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Europe
Diana Johnstone has written a revisionist and highly contentious account of western policy and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The author, the former European editor of the left-wing American news magazine In These Times and a former press officer for the Green group in the European Parliament, turns many of the established truths about the fall of Yugoslavia on their heads. Slobodan Milosevic emerges as a multiculturalist committed to the preservation of a reformed socialist Yugoslavia who was demonized by the West not because of his militant nationalism, which she maintains the West largely fabricated, but because he stood in the way of western hegemonic designs for the region. The true villains, she argues, are the leaderships of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina--genuine nationalists who, with the support of the western powers, sought to disguise their self-interested quest for independence as a struggle between democracy and extreme forms of (Serbian) nationalism.
The author draws attention to numerous aspects of the Yugoslav crisis where fair and accurate analysis has indeed been in short supply. Western media and political leaders, for instance, often ignored or downplayed crimes committed by Croats, Bosniacs (Muslims) and Albanians, some of which were no less heinous in their purposes and consequences than those of their Serb opponents (i.e. Croatia's forced exodus of Krajina Serbs in 1995). Or they rushed to judgement about the scale and responsibility for alleged Serb crimes when uncertainty and imprecision should have suggested greater restraint (i.e. with respect to the issue of mass rapes). After the wars, moreover, one side has frequently proved to be as intolerant, corrupt and unforgiving as the other, but this too has been ignored in favour of the West's allies. Here Johnstone is on firm ground, marshalling what is sometimes new and compelling evidence to good effect.
Yet for all of the book's constructive correctives, it is often difficult to recognize the world that Johnstone describes--the implications, for instance, that in Kosovo the United States was allied with 'fundamentalist Islamic factions' (p. 11), that with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic 'the US government had found its own client (or pawn) in the silent rivalry between western powers over the remains of "disintegrating Yugoslavia"' (p. 45) or that Germany was motivated to recognize Slovenia and Croatia by a desire to intervene militarily in the region and thus transcend its Nazi past and become a 'normal' power again (p. 169). The book also contains numerous errors of fact on which Johnstone, however, relies to strengthen her case. For instance, the 1996 SIPRI yearbook (an 'authoritative source'), which she invokes in support of her claim that the number of people killed in the Bosnian war has been exaggerated, actually offers the higher estimate (250,000) that she challenges (p. 55). And it was not double standards that explain the EU's initial non-recognition of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in 1992 but the fact that the FRY was claiming to be the successor state to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (p. 40)--a claim that the other former republics rejected. Finally Johnstone herself is very selective. She omits any discussion of Milosevic's own assault on the constitutional order (by abolishing Vojvodina's and Kosovo's autonomy); of the irregular if not extra-legal means he employed to remove the political leadership of Vojvodina, Montenegro and Kosovo; or of the extensive materiel and other support he provided to some of the most vicious Serb militias in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The result is an insightful but overzealous critique of western diplomacy and Yugoslavia. Fool's crusade is well worth reading--but for the discriminating eye.
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