'THE WHOLE LOT OF THEM ARE SERBS'

Noel Malcolm describes the anti-Bosnian

disinformation campaign being conducted by the British Government and the UN

MY AMERICAN friend was puzzled; and, as someone familiar with all the tricks of the trade in the US political and defence establishment, he is not an easily puzzled man. He had just been given a lop-level briefing' on Bosnia by a senior officer at the Ministry of Defence in London, and was more perplexed by the briefing than he had ever been by the entire Bosnian war.

'It was a very smooth presentation, com- plete with special blown-up photographs: obviously a package they have put on many times before. But the whole purpose of the briefing seemed to be to lay as much blame as possible on the Bosnian Muslims. There was nothing about who started the war, or who had committed most of the atrocities. Instead, it was all about a few recent incidents where the Muslims had "provoked" the Serbs.' Unsuspectingly, he had stumbled upon one of the least under- stood elements of the whole Bosnian imbroglio: the British (and UN) propagan- da campaign against the Bosnian govern- ment.

Some elements of this campaign may be familiar to British television viewers, though of course they would not have known that they were watching propagan- da at the time. Take those blown-up pho- tographs, for example. What they depicted was a number of burnt-out houses in the besieged eastern enclave of Gorazde. The same houses were shown to British viewers by Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Rose in a Panorama documentary in January, where he explained that they were the homes of some of the 12,500 Serbs who had been 'ethnically cleansed' from Gorazde by the Muslims. That informa- tion, coming from such an authoritative source, quickly became part of the accept- ed wisdom on the subject: only a few weeks later, I heard a former Adjutant- General of the British Army repeating all General Rose's claims to a distinguished audience of invited guests in London.

But where did that information original- ly come from? Not from the UN's own reports on ethnic cleansing. According to Calum MacDonald MP (one of the very few Members of Parliament to have taken an informed interest in the Bosnian war), a search of all the UN's voluminous human rights reports reveals no documen- tation whatsoever of this alleged mass- expulsion from Gorazde. My own suspicions were aroused by the figure of 12,500 Serbs, which seemed improbably large for what I remembered, from visits before the war, as a small, predominantly Muslim town. So I looked up the figures in the 1991 census. In the whole administra- tive district of Gorazde (covering 383 square kilometres) there were only 9,844 Serbs. Many of them lived in villages out- side the town; it is doubtful whether more than 5,000 can have lived in Gorazde itself. So where did General Rose get his bogus figure of 12,500 from? The answer must be that it came, directly or indirectly, from Serb propaganda. And today that propa- ganda is being issued, as if on the Serbs' behalf, by a smooth-talking officer at the Ministry of Defence in London.

This is not the only example of an anti- Bosnian disinformation campaign being conducted at senior levels of the British Government. Readers of the Daily Tele- graph will have been struck last week by a front-page story headlined 'Allies suspect US hawks of increasing risk of war'. The story itself was curiously insubstantial: it alleged that 'pro-Muslim factions' in the CIA were distorting intelligence material in order to 'promote the Muslim cause', but offered no supporting evidence whatsoever for this claim. Nevertheless, the allegation had obviously been fed to the Telegraph by very high-ranking officials: there were ref- erences to 'authoritative diplomatic sources' and to 'ministers' in the British Government. What was the explanation for this hurried but flimsy anti-American offensive?

The answer may have lain in the fact (also reported in the same article, though not directly linked there to the British alle- gation) that a leading US military analyst had published a study of the Bosnian war which argued, with compelling logic and a mass of supporting evidence, that the arms embargo against the Bosnian government was actually prolonging the war. The first copies of this report (The Right to Defence: Thoughts on the Bosnian Arms Embargo, by Professor Norman Cigar, published by the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies in London) had just appeared on the previous day. It would not be surprising if the British Foreign Office or MoD, unable to refute the author's arguments, had decided instead to discred- it him by planting a story in the press which hinted at the activities of devious 'pro-Muslim factions'.

It is becoming increasingly clear that parts of the British government machine are involved in a propaganda offensive against either the Bosnian government or those who argue in its defence. Indeed, conspiracy theorists have often suggested to me that the British Ministry of Defence was 'penetrated' by pro-Serb elements long ago. They point to the fact that Jovan Zametica, the English-educated man with the Lord Haw-Haw voice who now works as a spokesman for the Bosnian Serb lead- ership, was still giving lectures to British military training courses as an 'indepen- dent' expert long after the start of the Yugoslav war.

They observe that Jovan Gvozdenovic, the Belgrade-born pro-Serb activist who calls himself 'John Kennedy', has been personally connected, via the Conservative Council on Eastern Europe, with Henry Bellingham MP: as a glowing tribute to Gvozdenovic put it in the nationalist Bel- grade magazine Intervju recently, 'Belling- ham says that John has had access to the highest levels of the Conservative Party, and this statement gains a special signifi- cance from the fact that Bellingham is now parliamentary secretary to the Defence Secretary, Malcolm Riflcind.' They might have added that one of the few commenta- tors to have called openly for the British Government to support the Serbs, the maverick right-wing activist David Hart, has also been working as an adviser to Mr Rifkind.

And yet, although individual influences may indeed have played a part, I do not believe that these details amount to a proper explanation of Whitehall's desire to blacken the Bosnian government. The real origins of this attitude can be traced to two more important things: the in- house wisdom of the Unprofor military operation in Bosnia, in which the British Army plays an important role, and the overall policy stance of the British Gov- ernment and the UN administration.

Most visitors to Sarajevo who have had any dealings with the Unprofor spokesmen there have been struck by their eagerness to extenuate the responsibility of the Serbs for bombardments, massacres and mur- ders. Sometimes this has reached grotesque proportions, as when Brigadier Andrew Vere Hayes claimed in mid-1993 that the city was not really under siege by the Serbs. His Canadian colleague Com- mander Barry Frewer insisted, rather deli- ciously, that it was not a siege but a 'tacti- cally advantageous encirclement', and claimed that 'the Muslims' were equally responsible for cutting off supplies to the city — a claim he was later forced to retract for lack of evidence.

When Calum MacDonald MP visited Sarajevo that year, he was assured by one senior British officer that the Serb artillery was fired only at specific military targets in the city. On the following day he went to Pale and spoke to one of the UN observers who monitored the Serb guns on the hills. 'I suppose they only fire them at military targets?' he asked, with as much innocence as he could manage. The observer looked at him as if he were a half-wit. 'Christ, no. Most of the time, they just point them any- where and fire.'

Why the lies? When you have been sent to protect people and are unable properly to do so, it is only human that some of your feelings of frustration should turn into a kind of irritated resentment directed against those people themselves. A classic example of this syndrome came in January 1993 when Serb gunmen halted a UN con- voy which was bringing the Bosnian deputy Prime Minister, Hakija Turajlic, from the airport. The French Unprofor soldiers, at the Serbs' request, opened the armoured personnel carrier in which Dr Turajlic was sitting, whereupon the Serbs shot him dead. A subsequent inquiry into the inci- dent, carried out by Unprofor itself, exon- erated Unprofor and put the blame on the Bosnian government for having created an 'atmosphere of anxiety'.

Other psychological factors include the military camaraderie instinctively felt by British officers for their Serb opposite numbers, many of whom had been full- time soldiers in the old Yugoslav federal army. These were people with whom one could swap regimental cap-badges and mil- itary anecdotes; General Rose, in a dis- maying lapse of judgment, even accepted an elaborate painting of himself, surround- ed with symbols representing the rebirth of Serb nationhood. The Bosnian army, on the other hand, was a makeshift thing to begin with, lacking proper equipment and uniforms and staffed mainly by volunteers. In one British commanding officer's mess, the Bosnian Muslims (and only the Mus- lims) were jocularly referred to as 'the wogs'.

But the strongest influence on these atti- tudes in Sarajevo was the in-house Unpro- for doctrine, passed on from one commander to the next, which asserted that the overriding aim of the Bosnian gov- ernment was to trick the UN and the west- ern powers into entering the war on its behalf. Looked at in this light, any particu- larly grievous atrocity suffered by the peo- ple of Sarajevo — the bread-queue massacre of May 1992, for example, or the marketplace massacre of February 1994 — was immediately regarded as suspect. The originator of this doctrine was the first UN commander in Bosnia, the Canadian Gen- eral Lewis MacKenzie, whose utter mis- comprehension of the nature of the Bosnian war is set out for all to see in his recently published autobiography, Peace- keeper. (For the crucial opening weeks of the war, he describes the Yugoslav federal army as a disinterested party trying to impose 'peace' on the Serbs — forgetting to mention that its artillery was helping the Serbs to clear out hundreds of thousands of peaceful Muslim citizens from eastern Bosnian cities at the very same time.) No evidence has ever demonstrated that the Bosnian government was responsible for either of those terrible massacres in Sarajevo. But this has not stopped General MacKenzie from hinting openly at their involvement, or indeed from giving lec- tures paid for by `Serbnet', the Serb lobby- ing organisation in the United States. He has been treated as an authority on the subject by the world media, and some of his allegations are still being repeated, in private, by senior figures in the British administration.

Blaming the victims also serves the wider policy purposes of western govern- ments, and the British Government in par- ticular. Their attempts to broker a 'negotiated settlement' have long been based on taking the claims of the Serbs and the Bosnian government as more or less equally valid, and trying to find some half-way house between them. This approach demands a kind of diplomatic symmetry; and where symmetry does not exist on the ground, it must be invented. Of course, the non-existence of symmetry has long been clear to all objective observers: detailed reports by Amnesty, the UN human rights rapporteur, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Die Gesellschaft fiir bedrohte Volker and oth- ers have found that the overwhelming responsibility for human rights abuses, organised rape, concentration camps, eth- nic cleansing and the murder of civilians lies with the Serbs. (This too was the con- clusion of the CIA report in March this year, a conclusion which the Daily Tele- graph chose to report as 'evidence' of 'pro- Muslim bias'.) But these facts have only made the UN publicity machine all the more eager to find evidence, any evidence, of `Muslim atrocities'.

In October last year they thought they had got what they were looking for. A Serb bulletin reported that 16 Serb soldiers and four female nurses had been murdered in their beds by Bosnian mujahedin, and their bodies mutilated. Immediately, without checking the facts, the office of Mr Akashi (the senior UN official in the former Yugoslavia) circulated this story to the world press. Compared with the ponder- ous way in which any alleged atrocity is investigated inside Sarajevo — with teams of artillery experts measuring the splash- patterns of the mortar shells, and so on — this hasty endorsement of a Serb publicity statement had all the desperation of a drowning man clutching at straws. Only several days later did Akashi's officials feel obliged to admit that they were wrong: the dead Serbs were ordinary soldiers killed in an ordinary commando raid and not muti- lated thereafter.

Another example was given only two months ago, when two French soldiers in Sarajevo were shot by snipers. When the first was killed, there was no doubt that the sniper was a Serb; but in the second case there was a possibility that he had been within range of a Bosnian government sniper too. Symettie oblige: the French authorities announced that they had rea- son to believe that this soldier had been shot by Bosnian forces. This time, even the UN officials in Sarajevo found it difficult to support the allegation, pointing out that the French sergeant had been killed direct- ly in front of Serb lines and that he had been helping to erect an anti-sniper barri- cade, to protect citizens of Sarajevo against Serb snipers, when he was shot.

Mysteriously, the French said they would not make any final judgment until they had taken his flak jacket back to Paris for examination — which, in a conflict where all types of ammunition have fre- quently crossed front lines through capture or trade, was a quite meaningless remark. Still, the French would not have to deny their initial accusation for a while, and when they eventually did so the denial would have lost all news value. One final twist to this story must, however, be added: at a recent confidential briefing by a very senior British Foreign Office offi- cial, it was calmly stated that both those French soldiers had been killed by Bosni- an government snipers.

The great advantage of getting other people to do your propaganda for you is that they may even believe that it is true. They then become what Lenin called `use- ful idiots': not knowing agents of decep- tion, but well-meaning fools whose well-meaningness is all the more useful to your cause. The classic examples of this are the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of international Bosnian diplomacy, Lord Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg. Just one example of Owen's gullibility must suffice. In a period of crucial negotiations over the territorial division of Bosnia in 1993, he announced that `the Serbs owned 60 per cent of the land before the war', implying that it was therefore reasonable to give them more than half of Bosnia today. No doubt he believed this figure, even though it had been given to him by Mr ICaradzic. The correct figure, according to the last set of land registers before the war, was 23 per cent; and roughly half of Bosnia's sur- face area, naturally enough, did not belong to individuals of any ethnic identity, being owned by the state authorities instead.

But it is the UN negotiator and former Norwegian foreign minister Thorvald Stoltenberg who wins the Lenin Prize for outstanding contributions to useful idiocy. In a speech to the Norwegian Refugee Council in Oslo last week, he blithely explained the underlying reasons for the war. It was, he said, the product of socio- economic forces: before the war, the Mus- lims had consisted mainly of rich landown- ers, backed by the wealth of Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states, while the Serbs had been poor peasants who suffered from a terrible lack of `social self-confidence'. As an account of the economic status of Bosnian Muslims (most of whom, through- out their history, have been peasants), this was simply bizarre. As an exoneration of the Serb leadership, it was astonishing; no mention was made of the federal army or the territorial policies of the Belgrade regime, and the impression was given that driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes was just an unfortunate expression of a lack of social skills.

But worse was to follow. In the same speech, Stoltenberg (who has been the UN negotiator over Bosnia for two whole years) announced that the entire popula- tion of Bosnia was Serb. 'The whole lot of them are Serbs. So are the Muslims. They are in fact Serbs who converted to Islam. And a great many of those who dress like Croats, who present themselves as Croats, are in fact also Serbs.' These remarks, described by Norway's leading Balkan his- torian, Professor Monnesland of Oslo Uni- versity, as 'monstrous' and 'absurd', are beyond the wildest dreams of a Serb propa- gandist. lithe Muslims are all `really' Serbs (which they are not), then it can be argued that the Serbs are right to force Muslims to convert to Serbian Orthodoxy, right to dynamite mosques and eliminate Muslim place-names, and right to claim as much as possible of Bosnia as Serb land.

In three years of monitoring the pro- nouncements of officials, military men and politicians on Bosnia, I have never heard so much startling nonsense on the lips of someone so closely involved in determining the future of the Bosnian people. Already, as a consequence of this speech, there have been calls in Norway for Mr Stoltenberg to resign. The consolation must be that if ever he is forced out of his present job, he can always find a post, surely, working for the British Foreign Office or the Ministry of Defence.