Library:To kill a nation/Republika Srpska: democracy, NATO style

Republika Srpska (RS), or Serb Republic, is the smaller portion of Bosnia-Herzegovina left to the Bosnian Serbs after it was partitioned. Gregory Elich provides an excellent and well-documented account of the Western colonialist rule imposed on Republika Srpska. What follows is drawn almost entirely from his writing.

The first RS president, Radovan Karadzic, incurred the ire of the West when he proposed that Serb majority areas of Bosnia be allowed to remain within Yugoslavia rather than being forced to secede against their will. In addition, although Karadzic was not a Communist, he appointed many Communist and leftist officers because they were his most capable military men, and they shared his anti-separatist goal. Western threats and diplomatic pressure forced him from office, allowing vice president Biljana Plavsic, a right-wing monarchist, to take over the presidency. In violation of its own professed commitment to free speech and democracy, NATO ordered Republika Srpska to remove all posters of Karadzic (now branded a war criminal), and to avoid ever referring to him in speeches, or on television or radio. Although sent down the Orwellian memory hole, Karadzic was still at large and being hunted by Western intelligence agents as of 2000.

President Plavsic worked closely with Western authorities, purging the RS army of over one hundred officers suspected of leftist leanings. "Leftist" officers were ones who were sympathetic to collectivist social programs and unfriendly toward capitalist restoration and the free-market agenda. When these officers resisted their removal, special police units moved against them. The progressive Radio Krajina, a station run by the army, was shut down. RS military leaders charged that the Interior Ministry carried out these measures "on orders from foreign mentors."

With NATO troops backing her, Plavsic then began a purge of the civilian government, pushing the surprise nomination of Milorad Dodik as premier, a highly unusual choice since Dodik's party held but two seats in the People's Assembly. Yet Carlos Westendorp, NATO's "High Representative" in Bosnia, immediately hailed the appointment. Westendorp had authority to remove uncooperative elected officials and impose Westernapproved solutions. In a menacing show of support for Dodik, NATO troops were deployed around the Interior Ministry.

Several months earlier, the Bosnian Serb press had charged that Dodik was "under direct control of the US intelligence service, the CIA" and some deputies in the RS Assembly alleged that "he had already traveled abroad several times for consultations and direct instructions." The lavish praise Western leaders heaped on the heretofore obscure Dodik lent support to the accusation.

In violation of the constitution, Plavsic dissolved the People's Assembly in 1997. Instead of condemning this abrogation of democratic rule, Western officials supported the move. When the RS Constitutional Court found her action to be unconstitutional, its ruling was simply ignored. In the words of US State Department spokesman James Rubin, "Challenges to [Plavsic's] actions are not legally valid" and Serbs who fail to comply with Western demands are "stupid." Reports in the Yugoslav press talked of multimillion-dollar payments from covert US sources to a Swiss bank account in Plavsic's name. Many of the individuals Plavsic appointed to her staff came from abroad and were of monarchist persuasion.

In August 1997, NATO troops began seizing police stations in Republika Srpska, ejecting police officers and hiring new ones who were trained by Western police instructors. As UN police spokesperson Liam McDowall explained: "We basically let them know what is expected of a normal police force; not a socialist police force....... At about that time, NATO troops began to take over radio and television stations throughout Republika Srpska, handing the transmitters over to Plavsic. When large crowds angrily protested, they were greeted with NATO armed vehicles, tear gas, and warning shots. NATO Secretary General Javier Solana announced that NATO "will not hesitate to take the necessary measures, including the use of force, against media networks or programs" critical of Western intervention.

Americans assume that the "democratic principles" we live by in the United States (such as the First Amendment) should apply everywhere in the world under all circumstances. Yet even in the United States there are places journalists are not allowed to go and things they are not allowed to print, usually in the interest of "national security." And our government is more than willing to bomb TV transmitters [killing sixteen Yugoslavs, mostly journalists] and censor our enemy's media, justifying it by characterizing Serb media as propaganda and tools of war (as if the US media weren't) . . American journalists still seem to expect to be protected by the US Constitution while in another country, and [they expect] that country [to] be more forthcoming with military information than even our own country's leaders are. It's the height of imperialist vainglory.

By the autumn of 1997, NATO "peacekeepers" had completed their takeover of police stations and had forcibly shut down the last dissident radio station. The New York Times took elaborate pains to explain why silencing this one remaining Serb station was necessary for advancing democratic pluralism. The Times used the terms "hardline" or "hardliner" eleven times to describe Bosnian Serb leaders who failed to see the shutdown as "a step toward bringing about responsible news coverage in Bosnia."" Throughout the Western intervention, those who agreed with the free-market agenda were deemed "pro-West" and "democratic" in their perspective. Those who disagreed were by definition "undemocratic hardliners."

In April 1998, Western officials organized a tribunal to censor and govern media in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "The tribunal not only arrogated to itself the power to shut down radio, television and newspapers that voice criticism of NATO's occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but also the authority to write laws regulating broadcasting," notes Elich. Under the guise of "democratic reform," foreign powers were dictating what the media could or could not say in their own nation. In 1999, this censorship tribunal ordered Television Kanal S to "immediately cease broadcasting." Kanal S did not carry Western news programs, and it committed a "serious violation" by broadcasting a message from Sarajevo University students inviting participation in a peaceful protest against NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. Such flickers of dissent were deemed intolerable by the champions of Western democracy.

The occupying powers also exercised a heavy hand over the electoral process, striking political candidates from election lists on the flimsiest excuses. The OSCE election commission eliminated three candidates of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) because posters of the former RS president Karadzic had been displayed. The SDS was not permitted to replace these candidates. The next year, nine candidates of the Serbian Radical Party were stricken from the lists because a TV station in neighboring Yugoslavia broadcast an interview with the party's presidential candidate, Nikola Poplasen. Apparently, television programs from a "foreign source" (Yugoslavia) represented a contaminating outside influence but not NATO troops and OSCE committees dictating who could and could not run as candidates, and what could be broadcast about the election by whom.

In September 1998, despite all the censorship and repression, citizens of Republika Srpska rejected NATO's well-financed candidate, the incumbent Plavsic, and elected Poplasen as president. "Whatever else one can say for them," writes Diana Johnstone, "the September 1998 elections showed that neither television nor money from the 'international community' determined the way Bosnian Serbs vote."' Infuriated by the election outcome, the Western colonialists immediately began to pressure Poplasen to break off relations with Yugoslavia, and appoint their pet Miorad Dodik as prime minister. When he refused, the legally elected Poplasen was forcibly deposed from office by Westendorp. Belgrade condemned the moves as a drastic abuse of the Dayton Accords.0 Elich remarked that this "coup d'etat by decree" left no pretense of democracy. Western diktat was deemed democratic "simply by virtue of being Western."

Under the guise of hunting down war criminals, NATO continued to commit war crimes of its own, including kidnapping and assassination. In January 1996 two Bosnian Serb generals, Djordje Djukic and Aleksa Ksrmanovic were asked to meet with Western civilian and NATO officials. Instead a trap was set, and both men were seized and imprisoned by Bosnian Muslim soldiers. Two weeks later, the two were transferred to The Hague where they underwent protracted interrogations and were pressured to accuse other Bosnian Serb leaders of war crimes, in exchange for lighter treatment for themselves. When both refused, punishment was not long in coming. Djukic was charged with such heinous deeds as having been "assistant commander for logistics," and "proposing appointments of personnel," and "issuing orders relating to the supply of materiel for units of the Bosnian Serb Army." Nothing even as flimsy as that could be cooked up against Krsmanovic, who was held without charges for several more weeks of interrogation and then released. Though suffering from an advanced case of pancreatic cancer, Djukic was incarcerated for almost three months. In late April he was returned to his family; he died a few weeks later.

On July 10 1997, a joint US-British operation swooped down on two other Bosnian Serbs without a public indictment against either. After gaining entrance to the Prijedor Medical Center, four NATO operatives arrested the popular hospital director, Milan Kovacevic. The arrest provoked an angry demonstration by the hospital's medical staff and several hundred citizens. During the Bosnian war, Kovacevic had been a member of the local governing committee. NATO accused him of having ordered the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Prijedor, when in fact, such actions were not done in an organized fashion but by Serbian gangs and paramilitaries. About a year after he was arrested, his doctor visited him in jail and recommended treatment for his serious heart ailment. Instead, after the doctor departed, Kovacevic was left unattended in his cell, in acute pain, crying out for help when a blood vessel burst in his chest. The guards ignored both him and the other prisoners who started shouting for someone to assist him. Kovacevic died that night.

Former security chief Simo Drljaca was equally unfortunate. As he returned from fishing, dressed in a bathing suit, to have breakfast with family and friends, NATO troops burst on the scene and began firing. A witness recounts: "Music was playing. I was sitting. Then suddenly I heard screams...Soldiers were armed...and they fired at [Simo]. Then I saw Simo lying down on the sand near a beach. He was lying on his side and shaking. Then a soldier came close to him and fired another bullet at him and finished him off."

Another NATO assassination took place on January 10, 1999, targeting a car occupied by Dragan Gagovic and five children from his karate class. Gagovic had been the local police chief in Foca during the war, and had been charged with knowing of abusive conditions in prisons. Why NATO waited almost seven years to go after him is not clear. One of the children, Sonja Bjelovic, described the ambush: "We heard shots. Our coach [Dragan] said, 'Down, you can be hit.' He tried to protect us...However, the car was hit, tires went flat and it overturned. I saw our coach covered with blood." Dragan was shot dead by the defenders of democratic procedures.

The two halves of Republika Srpska were held together by a narrow three-mile-wide strip in which lies Brcko, a city of ninety thousand. On the day that Poplasen was removed as president, Robert Owen, Western arbiter for Brcko, put the city under joint control of the Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska. Under this new ukase, Bosnian Serb forces could no longer move from one half of the RS to the other without NATO permission; the area was in effect split into two parts. Without control of Brcko, the western part of Republika Srpska, where two-thirds of Bosnia's Serbs live, was now pinned between the Muslim-Croat Federation and Croatia itself, disconnected from the eastern part, which runs alongside Serbia proper. 14 To back Owen's decision, NATO troops bolstered their presence in Brcko.15It was made known, Elich reports, that the Muslim-Croat Federation, which had been richly equipped with some of the latest Western weaponry, would receive the green light from NATO to invade Republika Srpska were it "ever to display too much independence and recalcitrance in response to NATO demands."

One such demand was that Republika Srpska take the proper steps toward privatization. The process initiated by the RS government, allocating some 47 per cent of companies' shares to seven government-managed funds, was judged unacceptable by the Western free-marketeers. Documents from the US embassy in Sarajevo noted: "In the RS, the privatization framework is being overhauled and will create more opportunities for involvement of potential foreign investors." The World Bank and USAID helped develop laws similar to those in the Muslim-Croat Federation, aiming "to promote foreign direct investment" and "favorable tax conditions" with "no restrictions on foreign investment" (except armaments and media, which presumably Western authorities preferred to control directly). "Expropriation or nationalization actions against foreign investments" were expressly disallowed.

For all intents and purposes, Republika Srpska became a NATO colony. Its citizens were free to pursue only those policies pleasing to their imperialist overlords, free to listen only to media programs and elect only candidates approved by NATO. By definition, the free-market reforms and NATO domination were equated with democracy. And by definition, any resistance to such rule, even by duly elected RS representatives, was deemed hard-line, anti-reformist, and anti-democratic.