October 30, 2003

THE BURDEN OF BEING A SERBIAN-AMERICAN
Address at the First Annual Banquet of the Serbian-American Congress on October 26, 2003

by Srdja Trifkovic

The founders of the Serbain-American Congress have been told, more than once, that it is too late—too late to prevent the demonization of the Serbs that had started over a decade ago, too late to prevent the sanctions, to save the Krajina, to improve on Dayton, to stop the bombing, to preserve Kosovo. The implicit view of the skeptics is, (1) that the Serbs have been unfairly beaten in a crooked game, and (2) that the game is over, and therefore unworthy of re-visiting.

The founders of the Serbian-American Congress are well advised to take note of this attitude and to address it with patience and tact. The response should be, briefly, that the disastrous outcome of the past decade has not sated the appetite of Serbia’s foes, but—quite the contrary—encouraged their belief that the rump of Serbia is a candy store with a busted lock; and that it is therefore vital for the Diaspora to have an articulate voice that would seek to counter the trend.

The present Balkan reality is far from encouraging. Last February the state known as Yugoslavia was dissolved and replaced with a loose union of its last two republics, Serbia and Montenegro. There are people—in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Prishtina, Novi Pazar, Podgorica, Subotica, The Hague, or Washington D.C.—for whom this event did not mark by any means the end of fragmentation of the area. They do not envisage an era of dust-settling, confidence-building and overall stabilization ahead. Determined to continue slicing the Serbian salami, they do not seek harmony but turmoil; they do not want a lasting peace and reconciliation, but a permanent crisis in which the Serbs will continue to be permanent culprits. They sense, or seek to create, new opportunities for mischief. They keep developing fresh scenarios for the next act in the old play of turning Serbia into the black hole of Europe and treating the Serbs—collectively—as pariahs.

It may be too late—for now—to do much for the Krajina Serbs, but it is nevertheless not too late:

1. To save the Serb Republic in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Republika Srpska, RS);
2. To retain at least the nominal Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo and Metohija in perpetuity, and to maintain physical presence and control in certain parts of the province;
3. To re-examine Belgrade’s relationship with The Hague Tribunal;
4. To act decisively to prevent the advanced Muslim plans for fomenting a crisis and eventually effecting the secession of the Rashka region, mistakenly known to most foreigners by its Turkish name of "Sanjak"; and
5. To encourage pro-unionist forces and pro-Serb sentiment in Montenegro.

The task of the Serbian-American community is to place all of the above in a clear context of the American interest, to act as Americans with an ethnic sensibility and not as Serbs with a grafted American identity. They must not argue the "Serbian case"—whatever it may be—in the name of abstract justice, let alone of Serbian interests per se. They must act in the only manner their arguments can appeal to a patriotic American: does it matter to me, or to my country?

A good example is offered by The Hague Tribunal, an international war crimes court where we are witnessing an ongoing travesty of justice. The Serbian-American Congress’s pitch on The Hague should be that the "tribunal" is as legal and has as much legitimacy as a Green Party Ad-Hoc Environment Court that would seek to impose greenhouse-gas taxes on American companies. Recent indictments against four Serbian generals—yet again on the utterly spurious grounds of "command responsibility"—prove that the ICTY is not an instrument of reconciliation. It is the child of the 1991-1995 propaganda project of expounding Muslim innocence in the light of Serbian guilt.

We should ask our fellow Americans: who really wants this court? Not those who care for U.S. interests, including the preservation of American judicial sovereignty against the monstrosity known as the International Criminal Court (ICC)! The Hague is wanted by various Balkan players with transparent and undistinguished motives, and by the lawyers and bureaucrats who live on it. They’ll rule the world if they are not stopped. The precedent of The Hague will subvert American sovereignty, especially vis-Ð-vis the ICC, and pave the way for "global justice." The Serbian-American Congress should say that the Serbs are painfully aware that a variety of war crimes and crimes against humanity against all ethnic groups and by all of them have been committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991. It should accept that a judicial process should be an integral part of such reconciliation, but also assert that The Hague Tribunal is emphatically not a mechanism of judicial retaliation capable of achieving those goals—least of all in the bloodiest battlefield of all, the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

After eight years of misrule by a succession of proconsuls appointed by "the international community" Bosnia is in shambles: Since the end of the war in 1995, it has received almost $6 billion in reconstruction aid, but the beneficiaries were assorted crooks, international bureaucrats, and foreign contractors. It is now ranked economically behind Albania; in South Eastern Europe, only Moldova is poorer. This reality should be presented to our legislators, decision-makers, and the media through the prism of American interests in the region, through the lens of the war against terror, but also with reference to the fact that American taxpayers have been underwriting Bosnia, Inc. for the past decade. It should be stressed that indulging global apparatchiks by allowing them to continue running Bosnia like a feudal fiefdom is not only unnecessary and detrimental to peace and stability in the Balkans, it costs American taxpayers’ money.

It should be pointed out that Bosnia’s current tsars, "High Representative" Paddy Ashdown and his American deputy Donald Hays, directly undermine President Bush’s war on terror by continuing to support the Islamist side in Bosnia. Both were recently particularly active in giving credence to the Muslim claim that 7,000 of their men were killed at Srebrenica in 1995, and in arranging Bill Clinton’s visit to unveil a monument there. That figure has been repeatedly challenged as vastly inflated and unsupported by evidence, calculated to perpetuate regional ethnic hatred and distrust. Ambassador Hays used the power of the Office of the High Representative to force Bosnian Serb elected officials to sign a fraudulent document accepting the official version of events in Srebrenica. The monument unveiled by Clinton is intended to become a shrine for radical Islamists in Europe and site for annual pilgrimages. Contrary to the Bush Administration’s stated policy, Hays and Ashdown seek to vindicate Clintonian policies of support for the radical Islamists. Ashdown’s eulogy at the funeral of Alija Izetbegovic, an Islamic fundamentalist and war criminal, offers the cue for the first public act of the Serbian-American Congress: to demand Ashdowns replacement, on the grounds that he has compromised himself as not only partial to one side in Bosnia—the Muslim side—but also that he has become actively detrimental to America’s own efforts in the war against terror.

As for Kosovo, if a dozen well-known KLA allies and apologists, such as Bill Clinton and Richard Hollbrooke, and pro-Albanian lobbies parading as think-tanks, start simultaneously clamoring for its independence—making identical or similar statements—it is almost certain that their efforts will be presented as a pressing policy issue very soon. The campaign started in earnest last May. The opening salvo was fired by Paul Williams and Janusz Bugajski of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Then Daniel Serwer of the United States Institute of Peace, James Dobbins, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation and a key advocate of the war against Serbia in the Clinton administration, and Charles A. Kupchan, director of European studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, all joined the chorus. The billionaire "philantropist," currency speculator George Soros, even went to Belgrade to tell the Serbs that it was in their interest to support the independence of Kosovo. His unsubstantiated claim that Serbia could be put into the "fast-lane to European integration" in exchange for Kosovo’s independence paved the way for Hollbrooke’s absurd and fraudulent claim that Serbia has to choose between Kosovo and European integration.

These pro-Albanian lobbyists privately package Kosovo’s independence in "realpolitical" terms in their pitch to the Bush administration. They claim that doing a big favor to a Muslim community—the Albanians—could be used to improve America’s standing in the Muslim world. The precedent already exists in Mr. Rumsfeld’s pointed invocation, during the war in Afghanistan, of America’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo as the conclusive proof that the United States is not a priori anti-Muslim. The KLA’s Washingtonian friends will claim that strip-mining Serbia costs nothing and yields rich rewards in giving America leverage in appeasing enraged Muslim opinion around the world.

The Serbian-American Congress should counter such pressures by pointing out that granting Kosovo independence would be a mistake—and not only because it would reward mass ethnic cleansing and murder, carried out on a grand scale by the Albanians ever since the beginning of the NATO occupation four years ago. More importantly, from the standpoint of American interests, Kosovo’s independence would condone the principle that an ethnic minority’s plurality in a given locale or region provides grounds for that region’s outright secession. That precedent may yet come to haunt America in the increasingly "Latino" mono-ethnic and Spanish mono-lingual Southwest.

In geopolitical terms giving independence to Kosovo would terminally alienate the Serbs, whose cooperation with Washington is crucial to making the Balkans finally stable and peaceful at a time when American energy, money and manpower is more pressingly needed further east. Almost as worryingly, it would create an inherently unstable polity that would be an even safer haven for assorted criminals and Islamic extremists than it is today. And finally, no responsible American leader wants to re-ignite the war in neighboring Macedonia, where the current semblance of peace is absolutely predicated upon the continuing status quo in Kosovo.

It is to be hoped that the Bush team will not commit itself to continuing the failed, discredited Clinton-Gore "nation-building project" in Kosovo that culminated with the bombing of Serbia in 1999. That event marked an illogical, immoral, and untenable rearrangement of the Balkan architecture. It is in America’s interest to have it reversed, not ratified and made semi-permanent. There are ample arguments against Cilnton’s model of the new Balkan order that seeks to satisfy the aspirations of all ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia—except the Serbs. Whatever is imposed on them in this moment of weakness, the Serbs shall have no stake in the ensuing order of things, causing chronic regional imbalance and strife for decades to come. That is not in America’s interest, and therefore should not be condoned.

Strong and valid arguments of the Serbian-American community exist, they need not be invented but coherently defined and convincingly presented. The task is not impossible, but it requires energy, creativity, and money. It is a worthwhile investment into the future of Serbian-Americans as a self-respecting community that has made, and is continuing to make, a hugely disproportionate and on the whole splendid contribution to the knowledge, strength, and wealth of this great country of ours.

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