In the Yugoslav conflict two concepts cropped up more often than they had in the whole of the preceding century of bloody war: the concepts of 'ethnic cleansing' and of 'genocide'. In Chapter 1 we showed how Dutch politicians regularly made use of these words when speaking of the horrific events in Kosovo. In a television appearance, former Defence Minister Joris Voorhoeve went, shortly after the outbreak of the war, a step further, by comparing the fate if the Kosovars to that of the Jews in the Second World War. 'This is an Endlösung,' said the ex-minister, using the German word for the "final solution". 'There is a holocaust happening in the heart of Europe. Over ten days, Kosovo has emptied. Many tens of thousands of people have already died. Mass executions are taking place.' And such rhetoric was not confined to the Netherlands. On 22nd March 1999, two days before the first NATO bombs rained down on Yugoslavia, British PM Tony Blair told the House of Commons that it was imperative to 'save thousands of men, women and children from a humanitarian catastrophe' from death and barbarism, and from ethnic cleansing at the hands of a 'cruel dictatorship', adding a month later that it was 'sometimes necessary to use violence against a bloody dictator' guilty of 'making a policy of racial genocide'. Three weeks after that US President Bill Clinton declared on television that 'Although Milosevic's ethnic cleansings are not the same as the Holocaust', the two things were indeed related because both were horrific, well-planned, systematic examples of oppression, 'fed by religious and ethnic hatred.' Naturally these powerful accusations were accompanied by the necessary statistics. The American Defence Secretary William Cohen stated that probably 100,000 had died. When the government in Belgrade decided to release three American prisoners of war, he said also that the gesture of good will "cannot obliterate or overcome the stench of evil and death that has been inflicted in those killing fields in Kosovo." This reference to Cambodia, where hundreds of thousands of Pol Pot's victims had been consigned to shallow graves, had not been dreamed up by Cohen himself. On 1st April, his British homologue had declared that his country would increase its attacks on the Serbs in 'the killing fields of Kosovo.' while the British Defence Ministry estimated a month and a half later that the number of dead was 'around 10,000' and these had died in more than a hundred instances of mass murder.'
When we first made contact with Noam Chomsky, via the Internet, he told us immediately that he had great difficulty with the expression "ethnic cleansing", as he did with the word "genocide". 'They have been so misused in the last decade that they have become meaningless', he wrote to us. When he eventually agreed that we could interview him by e-mail, our first question to him was therefore the following:
Where and when have these two concepts lost their meaning, in your view, and with what aim are they being misused?
Noam Chomsky: 'The term ethnic cleansing was as far as I know first introduced in the first years of the Balkan wars, at the beginning of the 1990s. The term was used selectively to indicate those acts of ethnic cleansing (in the literal sense) which served as justification for western intervention. So no-one speaks of "ethnic cleansing" when the Croats, supported by the United States, drove hundreds of thousands of Serbs out of Krajina. Or when in the same period the Turks, once again with the support of the United States, destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages, through which tens of thousands of people lost their lives, and millions of others were driven from house and home. Still less is the term "ethnic cleansing", in its propagandistic meaning, applied to the many actions of the United States at the time of the terrorist wars in central America, which in the 1980s brought into being enormous flows of refugees. Or even earlier, at the time of the war in Vietnam, which later spread to large parts of Indochina. or the driving out and flight of 85 percent of the population of Palestine in 1948 and of still more hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1967 (who according to the United States have no right of return or of any form of compensation). None of these is any form of 'ethnic cleansing' in the propagandistic sense. Ethnic cleansing is unfortunately already very old as a political instrument: the country which is at the moment the world's most powerful, for example, came into being via ethnic cleansing, to give just one obvious example. But as a propaganda instrument the term is quite recent, and its selective use does not deserve imitating.
As for the term "genocide", this has been in the last few decades so misused that it has become almost meaningless. There are cases where the word is applicable: Nazi Germany, for example, Rwanda, and perhaps a few others. But it is now used for enormities which for whatever reason you are against. In 1999 the propagandistic use of this word assumed wellnigh pathological forms. The NATO bombing of Serbia was generally justified by referring to the genocide which had taken place in Kosovo - at least according to NATO. By this what was meant was the two thousand who had died on both sides as a consequence of the violent Serbian reaction to what in Washington not so long before was described as the "terror" of the UCK. To talk about "genocide" in such a case is in fact a form of Holocaust revisionism. But already well before 1999 the term "genocide" had become so wellnigh meaningless through careless and selective use, that it is an insult to the victims of real genocide.'
Did it surprise you that two government leaders who could be described as representatives of the Sixties generation, the anti-Vietnam generation as it is called, have taken the lead in adopting a harsh approach to Yugoslavia?
Chomsky: 'I don't know much about Blair's background, but I don't see how Clinton can seriously be described as a member of the "anti-Vietnam generation". He was not involved in actions against the war, and only spoke out against it on the grounds that it was a failure and too costly - not out of principle. In that he was no different to the overwhelming majority of the American political elite. In opposition to that were the some 70 percent of the general population who eventually came to see the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral" and not as "a mistake" - a fact that in all these years has not changed, although it's rarely mention in the media and rarely brought out in discussions within the elite in general.
The fact that people who studied during the sixties conduct largely the same policies as their forerunners (by for example bombing Serbia and at the same time leaving similar crimes in Turkey and Indonesia unpunished and even supporting them) does not provoke surprise. The movements from the 1960s led amongst other things to the human rights movement (which is often cynically misused by the powerful), to the feminist and environmental movements, to a great resistance to state violence (in the propaganda often misleadingly indicated by the term "Vietnam syndrome") and to a great number of other developments which in general have had a civilising effect on the West. But we cannot attribute these positive developments to everyone who by coincidence belongs to that generation. Not for nothing are they still ridiculed and marginalised by that part of the political elite which feels itself threatened by them.'
On the question of the use of the statistics on the numbers of victims for whom the Serbs were responsible in Kosovo having been used as a propaganda tool, Chomsky was dismissive in his reaction, writing that he had "no desire to get involved in the discussion over whether two thousand corpses, or however many it is which have been found since in Kosovo, do or do not justify the NATO actions. It is too easy in this discussion to create the impression that the Serb outrages weren't as bad as thought - which is of course in no sense the case. The enormities in the Balkans, whoever carried them out, should not in any way be smoothed over. The arguments above concerning the selectivity of the indignation seem to me a more advisable contribution to the discussion.'
Raymond Detrez is, however, less reticent, saying that 'We can assume that NATO did worked extremely hard to look for victims, and the UCK even harder. Yet after six months of looking, 2108 corpses appear to have been found in Kosovo, of whom the identity and the way in which those involved lost their lives has still not at all been established. But okay, let's for the sake of convenience assume that all of these were cases of murdered Albanians, and let's then observe a wide margin and estimate that just a third of the real number of mass graves has been discovered - the definition of a mass grave, according to NATO, is a grave in which more than one person is buried. So then we arrive at six thousand dead. Of course that is terrible, but is it genocide? The association with the Holocaust seems to me rather exaggerated. It seems to me that the number of dead doesn't differ a great deal from what you might expect in a war against a guerilla movement, where things such as those we have seen now in Kosovo always happen. The imputation of planned genocide thus falls away. And with it a little of NATO's credibility.'
You could also say that it proves that the NATO action has been a success. According to NATO the Serbs had had a plan, the Hoefijzer Plan, to put all the Albanians to flight from Kosovo or to kill them. It's possible that they managed to prevent the execution of this plan.
Detrez: 'The point is that there is a lack of any historical-analytical framework for the part of people who make this sort of assertion. If you are not well-informed, the conclusions you come to will be disjointed. In the event of lack of proof of the existence of the Hoefijzer Plan, you need to look who might have had an interest in it. What interest could the Serbs have in such an operation? They could surely never really have thought that they could run all of the Kosovars once and for all out of Kosovo? If they had in practice been in a condition to do that, then wouldn't they have been given pause by consideration of the international reaction which would have followed? They were already threatened with bombing and so would they have done something which they could with certainty have foreseen that the whole world would have condemned - that seems improbable.'
It has been suggested that they wanted to put the hundreds of thousands of refugees now in Serbia into the houses and villages which have been emptied.
'Sure, but the fact that these villages had been burnt to the ground provides evidence to the contrary, it seems to me. And moreover, it wasn't only the Albanian Kosovars who were put to flight by violence, but also Serbs. Once again, I don't see what interest the Serbs could have had in the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. And NATO says that they have proof of this Operation Hoefijzer, but I've never seen it.'
All of the horrors taken together, those which occurred in Bosnia and those in Kosovo, before, during and after the war, appear to confirm the image that we are dealing here with barbarians who have no hesitation in murdering old people, women and children in cold blood, before, during or after the war, Doesn't that at least make the people in the Balkans different to us?
Detrez: 'No. The holocaust remains, as far as horror is concerned, unsurpassed. The way in which people are killed in wars is in the end a mere detail. What has happened in Yugoslavia could have happened anywhere. We had here in Belgium this business involving a few of our UN soldiers in Somalia. They were there for only a few weeks or months, and you hear stories of children being hung over a fire. It therefore doesn't take much before such things begin to happen. It is no excuse, of course, but it's also not that unusual.'
But what then what allows such behaviour? What are the conditions which make people resort to such horrors?
Detrez: 'To begin with, not everyone who dies in a war is put to death in an horrific fashion. A lot of people fall victim also to what I would call "ordinary" war violence. In exchanges of fire. They are hit by grenades. Truly horrific acts, the torturing of people, throat cutting, that sort of thing is done by only a limited number of persons. These are diseased minds which you come across also in a peaceful society, but which in a situation of war can go about their business unhindered. Most violence results however from fear. From the fact that people feel their continued existence threatened by others. In Bosnia everyone felt threatened by others. And in Kosovo the Albanian Kosovars felt threatened by the Serbs, because they were the ones with the power, while the Serbs felt threatened by the Kosovars because they were growing in numbers far more quickly than they were themselves, and because moreover the position of the Serbs in general in what had formerly been Yugoslavia was becoming ever more troubled. And what you see as a consequence, and what in the in the Balkans has been on various occasions well-documented, is that in such a tense situation certain people deliberately and determinedly provoke a conflict. It's also not so difficult to guess what would happen here in Antwerp if a few Flemish people were murdered by Moroccans, simply and only because they were Flemish. I think that we would quickly have a comparable situation. People feel themselves called on to take revenge, and so things escalate. The only manner in which the situation in the Balkans possibly differs from that here in Antwerp, is the conviction on the part of many Serbs and Croats that they were oppressed for five centuries by the Muslims, during the time of the Ottoman Empire, and that the roles are now reversed. This belief means that no sound moral barriers exist when it comes Muslims. That does play a role, I think. But other than that I don't see any difference.'
If Western interference in the conflict in Yugoslavia is really based on a number of myths and false views of affairs there, as you assert, must we then decide that we are completely ill-equipped to intervene in this kind of question? That we simply don't have the analytical resources, the understanding or the knowledge to do so?
Detrez: 'I don't really know, as things stand. Does the international community, which is to say NATO, the US, now perform as it has because they had really come to the conclusion that this was the best procedure? Was the analysis therefore faulty? Or are there objectives here which have less to do with Kosovo or with Bosnia and which have now indeed been realised? And has the matter thus actually been rather well executed? We can state that the Dayton Accord was for Bosnia a complete failure. No part of it functions well. The situation of the refugees remains hopeless. But all of this means that a military presence will be absolutely necessary for a very long time. Was the performance then so bad, to pin everything on a military presence, or was that precisely what was sought? That's the question I ask myself.'
But why would anyone want that?
Detrez: 'Because it's an important area. Let's begin with the idea that things unfolded the way they did in Bosnia by accident. Then we see that subsequently things went precisely the same way in Bosnia. One again a solution which was in fact no solution. A high degree of autonomy for Kosovo, with which the Serbs would not be happy, but no independence, which is what the Albanians want. So here too a military presence is needed. Furthermore there's a military presence on the fringes of the area of conflict in Albania and Macedonia, and there's a corridor forced out of Bulgaria and Romania, and so on. Did that all simply happen by accident, from stupidity? Or is that the strategy? There's surely enough brains in NATO to think this sort of thing through. It's not my speciality, it has more to do with international politics, but I have the impression that NATO is expanding in two ways: in a more or less legal manner, with Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and in addition in a rather underhand fashion, as in the Balkans, by making itself indispensable. And perhaps that is indeed what they want: to be indispensable."