Global Policy Forum

A Study in Inhumanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse)

by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

Part I
The breakup of Yugoslavia provided the fodder for what may have been the most misrepresented series of major events over the past twenty years. The journalistic and historical narratives that were imposed upon these wars have systematically distorted their nature, and were deeply prejudicial, downplaying the external factors that drove Yugoslavia's breakup while selectively exaggerating and misrepresenting the internal factors. Perhaps no civil wars-and Yugoslavia suffered multiple civil wars across several theaters, at least two of which remain unresolved-have ever been harvested as cynically by foreign powers to establish legal precedents and new categories of international duties and norms. Nor have any other civil wars been turned into such a proving ground for the related notions of "humanitarian intervention" and the "right [or responsibility] to protect." Yugoslavia's conflicts were not so much mediated by foreign powers as they were inflamed and exploited by them to advance policy goals. The result was a tsunami of lies and misrepresentations in whose wake the world is still reeling.

Part II
A striking feature of U.S. policy since the collapse of the Soviet deterrent is the frequency with which it relies on the Security Council and the Secretariat for its execution-before the fact when it can (Iraq 1990-91), but after the fact when it must (as in the cases of postwar Kosovo and post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq). Even though the Security Council never authorized these last three major U.S. aggressions, in each case the United States secured degrees of council assent and ex post facto legitimation.

Part III
The four-year trial of Slobodan Milosevic was the culmination of ICTY service to the NATO program in the Balkans. It was designed to show the world by an elaborate procedure leading ultimately to the conviction of the top Serb leader-the first head of state in modern times to be indicted, seized, and tried in this fashion-that the "judgment and opprobrium of history awaits the people in whose name their crimes were committed," as Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said in 1992.95 As with the ICTY overall, this trial was supposed to "help shape how current and future generations view the wars and in particular Serbia's role in them," as the advocates for this brand of "international justice" at Human Rights Watch clearly understand.96 This required the framing of indictments around the Serbs' unique guilt for wars dating back to the summer of 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, with NATO's 1999 violation of the UN Charter vindicated on moral grounds that allegedly preempt the Charter's restrictions on the use of force.

Part IV
Media coverage of the Yugoslav wars ranks among the classic cases in which early demonization as well as an underlying strong political interest led quickly to closure, with a developing narrative of good and evil participants and a crescendo of propaganda steadily reinforcing the good-evil perspective. This was the case after the shooting of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981, where dubious evidence of Bulgarian-KGB involvement was quickly accepted by the New York Times and its mainstream colleagues, and only plot-supportive evidence was of interest to the media thereafter. They remained gulled for years.