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Fw: YUGOSLAVIA, THE AVOIDABLE WAR: The Horrors of the Balkan Wars asShrewdly Staged Illusions
- To: <pck-pace@peacelink.it>
- Subject: Fw: YUGOSLAVIA, THE AVOIDABLE WAR: The Horrors of the Balkan Wars asShrewdly Staged Illusions
- From: "Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>
- Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 18:38:42 +0100
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.