Atavism's lobbyists

I have commented in the last couple of days on the eclecticism of the pro-Milosevic fringe, with which - in microcosm - I have exchanged words. This post is by way of conclusion. The alliance of North American Jewish extremists with xenophobic Serb nationalism does exist and is deplorable, but it is unrepresentative. As one of my correspondents has pointed out, there were a few loud and cerebrally challenged Israelis who supported Milosevic, but the the Israeli government was quick to provide medical aid for Albanian Kosovar refugees, and the great majority of American Jews supported the victims rather than the perpetrators of Serb-nationalist aggression.

On the broader question of the Belgrade lobby and the American Right, the scholar Michael Sells has written on the trajectory of "the right wing, particularly in the GOP, toward a pro-Milosevic position [that] accelerated with the retirement of former majority leader Bob Dole who had clearly and cogently criticized U.S. appeasement of the Milosevic and Karadzic regimes". Senior Republicans such as John McCain and Richard Lugar supported Western intervention in Kosovo and urged the use of ground troops (thereby agreeing with senior Democrats including Joseph Lieberman and John Kerry, but going far beyond the weak position of President Clinton). But a discernible undercurrent among Republicans dismissed the intervention as "Clinton's war", ventured for no US strategic interest. It was a short-sightedly partisan view, and it merged easily with some still less reputable sentiments. Sells notes various parties, but one stands out:

The GOP Senate Policy Committee has taken as its chief advisors for Balkan policy Yossef Bodansky and James Charles Jatras. The WEB site of the policy committee proudly proclaims Bodansky as an expert and cites his long association with the House Task Force on Terrorism. The key person in the link is Senator Larry Craig, third in the GOP senate leadership. [Note, since this article was written, Bodansky, who spent years warning that Bosnjaks and an alleged Bosnjak-Iran conspiracy were the key threats for terrorism morphed after Bin Laden's attacks into an "expert" on al-Qaeda, very profitably].

Bodansky has been a major influence with the Serbian Unity Congress, which has long advocated the expulsion of Kosovars and supported the Karadzic regime during its worst genocidal policies. Bodansky has spoken at their meetings. He has protrayed all Muslims as a terrorist threat and has support the Belgrade regime's policy in Bosnia and in Kosovo with complete zealousness, and attacked Bosnians and Kosovars with the kind of stereotypes emanating directly from Milosevic propaganda.

Bodansky is Research Director of an organisation called the International Strategic Studies Assocation (ISSA), in which capacity - according to the organisation's own publications, as of 2003 - he has described the figure of 7,000 deaths in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 as "disinformation", and claimed that "all independent forensic evidence points to Muslim casualties [at Srebrenica] in the hundreds. Continued emphasis on such allegedly high numbers of Muslim deaths at Srebrenica also obfuscates the Muslim murders in that city, earlier, of Serb civilians."

In August 2006, Reuters reported that forensic experts had exhumed 133 complete skeletons and more than 900 body parts in a single grave containing victims of the Srebrenica massacre. In total, 2,500 victims of the massacre had been identified, while remains in 3,500 body bags still awaited identification by DNA. Bodansky's spurious and made-up figure of Muslim deaths in the hundreds was more extreme even than one advanced in a "report" by the Bosnian Serb government in 2002 and that Lord Ashdown aptly termed "an insult" and "preposterous". It is completely extraordinary that Bodansky has held any advisory position on Balkan policy. (This is incidentally a trivial level on which to be politically effective, but I can claim a minor role in having exposed the provenance of a particular dubious claim coming directly from Bodansky's organisation and then retailed in UK media with its source inaccurately cited.)

The Balkan wars of the 1990s were of course primarily a humanitarian catastrophe. They were also wars of aggression by one party. The question how - and indeed whether - to respond to that party caused immense ructions in foreign policy debate in the US and Europe, and they remain with us. One of the lessons that ought to have been learned was the heterogeneous character of the political forces that would side not only with reaction but with atavism. It is worth examining how it happened, the better to avoid them in future.