>Nice thesis except the issue of Serb chauvinism was hardly started with the
>Kosovo war.
>It was what what fueled wars across the region (along with other forms of
>Croat and, yes, Muslim chauvinism).
Well, that depends on what you mean by 'the issue of Serb chauvinism'. There are two issues of Serb chauvinism: the first, is the issue of Serb chauvinism as it is the Balkans; the second is the issue of Serb chauvinism as it lives in the imaginations of the Western intelligentsia. The first is a problem for the region. The second is a motivating idea for an elite that needs a moral framework within which to express its inner conviction of superiority.
The appeal of descriptions of Serb chauvinism in the West is that it lets you feel morally superior. Racism and fascism (in fact predominantly Western and elite ideologies) are re-presented as a failing of lesser peoples. This is the meaning of Fanon's comment. The first ever analyses of racism were not analyses of racism in the West, but of the racism of peoples in the underdeveloped world, such as A Miller's Races, Nations and Classes: The Psychology of Domination and Freedom (1924).
In the 1950s one paper presented to Unesco felt moved to complain 'race prejudice has so far been analysed almost exclusively as exemplified by white people, though it cannot be said to be their preserve.' (quoted in Furedi, The Silent War, 1998, p229). It was round that time that the strategy of pointing up examples of racism amongst third world peoples was first developed as a way of relativising the obvious fact that race prejudice was primarily an expression of colonial domination. So, for example, ostentatious denunciations of India's 'caste system' became commonplace (though of course, it was the British Empire that did most to formalise the caste system). One American specialist took the view that 'the caste system of India' represented the 'most extreme system of color bar and racial prejudice' (Ibid. 228). Plainly these academics' concern with the caste system in India was not born of any real sympathy but as a means of emphasising their own moral superiority, at a time when the prior record of colonial domination threatened to besmirch it.
So too with the British and American preoccupation with Serb chauvinism. The larger picture is one in which Nato has colonised much of the Southern Balkans, bombing civilians, instituting a system of ethnic divide and rule. But to ensure that the obvious fact of Western domination of the East is not pulled into focus, the propaganda machines are obliged to make more and more of Serb Chauvinism. The weight that such chauvinism carries in Western reporting has no direct relationship to its strength on the ground (after all Serb Chauvinism has suffered successive defeats at the hands of Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, and no Kosovan separatist movements). On the contrary, the importance granted Serb chauvinism is directly proportional to the extent of Nato intervention in the Balkans. In this sense Serb Chauvinism is a bit like black crime. It does exist, but its importance to reporters is that it justifies police actions.
>
>And if rendering the enemy less than human is the goal, then the NY TIMES
>article is a terrible failure, since it renders a portrait of all too human
>characters, disillusioned, disgusted with their government, yet
>self-deceiving in ignoring the murders made in their name against the
>Kosovars.
On the contrary, as you intelligently emphasise, the point of the
article is to make the Serb civilian population equivalent to the German
civilian population during the Second World War. The concept of
collective guilt artificially unites oppressor and oppressed to justify
the wholescale slaughter of civilians. They, we are supposed to
conclude, are guilty because they did nothing to stop it.
>
>"Glee"?- cite an example. On the other hand, I can cite many news articles
>and television broadcasts highlighting the suffering caused to the Serbs by
>the bombing campaign, even as the campaign was justified in the name of
>human rights. You can attack the policy but it is a straw man to use words
>like "glee."
May be America was different (or maybe you were just looking the other way), but I can assure you that Tony Blair and George Robertson were running around, sighing and gasping like giddy schoolgirls at the prospect of fighting a 'just war'. A friend who was covering the war described back to me the scenes on the roofs of the Albanian hotels where journos had all-night parties, pissed out of their heads, cheering every bomb-blast. So too was the atmosphere in the press-rooms. Journalists cheered the television reports of bombing, wore helmets in the news room etc etc. Glee is understating it.
>
>It would have been nice to have a multicultural Kosovo, but the Serb
>government quite a while ago decided that allowing the Kosovos to have their
>culture as part of Yugoslavia would not be allowed. So the Serbs tried to
>take the whole land in the middle of war and created over 1 million refugees
>in the attempt, with local Serbs often participating in the mass murder that
>was part of that ethnic clensing.
I think that's a somewhat propagandistic reading of events. In fact Kosovar autonomy was tolerated and encouraged by the Yugoslav federation right through the 70s and eighties up to 1989 and Milosevic's fateful piece of tub-thumping. In itself autonomy was not a threat to the Yugoslav state, and it is pointed that the Serb leadership offered substantial autonomy in negotiations. But following the Western support for 'independence' in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia the possibility that the Kosovars would settle for autonomy was gone. In a TV special on the war by journalist Mark Urban here, Wesley Clark (is that the right name?) made the point that the KLA had adopted a policy of assassinating Serb police to provoke an internationalisation of the conflict. Realising that they could only back one side or the other, the West deliberately made the terms of the military annex to the Rambouillet Accords impossible for Milosevic to accept. Again Clark was crystal clear on this point saying that the difficulty that they had was that the Serbs offer was threatening to deny them the war that they wanted. Terms included right of unimpeded access for all Nato troops throughout the whole of Yugoslavia - terms which no government could accept.
All told then, the West refused the prospect of Kosovar autonomy deliberately scuppering such a proposal in favour of a war policy. With the KLA supporting a military attack on Yugoslavia, it was not surprising that they would become targets for Serb militias, police and military. But that in itself does not say that Serb civilians who have been killed since were culpable - not unless the Serb militias are made up of ninety-year old ladies.
>
>Now, suddenly it is a tragedy that multiculturalism has failed in Kosovo?
Your cynicism is breath-taking. If you had been honest about the contempt that you had held multiculturalism in before the war to defend multiculturalism started, then your pragmatism would be more acceptable. Instead you could have said, forget multiculturalism, lets bomb those Serb nazis.
Is it a tragedy that multiculturalism has failed in Kosovo? Certainly it is a tragedy that gypsies are being targeted by the KLA, and are fleeing the country. Or do you think that that is what the war was for?
Of all the former republics of Yugoslavia, only one today is ethnically mixed - and that is Serbia. Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and now Kosovo are states defined by their ethnic separatism, and are consequently ethnically pure (or in the case of Bosnia - and for the moment Kosovo - ethnically divided).
>
>Since your assumption is that everything was peechy-keen in Kosovo until
>NATO's bombs started falling, I guess it makes sense to blame the Kosovars
>for finding it hard to impossible to live with those who participated or at
>least watched in their murder and ethnic clensing.
The reports in Britain of deaths of Serbs have strangely missed out the assassinations of milita members (who I had thought had mostly hot- footed it out of the country). Instead we have had quite a few old grannies slaughtered, and some fifty year-old farmers killed in a field while the British troops were having their tea. I'm not naive. Of course there will be reprisals, and street justice is rough. But let's not dress this up as the righteous punishment of the 'collectively guilty'. It's ethnic revenge.
>
>But I find the moral equivalence you draw strained beyond belief.
Here's you juggling to justify hand-grenading some old Babushka and you accuse me of drawing moral equivalence.
>
>It would be more ideal to have a multiracial, multicultural Kosovar, but
>that possibility was largely destroyed long before any NATO bombs were
>dropped.
Suddenly you beginning to sound like a champion of Henry Kissinger's realpolitic, and I thought that you were motivated by higher principles than 'The KLA might be sons of bitches, but they're our sons of bitches'.
-- Jim heartfield