Open Letter to The Guardian

The letter in question is signed by 25 individuals who have written on the wars over the breakup of Yugoslavia. The essence of their complaint against Prof. Chomsky seems to be that he has not only defended Ms. Johnstone's freedom of expression, but has, indeed, praised and endorsed the actual content of her work. If that's the charge, then we, the undersigned, plead guilty to it as well. Ms. Johnstone's work, epitomized in her book, Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions, is a model of humanity, insight and impeccable scholarship. We cannot understand how anybody who has read this book could find it anything but admirable, even though the point of view and conclusions might be unpalatable to those who supported America's military involvement in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The claim that it constitutes a "whitewashing" or "minimization" of anyone's crimes is simply false.

The scholarly contributions of Diana Johnstone and Noam Chomsky need no defense from us. They are capable of standing on their own. We write only to oppose the attempts to carry out a kind of Inquisition in matters of the Balkan Wars that aims to root out as heresy and apostasy any challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy, no matter how well-reasoned the arguments or how solid their evidential foundation.

We find it very telling that the only substantive claims made in the letter of the 25 against Ms. Johnstone's book are (a) that she once put the words "Srebrenica massacre" inside quotation marks—something which, in the context, no impartial observer could consider even the weakest ground for a claim of "revisionism"; (b) that she dares to question, on legal and moral grounds, the determination by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that "genocide" occurred at Srebrenica; and (c) that she does not accept at face value the conventional figure of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims summarily executed there, but actually evaluates the evidence for it. For this she is libeled as a "revisionist" and a "denier" as if she were a neo-Nazi lying about the Holocaust.

In reply, we would simply like to point out the following:

1) A number of the 25 signatories to the protest letter had asserted earlier and with equal aggressiveness that the Bosnian Muslim death toll during the period 1992-95 was 200,000 or 250,000, and challengers to that number in the 1990s, like George Kenney and Peter Brock, had been assailed then as "revisionists" and "deniers." Some of those alleged deniers had pointed out at the time that there was no serious evidence for the 200-250,000 number, which had been spread about by Bosnian Muslim officials, and, despite its provenance, quickly accepted by "journalists of attachment." That high figure has very recently been challenged by analysts Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak working for the Demographics Unit of the ICTY's Office of the Prosecutor, and by Mirsad Tokaca, head of the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center. Tabeau and Bijak's estimate is 102,622 total deaths on all sides in the Bosnian wars, of which they estimate some 55,261 were civilians (European Journal of Population, June, 2005). Tokaca's estimate stood at approximately 93,000 through October, but, as he explained in late November, his group expects the total to increase "slightly," and the "final tally will likely be around 100,000" (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, November 21). Are these researchers also "revisionists" and "deniers" of the "Bosnian genocide"? And if not, why not? Similarly, if the estimate of overall war-related deaths in Bosnia can be subject to legitimate analysis, then why can't the comparable estimate for the Srebrenica massacre also be critically evaluated?

2) The figure of 8,000 victims at Srebrenica has been no more firmly established than was the overall Bosnian total, as seven of the signatories to the present letter (names with an asterisk) will show in detail in the volume Srebrenica: The Politics of War Crimes, currently in its last stages of pre-publication editing. But one remarkable feature of the accepted total has been its stability. It originated with a declaration by the Red Cross in July 1995, not that 8,000 had been executed, but that an estimated 3,000 had been captured by Serb forces and another 5,000 were "missing." This total (i.e., 3,000 detainees plus 5,000 "missing") continued to be cited even though the Red Cross itself soon acknowledged that several thousand of the "missing" had reached Bosnian Muslim territory and several thousand others had been killed in fighting. Despite this, and despite the fact that forensic, satellite and eyewitness evidence has never produced support for anything remotely like 8,000 executions, the original number persists. Other original estimates such as the 6,800 supposed victims of 9/11 in the United States, or the 100,000 supposed victims in Kosovo in 1999, declined sharply as forensic evidence pointed to smaller numbers and thus to a prior unsustainable exaggeration. But the Srebrenica total remains magically immune. We would suggest that this is based on political demands and vested interests that have made the 8,000 number an article of faith, long supported by believers and Inquisitors who claim to know the truth a priori, and who, to this very day, strive to deny the legitimacy of any questions being asked about it.

It is worth noting that the ICTY Trial Chamber that decided the Krstic Case was much more equivocal on the number of victims. The Chamber conceded that a number of the bodies exhumed to that point (2,028) had died in combat, in fact going so far as to say that the forensic evidence only "suggested" that "the majority of bodies exhumed were not killed in combat; they were killed in mass executions." The Trial Chamber found that the evidence as a whole only "strongly suggests that well in excess of 7,000 people went missing following the take-over of Srebrenica." The evidence was found only to "support the proposition that the majority of missing people were, in fact, executed and buried in the mass graves." A majority of a maximum of 7,000-8000 leaves us far short of the supposedly untouchable 8,000 executed, even on the authority of the ICTY!

3) Which brings us to the finding of the ICTY that "genocide" occurred at Srebrenica. According to the authors of the letter this settled the matter because the ICTY is "an international court established by the United Nations." But, from its inception, and especially since its protagonism during the Kosovo war, the ICTY has been the subject of intense criticism for its appearance of partiality on behalf of the NATO countries. This charge was leveled at it by the Secretary General of the United Nations in 1995 and by two permanent members of the Security Council in 2000. Its finding of "genocide" at Srebrenica is certainly idiosyncratic, and, in our opinion, alarmingly wrong. Its treatment of the "ethnic cleansing" of one village as the moral and legal equivalent of the physical destruction of an entire people seems to be an abuse of both the concept and the victims of real genocide. As the Appeals Chamber itself admitted, the crimes at Srebrenica were not part of anything remotely like an attempt on the actual life or means of life of the people concerned, namely the Muslims of Bosnia. Even the claim of genocide-by-ethnic-cleansing of that one town depended on a host of wild and unsupported assumptions about the supposed occult motives behind the killing of military-aged males more than three years into a bloody war with heavy casualties on all sides.

In conclusion, we believe that, whether or not all the complaints The Guardian has received over its retraction are as hysterical as the charges leveled against Prof. Chomsky and Ms. Johnstone by these 25 Inquisitors, "a line should be drawn under the matter," as Ian Mayes put it.

Respectfully,

Signatories on Letter to The Guardian:

James Bisset, former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia

Christopher Black, Canadian lawyer dealing with human rights issues

George Bogdanich*, filmmaker and journalist who directed Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War

Peter Brock, author of Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia

Al Burke, editor/publisher of Nordic News Network

Phillip Corwin, UN Civilian Affairs Coordinator in Bosnia in 1995, author of Dubious Mandate

Louis Dalmas, editor of B.I., Balkans Infos

Tim Fenton*, researcher

Philip Hammond*, co-author of Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo War

Edward S. Herman*, co-author of Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo War

David Jacobs, lawyer practicing on human rights; defense counsel before ICTR

George Kenney, writer and former U.S. State Department official

Nebojsa Malic, columnist, antiwar.com

Michael Mandel*, lawyer and author of How America Gets Away With Murder

David Miller, Professor of Sociology, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

Jan Oberg, dr.hc., peace researcher, Director of TFF, The Transnational Foundation in Sweden

David Peterson, writer and researcher, Chicago

Jonathan Rooper*, former BBC reporter

George Szamuely*, journalist and writer, New York

Vera Vratusa, Philosophy Department, University of Belgrade