Diana Johnstone writes in her "SEEING YUGOSLAVIA THROUGH A DARK GLASS: Politics, Media and the Ideology of Globalization":
Perhaps the most effectively arrogant NGO in regard to former Yugoslavia is the Vienna office of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki. On September 18, 1997, that organization issued a long statement announcing in advance that the Serbian elections to be held three days later "will be neither free nor fair." This astonishing intervention was followed by a long list of measures that Serbia and Yugoslavia must carry- out or else", and that the international community must take to discipline Serbia and Yugoslavia. These demands indicated an extremely broad interpretation of obligatory standards of "human rights" as applied to Serbia, although not, obviously, to everybody else, since they included new media laws drafted "in full consultation with the independent media in Yugoslavia" as well as permission meanwhile to all "unlicensed but currently operating radio and television stations to broadcast without interference. Some 400 radio and television stations have been operating in Yugoslavia with temporary licenses or none at all. The vast majority are in Serbia, a country of less than ten million inhabitants on a small territory of only 54.872 square miles.
Human Rights Watch/Helsinki concluded by calling on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to "deny Yugoslavia readmission to the OSCE until there are concrete improvements in the country's human rights record, including respect for freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and minority rights, as well as cooperation with the International Criminal Tribuna for the former Yugoslavia".
As for the demand to "respect freedom of the press," one may wonder what measures would satisfy HRW, in light of the fact that press freedom already exists in Serbia to an extent well beyond that in many other countries not being served with such an ultimatum. There exist in Serbia quite a range of media devoted to attacking the government, not only in Serbo-Croatian, but also in Albanian. As of one 1998, there were 2.319 print publications and 101 radio and television stations in Yugoslavia, over twice the number that existed in 1992. Belgrade alone has 14 daily newspapers. The state-supported national dailies have a joint circulation of 180.000 compared to around 350.000 for seven leading opposition dailies".
Moreover, the judiciary in Serbia is certainly no less independent than in Croatia or Muslim Bosnia, and most certainly much more so. As for "minority rights," it would be hard to find a country anywhere in the world where they are better protected in both theory and practice than in Yugoslavia. Serbia is constitutionally defined as the nation of all its citizens, and not "of the Serbs" (in contrast to constitutional provisions of Croatia and Macedonia, for instance). In addition, the 1992 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) as well as the Serbian Constitution guarantee extensive rights to national minorities, notably the right to education in their own mother tongue, the right to information media in their own language, and the right to use their own language in proceedings before a tribunal of other authority. These rights are not merely formal, but are effectively respected as is shown by, for instance, the satisfaction of the 400,000-strong Hungarian minority and the large number of newspapers published by national minorities in Albanian, Hungarian and other languages. Romani (Gypsies) are by all accounts better treated in Yugoslavia than elsewhere in the Balkans. Serbia has a large Muslim population of varied nationalities, including refugees from Bosnia and a native Serb population of converts to Islam in Southeastern Kosovo, known as Goranci, whose religious rights are fully respected, and who have no desire to leave Serbia.
For those who remember history the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki ultimatum instantly brings to mind the ultimatum issued by Vienna to Belgrade after the Sarajevo assassination in 1914 as a pretext for the Austrian invasion which touched off World War I. The Serbian government gave in to all but one of the Habsburg demands, but was invaded anyway.
The hostility of this new Vienna power, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, toward Serbia, is evident in all its statements, and in those of its executive director Aaron Rhodes. In a March 18, 1998, column for the International Herald Tribune, he wrote that Albanians in Kosovo "have lived for years under conditions similar to those suffered by Jews in Nazi- controlled parts of Europe just before World War II. They have been ghettoized. They are not free but politically disenfranchised and deprived of basic civil liberties".
The comparison could hardly be more incendiary, but the specific facts to back it up are absent. They are necessarily absent, since the accusation is totally false. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have never been "politically disenfranchised", and even Western diplomats have at times urged them to use their right to vote in order to deprive Milosevic of his electoral majority. But nationalist leaders have called for a boycott of Serbian elections since 1981 - well before Milosevic came on the scene -and ethnic Albanians who dare take part in legal political life are subject to intimidation and even murder by nationalist Albanian gunmen. The March 24, 1998 report of the International Crisis Group entitled "Kosovo Spring" notes that: "In many spheres of life, including politics, education and health-care, the boycott of Kosovars of the Yugoslav state is almost total". In particular, "Kosovars refuse to participate in Serbian or Yugoslav political life. The leading Yugoslav political parties all have offices in Kosovo and claim some Kosovar members, but essentially they are 'Serb only' institutions. In 1997 several Kosovars accused of collaborating with the enemy, /i.e., the Serbian State/ were attacked, including Chamijl Gasi, head of the Socialist Party of Serbia in Glogovac, and a deputy in the Yugoslav Assembly's House of Citizens, who was shot and wounded in November. The lack of interest of Serb political parties in wooing Kosovars is understandable. Kosovars have systematically boycotted the Yugoslav and Serbian elections since 1981, considering them events in a foreign country.
The ICG, while scarcely pro-Serb, in its conclusions, nevertheless provides information neglected by mainstream media. This is perhaps, because the ICG addresses its findings to high-level decision-makers who need to be in possession of a certain number of facts, rather than to the general public.
Gasi was not the only target of Albanian attacks on fellow Albanians in the Glogovac municipal district, situated in the Drenica region which the "Kosovo Liberation Army" tried to control in early 1998. Others included forester Mujo Sejdi, 52, killed by machine-gun fire near his home on January 12, 1998; postman Mustafa Kurtaj, 26, killed on his way to work by a group firing automatic rifles; factory guard Rusdi Ladrovci, ambushed and killed with automatic weapons apparently after refusing to turn over his official arm to the KLA; among others. On April 10, 1998, men wearing camouflage uniforms and insignia of the Army of Albania fired automatic weapons at a passenger car carrying four ethnic Albanian officials of the Socialist Party of Serbia including Gugna Adem, President of the Suva Reka Municipal Board, who was gravely injured; and Ibro Vait, member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia and President of the SOS district board in the city of Prizren. Numerous such attacks have been reported by the Yugoslav agency Tanjug, but Western media have shown scant interest in the fate of ethnic Albanians willing to live with Serbs in a multi- ethnic Serbia.
In order to gain international support, inflammatory terms such as "ghetto" and "apartheid" are used by the very Albanian nationalist leaders who have created the separation between populations by leading their community to boycott all institutions of the Serbian State in order to create a de facto secession. Not only elections and schools, but even the public health service has been boycotted, to the detriment of the health of Kosovo Albanians, especially the children. In March 1990, during a regular official vaccination program, rumours were spread that Serb health workers had poisoned over 7,000 Albanian children by injecting them with nerve gas. There was never any proof of this, as no child was ever shown to suffer from anything more serious than mass hysteria. This was the signal for a boycott of the Serbian public health system. Ethnic Albanian doctors and other health workers left the official institutions to set up a parallel system, so vastly inferior that preventable childhood diseases reached epidemic proportions. In September 1996, WHO and UNICEF undertook to assist the main Kosovar parallel health system, named "Mother Theresa" after the world's most famous ethnic Albanian, a native of Macedonia, in vaccinating 300,000 children against polio. The worldwide publicity campaign around this large-scale immunization program failed to point out that the same service has long been available to those children from the official health service of Serbia, systematically boycotted by Albanian parents. Currently, the parallel Kosovar system employs 239 general practitioners and 140 specialists, compared to around 2,000 physicians employed by the Serbian public health system there. Serbs point out that many ethnic Albanians are sensible enough to turn to the government health system when they are seriously ill. According to official figures, 64% of the official Serb system health workers and 80% of the patients in Kosovo are ethnic Albanians.
It is characteristic of the current age of privatization that the "international community" is ready to ignore a functional government service and even contribute to a politically inspired effort to bypass and ultimately destroy it. But then, Kosovo Albanian separatists aware of the taste of the times, like to speak of Kosovo itself as a "non-governmental organization".
These facts are contained in the "Kosovo Spring" report of the International Crisis Group.
Human Rights Watch blanket condemnation of a government which like it or not was elected, in a country whose existence is threatened by foreign-backed secessionist movements, contrasts sharply with the traditional approach of the senior international human rights organization, Amnesty International.
What can be considered the traditional Amnesty International approach consists broadly in trying to encourage governments to enact and abide by humanitarian legal standards. It does this by calling attention to particular cases of injustice. It asks precise questions that can be answered precisely. It tries to be fair. It is no doubt significant that Amnesty International is a grassroots organization, which operates under the mandate of its contributing members, and whose rules preclude domination by any large donor.
In the case of Yugoslavia, the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki approach differs fundamentally from that of Amnesty International in that it clearly aims not at calling attention to specific abuses that might be corrected, but at totally condemning the targeted State. By the excessive nature of its accusations, it does not ally with reformist forces in the targeted country so much as it undermines them. Its lack of balance, its rejection of any effort at remaining neutral between conflicting parties, encourages disintegrative polarization rather than reconciliation and mutual understanding. For example, in its reports on Kosovo, Amnesty International considers reports of abuses from all sides and tries to weigh their credibility, which is difficult but necessary, since the exaggeration of human rights abuses against themselves is regularly employed by Albanian nationalists in Kosovo as a means to win international support for their secessionist cause. Human Rights Watch, in contrast, by uncritically endorsing the most extreme anti-Serb reports and ignoring Serbian sources, helps confirm ethnic Albanians in their worst fantasies, while encouraging them to demand international intervention on their behalf rather than seek compromise and reconciliation with their Serbian neighbours. HRW therefore contributes, deliberately or inadvertently, to a deepening cycle of violence that eventually may justify, or require, outside intervention.
This is an approach which like its partner, economic globalization, breaks down the defenses and authority of weaker States. It does not help to enforce democratic institutions at the national level. The only democracy it reorganizes is that of the "international community", which is summoned to act according to the recommendations of Human Rights Watch. This "international community", the IC, is in reality no democracy. Its decisions are formally taken at NATO meetings. The IC is not even a "community"; the initials could more accurately stand for "imperialist condominium", a joint exercise of domination by the former imperialist powers, torn apart and weakened by two World Wars, now brought together under U.S. domination with NATO as their military arm. Certainly there are frictions between the members of this condominium, but so long as their rivalries can be played out within the IC, the price will be paid by smaller and weaker countries.
Media attention to conflicts in Yugoslavia is sporadic, dictated by Great Power interests, lobbies, and the institutional ambitions of "non-governmental organizations" - often linked to powerful governments - whose competition with each other for financial support provides motivation for exaggerating the abuses they specialize in denouncing.
Yugoslavia, a country once known for its independent approach to socialism and international relations, economically and politically by far the most liberal country in Eastern Central Europe, has already been torn apart by Western support to secessionist movements: What is left is being further reduced to an ungovernable chaos by a continuation of the same process. The emerging result is not a charming bouquet of independent little ethnic democracies, but rather a new type of joint colonial rule by the IC enforced by NATO.
("CovertAction Quarterly", Washington D.C., Fall 1998.)
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