The Dismantling of Yugoslavia Part 1 - Monthly Review

The Dismantling of Yugoslavia Part 1 - Monthly Review

journalistic and historical narratives systematically distorted, downplaying the external factors, selectively exaggerating and misrepresenting the internal factors

Perhaps no civil wars have ever been harvested as cynically by foreign powers to establish legal precedents and new categories of international duties and norms
into such a proving ground for the related notions of “humanitarian intervention” and the “right [or responsibility] to protect.”

Yugoslavia’s conflicts were inflamed and exploited to advance policy goals exploited for ends
(1) preserving the NATO military alliance
(2) overthrowing the UN Charter non-interference in favor of the right to interfere in “failing” states and to wage wars against “rogue” states;
(3) humiliating the European Union (EU) inability to act in a militarily punitive force in its own backyard;
(4) dismantling the last holdout to the “Washington consensus.”

The required that certain agents be cast as victims, and others as villains, not just belligerents engaged in a civil war, but evil and murderous perpetrators of mass crimes which would legitimate military intervention

in the work of ICTY, Yugoslavia was a crime scene, wars as a “Joint Criminal Enterprise,” the alleged purpose was the expulsion of non-Serbs from territories the Serbs wanted. This is an utterly risible caricature taken seriously in Western commentary

external causes were masked by focusing on the alleged resurgence of Serb nationalism as the root of the collapse. The widely read book along with the BBC documentary, Laura Silber and Allan Little wrote, “under Milosevic, Serbs were “the key secessionists,” they sought an enlarged Serbian state with as much territory of Yugoslavia as possible,” with the “politics of ethnic intolerance convincing other nations that it was impossible to stay, propelling them to independence.”

another book, Misha Glenny said, Milosevic let the genie [of violent, intolerant nationalism] out of the bottle. Noel Malcolm wrote that in the late 1980 there were “Two processes, one, gathering of power into Milosevic’s hands, and two, gathering of the Serbs into a single political unit with the intent of dominate Yugoslavia or break it

Roy Gutman wrote, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was the third in a series of wars