Milosevic and the forces of anti-imperialism

A fine piece by David Aaronovitch in The Times begins with a surely unexceptionable observation: "One of the more tragic aspects of the demise of Slobodan Milosevic is that the international committee to defend him will now have to be wound up."

The cartoonist David Low famously depicted the Holocaust, and did it with brilliance and poignancy. I can see no reason that even suffering inflicted by depravity on a scarcely conceivable scale should be out of bounds for wit of a certain order. The motley crew of Milosevic apologists is, by its obtuseness and stupidity, a subject for mockery as well as pathos.

But note in particular David's reflections on two personalities:

Some of these apologists have never gone away. Recently, after a published interview with the antiwar intellectual Noam Chomsky, The Guardian erased the article from its website and apologised to Professor Chomsky for the interviewer’s suggestion that either he, or Diana Johnstone — an author whose work he praised — had denied that the Srebrenica massacre had taken place.

This correction was entirely wrong. In the sense that the world understood there to have been an act amounting to genocide at Srebrenica — ie, an act that we would have been justified in attempting to prevent by force — Johnstone certainly, and Chomsky implicitly, had most certainly denied the massacre. In Johnstone’s book, Fools’ Crusade, and elsewhere she had argued that the numbers of deaths had been exaggerated, that many supposed victims were in fact still alive somewhere, that Srebrenica had actually been an armed camp, that the Bosnians had deliberately let it be overrun hoping for a anti-Serb propaganda coup, that there had been some regrettable “revenge” killings, as can happen in wartime. Anything and everything, indeed, except the truth — which was that 7,000-8,000 Muslim men were killed by the Bosnian Serb forces precisely because they were Muslim men. Johnstone argued this, and Chomsky commended Johnstone.

Indeed, she did; and indeed, he did.

The issue that David raises is one that he, the writer Francis Wheen and I have spent much time in examining and pursuing since The Guardian published its demonstrably incorrect 'correction' to the interview with Chomsky. We shall be returning to this subject very shortly.