Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladic saw himself as a defender of Europe against Muslims and multiculturalism

Q. Now, you indicated that General Mladic had some questions about your colleagues in DutchBat. Can you describe that conversation and any further detail for the Trial Chamber, please.

A. There were a few DutchBat soldiers sitting alongside the road, and my conversation with General Mladic was just in front of them. And he asked me if I was from the Netherlands, and he also asked the soldiers if they were also from the Netherlands. And there was one Dutch soldier from apparently an African heritage with dark skin. And General Mladic asked me if he was also from the Netherlands or if he was from Ethiopia. And I explained to him that we had a multi-ethnic society in the Netherlands, multi-racial, and there were a lot of people looking different but they were all Dutch. And he answered to me that this was a big problem for the Netherlands and that in ten years from then the Serb army would be in the Netherlands protecting us from the Muslims and other races. And I told him I didn’t believe him.

–International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, 27 September 2006

Bringing a halt to “the middle-class life”

New York Times, 26 Apr. 2011:

Military officials privately acknowledge that removing Colonel Qaddafi from power is the desired secondary effect of striking at state television and other symbols of his authoritarian rule. “His people may see the futility of continued resistance,” one Pentagon official said.
[…]
Senior officers who served in NATO’s previous air war, fought in 1999 to protect the population of Kosovo from Serbian forces, said the campaign over Libya drew on lessons learned then.

Gen. John P. Jumper, who commanded United States Air Force units in Europe during the Kosovo campaign, recalled that allied “air power was getting its paper graded on the number of tanks killed” — even though taking out armored vehicles one by one was never going to halt “ethnic cleansing.”

So NATO began to hit high-profile institutional targets in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, instead of forces in the field. Although they were legitimate military targets, General Jumper said, destroying them also had the effect of undermining popular support for the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic.

“It was when we went in and began to disturb important and symbolic sites in Belgrade, and began to bring to a halt the middle-class life in Belgrade, that Milosevic’s own people began to turn on him,” General Jumper said.

Related (and downright prescient):
The myth of “humane” American warfare
Is Libya about to get the Serbia treatment?

For more on NATO’s campaign against Serbia see:

• “Legitimate Targets? How US media supported war crimes in Yugoslavia” by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, Jul./Aug. 1999)
• “BELGRADE: Reduced to a ‘caveman’ life, Serbs don’t blame Milosevic” by Steven Erlanger (New York Times, 25 May 1999)
• “NATO bombs infrastructure” (Associated Press, 4 May 1999)

The myth of “humane” American warfare

The US/”international community” campaign against Libya is partially based on the false premise that the US wages war in a significantly more humane and discriminate manner than most Third World military forces do. Much of this can be attributed to the media hype over “smart bombs” and similar assertions that more precise targeting has enabled the US to avoid the deaths of innocent civilians. This discourse cleverly obscures the fact that the US military and diplomatic establishment understands that pressuring civilians is a common tactic to force capitulation. Whether a war is fought against a sovereign nation-state or an armed insurgency, civilian populations living under the control of enemy forces are commonly viewed as either potential fighters or passive supporters of belligerency. The US, which often finds its military occupations and proxy forces confronted with popular opposition throughout the world, is no stranger to these views.

The inherent contradiction in all this was described by Ward Thomas in “Victory by Duress: Civilian Infrastructure as a Target in Air Campaigns“:

Recent trends in the use of air power by the United States have given rise to a striking paradox. Although better technology allows air campaigns to be more discriminating, and norms against directly targeting civilians remain strong, some Air Force thinking—including the ascendancy of “effects-based” targeting—evince a growing willingness to target civilian infrastructure in an attempt to undermine popular support for the war effort.

The most obvious example of this would be the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent UN sanctions regime against Iraq. During the initial conflict in 1991, the US military destroyed Iraq’s electric, industrial, and transit capabilities to the point that a UN fact-finding mission declared that:

Nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country. The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society. Now, most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology.

An article in the Washington Post at the time made it clear that the US fully intended to inflict suffering on Iraqi civilians. It quoted a senior Air Force officer justifying this by suggesting that Iraqi civilians bore some responsibility for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait: “The definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear. They do live there, and ultimately the people have some control over what goes on in their country.”

It also made clear that the target selection was based on a comprehensive strategy. According to another officer involved in planning the air war:

The reason you take out electricity is because modern societies depend on it so heavily and therefore modern militaries depend on it so heavily. It’s a leveraged target set. People say, ‘You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage. Well, what were we trying to do with [United Nations-approved economic] sanctions–help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.

Col. John A. Warden III, a deputy director of strategy for the Air Force, declared that by taking out Iraq’s electricity, the US had “imposed a long-term problem on the leadership that it has to deal with sometime. […] If there are political objectives that the U.N. coalition has, it can say, ‘Saddam, when you agree to do these things, we will allow people to come in and fix your electricity.’ It gives us long-term leverage.”

As another planner put it: “Big picture, we wanted to let people know, ‘Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.'”

A report by Human Rights Watch examined credible claims that the bombing directly targeted food storage warehouses, water treatment plants, and agricultural facilities. It is hard to comprehend how any of these targets could be reasonably construed as “dual-use” or as needed for Iraqi military’s command and control functions.

Needless to say, the humanitarian condition this left Iraq in was dire.

The crippling of the electrical system multiplied geometrically the daily living horror of the people of Iraq. As a modern country, Iraq was reliant on electrical power for essential services such as water purification and distribution, sewage treatment, the operation of hospitals and medical laboratories, and agricultural production. Bomb damage, exacerbated by shortages attributable to the UN/US embargo, dropped electricity to three or four percent of its pre-war level; the water supply fell to five percent, oil production was negligible, the food distribution system was devastated, the sewage system collapsed, flooding houses with raw sewage, and gastroenteritis and extreme malnutrition were prevalent.

Two months after the war ended, a public health team from Harvard University visited health facilities in several Iraqi cities. Based on their research, the group projected, conservatively, that “at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects” of the destruction of electrical power, fuel and transportation; “a large increase in deaths among the rest of the population is also likely. The immediate cause of death in most cases will be water-borne infectious disease in combination with severe malnutrition.” One member of both the Harvard group and a later research group which visited Iraq testified before Congress that “Children play in the raw sewage which is backed up in the streets … Two world renowned child psychologists stated that the children in Iraq were ‘the most traumatized children of war ever described'” (William Blum, Killing Hope, ch. 52)

It is further worth noting that the US anticipated the total collapse of Iraq’s water purification capabilities as a result of the UN sanctions regime. A January 1991 cable from the Defense Intelligence Agency was blunt in its assessment that:

Iraq depends on importing-specialized equipment–and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline. With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent [UN] sanctions to import these vital commodities. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease.

To make matters worse, high ranking US officials repeatedly declared that nothing short of Saddam Hussein being pushed out of power would result in the sanctions being lifted. Robert Gates, Obama’s current Secretary of Defense, said that “Iraqis will pay the price while he is in power” and that “all possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone.”

For more on the sanctions, read Joy Gordon’s Invisible War (Harvard University Press, 2010) or a 2002 article in Harper’s entitled “Cool War.”

The US would return to using these tactics in later conflicts, most notably in the 1999 NATO campaign against Serbia and during counter-insurgency operations following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

So, imagine my surprise when I read President Obama’s letter to Congress justifying the military actions against Libya and found the following passage:

The international community made clear that all attacks against civilians had to stop; Qadhafi had to stop his forces from advancing on Benghazi; pull them back from Ajdabiya, Misrata, and Zawiya; and establish water, electricity, and gas supplies to all areas. Finally, humanitarian assistance had to be allowed to reach the people of Libya. […] Qadhafi has forfeited his responsibility to protect his own citizens and created a serious need for immediate humanitarian assistance and protection, with any delay only putting more civilians at risk.

As it turns out there are even allegation that the Libyan regime is intentionally denying electricity in rebel-held cities (which the regime itself denies). Imagine that: condemnations of a regime for using tactics that the US perfected.

The strategy of destroying civilian infrastructure and blocking necessary imports (often cleverly labeled “dual-use”) can now be seen in Israel’s collective punishment of the Gaza Strip. Many similarities can be found there, including the implication that civilian populations must suffer the consequences of tolerating the presence of rogue forces. It goes without saying that the Israelis learned well from their number one ally.

Is Libya about to get the Serbia treatment?

There is a popular argument comparing the current situation concerning Libya with the Iraq War as a way of criticizing the ridiculous amount of enthusiasm for intervention. The point theses critics wish to make is that back in 2002 and early 2003, Iraq looked like it would be an easy battle and, as we know now, it lasted longer and cost more lives and resources than many ever expected it would. However, I believe there is an even greater lesson to be learned from the 1999 US/NATO intervention in Serbia and Kosovo.

Neil Clark, “The spoils of another war,” Guardian (21 Sep. 2004):

The trigger for the US-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was, according to the standard western version of history, the failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace agreement. But that holds little more water than the tale that has Iraq responsible for last year’s invasion by not cooperating with weapons inspectors.

The secret annexe B of the Rambouillet accord – which provided for the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia – was, as the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to the defence select committee, deliberately inserted to provoke rejection by Belgrade.

But equally revealing about the west’s wider motives is chapter four, which dealt exclusively with the Kosovan economy. Article I (1) called for a “free-market economy”, and article II (1) for privatisation of all government-owned assets. At the time, the rump Yugoslavia – then not a member of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO or European Bank for Reconstruction and Development – was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital. “Socially owned enterprises”, the form of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75% of industry was state or socially owned. In 1997, a privatisation law had stipulated that in sell-offs, at least 60% of shares had to be allocated to a company’s workers.

The high priests of neo-liberalism were not happy. At the Davos summit early in 1999, Tony Blair berated Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to embark on a programme of “economic reform” – new-world-order speak for selling state assets and running the economy in the interests of multinationals.

In the 1999 Nato bombing campaign, it was state-owned companies – rather than military sites – that were specifically targeted by the world’s richest nations. Nato only destroyed 14 tanks, but 372 industrial facilities were hit – including the Zastava car plant at Kragujevac, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed.

Now, consider this chapter on Libya from the US State Department’s Investment Climate Statement released in Mar. 2010:

With the imposition of Law 443 of 2006, local ownership is essentially enforced for most foreign entities seeking to do business in Libya, as well as many established before the law came into effect. While this law boosts the percentage of foreign ownership when compared with previous regulations, it requires that at least 35% of non-Libyan businesses be controlled by Libyan individuals or companies. This law has made competent Libyan partners in all sectors a highly valuable commodity for foreign investors, providing ample fuel for rent-seeking behavior in many sectors of the economy.
[…]
Offsets are often a part of large foreign investment deals, particularly in the energy sector. “Corporate responsibility” and local staff training programs are common requirements for successful concession bids, and training programs in particular are generally essential to win bids on most Libyan government contracts. These programs can range from the training of a handful of local staff up to multi-year programs exceeding US $50 million for large energy companies. Also, some foreign firms have moved beyond these measures to bankroll much larger development projects. For example, following the October 2007 10-year extension of its holdings in Libya, Italian energy firm ENI Spa announced that it had signed an MOU with the Qadhafi Development Foundation to provide US $150 million for the building of hospitals and schools, and for the preservation of historical sites. Offsets of this type are very likely to remain a part of the business landscape for the foreseeable future.
[…]
While the term “Corporate Social Responsibility” is not well-known in Libya, the general concept of companies helping local charities and members of the community in need does exist. For example, one state-owned enterprise provides office space to an organization that assists children in need of cancer treatment. Many foreign companies have programs with communities and officials to address needs in healthcare, road safety, and education. While most firms follow generally accepted CSR principles, the extent to which they follow the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises is unknown. Firms who pursue CSR are viewed favorably by the general public and by officials. As noted above, elements of “Corporate Social Responsibility” and local staff training programs are common requirements for successful bids in the energy and construction sectors.
[…]
Private enterprises are allowed to compete with public enterprises under the same terms and conditions with respect to access to markets, credit, and other business operations. However, since approximately 80 percent of the economy consists of public sector entities, most large companies are government-owned and therefore, are the only companies that have the required capital to form joint ventures with foreign partners. SOEs are active in all sectors in Libya and especially in the Energy, Telecommunications, and Construction sectors.
[…]
The government directly intervenes in the hiring practices of foreign companies operating in Libya. For example, a 2006 decree ordered that all foreign oil companies must hire a Libyan national Deputy County Manager and Finance Manager. In August 2009, the government decreed that all foreign branch companies must hire Libyan general managers, but the government has inconsistently applied the rule. The National Oil Corporation also regularly assigns both qualified and unqualified Libyan workers to foreign energy companies.

So, we have the Libyan government being criticized by the US for extracting certain concessions from foreign investors. The US may be appreciative of Libya’s forays into neo-liberalism, but make no mistake, those pesky conditions imposed on foreign capital are things that the US wishes it could do away with.

In the final paragraph we learn that:

Libya has announced vast new development projects, including plans that it would spend 150 billion dinars ($123.4 billion) on public works over the next five years. The Libyan government has embarked on an ambitious plan to upgrade its infrastructure, and construction is underway to build new roads, airports, railroads, and housing.

$125 billion over five years is a lot of money for any country to be spending on infrastructure. It implies two things:

1. There is major potential for money to be made from public works contracts; and
2. the Libyan regime must be predicting significant future oil revenues in order to afford all of this.

Now, much like Serbia, Libya has a geographic region that consists of people with good reason to feel abandoned and persecuted by their national government. At the same time, the possibility of meddling by covert elements cannot be discounted. The Kosovo Albanians most certainly had legitimate grievances against the Serbian rulers of their territory, but that does not change the fact that their cause was exploited by the US and NATO to chip away at the Yugoslav republic as Western actors have done since the early 1990s.

Milosevic, it should be remembered, was a crooked opportunist who exploited ethnic nationalism among Serbs for the sake of his own ruling circle. The West probably would not have minded this if his regime was not an obstacle to economic liberalization. Indeed, it backed other mafia-esque ethnic-chauvinist factions against the Serbs. While Gaddafi has generally been successful in improving the standard of living of the general population through the use of oil revenues, he still has a tendency toward cronyism and patronage these days that cannot be justified by any anti-imperialist doctrine. His underdevelopment of the eastern region of Libya is particularly inexcusable. Nevertheless, there remain many questions about the sudden desire on the part of the “international community” to militarily intervene in Libya on behalf of the opposition there while either ignoring or aiding the repressive activities by other Arab states (the morbid synthesis of these two stances is neatly showcased in the US agreement for a Saudi invasion of Bahrain to prop up the Sunni oligarchy there in exchange for a declaration by the Arab League calling for Western intevention against Libya).

There is one major difference of course: Libya has a lot of oil, while the former Yugoslavia’s natural wealth was comparatively negligible. While it is doubtful the US would press for full privatization of Libya’s oil wealth considering it abandoned a similar measure while planning the privatization of Iraq’s state-owned assets, US interests would be served well enough by having the oil revenues flowing into friendlier hands. If nothing else, destabilizing the country with the highest life expectancy in Africa might be enough for elite policy makers. After all, it sets a good example for other third world countries and we all know what a threat those can be, right?