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Carl K.
Savich
The
Origins and Causes of the Bosnian Civil War
1992-1995
[2002]
You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.
---William Randolph Hearst, March, 1898
The collapse of the Cold War world order beginning in 1989 resulted in the
disintegration of the Communist federations of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia
and the other nations in Eastern Europe. The break up of these federations resulted
in bloody civil wars both in the former Soviet Union and in the former Yugoslavia.
The most destructive and costly in human life was the protracted civil war in
the former Communist republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, constituted in 1945
as a constituent republic of Yugoslavia.
The diplomats and the media knew very little about the background to the conflicts
and civil wars in the former Soviet Union. They knew even less about the former
Yugoslavia, especially about Bosnia-Herzegovina. In US government and media
propaganda, Yugoslavia became "the heart of Europe" and "in the center of Europe".
Before the massive US "information war", Yugoslavia was regarded as marginal,
peripheral, the "backwater of Europe", on the periphery of Europe, not vital
to any US interests, not part of the so-called Western civilization and culture,
not part of "enlightened Latin Christendom", but backward, Byzantine, alien.
Karl Marx termed the Balkan peoples "ethnic trash". His colleague Friedrich
Engels dismissed Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks as "robber riff- raff". Otto
von Bismarck warned that the Balkans were not worth the life of a single German
soldier at the time of the Bosnian Insurrection of 1875-1878. Through American
media and government propaganda, however, Bosnia became not only the center
of Europe, but during the civil war, the primary focus for the entire world.
The lack of fundamental understanding and grasp of the historical background
and issues on the part of diplomats, academics, scholars, and the media, contributed
to needlessly prolonging and exacerbating the conflict.
The civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was caused and sustained by essentially
three major actors: 1) the United States State Department; 2) public relations
firms; and, 3) the American media. The precedent for such an alliance was the
very successful performance of all three actors in the 1991 Persian Gulf War,
which the United States with her NATO allies Great Britain and France, waged
against former ally and client state Iraq. The paradigm of the Persian Gulf
War was transposed upon the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina with disastrous
results. All three actors perceived the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina
as Gulf War II. The paradigm for the Persian Gulf War itself was established
in 1898 with the Spanish-American War. William Randolph Hearst told Frederick
Remington, "You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war." Hearst was a
pioneer in realizing that the nature of war had changed. War was now about information,
not weapons and strategies. The Spanish-American War became an infowar where
pictures and images were the crucial elements. Hearst was ahead of his time.
Most military historians and pundits missed this revolutionary change in the
nature and concept of modern warfare. As one of the founders of the mass public
newspaper, Hearst understood that propaganda techniques would be much more important
in the modern mass media and mass communication era. The US government would
apply Hearst’s infowar paradigm in the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, the Krajina
conflict between Yugoslavia and Croatia, Haiti, and Kosovo. Indeed, the initial
invading force of Somalia consisted of an army of news reporters and camera
crew which televised its own landing on the Somalia coast. US policymakers learned
from the Vietnam War debacle that military force by itself is not sufficient.
Information is crucial in modern war. To defeat an enemy by force alone is to
win only half the battle. Thus, there was a re-emergence of the infowar, of
propaganda techniques and "information warfare" first developed by Hearst in
the 19th century.
The US State Department, the US media, and public relations firms caused and
maintained the bloody civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They based their
analyses consciously and unconsciously on ignorance, deceit, malice, racism,
power politics, Realpolitik, and incorrect assumptions and a faulty understanding
of the background to that conflict. Truth is indeed the first casualty in war.
Truth is the first victim in war. This dictum is best exemplified in the media
manipulations and distortions which characterized the reporting of the civil
wars in the former Yugoslavia, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The US
State Department and public relations firms have likewise distorted and manipulated
the facts and the information concerning the civil war in Bosnia. Along with
the thousands of human casualties could be listed truth itself. Along with the
crimes committed against humanity were those committed against integrity, decency,
fair-play, and justice.
Ever since the civil wars erupted in the former Yugoslavia in 1991, the so-called
Western media, at first primarily the newly united Germany, but particularly
the American media, presented a daily barrage of news accounts and stories from
Bosnia which equated the horrors of that war to the worst of World War II. This
media blitzkrieg was an unprecedented and unrelenting onslaught which combined
modern media techniques and advocacy journalism. The media became an organized,
coherent body, aggressive and strident co-belligerents who perceived themselves
as active and partisan combatants in the civil wars. The US government gave
them their marching orders. The enemy were the Orthodox Serbs. Allies were all
who were anti-Serbian: Roman Catholic Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians. All
the media reportage had one thing in common: The reporting was partisan, anti-Serbian,
and had as its sole purpose and goal to force and to coerce Western governments,
particularly the United States, to intervene militarily against the Serbs, i.e.,
to force an interventionist war against Serbs and against Serbia in a replay
of the Persian Gulf War scenario with the Serbian people and Serbia cast in
the role of Iraq and as "aggressors". If it worked with Kuwait, why couldn’t
it work in Bosnia? Needless to say, the US had militarily intervened in Central
and South America regularly and periodically throughout the twentieth century
not as "humanitarian interventions" but as invasions and occupations to install
right-wing dictators in the banana republics to maintain US commercial exploitation.
The Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 against Cuba is an example of just such an intervention.
The Persian Gulf War established the precedent of the modern infowar. The infowar
propaganda paradigm was followed during the Yugoslav conflicts. The Bosnian
Muslims and Croats hired prominent American public relations firms to advocate
and to lobby for their agendas and political programs. These firms manipulated,
distorted, and falsified information and facts to support the anti-Serbian policy
of the government and media, working in a symbiotic relationship. These public
relations firms racked up phenomenal and spectacular propaganda victories and
successes for their clients, the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Kosovo Albanians.
The US sought to penetrate Eastern Europe and the Balkans politically, militarily,
and commercially, to create a neo-imperialist and neo-colonialist market and
sphere of influence in a region where it had been largely excluded. To further
these goals, the US State Department became an active and strident sponsor and
advocate of secession movements in both the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia.
The State Department perceived that "sponsorship" of "new states" would be in
the American national interest and would advance "freedom and democracy" around
the globe. All the neo-imperialist catch-phrases were trotted out which were
anachronisms from the Cold War propaganda or information war. By breaking up
and dismembering states in Eastern Europe, the US was promoting "democracy",
"the will of the people", " economic prosperity", "freedom", and "fledgling
democracies". The US State Department thus became, like the US media, a partisan,
co-belligerent advocate and actor in favor of secession states. The State Department
declared war against the geopolitical status quo that was not in the US national
interest: Disintegration, secession, and the creation and emergence of "new
states" was good, maintenance of the status quo was bad. Needless to say, this
support was highly selective and was based on whether it advanced US political,
military, or commercial interests. An independent and free Palestinian state
was not supported, Palestinian statehood and freedom were not supported. Likewise,
Kurdish autonomy or independence was not supported in Turkey, a NATO member.
An independent Corsica and independent Basque state were opposed because France
and Spain respectively were NATO members. The State Department embarked on a
program to unconditionally support and back the secession movements in the Soviet
Union and Yugoslavia because those nations were not allies, client states, or
members of NATO, they were in short, states with adverse interests to those
of the US. Needless to say, such reckless and irresponsible actions resulted
in bloody and entangled civil wars which have not been resolved but have resulted
in Vietnam-style quagmires for the US.
The civil war in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was
caused and maintained by three principal actors; 1) public relations firms;
2) the US media; and, 3) the US State Department. The origins and causes of
the inherent ethnic, political, and religious conflicts and antagonisms in Bosnia
were ultimately caused by the mutually exclusive national and political agendas
of the three Bosnian factions: the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Muslims, and the
Bosnian Croats, all Slavic and all speaking Serbo-Croatian, but all divided
by religion, by culture, and differing national visions. The Bosnian Muslims
sought to secede from Yugoslavia but yet to maintain Bosnian borders and the
political structure as it had existed in the Yugoslav federation. That is, the
Muslims sought an unrealistic and uncompromising maximalist position, an all
or nothing approach, they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. The Bosnian
Serbs perceived that the destruction of the Yugoslav federation would necessarily
result in the destruction of what it maintained and instituted, the Bosnian
Republic, Bosnia-Herzegovina. If Yugoslavia was destroyed, then the internal
borders that Yugoslavia created would be destroyed. The so-called internationally
community de-recognized Yugoslavia but recognized arbitrarily the internal borders
created by Yugoslavia. In short, to establish Bosnia as an international entity
there would have to be bilateral agreement between Yugoslavia and a successor
state, Bosnia. But this was precisely what Germany and the US sought to prevent,
advocating instead unilateral and unconditional recognition of the internal
borders of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was handed a fait accompli. The Bosnian Croats
wanted first to detach Bosnia from the Yugoslav federation and then to create
their own Croat mini-state, Herceg-Bosna, which would unite with Croatia. These
three mutually exclusive and antagonistic agendas were at the root of the conflict
and the crisis. Civil war, however, was not inevitable. Bismarck called politics
the "art of the possible". But no diplomacy was apparent. There were no discussions,
negotiations, or agreements. Instead, Germany and the US supported unilateral
recognition. Germany and the US presented a fait accompli instead of diplomacy.
Germany and the US did nothing to prevent a civil war but in fact did everything
to encourage and foster it. With the absence of diplomacy or a political agreement,
the three Bosnian groups resorted to what Karl von Clausewitz called "politics
by other means", war. The actions and policies of the US State Department, public
relations firms hired by the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Albanians and financed
by radical and militant Islamic states, and the US media were the direct cause
of the civil war which followed and which continued from 1992 to 1995 greatly
contributed to sustaining and exacerbating that war. The key actions and policies
of these three key actors will be examined and analyzed in turn.
Propaganda has only one object, to conquer the masses…
You can make a man believe anything if you tell it to him in the right way.
---Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda
Even before the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia erupted in 1991, the Bosnian
Muslims, Croats, and Kosovo Albanians had hired prominent American public relations
firms and key US member of Congress and the Senate, such as Joe Biden, Robert
Dole, and George Mitchell., to lobby for and to advocate their political agendas
and national programs. These public relations firms, primarily Ruder Finn and
Hill & Knowlton, Inc., of Washington, D.C., were highly successful and effective.
Of course, they were successful and effective because the US government wanted
them to be. In short, there was a symbiotic relationship between the US government
and the public relations firms, just as there is a symbiotic relationship between
the US government and CNN and the other news networks. It is difficult to determine
where one ends and the other begins.
The precedence for a public relations war or infowar in the former Yugoslavia
was established with the Persian Gulf War, although the same or similar paradigm
was followed earlier in the Panama and Grenada "wars" during the 1980s. In the
Gulf War, US public relations firms, particularly Hill & Knowlton, achieved
spectacular results, which diplomats and statesmen from around the globe were
quick to pick up. Image was everything. The following famous example from the
1991 Persian Gulf War exemplified this point.
Hill & Knowlton, the public relations firm hired by the Bosnian Muslims
and Croats, had earlier as clients the Kuwaiti government. Kuwait retained the
services of the firm to garner public support in the US which would induce the
US to militarily intervene against Iraq. Hill & Knowlton thus deserves credit
for initiating the "atrocity stories" which became so common and routine during
the Bosnian civil war and the Kosovo conflict, but which in fact have a much
longer history. William Randolph Hearst induced the US to wage war against Spain
by sensationalizing "Cuban atrocities" in his newspapers. During World War I,
the Allies scored massive propaganda victories by reporting on German or "Hun
atrocities". Before invading Poland in September, 1939, Adolf Hitler harangued
against "Polish atrocities committed against the German minority" and the unprovoked
attack by Poland against the Gleiwitz radio station by Polish troops. Before
the US invasion of Haiti in 1994, President Bill Clinton distributed "atrocity
photos" allegedly committed by the Haitian regime. The atrocity stories were
proven to be effective in arousing public opinion.
Hassan el-Ebraheem, a former education minister in the Kuwaiti government and
a member of the Kuwaiti elite who had studied at Indiana University and understood
the "American way of thinking" hired Hill & Knowlton shortly after he became
the president of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait organization was formed in Washington,
DC. The Hill & Knowlton propaganda campaign cost the Kuwaiti government
$10.8 million but it was money well spent. Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado, a former member
of the US Information Agency, organized the propaganda campaign for Kuwait,
handing out tens of thousands of "Free Kuwait" bumper stickers and T-shirts,
and media press kits. She organized a national day of prayer for Kuwait by US
churches, established a "Kuwait Information Day" on 20 US college campuses,
and convinced 13 state governors to declare a national Free Kuwait Day. But
to be effective, as Adolf Hitler and Edward Bernays noted, the propaganda theme
must appeal to the emotional drives of the masses. El-Ebraheem noted that the
"popular psychology" of the US mentality was based on "standing for the underdog
and trying to stand for justice"., unless that underdog happened to be Palestinians
or Kurds or Basques or Corsicans, that is, unless the US government found that
"underdog" was hostile to American interests. The first axiom of all propaganda
is: Atrocities and massacres are an essential element of all propaganda meant
to lead to war or intervention. The difficulty was that there were no atrocities
that could be presented. Hill & Knowlton then manufactured or fabricated
an atrocity, the now famous Iraqi incubator hoax.
The master stroke of Hill & Knowlton preceding the Persian Gulf War was
their presentation of the incubator atrocity. The PR firm presented an anonymous
15 year old Kuwaiti girl before the US Human Rights Caucus chaired by California
Democratic congressman Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter. In tearful
testimony, she related forcefully and extensively how she "saw the Iraqi soldiers
come into the hospital" and "took the babies out of the incubators … and left
the babies on the cold floor to die." She thus testified that she had personally
witnessed the deaths of 15 Kuwaiti children when the Iraqi "aggressors" seized
the hospital. President George Bush cited this "atrocity" eight times in his
television conferences to justify war and US public opinion was swayed against
Iraq. Later, it was revealed that the girl was in fact, Nayirah al-Sabah, the
daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, Saud al-Sabah. She resided in
Washington, DC, and did not personally witness any of the events. She had purposefully
and consciously lied to a US Caucus. But as John R. MacArthur has pointed out
in Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, lying under oath
before a US congressional committee is illegal and a crime. Lying before a Human
Rights Caucus, however, is technically not illegal and is therefore not a crime.
Tom Lantos, a Hungarian Jew immigrant to the US who still speaks with a Hungarian
accent, admitted that he knew of Nayirah al-Sabah’s true identity but withheld
it from the media. Lantos was the mastermind behind the incubator hoax. Lantos
would figure prominently in the later anti-Serbian propaganda during the breakup
of Yugoslavia and during the Bosnian civil war. These activities by Lantos point
out the contradictions in his background. Lantos fled the Holocaust in Hungary
to escape to the US where he would engage in activities against Orthodox Serbs
that were identical to the Nazi activities against European Jews. The atrocity
which Lantos staged was pure sham. But it worked. But how did the incubator
hoax originate? What was its genesis?
The first reference to the incubator story was in the British newspaper, the
London Daily Telegraph on September 5, 1990. Yahya al-Sumait, an exiled Kuwaiti
minister of housing, reported to the paper that "babies in the premature unit
of one hospital had been removed from their incubators so that these, too, could
be carried off." On September 7, the Los Angeles Times ran a Reuters story in
which a San Francisco resident named "Cindy" along with her companion "Rudi"
witnessed "atrocities" committed by Iraqi troops while Cindy and Rudi in a group
of 171 Americans were evacuated from Kuwait: "Iraqis are … taking hospital equipment,
babies out of incubators. Life-support systems are turned off …The Iraqis are
beating Kuwaitis … cutting their ears off if they are caught resisting." As
John MacArthur noted, one of the primary axioms in journalism is to give full,
complete names of sources. In this instance, only the name "Cindy" was adequate
as a source to give hearsay testimony. This should tip one off immediately that
this "atrocity" story is a plant and that it is being used in a propaganda or
PR campaign. But in US journalism, once a planted story supports the government
policy or agenda, regardless of whether it is true or false, there is constant
repetition in a standardized way, "it gets repeated over and over again." This
is an example of planting. Hill & Knowlton planted the incubator story and
then the US media did the rest. This propaganda technique is useful because
it doesn’t cost Hill & Knowlton a penny once the media picks it up. Is the
US an open and free society? Who are these hidden persuaders? Is the incubator
atrocity hoax an example of freedom of speech or of the press in America?
These same public relations firms, which were so successful in the Persian
Gulf War, brought their campaigns of disinformation and propaganda to the civil
wars in Bosnia, Krajina, and Kosovo. Wars come and go but the propaganda techniques
remain constant. The US PR firm Ruder Finn Global Affairs in Washington, DC,
admitted it was retained by the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Kosovo Albanians
to wage a public relations war against the Serbs during the conflicts in Yugoslavia.
According to a Washington newsletter that lists the activities of US PR firms,
in 1993, Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Kosovo Albanian separatists paid Ruder
Finn a combined fee of over $320,000 for only six months of work. The policies
and techniques of Ruder Finn are as follows: Frequency is not crucial in information
dissemination, but timing and strategic targeting are. The right persons must
be reached at the right time. The first assertion is what actually causes results.
Moreover, all denials are entirely ineffective. Propaganda operates at the subconscious
level and at the sensory perception level. Once we see something we cannot unsee
it. This is why images are so important. Ruder Finn public relations personnel
understand the techniques of propaganda perfectly.
James Harff, who was the director of the Balkan public relations campaign for
Ruder Finn, explained his methods in an interview he gave to Jacques Merlino
of French TV2, which appeared in Merlino’s seminal analysis of the propaganda
campaign in the Bosnian conflict, Les verites Yougoslaves ne sont pas toutes
bonnes a dire (1993):
It is very simple. A card-index, computer and fax machine. Voila! The basic
work related tools of ours. It is not frequency that counts but the capacity
to intervene at the right moment and to reach the right persons. It is the
first assertion that really counts. All denials are entirely ineffective.
Between June and September, 1992, Ruder Finn organized the following PR activities
on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims: 30 press group meetings were organized, 13
exclusive items of information were disseminated, 37 last-minute faxes, and
17 official letters and 8 official reports were passed. Rudder Finn organized
several meetings between the Bosnian Muslim representatives and then Vice-Presidential
candidate Al Gore and with Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, an active
sponsor of the Croat and Bosnian Muslim agendas, and with 10 influential senators,
such as Robert Dole and George Mitchell. The staff made 48 telephone calls to
members of the White House staff, 20 calls to senators and almost 100 calls
to journalists, news anchors, and other influential media representatives. Harff
explained that "our craft consists of disseminating information, to circulate
it as fast as possible so that those favoring our cause are the first to be
expressed." He insisted that his job was not to "verify" information but to
only engage in the "circulation of information favorable to us." This could
serve as a concise definition of propaganda. Is propaganda appropriate in a
democracy and a free and open society? Since the time of Hearst and Edward Bernays,
the role of propaganda in American society has been examined and essentially
accepted as appropriate. The American understanding of propaganda in US society
is problematic, self-delusional, hypocritical, and complex. Propaganda, however,
has been, under different names, accepted as necessary in even a democratic
society. P.T. Barnum admonished that "there is a sucker born every minute".
In a capitalist, consumer-oriented society such as the US, commercial propaganda
is essential and fundamental. Propaganda is thus accepted, especially if the
ends justify the means. That is, it benefits the government and thereby the
national interest. As early as 1951, Marshall McLuhan, in The Mechanical Bride:
The Folklore of Industrial Man, noted:
Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual
minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public
mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object
now. And to generate heat not light is the intention. To keep everybody in
the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of
many ads and much entertainment alike.
The goal of commercial propaganda, advertising, marketing, promotion, is to
create a "condition of helplessness" in order to sell products and goods. Political
propaganda sells the programs or policies of the government. McLuhan saw that
modern war had become infowar, or information war, as earlier William Randolph
Hearst had shown. In The Medium is the Massage (1967), McLuhan noted
that "the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless. Real, total war
has become information war." So Hill & Knowlton and Ruder Finn are not an
anomaly or some sort of incongruity in US society but part of the overall environment
of US society. They make up our medium, our environment. The environment, the
medium, "as a processor of information is propaganda." So newspapers, television
reporters, public relations firms, are the messengers only. It is futile to
attack them. McLuhan gives the analogy of a hot dog vendor at a ballpark. It
is futile to attack him about the losing record of the home team. Likewise,
it is futile to attack the media and public relations firms for what the government
is doing. But the government is made up of persons we as citizens have chosen
to speak for us and represent us, speaking and acting on our behalf. Propaganda
reveals more about the propagandist than it does about the target. Propaganda
reveals the "popular psychology" of the propagandist and to what Hitler called
the "emotional ideas of the masses" and what Bernays called "the fundamental
motivations of the interested publics." What were the emotional ideas of the
masses and fundamental motivations of the interested publics which Ruder Finn
relied upon in its propaganda war against the Orthodox Serbs?
Ruder Finn considered its greatest propaganda success in the Bosnian civil
war was to have succeeded in moving the Jewish opinion on the side of the Bosnian
Muslims, Croats, and Kosovo Albanian separatists. The Jewish-American population
of the US is approximately 1% of the total. Why is the Jewish-American audience
or demographic the key "interested public"? Ruder Finn understood that getting
Jews to support the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Albanians would be a difficult,
delicate, and arduous task because all three of its clients had Nazi-fascist
pasts and had participated in the genocide and extermination of over 60,000
Yugoslav Jews during World War II, a time when Serbs protected and rescued Jews.
Moreover, Iranian-backed and supported Muslim Bosnia was no friend of Israel
or of Zionism. Franjo Tudjman’s neo-fascist and neo-Ustasha Croatia was likewise
no friend of the Jews, nor of Israel, nor of global Zionism. Kosovo Albanians
likewise had interests which were inimical to the state of Israel, Zionism,
and Jewish interests globally. Moreover, Ossama bin Laden’s mujahedeen forces
were a part of the Bosnian Army and fought during the civil war against Orthodox
Serbs. Ossama bin Laden is hardly a friend of Israel or Jewish Zionist goals.
During World War II, the Bosnian Muslims had formed two Nazi SS Divisions, the
13th Waffen SS Gebirgs Division der SS Handzar/Handschar and the
23rd Waffen SS Division Kama. Bosnian Muslims had destroyed the Jewish
Sephardic synagogue in Sarajevo in 1941 and had shown that they supported the
Final Solution of the Jewish Problem endorsed by their mentor and ally, Heinrich
Himmler. Himmler also was active with Kosovo Albanians, supporting the creation
of a Greater Albania, he sought to create two Kosovar Albanian Nazi SS Divisions.
Himmler created one, the 21st Waffen Gebirgs Division der SS Skanderbeg
made up mostly of Kosovo Albanians who rounded up the Jews of Kosovo for the
Nazis, who later killed these Kosovo Jews in the Nazi concentration camps. At
the Croat concentration camp of Jasenovac, approximately 60,000 Yugoslav Jews
were exterminated by the Croatian Ustashi, a fanatical Roman Catholic nationalist
organization. Following World War II, many of the Bosnian Muslim troops in the
Handzar SS Division fled to the Arab-Muslim world to escape prosecution for
war crimes. Instead, these former members of the Handzar Division became Bosnian
Muslim volunteers in the Arab armies which fought against the Jews in then Palestine
who sought to create the state of Israel. Why should Jews support these clients?
Moreover, while the Vatican was the first to recognize the independence of Croatia
in 1991 followed by Germany, Israel refused to recognize Croatia because the
Croats had murdered 60,000 Yugoslav Jews during World War II and because the
then President of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, was regarded by Israeli diplomats
as being anti-Semitic. Tudjman accused the Israeli government of conducting
a genocide against Palestinian Muslims and of being Judeo-Nazis in his book
The Wasteland of Historical Reality (1989), a book oddly not translated
into English and ignored in the West. Why? In his book, Tudjman stated that
6 million Jews did not die in the Holocaust, that 900,000 Jews actually died
during the Holocaust. Moreover, he argued that the Jews had committed the first
genocide in history when they massacred the original inhabitants to form what
is now Israel. Tudjman also publicly thanked God that his wife was neither a
Serb nor a Jew. Alija Izebetgovic had published The Islamic Declaration
in 1970 which outlined his Muslim nationalist goals for Bosnia. Izetbegovic
argued for a Muslim Bosnia for Muslims and that Christians and other minorities
should be marginalized. He left no doubt that Bosnia was to be a Muslim state
and that Christians had no place in it. This book too remained untranslated
and was ignored by the intellectual and scholarly elites in the US. Remarkably,
even Nobel Laureate Ivo Andric, who was a Bosnian and in fact was the most famous
Bosnian, was ignored and his works relegated to the junk heap. Even a Nobel
Prize winner was not good enough for the intellectual elites, who instead were
promoting and espousing such books as Roy Gutman’s Eyewitness to Genocide,
Zlata’s Diary about the Bosnian Muslim Ann Frank, using the memory of
Ann Frank for Muslim propaganda purposes, Noel Malcolm’s Bosnia: A Short
History. In short, the intellectual elites were rewriting the history of
the Balkans, or indeed, writing their own history.
So Ruder Finn knew that the pasts of Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo were marked
by a "real and cruel anti-Semitism" by their clients, the Croats, Bosnian Muslims,
and Albanians. The Orthodox Serbs had been the only ones who have protected
and rescued Jews. Harff discussed the problem as follows:
The game was extremely delicate … Because President Tudjman was too imprudent
in his book … A reading of his texts could find him guilty of anti-Semitism…
President Izetbegovic grounded himself too firmly in the quest for a Muslim
fundamentalist state in Bosnia. Moreover, the past of Croatia and Bosnia was
marked by a very real and cruel anti-Semitism … Several tens of thousands
of Jews perished in Croatian camps.
There was thus considerable hostility and antipathy towards the Bosnian Muslims,
Albanians, and Croats in Jewish intellectual circles and organizations. The
anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic history and policies of its clients, the Bosnian
Muslims, Croats, and Kosovar Albanians, was known to the Ruder Finn firm. The
president of Ruder Finn, David Finn, is Jewish and has stated that through its
PR activities, "I am helping to bring about historical truth." It is difficult
to comprehend how a PR firm through propaganda paid for and bought by clients
can "bring about historical truth". Using the Holocaust to manufacture bigotry
and racism and hatred against an entire people, the Orthodox Serbs, can hardly
be regarded as ethical or morally justified. Ruder Finn was nothing but a "hate
group" manipulating the Holocaust to foment hatred and bigotry against an entire
people. Propaganda is meant to dehumanize a target group so that they can be
killed. Propaganda is ultimately meant to lead to the killing or murder of those
the propaganda targets. And, indeed, Rudder Finn propaganda was used by the
US government and media to ethnically cleanse a quarter of a million Krajina
Serbs in 1995 and was used to justify the bombing of the Bosnian Serb forces.
In 1999, propaganda was used to justify the "strategic bombing" of Belgrade,
Novi Sad, Pristina, Nis, Cacak, and other targets in Serbia, killing Serbian
civilians and military personnel alike. Is such an unethical and immoral use
and misuse of the Holocaust to justify the manufacture of racism and bigotry
against an entire ethnic group appropriate in an open and free society, a democracy?
Ruder Finn achieved its brilliant propaganda master stroke with the so-called
Bosnia concentration camp stories which were featured from August 2 to 5, 1992
in New York Newsday. Once these "concentration camp" stories broke, Ruder Finn
staff immediately convened three major Jewish organizations: the American-Jewish
Congress, the American-Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League (which
is concerned with the defamation of only Jews and not others). The firm further
suggested that these Jewish groups print an insert in the New York times and
that they organize a protest in front of the United Nations building. Harff
described the spectacular propaganda effects as follows:
The engagement of Jewish organizations on the side of the Muslims was a super
poker play. We were able to associate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public
opinion. No one could understand what was going on in the former Yugoslavia.
The vast majority of Americans wondered in which African country to locate
Bosnia itself. In a single shot we were able to offer a simple story, a history
of the good and the bad guys … We have won … targeting the Jewish audience,
the right target. The emotional charge was so powerful that no one could go
against it … We really batted a thousand in full!
Propaganda reveals more about the propagandist than it does about the target.
Harff analogizes the fomenting of racial hatred against an entire people and
religion to a poker game and to a batting average in baseball. He nonchalantly
reveals how he exploited and manipulated the Jewish Holocaust for paying clients
to stir up hatred and racist bigotry against an entire people so that the US
government would be able to kill and murder that people so castigated by the
Ruder Finn propaganda machine. Fomenting racist hysteria for the object of killing
and inducing military intervention is analogized to a card game and a baseball
game, it is merely a game. But not even Babe Ruth "batted a thousand in full!"
Can these results be legitimate?
The association of the Bosnian Serbs with the Nazis in public opinion thus
resulted in a tremendous propaganda success for Ruder Finn. Harff explained
that "it was not long before there was a clear change in the press language
as emotional terms like ethnic cleansing and concentration camps arrived, all
evoking Nazi Germany, the gas chambers at Auschwitz." The firm understood that
the majority of Americans lacked any meaningful understanding of the conflict
in Bosnia. The creation of a bad guys and good guys scenario was crucial in
their success. Targeting the Jewish audience created a powerful emotional surge
which could not be resisted or challenged without accusations of anti-Semitism,
revisionism, and insensitivity to the Holocaust. Moreover, while Jews make up
approximately 1% of the US population, they are represented disproportionately
at the US State Department, at the White House, and in the President Bill Clinton
Administration. Jews are also disproportionately represented in the mass media,
the movie industry, and newspapers and magazines. The Israel lobby and the Zionist
objectives of many Jewish-American organizations based in New York are powerful
in the intellectual life of the US. All James Harff and David Finn had to do
was to spin doctor the events in the former Yugoslavia as inimical to Jewish
interests, as inimical to the powerful Israel lobby, and adverse to global Zionist
interests and objectives, and showing irreverence towards the Holocaust. The
propaganda terminology of the Bosnian civil war was almost exclusively derived
from World War II and Holocaust terms: "genocide", "ethnic cleansing", "concentration
camps", "refugees", "railroad wagon cars", "atrocities", "massacres", "mass
graves", "war crimes", "war crimes tribunal", Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan
Milosevic equated with Adolf Hitler. A fundamental tenet off all propaganda
is the moral superiority of the propagandist.
Like the Kuwaiti incubator hoax of the Persian Gulf War, the Bosnian concentration
camp stories were later exposed to be untrue and spurious. The British news
network ITN had actually filmed from inside the barbed wire which enclosed not
Bosnian Muslim inmates but a tool shed. This was "The Picture that Fooled the
World" but like the earlier Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, it had
served its propaganda purpose. For propaganda has a short life-span. Once the
purpose of the propaganda is achieved, then the propaganda material is relegated
to the junk heap. Who can remember the last time the US media covered Sarajevo
or Bosnia. At one time, Bosnia is the top news story in the world. Once the
propaganda had achieved its objectives, Bosnia disappeared from news coverage
entirely as if it had never existed. In fact, it was later disclosed that all
three sides, the Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, and Bosnian Croats, had all
set up detention camps and centers, which were all later disbanded. The concentration
camp story was thus pure sham. The deception was, nevertheless, greatly successful.
The public relations firms hired by the Bosnian Muslims and Croats and Kosovo
Albanians were thus crucial in molding public opinion against the Serbian people
through a massive propaganda and disinformation campaign.
The US State Department sought to dismember Yugoslavia along the same lines
as the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. The State Department was the overseer
of the dismemberment and the dismantling of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia
was anticipated as the next victim. The US State Department became an active
and vociferous sponsor of "new states" and nations and of secession movements
in countries which were perceived as hostile to American geopolitical interests.
The new and independent state of Palestine, however, was not supported or sponsored,
nor was a Kurdish state out of NATO member Turkey, nor a Corsican state out
of NATO member France, nor a Basque state out of NATO member Spain. The Soviet
Union were perceived as "evil empires" or "artificial states" or "impossible
countries", "lands of demons" which had to be dismantled and its constituent
parts given "freedom" and "democracy" and "independence". The US State Department
thus obviously was sponsoring secession movements selectively and with regard
to whether such secession would be in the interests of the US. Moreover, the
new Balkan states, such as Bosnian and Herzegovina, were erroneously equated
with the "captive" Baltic states. As a sponsor of "new states", the US would
thereby gain in global geopolitical power and influence and stature. New markets
and new spheres of influence would be opened up in a region hitherto denied
to US neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism. By dividing and conquering potentially
powerful unified potential enemies, such policies would greatly contribute to
advancing American political, military, and commercial interests in the Balkans.
The Balkans were ripe for picking. The benefits of such a policy were evident
with regard to the breakup of the Soviet Union, the principal antagonist and
competitor to the United States. Such a policy was at first not considered beneficial
with regard to Yugoslavia, where vital American national interests were not
at stake. Thus, at first, the US State Department policy under President George
Bush Administration was to maintain the Yugoslav federation. Intense diplomatic
pressure from the resurgent, post-Maastricht Germany, which was sponsoring the
break-up of Yugoslavia, however, led to the recognition of Slovenia, Croatia,
and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Vatican was the first country to recognize Croatia,
followed by Germany, and then, under intense German pressure, the rest of the
Western European states followed. The German fait accompli forced the US to
follow suit and to recognize these seceding republics and to embark on a disastrous
course in Bosnia.
Once the dismemberment of the 72 year old state of Yugoslavia was an accomplished
fact due to the intense diplomatic efforts of Germany, US policy makers embarked
upon a policy to recruit the secessionist "new states" of the former Yugoslavia
as client states. The US sought to recognize and sponsor new states which would
be dependent upon the US and which would act as bulwarks against the dominant
regional power in the region whose interests were adverse to those of the US,
a neo-colonialist and neo-imperialist "balance of power" theory. With regard
to the former Soviet Union, the major power or successor state to be contained
and neutralized was Russia; with the former Yugoslavia, the power was Serbia.
US policy makers had a complex and delicate problem with the containment of
Russia, which US policy makers sought to contain but not to unduly antagonize
because Russia was still a threat to American interests and still remained a
threat to American security. Thus, American policy makers had to walk a fine
line with regard to Russia. Full NATO membership to former Warsaw Pact nations
was postponed by the creation of the Partnership for Peace program, which would
temporarily postpone the inevitable and give Boris Yeltsin a face saving measure
at home. Such a delicate and intricate high wire act, however, was neither necessary
nor desired with regard to Serbia. Serbia was not a threat to USA security and
was not vital to American interests. Serbia, indeed, presented the sole obstacle
to NATO expansion in the Balkans. Moreover, Serbia rejected the status of a
satellite or puppet state of the US. Serbia was pursuing an independent course.
This did not fit the script for the New World Order. Initially, Serbia was seen
as another Iraq, in other words, Serbia was expendable as serving no useful
purpose to US interests and in fact having interests inimical to those of the
US. The US State Department perceived the "new states" of Bosnia and Croatia
as ideal for sponsorship, they would be pliant "Balkan banana republics" and
"fledgling democracies".
Bosnia met all the State Department criteria for US sponsorship: 1) the Bosnian
Muslim dominated and Muslim-controlled government for be dependent upon the
US for defense, development, and viability; 2) a Bosnian Muslim-dominated Bosnia
would act as a bulward against the independent Serbian state, a balance of power
would emerge; and, 3) American geopolitical interests would be advanced because
political, military, and commercial influence and markets would be gained in
the Balkan region, which was formerly outside the American sphere of influence,
and a potential enemy would be neutralized. Opening markets suitable for exploitation
by US commercial interests had always guided US neo-imperialism, "globalism".
The US Ambassador to former Yugoslavia, the self-styled "last ambassador", Warren
Zimmermann, admitted that American policy in Bosnia was based on the prevention
of the Serbian population of Bosnia from exercising its inherent right to self-determination.
With regard to the Bosnian Serb population, the US policy was anti-democratic
and sought to defeat the popular will of the masses. Zimmermann opposed Bosnian
Serb autonomy and self-rule in Bosnia and instead rushed to recognize Bosnia
and thus "internationalizing the conflict", which meant preventing the Serbian
population from deciding its own national fate and making a mockery of democracy
which the US espoused for propaganda purposes. The propaganda ploy did not fool
anyone. The war was on. Zimmermann explained this anti-Serbian and anti-democratic
policy in the New York Times, August 29, 1993:
Our view was that we might be able to head off a Serbian power grab by internationalizing
the problem. Our hope was the Serbs would hold off if it was clear Bosnia
had the recognition of Western countries. It turned out we were wrong.
Many innocent people would pay with their lives in the former Yugoslavia for
that mistake. Zimmermann would get a book of it, a memoir recounting his disastrous
and inane diplomatic efforts.
The State Department goals were thus to sponsor a weak Bosnian Muslim-ruled
and Muslim-dominated Bosnia (although Muslims were a minority to the Christian---Serbian
and Croatian---majority) dependent upon the US for security, economic development,
and political viability, to contain and neutralize the dominant independent
power in the region, Serbia, create a "balance of power", and thereby to advance
American interests with this increase in influence and control and the opening
of new markets ripe for exploitation, "economic globalism", which the ill-fated
Ron Brown mission in 1996 sought to advance. A further goal was to prevent a
bad precedent or example from being set for the new states or fledgling democracies
of the former Soviet Union. By these policies, the US State Department denied
the Serbian population of Bosnia their inherent right to self-determination
and self-rule and autonomy. Why was not a referendum supported which would allow
the population of Bosnia to democratically decide its own national future? Why
does the US support such a referendum for Kosovo Albanians but not for Bosnian
Serbs or Krajina Serbs? The civil war which followed was then inevitable but
due mainly on disastrous and misguided US policies which made it so.
The 1992 Lisbon Agreement between the three ethnic factions in Bosnia was a
political settlement of the crisis which prevented a civil war. Warren Zimmermann
has admitted, however, that he persuaded the Bosnian Muslim political leaders,
Alija Izetbegovic and Ejup Ganic, to renounce the Lisbon Agreement, where the
three factions agreed to make Bosnia a republic divided into three ethnic regions
associated in a confederation, much like the Swiss confederation made up of
German, French, and Italian cantons. Swiss-like cantonization was a viable and
realistic compromise solution to the Bosnia conflict and was a model that may
have worked for all of former Yugoslavia. This was the only realistic and practical
solution which would be fair to all the ethnic minorities of the former Yugoslavia
who lost any safeguards once the multi-ethnic Yugoslavia was dismembered into
ethnically homogenous national states. Germany and the US State Department would
have nothing to do with any compromises or safeguards for ethnic minorities
such as the Krajina Serbs in Croatia. Former UN commander in Bosnia, Canadian
general Lewis MacKenzie, conceded that the Bosnia disaster resulted due to "premature
recognition" and by the absence of any agreement safeguarding ethnic minorities.
The US State Department policy was to encourage the Bosnian Muslim leaders to
break with the proposed partition plan, to unilaterally and to unconditionally
reject and to renounce the Lisbon Agreement. A high ranking State Department
official, "who asked not to be identified", admitted in the August 29, 1993
New York Times that the "policy was to encourage Izetbegovic to break with the
partition plan." He stated that "we let it be known we would support his Government
in the United Nations if they got into trouble." Richard Johnson, the Yugoslav
desk officer at the State department stated that James Baker, the Secretary
of State, "told the Europeans to stop pushing ethnic cantonization of Bosnia."
He further maintained that "we pressed the Europeans to move forward on recognition.
Recognition soon followed and the civil war in Bosnia erupted and spread throughout
the republic. Henry Kissinger noted that premature recognition "called into
being a civil war, not a country." In Balkan Tragedy, Susan L. Woodward
concluded that "the purpose of recognition … was not to end violence but … to
assert power and leadership within the Euro-Atlantic alliance …so that that
the United States could join the allies and respond to its Croatian lobby."
Negotiator David Owen, former US NATO commander Charles G. Boyd, and George
Kenney of the State Department admitted that recognition had been premature
and provocative and had led to the civil war. The evidence shows clearly the
complicity of the US State Department in causing and unleashing the civil war
in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic warned that
by abandoning the Lisbon Agreement and giving the Bosnian Muslims the green
light to wage a civil war would result in the needless loss of life and in wanton
destruction, a civil war would result in ‘hundreds of thousand dead and hundreds
of towns destroyed'. The US State Department has never accepted responsibility
for its complicity and guilt in causing the Bosnian civil war.
At first the claims of the propaganda were so impudent that
people thought it insane;
later, it got on people’s nerves; and in the end, it was believed…
The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to
a small one.
---Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1924
The media, particularly the US media, perpetuated and, indeed, greatly exacerbated
the Bosnian Civil War of 1992-1995. In the Bosnian civil war, as journalist
Peter Brock noted in "Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press" in Foreign Policy,
the US media took on a stridently active advocacy and partisan and combatant
role in the conflict, a civil war where each ethnic group was asserting its
own interests. For the US media, the civil war became an ideological crusade
against the Serbian Orthodox population of Bosnia, Krajina, Kosovo, and Serbia,
that is, a propaganda or information war. The US media did not merely report
on the war but in fact contributed deleteriously to its progress by distorting,
falsifying, manipulating, and manufacturing information and facts. Such an information
war against a people and nation was in previous conflicts termed "war propaganda",
reporting that was consciously biased and partisan, reporting organized by governments
to induce military intervention. They key question is: Was this media reporting,
the planned, organized, systematic, and orchestrated information or propaganda
war against the Serbian Orthodox people merely a product of the whims and wishes
of lowly journalists, newspaper editors, news networks, and the news media?
That is to say, why this propaganda war merely a random and arbitrary decision
and action of the US media, or was the US government behind it, or US public
relations firms responsible? The media in any country invariably and ineluctably
acts on behalf of the government and society which sent it? Public relations
firms act to promote the interests of the government. The US media infowar against
the Orthodox Serbian population was planned and organized solely by the US government.
The media are only the messengers.
The propaganda war against the Serbian people was begun and organized initially
by the newly united Germany in July, 1991, on behalf of its new clients, Roman
Catholic Croatia and Slovenia. The editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
newspaper, Johann Reismuller, attacked the Serbian Orthodox as "Yugo-Serbs",
"military Bolsheviks", and that Orthodox Serbs had "no place in the European
Community", Roman Catholic Europe, "enlightened Roman Christendom" of which
Germany and her clients were members. Joschka Fischer of the German Green Party
which was committed to pacifism and was antiwar, argued that Germany should
military intervene against the Serbs to "combat Auschwitz", that is, that Germany
should go to war against the Orthodox Serbian population, which was equated
to Nazi Germany, to prevent the genocide against Croats and Bosnian Muslims.
The German racism and bigotry pre-dated Hitler and was of pre-Nazi origin, deriving
from the Austro-German nationalism of World War I when the slogan "Serbien muss
sterben!" (Serbia must die!) guided German policy. Germany violated the Helsinki
Agreement in pushing for the unilateral, unconditional, and un-negotiated "recognition"
of Slovenia and Croatia. The Helsinki Agreement pledged signatories to respect
"the territorial integrity" of member states such as Yugoslavia. But even before
German recognition, another European state recognized Roman Catholic Croatia:
the Vatican. The Vatican was the first state to recognize Croatia, a controversial
action in that a religious body had taken a political step which violated international
law and agreements. Why did the Vatican and a resurgent and nationalist Germany
prematurely and unilaterally rush to recognize and destroy Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic,
democratic state, and a member of the United Nations? The motivations were ideological
in nature.
Germany and the Vatican had waged war against Serbia and Yugoslavia throughout
the twentieth century. The Vatican, in fact, sanctioned and authorized the Austro-German
war against Serbia in 1914, ushering in the Great War. Both the Vatican and
Germany were excluded from the Balkans and Eastern Europe, where they sought
to reassert their influence and control. Serbia was an obstacle in their way.
Being Orthodox, Serbia was associated with Russia, which was a major antagonist
of Germany and the Vatican. Serbia would play the role of a surrogate for Russia
and be a whipping boy or straw man target for Germany and the Vatican, who sought
to destroy or weaken Russia by destroying Serbia. Germany and the Vatican could
not antagonize Russia which remained a powerful nation, but Serbia could function
as a surrogate to reassert their influence. The German and Vatican policies
led to a disastrous and humiliating military defeat for its client Croatia,
where a civil war began between Croats and Serbs within the Croat Republic.
Peace, however, was not a goal. Both the Vatican and Germany sought war, if
necessary, to achieve their objectives in the Balkans.
The US initially pursued a cautious policy in the Balkans and was seeking to
negotiate with Belgrade over the secession of the republics. Secretary of State
James Baker at first pursued such a course. But intense German pressure and
lobbying and following the Maastricht Agreement, the US began pursuing a policy
similar to that of the Vatican and Germany with regard to recognition. The US
ambassador to Yugoslavia, the self-styled "last ambassador to Yugoslavia", Warren
Zimmermann, stated this policy as follows: "We are aiming for a dissolution
of Yugoslavia into independent states peacefully." He told Bosnian Muslim leaders
to reject the Lisbon Agreement and to rely upon the US for help. James Baker
admitted that he told Margaret Tutweiler to brief the US press corps and media
and to inform them on what policy line they should take. The propaganda war
against Orthodox Serbs had begun in the US. David Gompert, a former National
Security Council member, in "How to Defeat Serbia" in Foreign Affairs, explained
the propaganda campaign would consist of a "sustained economic and information
warfare against Serbia" and noted that "the power of information technology
is growing".
The US media essentially repeated the media techniques used against Iraq and
Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Successful US media experiences
in the Gulf War to a large extent explain the media posture and role in Bosnia.
In fact, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia was meticulously and carefully
modeled upon the Gulf War scenario, with the Serbs in the role of the Iraqis,
and the Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Kosovo Albanians as the Kuwaiti
victims. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, the "Butcher of the Balkans,"
a "thug", a "Hitler", was the counterpart to Saddam Hussein, the "butcher of
Baghdad", also a "thug", and remarkably, also a "Hitler". The Bosnian Muslims
were perceived in US propaganda as akin to or parallel with the Kuwaiti "victims"
of "aggression" by a foreign invading power. Anthony Lewis and the so-called
liberal media called for the bombardment of Belgrade as early as 1992, following
the pattern set with the bombing of Baghdad. No one bothered to point out the
important distinction. The analogy between Bosnia and Kuwait was perfect for
the media. In Yugoslavia, there was a civil war and that unilateral recognition
initiated by outside powers was violative of the Helsinki Accords, that is,
that recognition violated international law. Instead, the US media embarked
on rhetoric and propaganda, an infowar.
The US media was not acting randomly, arbitrarily, and of its own initiative.
The US government had planned and organized the information or propaganda war
during the Bosnian civil war. The techniques and modus operandi (MO) goes back
at least as far back as the Spanish-American War of 1898. The US government
had sought to annex Cuba at least since the 1854 Ostend Manifesto, which stated
that the US should seize Cuba if Spain refused to sell it. On July 15, 1895,
the rebel Cuban junta, directed and headquartered in New York City and led by
Tomas Estrada Palma, unilaterally proclaimed Cuba an independent state, which
was followed by revolt and civil war. The revolt was led by Jose Marti, Maximo
Gomez, Antonio Maceo, and Calisto Garcia Iniguez. The rebels were armed, supplied,
and trained by the US, as would be the Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Kosovo Albanians.
The US thus had expansionist and imperialist-colonialist goals in supporting
Cuban "independence" which was camouflaged under the smokescreen of yellow journalism
and government and media propaganda. William Randolph Hearst was an early pioneer
of the concept of an infowar. He enunciated the infowar philosophy succinctly
in the phrase: "You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war." Hearst amassed
a vast media empire that included ownership of the New York Journal, the Chicago
American and Examiner, the Boston American, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping,
World Today, Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country, and Hearst International, over
28 newspapers, 18 magazines, radio stations, and a movie company. He established
a symbiotic relationship with the US government. He would furnish them their
war if they would furnish the troops to fight it. This symbiotic relationship
between the government and media would be characteristic of the Bosnian civil
war, both working hand in hand. Propaganda is not meant as Adolf Hitler noted
as "distraction for blasé gentlemen". Propaganda is directed towards
achieving a goal, military intervention, war. Hearst did not originate the American
expansionist and imperialist-colonialist policy. He was merely perpetuating
the "manifest destiny" doctrine first espoused by John L. O’Sullivan in 1845
to justify and rationalize the US annexation of Texas, which had been part of
Mexico. In short, the media was merely the mouthpiece for the government.
The goal of US propaganda or the massive infowar was to create or manufacture
an imperative for military intervention. Such intervention was difficult to
engineer because the Bosnian conflict was a civil war between three ethnic factions.
The US propaganda ploy was to re-characterize the conflict as an aggression
or military invasion of Yugoslavia against a UN recognized independent state,
Bosnia. This was merely rhetoric, however. On the ground and factually, Bosnia
had deconstructed into three ethnic factions, Bosnian Serbs, Muslims, and Croats.
And if Yugoslavia had forces in Bosnia and was providing support to the Bosnian
Serbs, Croatia had forces in Bosnia and was supplying the Bosnian Croat forces,
while Iran, Algerian, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and even Ossama bin Laden and his
mujahedeen forces were in Bosnia and supplying the Bosnian Muslims. What we
had in Bosnia was a classic, dictionary definition of a civil war. US policy,
however, was to engage in info war and to take sides against one of the combatants,
the Bosnian Serbs, which was arbitrary, partisan, biased, and not even-handed
and fair. To rationalize this military intervention against one side, a propaganda
war was needed.
In all propaganda meant to lead to war, massacres and atrocities are necessary
to create an imperative for war. In Bosnia, there were the Sarajevo Breadline
Massacre, the Markale Market Massacre I, the Markale Market Massacre II, and
the Srebrenica Massacre, described by US journalists as the largest massacre
in Europe since World War II. None of these so-called massacres were ever proven
or shown to have been perpetrated by the Bosnian Serbs. In fact, UN investigators
and peacekeepers concluded that they were deliberately staged by the Bosnian
Muslim government to create sympathy and to create in the words of UN commander
in Bosnia Michael Rose’s words, "images of war". General Rose, General Lewis
MacKenzie, David Owen, Canadian peacekeepers all recounted how they had personally
witnessed incidents where the Bosnian Muslim forces had shelled their own citizens
and had fired near hospitals to create "atrocities" for the cameras, for the
US propaganda machine. Massacres and atrocities, however, were not enough or
sufficient. Genocide and ethnic cleansing became the defining propaganda terms
for the Bosnian civil war.
The US government and media propaganda strategy was to categorize Bosnia as
a conflict where the Bosnian Serbs were committing genocide against Bosnian
Muslims through ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, rape camps, massacres, and death
camps. Journalist Roy Gutman of the sensationalistic newspaper New York Newsday
and John Burns of the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for their "ethnic
cleansing" news articles. John Burns received his Pulitzer for his interviews
with Borislav Herak, who with Srecko Damjanovic, were condemned to death for
the ethnic cleansing murders of Kasim and Asim Bleckic, two Bosnian Muslims.
In the March 1, 1997 New York Times article "Jailed Serbs’ ‘Victims’ Found Alive,
Embarrassing Bosnia" both alleged victims were found alive, Kasim Blekic was
shown raising sheep in a Sarajevo suburb. Instead, Blekic had been an ambulance
driver for the Bosnian Muslim Army during the civil war. The ethnic cleansing
stories of Burns were shown to be false and manufactured. But Burns was not
stripped of his Pulitzer Prize. The ethnic cleansing dispatches of Roy Gutman
were likewise based on innuendo, hearsay, and the information office of the
Bosnian Muslim political leadership. None of his allegations were substantiated.
He too did not have to return his Pulitzer Prize. This infowar led to the most
sensationalistic denouement to the US propaganda war, the so-called concentration
camp stories.
The propaganda strategy of accusing the Bosnian Serbs of genocide and comparing
their actions to those of the Nazis and to the events of the Holocaust necessitated
the need for US propagandists to trot out all the Worlds War II era Holocaust
analogies. For the Holocaust comparison to work, there had to be trains transporting
the victims, mass graves, war criminals, war crimes, massacres, atrocities,
cattle cars, attack on a religion and religious symbols, an international war
crimes court or tribunal, a plan of genocide, and finally, death or concentration
camps. Roy Gutman had written a story in which he called the Omarska camp in
northern Bosnia a "death camp". Penny Marshall and the British news network
ITN were sent by their editors to specifically find Serbian-run concentration
camps. Roy Gutman and John Burns had created a media feeding frenzy to find
evidence of concentration camps in Bosnia. Penny Marshall filmed refugees at
the detention camps of Omarska and Trnopolje in northern Bosnia. The refugees
were at the detention center for their own safety and to obtain food and shelter
as war refugees. But informed Marshall that they were free to move about and
could leave anytime they chose to. What Penny Marshall and her team did, however,
was to film behind a barbed wire fence that enclosed the news reporters and
not the refugees. Moreover, the refugees were not mistreated and were not starved.
But the ITN/Marshall team purposely chose a refugee that apparently suffered
from a child-hood disease that left his bones deformed and gave him an emaciated
appearance. His condition, however, was not caused by his ill-treatment at the
detention camp. But through deceptive camera angles and judicious selection
and staging, Penny Marshall was able to create what the Daily Mail called "The
Proof" and the Daily Star called "Belsen 1992: War Camp Hell Stuns the World",
the Daily Mirror called it "Belsen 92: The Picture that Shames the World", proof
of concentration camps in Bosnia. These images were crucial in creating. In
the article "The Picture that Fooled the World", which appeared in Living Marxism,
German journalist Thomas Deichmann was able to show how the barbed wire fence
was actually enclosing a tool shed and not the refugees. The Penny Marshall
team had chosen the shed because the barbed wire fence would deceptively and
misleadingly create the impression that the refugees were imprisoned and made
it easier for US and British propaganda to liken the camp to a German concentration
camp. A Bosnian Serb news crew also accompanied the ITN team and filmed the
encounter. This footage further confirms and substantiates Deichmann’s exposures.
In addition, Dragan Opacic, who testified on behalf of the Bosnian Muslim regime
confessed that he had lied on the witness stand before the UN war crimes tribunal
and that his testimony was manufactured by the Bosnian Muslim regime. The entire
genocide and ethnic cleansing propaganda campaign had been shown to be a sham.
But it had worked. Military intervention was ensured against the Bosnian Serbs.
US media deceptions, manipulations, and distortions were rampant. An infamous
example is the "Sarajevo breadline massacre" in 1992 which UN investigators
and reports concluded was perpetrated and staged by the Bosnian Muslim regime
and was a horrendous atrocity committed against their own people in order to
gain world sympathy and to induce the US to militarily intervene against the
Bosnian Serbs. Investigators noticed that the area was cordoned off and that
news crews were positioned to film near the site. The propaganda ploy worked.
After this staged and manufactured Bosnian Muslim incident, the US induced the
UN to impose sanctions on Yugoslavia.
Television, magazines, newspapers, all aspects of US media, were engaged in
war propaganda, following the Gulf War pattern. The infowar was systematized,
centrally organized and planned from the State Department and other US government
branches, with news accounts that were being consciously manipulated to present
a uniform and unvarying image of the Bosnian conflict. US Army psychological
operations specialists, psyops, military propagandists, were working with CNN,
the largest US news network, and with other US media outlets. The US government
planted news stories and information in US newspapers and television networks,
the technique of planting. In every news account from the former Yugoslavia,
one could detect US government propaganda imbeds, or imbedding. Every news account
from the Balkans would include a superfluous and always repeated sentence or
paragraph, the subliminal imbed of the US government. Why were there subliminal
imbeds in every US newspaper? Were we living in George Orwell’s 1984 or Joseph
Stalin’s USSR or Adolf Hitler’s Germany or the Senator Joseph McCarthy "Communist
witch hunt" era of the 1950s or was it Bill Clinton’s United States, the "leader
of the free world"? It was difficult to tell. There was little if any independent
thought or a diversity of opinion and debate or discussion. Only a single viewpoint
was presented. Contrary viewpoints were rejected. US editorial staffs of newspapers,
magazines, and other publications silenced any dissent. The US media never reported
on atrocities, massacres, or ethnic cleansing committed against Bosnian Serbs
or Krajina Serbs. Serbian victims were erroneously listed as Muslims or Croats
killed by Serbs. The US media reported on Bosnian Muslim civilian deaths and
casualties, collateral damage, but not on Bosnian Muslim military deaths or
casualties. Serbian deaths or casualties were rarely reported, and when they
were, the deaths were spin doctored to appear as justified deaths or rationalized
as "revenge killings". When Serbs were attacked and killed, the media reported
on "violence" in Bosnia, a US State Department infowar code word. Thus, when
Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, Kosovo Albanians kill Serbs, or Turkish Army troops
kill Kurdish separatists, or Israeli Army troops kill unarmed Palestinians,
it is referred to as "violence", the infowar code word. When Bosnian Serbs killed
ethnic Albanian terrorists and separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo
and Metohija it is termed "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide". The US State Department
coined the oxymoron "Croatian Serbs" and "Israeli Arabs", showing a similar
pattern applied to both conflicts. The US media techniques of infowar have not
changed drastically since the time of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer,
during the age of yellow journalism.
The unprecedented US media barrage of disinformation and war propaganda only
fueled the Bosnian civil war leading to still more death and destruction. The
innocent victims of this US media infowar were the populations of the former
Yugoslavia.
With the benefit of hindsight, many analysts conceded that the civil wars in
the former Yugoslavia were precipitated by premature diplomatic recognition.
The resurgent Germany was at the forefront of this new form of aggression which
took the form of unilateral, unconditional diplomatic recognition. Germany,
prevented from using its military forces outside its own borders since World
War II by treaties ending that war and by subsequent legislation, sought a new
means of exerting its new-found power and influence, which was demonstrated
at the Maastricht Summit. This power turned out to be illusory. Germany initially
created the crisis that the US resolved. Germany used diplomatic recognition
as a substitute for outright military aggression against the Balkans, particularly
Serbia. German troops had invaded and occupied Belgrade in 1915 and again in
1941 after a massive bombardment that killed tens of thousands of Serbian civilians.
With German diplomatic support, Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina
in 1908 in violation of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, in violation of international
law. Adolf Hitler invaded and conquered Yugoslavia in 1941 and then dismembered
the country, "recognizing" the newly created independent states, one of which
was the Independent State of Croatia, A Nazi-fascist puppet state which "de-recognized"
the Orthodox Serbs and incorporated Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The leaders of the new Germany, Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and
later, Klaus Kinkel, a former German intelligence chief working for Croat, Bosnian
Muslim, and Kosovo Albanian secession during the 1980s, sought to exert their
new geopolitical power and influence in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe
and the Balkans, a sphere from which they had hitherto been excluded. One means
of German power expansion was to seek to create a unified Euro-state led, dominated,
and controlled by Bonn. German leaders wanted a unified currency, a European
parliament, common markets, and a common army. This unified, monolithic Euro-state
would be dominated by Germany. Thus, German foreign policy sought unification,
conglomeration, and centralization where such would advance German interests.
A second means of power expansion was to dismember, re-recognize, and Balkanize
states and destroy the status quo where doing so would serve German interests
by allowing German penetration and infiltration of markets and military and
political influence. A policy of "Balkanization": was pursued in the Balkans
where Germany sought entrée. This policy was achieved by a new form of
aggression: diplomatic recognition. Thus, without firing a single bullet, Germany
could achieve all its foreign policy and geopolitical goals and agendas which
it set. Like Hitler before them, however, the German policy led to disaster
and war. In both former Yugoslav republics which Germany had recognized, two
brutal civil wars erupted which unraveled and undid all of Germany’s machinations.
Once it was seen that premature recognition was unfair and provocative, US
Secretary of State Warren Christopher and French President Francois Mitterrand
accused Germany of precipitating and causing the civil wars in Yugoslavia through
a reckless and dangerous policy of unconditional, unilateral recognition.
Was diplomatic recognition proper for Croatia and Bosnia in 1991 and 1992 without
negotiations with Belgrade and without safeguards for the Serbian populations
and without agreements ensuring minority rights? The international legal guidelines
for recognizing new states were established in the 1932 Montevideo Convention.
Under that Convention, three criteria must be first met before recognition could
and should be granted: 1) there must be a government which is in control; 2)
there must be clearly established borders; and, 3) there must be a stable population.
With regard to both Croatia and Bosnia, these criteria were not met or satisfied.
Unilateral, unconditional, non-negotiated diplomatic recognition of the seceding
republics of the former Yugoslavia violated the Helsinki Accords. Under the
Helsinki Agreement, signatory states had agreed to respect the "territorial
integrity" of member states, of which Yugoslavia was one. Unilateral and unconditional
recognition of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina as independent states
by the Vatican, Germany, and other states violated the Helsinki Agreement. Thus,
premature recognition violated both the Montevideo Convention and the Helsinki
Agreement. In recognizing the seceding Yugoslav republics, international agreements
and laws were violated.
Approximately 30% of Croatia as constituted in the Communist Yugoslavia was
settled by ethnic Orthodox Serbs who were the majority in those areas and who
did not wish to be a part of the new nationalist Croat state, which was anti-Serbian
and anti-minority rights and which based its independence drive on a racist
attack on Serbs. The city of Knin was made up of a majority Serbian population,
before the civil war, the Serbian population of Knin was 88%. The total Serbian
population in this region of Croatia, called Krajina, numbered approximately
1,200,000. The Srem and Slavonija regions were also majority Serbian regions
of Croatia. Even before the secession of Croatia from Yugoslavia, there were
widespread skirmishes and battles in these regions. Instead of negotiations
which would grant the Krajina Serbs autonomy or a legal safeguard to their minority
rights which Serbia had granted to Kosovo Albanians, however, the Croatian government
under former Communist general Franjo Tudjman turned neo-fascist nationalist
sought to unsuccessfully annex these areas by military force into a German and
Vatican sponsored Greater Croatia. To assist Croatia in these efforts, Germany
and the Vatican initiated a propaganda war and attempted to gain international
recognition for the Communist created borders of Croatia, which were arbitrary
and artificial internal borders imposed by Belgrade under the Communist dictatorship
of the Croat-Slovene Josip Broz. After a bloody and brutal six month civil war,
neither Croatian military efforts nor German diplomatic efforts were able to
prevent the secession of Krajina. While Germany supported the secession of Kosovo
from Serbia, it at the same time opposed the secession of Krajina from Croatia.
Thus, based on the guidelines of the Montevideo Convention and the Helsinki
Agreement, Croatia should not have been recognized until it had resolved the
issue of Krajina, Srem, and Slavonija.
Bosnia-Herzegovina, more so than Croatia, met none of the criteria of the Montevideo
Convention. Bosnia did not have a government which was in control. Under the
Communist Yugoslav federation, Bosnia had a rotating, collective presidency
modeled on the federal Yugoslav system to ensure that Bosnia’s three ethnic
groups, Serbs, Slavic Muslims, and Croats, would be represented in the leadership.
So even before secession, Bosnia was in fact a state of three "nations" and
was created in 1945 by the Communist dictatorship to protect the interests of
all three groups from domination by the others. Realizing the precarious and
delicate balance in Bosnia, it was resolved by the leaders of the three factions,
Radovan Karadzic, Alija Izetbegovic, and Mate Boban, to meet in Lisbon, Portugal
to reach a peaceful agreement on the future of the republic. From these meetings
the Lisbon Agreement emerged which divided Bosnia into three ethnic zones or
cantons, Serbian, Muslim, and Croatia, the so-called partition plan, all three
united in a Bosnian confederation. This effort was a compromise negotiated solution
meant to avoid a civil war.
The US State Department, through US ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann,
informed the Bosnian Muslim leaders that they did not have to abide by the Lisbon
Plan, that the negotiations with the Bosnian Serbs and Croats should be rejected,
and that a Muslim-dominated and Muslim-controlled Bosnia would be supported
by the US in the UN and in the US media. Shortly thereafter the Bosnian Muslims
reneged on the Lisbon Agreement and voted with the Croats to unilaterally secede
from Yugoslavia. The Bosnian Serbs boycotted the referendum on secession and
declared it null and void because under the Bosnian Constitution, all three
ethnic groups had to agree for any political changes to occur. Immediately after
these events, the civil war began in Bosnia. Thus, Bosnia never had a government
in control, a prerequisite of the Montevideo Convention for recognition. What
Bosnia did have was three governments.
Bosnia did not have clearly defined or established borders, but only internal
boundaries imposed by Belgrade. Bosnia-Herzegovina was the political creation
of the Yugoslav Communist dictatorship in 1945. Before the founding of Yugoslavia
in 1918, Bosnia had no independent political existence but had been part of
imperial and colonial empires, the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, Bosnia was part of the Ottoman
Empire, ruled from Constantinople (Istanbul).. The Communist internal boundaries
for the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina were modeled on the Ottoman borders.
Between 1878 and 1918 Bosnia was administered and ruled by the Austro-Hungarian
Empire from Vienna. The 1908 annexation of Bosnia by the Austro-Hungary in violation
of the Treaty of Berlin set in motion the events that led to the Great War,
World War I. After 1918, Bosnia was part of Yugoslavia, then known as the Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes until 1929, when the name was changed to Yugoslavia.
In the "first Yugoslavia", 1918-1841, Bosnia-Herzegovina had no distinct borders
or boundaries under the banovina system. There was thus considerable dispute
as to what the borders for Bosnia should be.
Most importantly, Bosnia had a very unstable population which was made up of
Serbs, Slavic Muslims, and Croats, but which included Yugoslavs, that is, persons
with mixed-ancestry or those who identified with Yugoslavia, with being part
of the larger South Slavic ethnic identity. By analogy, Germany is made up of
Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Hesse, and many other states and regions. Germans
identify with, for instance, Bavarian identity and with the larger identity
as Germans, or with Germany. All three groups were Slavic and part of the South
Slavic cultural group and all spoke Serbo-Croatian but were deeply divided by
religion, culture, and history. For over 400 years, the Bosnian Muslims had
been the local rulers of Bosnia, who were subordinate to the Turkish rulers
in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which was a Muslim state where
only Muslims have full political and civil rights. The Orthodox Christian Serbs,
the largest ethic group in Bosnia for most of the Ottoman period, were second-class
citizens. In 1875, the Serbian population of Herzegovina, one of the poorest
and most exploited region by the Muslim rulers, revolted and began the Bosnian
Insurrection or Revolution. Serbia and Montenegro declared war against Turkey.
In 1877-78, Russia intervened militarily against Turkey and defeated the Turkish
forces in the Russo-Turkish War. The Serbian population expected freedom and
independence from foreign occupation and rule. But at the 1878 Treaty of Berlin,
Austria and Germany forced Russia and the Bosnian Serbs to accede to the administration
of Bosnia by the Austro-Hungarian Empire while in theory the Turkish Sultan
retained his role over Bosnia. In 1908, Austria annexed Bosnia outright. The
Austrian government sought to maintain the status quo in Bosnia and to maintain
Bosnia as it existed under the Ottoman Empire, preserving the privileges of
the Bosnian Muslims and supporting the Roman Catholic Bosnian Croats while maintaining
the Serbian population in a backward state, preventing land or agricultural
reform and educational reform. The Bosnian Serbs rejected this oppressive foreign
rule and occupation which did not benefit them and deprived them of their rights.
On June 28, 1914, Vidov Dan (Day of St. Vitus), Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian from
Herzegovina and a member of the Young Bosnia nationalist movement, assassinated
the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo., the act that precipitated
World War I. Austria fostered a Bosnian ethnic identity for all three ethnic
groups seeking to stifle national self-determination by the Serbian and Croatian
populations and opposed to the creation of a unified South Slavic state.
During World War II, Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of the Ustasha Independent
State of Croatia, headed by Ante Pavelic, like Gavrilo Princip, born in Herzegovina,
and Dzafer Kelnovic, a Bosnian Muslim, as vice-president. The leadership of
this state was thus made up of a Bosnian Croat and a Bosnian Muslim. During
this period, 1941-1945, hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Serbs and Krajina Serbs,
or "Croatian Serbs", to use the oxymoron created by US State Department propagandists,
were massacred and ethnically cleansed by Croats and Bosnian Muslims in a planned
and systematic genocide. Ethnic cleansing had its origins during this period,
the term being coined by Ustashi leaders. Due to this genocide and ethnic cleansing,
the Bosnian Muslims became the largest group in Bosnia while the Bosnian Serb
population declined. The Communist dictatorship which ruled Yugoslavia following
World War II locked in the Bosnian Muslim and Croat population gains giving
them control over formerly Serbian areas. A separate "nation" status was created
for the Bosnian Muslims. In 1971, the Bosnian Muslims were given a new ethnic
classification by the Yugoslav regime. These actions only exacerbated the Bosnian
Muslim nationalist drive to control and to rule Bosnia, which was begun during
the Ustasha period when the Bosnian Muslims established a Nazi Protectorate
with the aid of Heinrich Himmler. The Bosnian Serbs and Croats were alarmed
by such Islamic nationalist goals and sought to keep districts where they were
the majorities under their control. The Bosnian Muslims sought to rule Serbian
and Croatian districts because the Slavic Muslims were the largest ethnic group
in Bosnia in 1992. Such Bosnian Muslim hegemony led to the brutal civil war
with all three groups seeking to control districts where they predominated.
The Bosnian Muslims realized that they could not control Serbian and Croatian
districts without foreign intervention and occupation. The Bosnian Muslim leadership
thus sought to induce the United States or Germany or Islamic/Arab states to
militarily intervene to occupy the Serbian and Croatian districts which the
Bosnian Muslims themselves could not achieve. The Bosnian Muslim strategy was
concise and simple: Induce a foreign military power, the US or Germany to militarily
intervene against the Bosnian Serbs.
Bosnia, thus, met none of the criteria for recognition as defined in the 1932
Montevideo Convention. Unilateral and unconditional premature recognition caused
the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Krajina and Croatia. Diplomatic recognition
was thereby transformed from a diplomatic gesture into a new form of aggression.
If you forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens,
you can never regain their respect and esteem.
It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time;
you may even fool some of the people all the time;
but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.
---Abraham Lincoln
The civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was caused and sustained by three principal
actors: 1) the US State Department; 2) US public relations firms; and, 3)the
US media. Premature unilateral and unconditional recognition led to the civil
war. Recognition became a new form of aggression, becoming more normative in
nature. Recognition was based not on objective criteria but on normative ideals
and goals, based not on legal principles but on ideology and self-interest.
Thus, the US and Germany supported recognition of states that did not meet international
legal guidelines for recognition. The reality on the ground in Bosnia was that
three ethnic groups, with mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed national
and political agendas, did not envision a multi-ethnic state ruled by leaders
from all three groups. The US State Department, US public relations firms, and
the US media waged an infowar in Bosnia that failed to change the reality on
the ground. The Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995 was the US version of the 1992
Lisbon Agreement. Tens of thousands of lives were needlessly and senselessly
lost only to reaffirm an agreement initially rejected by the US. Such is the
nature of propaganda. Such is the nature of infowar, a war based on "images",
based on what Walter Lippmann called "pictures in our heads", rather than objective
factual reality on the ground. William Randolph Hearst defined the nature of
infowar most succinctly: "You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war."
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