And it is she who is responsible for the communal electoral system, for the sub-Federation organisation, etc.

And so, to the platitude of the Labour Government that they want to give independence, but the Indians are not capable of ruling themselves, and will cut one another’s throats in communal clashes, we must answer that the occupation army has not yet left India, that the pillars of imperialist rule – the Princes, zamindars etc. – are still in the saddle; and without their eradication the independence of India can only be a fiction.

The task of leading India’s independence of course cannot be carried out by the feudalist Moslem League or by the capitalist Indian Congress.

This should have been the approach of the socialist movement during the Bosnian civil war. Instead some elements became disoriented by the mammoth pressure orchestrated by the bourgeois press and well-funded NGO’s and began to look for “evil” men to demonize.

There seems little point in my opinion in debating over how many Muslims were killed at Srebrenica. Even accepting the 8,000 dead as an established fact, one has to ask whether justice is being served by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. On July 3^rd, it decided to free the ex-commander of Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica, who was originally convicted of failing to prevent men under his command killing and mistreating six Bosnian Serb prisoners. Such is the state of affairs in The Hague that this was the only charge preferred against him despite such reports in the mainstream media at the time:

Oric is a fearsome man, and proud of it.

I met him in January, 1994, in his own home in Serb-surrounded Srebrenica.

On a cold and snowy night, I sat in his living room watching a shocking video version of what might have been called Nasir Oric’s Greatest Hits.

There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed heads, and people fleeing.

Oric grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork.

“We ambushed them,” he said when a number of dead Serbs appeared on the screen.

The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by explosives: “We launched those guys to the moon,” he boasted.

When footage of a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce: “We killed 114 Serbs there.”

Later there were celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices chanting his praises.

(Bill Schiller, “Fearsome Muslim warlord eludes Bosnian Serb forces”, The Toronto Star, July 16, 1995)