Yugoslavia

Noam Chomsky

Description

The Balkans, in particular the turbulent ex-Yugoslav territory, have been among the most important world regions in Noam Chomsky’s political reflections and activism for decades. His articles, public talks, and correspondence have provided a critical voice on political and social issues crucial not only to the region but the entire international community, including “humanitarian intervention,” the relevance of international law in today’s politics, media manipulations, and economic crisis as a means of political control.

This volume provides a comprehensive survey of virtually all of Chomsky’s texts and public talks that focus on the region of the former Yugoslavia, from the 1970s to the present. With numerous articles and interviews, this collection presents a wealth of materials appearing in book form for the first time along with reflections on events twenty-five years after the official end of communist Yugoslavia and the beginning of the war in Bosnia. The book opens with a personal and wide-ranging preface by Andrej Grubačić that affirms the ongoing importance of Yugoslav history and identity, providing a context for understanding Yugoslavia as an experiment in self-management, antifascism, and mutlethnic coexistence.

Sujets

• Self-management
• Anti-fascism
• Imperialism
• Kosovo
• Civil War
• Nato
• Belgrade

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 10 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781629634647
• Langue: English

Extrait

Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution
Noam Chomsky. Edited by Davor D alto
Valeria Chomsky 2018
Preface Andrej Gruba i 2018
Introductory chapters Davor D alto 2018
This edition 2018 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-442-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942916
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
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Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
Contents
Acknowledgments
PREFACE Remaining Yugoslav
Andrej Gruba i
INTRODUCTION
Davor D alto
Glossary of Acronyms
PART I YUGOSLAVIA
Yugoslavia: Dreams and Realities
Davor D alto
The Conscience of Yugoslavia
The Repression at Belgrade University
Letter to Tito
PART II YUGOSLAV WARS
Solutions and Dissolutions
Davor D alto
USA, Germany, and the Faith of Yugoslavia
Most Guns, Most Atrocities
Open Letter to the Guardian
On the Srebrenica Massacre
PART III KOSOVO CRISIS
Kosovo: A Drama in Multiple Acts
Davor D alto
Crisis in the Balkans
Wiping Out the Democratic Movement
The Truth about Kosovo
Kosovo Peace Accord
Lessons from Kosovo
A Review of NATO s War over Kosovo
Humanitarian Imperialism: The New Doctrine of Imperial Right
Comments on Milo evi Ouster
On the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia
Perspectives
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
INDEX
Acknowledgments
This book would have never been completed without the enthusiasm, energy, and support that my dear colleague and friend Marina Sovilj invested in this project over a couple of years. I am deeply grateful for that.
I owe gratitude to my dear colleagues and friends Irene Caratelli, Borut Zidar, Vladimir Veljkovi , and Emil D ud evi . They gave me many important suggestions and comments that significantly improved the manuscript. My gratitude also extends to Milenko Sre kovi , who provided me with important materials for documenting and understanding some of the recent developments in the region.
I am grateful to my assistant Ella May Sumner; I cannot imagine the completion of this project without all the time and effort she invested in addressing many practical aspects of the process.
A big thank you also goes to Anthony Arnove, who continued to support this project over many years.
Last but certainly not least, I want to thank Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest intellectuals and humanists of our time, for his tireless engagement in the world s affairs and for his struggle against injustice, oppression, and imperial ambitions everywhere, not least in the Balkans.
-Ed.
Remaining Yugoslav
Andrej Gruba i
Sixty years ago, the concrete pier that butts against the Adriatic in the village of Trpanj was strewn with drying fishing nets. Local fishers came into the cannery to empty their bursting nets, and in the summer tourists from the USSR mingled among them. Twenty years ago, it was empty, abandoned because of the Yugoslav civil war. Stone buildings that had housed gathering places and families were transformed into hospitals, the fishing boats long abandoned. I look upon the same pier today, busy with young families and tourists, mostly from the former Soviet republics. A short walk from the harbor, I come upon a magazine stall. The papers report on the most recent attempt to change the name of Marshal Tito Square, five hours north in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Despite the passing of decades, the battle for the soul of Croatia, now a member of the European Union, and all of former Yugoslavia rages on. Was Comrade Tito a good Croatian or a pro-Serb dictator? Who inherits modern-day Croatia, antifascists or the heirs of the Usta e, infamous Nazi-collaborators?
Few in the U.S. have tackled the complexity of the former Yugoslavia the way that Noam Chomsky has. When asked to write this preface, I started reworking my way through Noam s writing. His analysis is ruthless, clinical. His debates with the Guardian s George Monbiot and the new intellectuals of the Bosnian Institute of England are the stuff of legend. Noam s influence on public discourse in the countries of former Yugoslavia remains unparalleled. As I read through his writings, I was struck by what I consider an Alexievich moment, an absence of what Russian oral historian Svetlana Alexievich called the interior life of socialism, or socialism of the soul. (Only a Russian could come up with such a delightful phrase!) Alexievich was referring to everyday life under socialism, a challenge to an oft-repeated falsehood of capitalist historians: that all the world s socialisms were alike. Of course those of us who grew up in the formerly socialist world-ineptly referred to as Eastern Europe, or where the boogeyman lives , as a friend from Ohio once told me, only half joking-have certain things in common. But the Soviet man and the Yugoslav woman, for example, were quite different. And they had little in common with a Bulgarian or Romanian socialist citizen.
This preface aspires to be one glimpse of the interior life of former Yugoslavia from the perspective of a Yugoslav, of a Yugoslav exile. And even after multiple exiles-first from Yugoslavia at the end of socialism and later from what was left of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the 1999 NATO bombings-I remain a Yugoslav. My family has lived at the same Belgrade address, first in Socialist Yugoslavia, then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, and today, Serbia. My story and that of my family are at the same time idiosyncratic and representative of Yugoslav history.
I never met Comrade Tito. But I remember the day he died in May 1980. His funeral procession in Belgrade brought seven hundred thousand to the streets, millions of people wept and mourned throughout Yugoslavia. Many of them were Tito loyalists, pledging their allegiance to our endangered socialist homeland. Many others, like myself, were proud to call themselves Yugoslavs, proud to be from a communist country. A country that hosted the Living Theatre, a country that was home to the music of Laibach and the Black Wave cinema of Du an Makavejev.
Even as a child, I knew our Yugoslavia was an anomaly. We played Partisans and Germans, not Cowboys and Indians. In the U.S., children cross their hearts and hope to die when they make a promise or swear they re telling the truth. As school children in Yugoslavia, we would say Tita mi! -I swear on Comrade Tito! For us, there was nothing more sacred. The adults were equally serious. When I was seven, my teacher asked whom I loved more, my mother or Comrade Tito. When I chose my mother-after all, I reasoned, I had never met Tito, while I d gotten to know my mother quite well-I was called a reactionary and sent home in tears. My mother was fuming; she marched straight to the school, and I was allowed to return the next day.
But my mother could afford to do things like that: her father Rato was one of the most celebrated communists in Yugoslavia. His first family, he once told my mother, was the Communist Party: he was the last secretary of the legendary Communist Youth; a minister in the first post-World War II Yugoslav state; a member of the Central Committee of the League of Yugoslav Communists; an ambassador to the Non-Aligned Movement; the president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Bosnia; later becoming a member of the rotating Yugoslav presidency after Tito s death. Even before World War II, my grandfather was well known: a professional football player (real football, not that odd thing people do in the U.S.). He used trips to away games to distribute party material. It is even said that he and his cousin Miljenko Cvitkovi , a fighter in the Spanish Revolution, attempted to assassinate the anti-communist Minister of the Interior of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Luckily for the minister (and for my grandfather), they did not find him.
A communist illegalist, Rato also spent time in a Sarajevo prison, then considered a red university where young militants were educated. The party, which actively recruited students before the war, later sent him to study law and forestry in Belgrade. After he finished university in 1939 war broke out: my grandfather fought against the fascists, both as a Partisan commander and a political commissar. He helped organize the Sarajevo uprising and took part in the political assemblies of the incipient Yugoslav state, held in the so-called free territories of U ice and Biha . As Yugoslavs struggled for their liberation, Rato met my grandmother Tatjana, a member of the youth antifascist movement. They were an odd couple. Tatjana, named after the famous Pu kin poem, was a well-educated Montenegrin royal exiled after the establishment of the Union of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes after World War I. Class differences aside, they fell in love. (Tatjana s mother, a royalist taught from an early age that communists were devils, even came to love my grandfather as one of her own.) Tatjana always held onto a bit of her old elitism, though: she couldn t stand the future communist dissident Milovan ilas, then a family friend. The man has never read a single novel in his life, she used to say. One can only assume his penchant for brutally assassinating his wartime comrades was related to this lack of poetic imagination.
After World War II, my grandfather Rato met his counterpart in the Cuban government, the Minister of Light Industry Che Guevara, who was in Yugoslavi