Fw: YUGOSLAVIA, THE AVOIDABLE WAR: The Horrors of the Balkan Wars asShrewdly Staged Illusions

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg at tin.it>]

 NY Times, March 15, 2002

 MOVIE REVIEW | 'YUGOSLAVIA, THE AVOIDABLE WAR'

 The Horrors of the Balkan Wars as Shrewdly Staged Illusions

 By STEPHEN HOLDEN

 One of the many unsettling contentions of George Bogdanich's documentary
 film, "Yugoslavia, the Avoidable War," is its assertion that many of the
 most horrendous events in the recent Balkan wars were stage-managed for the
 news media. A number of the massacres and atrocities reported on television
 with bodies on display, it maintains, were shrewdly planned illusions
 concocted by the Bosnian Muslims to inflame international opinion against
 the Serbs. The city of Sarajevo in particular served more than once as an
 accessible location for deceptive television coverage.

 Although it would be inaccurate to label this documentary pro-Serbian, the
 film, which opens today at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, methodically sets
 out to demolish much of the conventional wisdom about who did what to whom
 and who was to blame. It insists that a regional civil war that could have
 been settled without prolonged bloodshed was turned into a major
 conflagration by outside interference and national self-interest.

 As the United States government has tacitly acknowledged by keeping the
 press at bay in Afghanistan, public relations and the ability to get your
 version of events across is almost as important as weaponry in modern
 warfare. The version of a war that is reported on television becomes the
 official version that in turn motivates crucial political decisions.

 The film asserts that partly because of American television's need for
 clear-cut heroes and villains, a scenario of good guys (the oppressed
 Bosnian Muslims) versus bad (the evil, barbaric Serbs) came to dominate
 mainstream news coverage of the war. After one reporter heard a Serbian use
 the words "ethnic cleansing," for instance, the term, with its repugnant
 genocidal associations, was seized on by the Clinton administration as a
 buzzword and used to bash the Serbs, when in fact all sides were equally
 intent on "cleansing" their territories of undesirables.

 This heroes-and-villains mentality, the film contends, also served American
 interests by giving the United States an excuse to preserve and strengthen
 NATO in the post-Communist era when its relevance had become debatable.

 It allowed us to keep our power base in Europe. The film bluntly calls "an
 occupying force" the NATO forces (led by the United States) that remain in
 Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia without an official date for withdrawing, and
 it goes so far as to accuse that 19-nation army of conspiring to commit war
 crimes.

 Almost anything we thought we knew about the Balkan wars is thrown into
 question by the film. Did a highly publicized civilian massacre of Bosnian
 Muslims by Serbs in Kosovo that prompted NATO to intensify the bombing of
 Yugoslavia really take place? Or did Bosnian Muslims transport the bodies
 of dead soldiers (not civilians) overnight to the site and then cry
 massacre?

 And what about the numbers? Subsequent investigations, the movie claims,
 have shown that the tally of casualties at the hands of Serbs, including
 the supposed mass rapes of Bosnian women, was outrageously inflated.

 Whether or not you're convinced by the film's assertions, many of which are
 based on information provided by the Red Cross, Amnesty International,
 Human Rights Watch and other organizations that investigated reported
 events after the fact, "Yugoslavia, the Avoidable War" does an impressive
 job of relating the complicated history of the war and of filling in the
 background. Some of that background has been overshadowed by the
 designation of the Serbs as the villains. The Croatians, it reminds us,
 collaborated closely with the Nazis during World War II in the slaughter of
 750,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in their territory.

 As for the Bosnian Muslims, the film says there is ample evidence
 documenting Bosnians' alliance with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

 Mr. bin Laden was a regular visitor to the office of Bosnia's president
 Alija Izetbegovic in early 1993, a time when the United States was lauding
 his commitment to moderation and multiethnic cooperation.

 As the meticulously chronological account of the Balkan wars unfolds event
 by event, failed peace initiative by failed peace initiative, "Yugoslavia,
 the Avoidable War" leads you to a no man's land of doubt.

 The truth, of course, was never as black-and-white as it is has been
 painted for us. It rarely is.