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Yugoslavia Peace, War, and Dissolution Noam Chomsky Edited by Davor Džalto Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution Noam Chomsky. Edited by Davor Džalto © Valeria Chomsky 2018 Preface © Andrej Grubačić 2018 Introductory chapters © Davor Džalto 2018 This edition © 2018 PM Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN: 978–1–62963–442–5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942916 Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com Interior design by briandesign 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com Contents Acknowledgments v preface Remaining Yugoslav vii Andrej Grubačić IntroductIon 1 Davor Džalto Glossary of Acronyms 4 PART I YUGOSLAVIA Yugoslavia: Dreams and Realities 6 Davor Džalto The Conscience of Yugoslavia 35 The Repression at Belgrade University 36 Letter to Tito 45 PART II YUGOSLAV WARS Solutions and Dissolutions 50 Davor Džalto USA, Germany, and the Faith of Yugoslavia 63 Most Guns, Most Atrocities 67 Open Letter to the Guardian 69 On the Srebrenica Massacre 74 PART III KOSOVO CRISIS Kosovo: A Drama in Multiple Acts 78 Davor Džalto Crisis in the Balkans 85 Wiping Out the Democratic Movement 102 The Truth about Kosovo 111 Kosovo Peace Accord 116 Lessons from Kosovo 126 A Review of NATO’s War over Kosovo 136 Humanitarian Imperialism: The New Doctrine of Imperial Right 157 Comments on Milošević Ouster 187 On the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia 191 Perspectives 201 about the authors 204 Index 205 Acknowledgments This book would have never been completed without the enthusiasm, energy, and support that my dear colleague and friend Marina Sovilj invested in this project over a couple of years. I am deeply grateful for that. I owe gratitude to my dear colleagues and friends Irene Caratelli, Borut Zidar, Vladimir Veljković, and Emil Džudžević. They gave me many impor- tant suggestions and comments that signifi cantly improved the manu- script. My gratitude also extends to Milenko Srećković, who provided me with important materials for documenting and understanding some of the recent developments in the region. I am grateful to my assistant Ella May Sumner; I cannot imagine the completion of this project without all the time and eff ort she invested in addressing many practical aspects of the process. A big “thank you” also goes to Anthony Arnove, who continued to support this project over many years. Last but certainly not least, I want to thank Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest intellectuals and humanists of our time, for his tireless engage- ment in the world’s aff airs and for his struggle against injustice, oppres- sion, and imperial ambitions everywhere, not least in the Balkans. —Ed. v Remaining Yugoslav Andrej Grubačić Sixty years ago, the concrete pier that butts against the Adriatic in the village of Trpanj was strewn with drying fi shing nets. Local fi shers came into the cannery to empty their bursting nets, and in the summer tourists from the USSR mingled among them. Twenty years ago, it was empty, aban- doned because of the Yugoslav civil war. Stone buildings that had housed gathering places and families were transformed into hospitals, the fi shing boats long abandoned. I look upon the same pier today, busy with young families and tourists, mostly from the former Soviet republics. A short walk from the harbor, I come upon a magazine stall. The papers report on the most recent attempt to change the name of Marshal Tito Square, fi ve hours north in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Despite the passing of decades, the battle for the soul of Croatia, now a member of the European Union, and all of former Yugoslavia rages on. Was Comrade Tito a good Croatian or a pro-Serb dictator? Who inherits modern-day Croatia, antifascists or the heirs of the Ustaše,infamous Nazi-collaborators? Few in the U.S. have tackled the complexity of the former Yugoslavia the way that Noam Chomsky has. When asked to write this preface, I started reworking my way through Noam’s writing. His analysis is ruthless, clini- cal. His debates with the Guardian’s George Monbiot and the new intellectu- als of the Bosnian Institute of England are the stuff of legend. Noam’s infl u- ence on public discourse in the countries of former Yugoslavia remains unparalleled. As I read through his writings, I was struck by what I con- sider an “Alexievich moment,” an absence of what Russian oral historian Svetlana Alexievich called the “interior life of socialism,” or “socialism of the soul.” (Only a Russian could come up with such a delightful phrase!) Alexievich was referring to everyday life under socialism, a challenge to an oft-repeated falsehood of capitalist historians: that all the world’s vii preface socialisms were alike. Of course those of us who grew up in the formerly socialist world—ineptly referred to as Eastern Europe, or where the boo- geyman lives, as a friend from Ohio once told me, only half joking—have certain things in common. But the Soviet man and the Yugoslav woman, for example, were quite different. And they had little in common with a Bulgarian or Romanian socialist citizen. This preface aspires to be one glimpse of the interior life of former Yugoslavia from the perspective of a Yugoslav, of a Yugoslav exile. And even after multiple exiles—first from Yugoslavia at the end of socialism and later from what was left of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the 1999 NATO bombings—I remain a Yugoslav. My family has lived at the same Belgrade address, first in Socialist Yugoslavia, then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, and today, Serbia. My story and that of my family are at the same time idiosyncratic and representative of Yugoslav history. I never met Comrade Tito. But I remember the day he died in May 1980. His funeral procession in Belgrade brought seven hundred thousand to the streets, millions of people wept and mourned throughout Yugoslavia. Many of them were Tito loyalists, pledging their allegiance to our endan- gered socialist homeland. Many others, like myself, were proud to call themselves Yugoslavs, proud to be from a communist country. A country that hosted the Living Theatre, a country that was home to the music of Laibach and the Black Wave cinema of Dušan Makavejev. Even as a child, I knew our Yugoslavia was an anomaly. We played Partisans and Germans, not Cowboys and Indians. In the U.S., children cross their hearts and hope to die when they make a promise or swear they’re telling the truth. As school children in Yugoslavia, we would say Tita mi!—I swear on Comrade Tito! For us, there was nothing more sacred. The adults were equally serious. When I was seven, my teacher asked whom I loved more, my mother or Comrade Tito. When I chose my mother—after all, I reasoned, I had never met Tito, while I’d gotten to know my mother quite well—I was called a reactionary and sent home in tears. My mother was fuming; she marched straight to the school, and I was allowed to return the next day. But my mother could afford to do things like that: her father Rato was one of the most celebrated communists in Yugoslavia. His first family, he once told my mother, was the Communist Party: he was the last secretary of the legendary Communist Youth; a minister in the first post–World viii preface War II Yugoslav state; a member of the Central Committee of the League of Yugoslav Communists; an ambassador to the Non-Aligned Movement; the president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Bosnia; later becoming a member of the rotating Yugoslav presidency after Tito’s death. Even before World War II, my grandfather was well known: a professional football player (real football, not that odd thing people do in the U.S.). He used trips to away games to distribute party material. It is even said that he and his cousin Miljenko Cvitković, a fighter in the Spanish Revolution, attempted to assassinate the anti-communist Minister of the Interior of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Luckily for the minister (and for my grandfather), they did not find him. A communist illegalist, Rato also spent time in a Sarajevo prison, then considered a red university where young militants were educated. The party, which actively recruited students before the war, later sent him to study law and forestry in Belgrade. After he finished university in 1939 war broke out: my grandfather fought against the fascists, both as a Partisan commander and a political commissar. He helped organize the Sarajevo uprising and took part in the political assemblies of the incipient Yugoslav state, held in the so-called free territories of Užice and Bihać. As Yugoslavs struggled for their liberation, Rato met my grandmother Tatjana, a member of the youth antifascist movement. They were an odd couple. Tatjana, named after the famous Puškin poem, was a well-educated Montenegrin royal exiled after the establishment of the Union of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes after World War I. Class differences aside, they fell in love. (Tatjana’s mother, a royal- ist taught from an early age that communists were “devils,” even came to love my grandfather as one of her own.) Tatjana always held onto a bit of her old elitism, though: she couldn’t stand the future communist dissi- dent Milovan Đilas, then a family friend. “The man has never read a single novel in his life,” she used to say. One can only assume his penchant for brutally assassinating his wartime comrades was related to this lack of poetic imagination. After World War II, my grandfather Rato met his counterpart in the Cuban government, the Minister of Light Industry Che Guevara, who was in Yugoslavia seeking arms. My grandfather, who considered Che a bandit incapable of understanding the process of socialist construction, was livid. (According to my anarchist mentor Trivo, who traveled with Che to Latin America, the Argentine was similarly disappointed in the reality of real socialism.) Later, as secretary of the Communist Youth, Rato initiated the ix

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The Balkans, in particular the turbulent ex-Yugoslav territory, have been among the most important world regions in Noam Chomsky’s political reflections and activism over the past couple of decades. Through his articles, public talks, and correspondence, he has been addressing some of the crucial
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