Shiraz Socialist

I would like to thank one Peter Godfrey of London E8, author of the following letter, published in today’s Morning Star, a publication closely identified with the remanants of the old Stalinist Communist Party of Britain:

“In his apologia for Slobodan Milosevic (M Star March 12), Neil Clark rather gives the game away away by referring to to Alija Izetbegovic as ‘the Bosnian Muslim leader’.

“He was, in fact, the leader of all Bosnians in a non-sectarian, multiethnic republic which had no standing army at the outbreak of an unprovoked war.

“Should I tell refugee friends who were lucky enough to survive Bosnian Serb concentration camps or who lost relatives in a war not of their making that Milosevic, as ‘a lifelong socialist’ - presumably, along with his associates, those other beacons of enlightenment, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic - was a non-racist who made no distinction between Serbs and Muslims?

“I think they would dismiss such contentions as offensive bigotry.

“I am surprised that the Morning Star does not do the same”.

My thanks to Mr (Comrade?) Godfrey are mainly because his letter is a rare note of common decency in the discussion that has spluttered into life following the international court of justice’s acquittal of Sebia on charges of genocide in Bosnia in the mid-1990’s. To a much lesser extent, I am grateful because his letter has spurred me into commenting upon something I should have dealt with some time ago.

Those who have wet dreams about any ‘heroic’ person willing to take on ‘the West’ loved the ICJ judgement of late February this year. The Neil Clark piece in the Star, referred to in Godfrey’s letter,  was headed by a big photo of Milosevic and the headline “A victim  of the West’s propaganda“.

Clark’s nauseating apology for genocide and the nearest thing to Nazism seen in Europe since WW2 opened, without apparent embarrassment, with Joseph Goebbels’ famous quote about the “big lie”: according to Clark those of us who regard Milosevic and his side-kicks as mass murderers responsible for the (at least attempted) genocide of the Muslim populations of Bosnia and Kosova, are followers of the Goebbels school of propaganda… I would submit that the jack boot is very much on the other foot.

The Slobo-fan Clark (who also writes frequently in fellow-Stalinist Saumas Milne’s Guardian ‘Comment’ pages), wrote in the Star (and these quotes are necessarily foreshortened and not in full context, given that I cannot here reproduce the whole article, which is not available on the web without a subsciption):

“Milosevic, the ‘aggressive nationalist’ was, in fact, a lifelong socialist who never once made a racist speech. The 1989 Koso Polje address, where it was claimed, Milosevic incided ethnic hatred was a call for socialist unity…Milosevic ‘the serial warmonger’ started no wars…the hostilities in Kosova were triggered by the US funding and arming the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army in a deliberate attempt to provoke a civil war, which would then give NATO the pretext to occupy the rump Yugoslavia…The more one considers the facts, the more clear it is that Milosevic was the victim of the most cynical demonisation campaign of recent times”.

The Stalinist Clark is not alone in arguing such a case: he joins such august company as the sinister far-right Guardian columnist (courtesy Milne, again) John Laughland   and the ridiculous SWP blogger Richard “Lenin” Seymour (scroll down to “Genocide, Bosnia and the ICTY“, February 26, 2007).

What all these craven apologists for genocide conveniently ignore, is what the ICJ report (flawed as it was), actually said about Serbia’s role in the 1992-95 war: it found (according to Ian Traynor’s Guardian Weekly report, that: “Belgrade did nothing to prevent what the court described as an act of genocide at Srebrenica in 1985 despite its close links with and support for the Bosnian Serb military.

“The Serbian authorities stood by as almost 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males were massacred by the Bosniam Serb military at Sebrenica in July 1995 despite the full knowledge that mass murder was likely, the court found. Serbia had also failed to honour its international duty to apprehend those charged with genocide…

“Strikingly, the court ruled that the mass murder of almost 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males at Srebrenica at the end of the war in July 1995 was indeed an act of genocide, but that the widespread ethnic cleanisng by the Bosnian Serbs, mainly in 1992, when tens of thousands were killed and up to 2 million uprooted, was not”.

In a letter to the Guardian (February 28, 2007), the expert in international law, Professor  Martin Shaw (University of Sussex; author of What is Genocide), wrote:

“The international court of justice judgement on Serbia’s role in Bosnia is narrow, conservative and perverse (Serbia condemned for Srebrenica despite acquital on genocide charge, February 27). Sticking to the findings of the international tribunal for former Yugoslavia, the court rules that only the Srebrenica massacre was genocide. Thus the judges isolate this massacre from the larger Serbian project of destroying Bosnian Muslim society and the killings, rapes and brutal expulsions used to effect it. As the court’s vice-president said in his dissenting opinion: ‘The court refused to infer genocide from a “consistent pattern of conduct”, disregarding in this respect a rich and relevant jurisprudence of other courts’. Likewise, the court curiously indicts Serbia for failing to prevent genocide, but exonerates it of having commited or even being an accomplice to genocide. These decisions bring the law into disrepute”.

 Hear, hear, Prof! And thanks again, Mr/and/or/Comrade Godfrey: we stand together against the apologists of anti-Muslim genocide - the likes of Clark (Stalinist), Laughland (fascist) and Seymour (Stupid Wankers’ Party).