July/August 1994, Page 71

Quatsch Watch: Mythinformation Observed

(The British say rubbish, Americans say nonsense, we won't print what the French say, and Germans say Quatsch, which rhymes with watch, which is what this column does.)

Does Helping Bosnia Only "Prolong the Agony"?

QUATSCH: "A Seth cease-fire will not change the fact that the Serbs, in a well planned and executed strategy, have 'cleansed' greater Bosnia of their Muslim enemies. The Serbs drove the Muslims from their land and penned them in valley towns surrounded by Serb-controlled mountains ... There is no need for the Serbs to capture the isolated towns. Sooner or later, the difficulty of sustaining the aid will make it necessary to evacuate the Muslims to Muslim territory further west. The sooner this deal can be struck, the better. Air attacks won't help ... The Serbs have won that war. The best we can hope is to convince them to settle for their gains and to press the Bosnians to accept their defeat. Allied energies should focus on that goal, not prolonging the agony through bombing.  —Retired Marine Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, director of national security programs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, New York Times, April 27, 1994.

WATCH: Serbs, who constituted 31 percent of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina's population, now occupy 72 percent of the country. Muslims, who constituted 44 percent of the population, and Croats, who constituted 17 percent of the population, for a total of 61 percent, now have only 28 percent of the country left to them. Therefore, there literally is no "territory further west" for more than a million displaced Muslims, tens of thousands of whom have taken refuge in Croatia and other countries of Europe. If they cannot return to the homes from which they have been driven at gunpoint, they will become the largest group of European refugees of the second half of the 20th century.

With 200,000 men under arms, far outnumbering the Serbs of Bosnia, the Muslim-led Bosnian government forces therefore have no intention of accepting defeat. In fact, now that Bosnian Muslims and Croats are again allies, weapons are getting through to government forces and they are making gains on the ground daily. To deny the Bosnian government forces the tanks and artillery to match those made available to the breakaway Bosnian Serbs from the army of the former Yugoslavia, and instead to press the Bosnian Muslims and Croats to surrender the territory from which they have been driven and become the homeless Palestinians of the 21st century, would be both futile and immoral.

Is the U.S. Accommodating Serb Genocide?

QUATSCH: "The best that can be done is to accept the de facto partition that has occurred. The media talks about 'Serb aggression in Bosnia,' overlooking that the Serbs, once the fires of nationalism were set loose, wanted to bring the Serbian areas of Bosnia into some kind of Greater Serbia. There is, from the Bosnian government, talk of genocide. What is happening is so terrible one might want to call it anything, but the Serbian objective is not genocide but the shift of populations so that Muslims leave the Serbian territory. Bad as it is, it isn't genocide ... It is what the Israelis did in Israel when they drove out the Palestinians." —David McReynolds, War Resisters League, writing in The Advocate, Panhandle, TX, April 1994

WATCH: Because no major power came to the aid of the Palestinians, some 750,000 were driven out of their homes and prevented from returning between 1947 and 1949—both in the 53 percent of the Mandate of Palestine the U.N. had designated for the Jewish state and much of the 47 percent the U.N. had designated for the Palestinian Arab state. This created the "Palestinian problem" that has destabilized the entire Middle East for 45 years and which gave birth to five more wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and the "oil price shock" that nearly impoverished the industrialized countries in the 1970s. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute was the biggest single United States liability in maintaining the Cold War alliance that contained and finally broke up an expansionist Soviet Union. The worst thing the U.S. could do now would be accept the Serb conquests in Bosnia. The Serbs have occupied these lands only by driving out the indigenous Muslims and Croats. Serb methods against the Muslim occupants have included raping thousands of women in the captive areas and lining up tens of thousands of men, women and children at the edges of cliffs, ditches and rushing rivers and killing up to 200,000 of them. These atrocities were designed to terrorize anyone who could flee to do so voluntarily, leaving at the disposal of the aggressors the lands from which every trace of the former occupants, from homes to businesses to mosques, are being burned and bulldozed into oblivion. This is genocide, just as surely as were the Armenian massacres and deportations of World War I, and the herding into work camps and death camps of Jews, Gypsies, and Polish, Ukrainian and Russian prisoners of war in World War II.

The arguments of appeasers against collective action to stop the genocide when it began in the late 1930s in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia are what made its spread into the rest of Europe, and the eventual deaths of some 55 million people in World War II, inevitable. If it is not reversed in Bosnia, Serb aggression will resume in Croatia, genocide will be practiced against the Albanians of Kosovo and possibly Macedonia, and the fighting will spread to Albania, Greece, Turkey and many countries of the former Soviet Union just as rapidly as did the fighting in 1939, 1940 and 1941. To ignore the brushfire in Bosnia is to stand by while it becomes a raging conflagration that consumes the Balkans and spreads into parts of the former Soviet Union.

Glossing Over Israeli Death Squad Activities

QUATSCH: "In the West Bank town of Hebron, about 100 Islamic activists protesting the raid [on a Hezbollah camp in Lebanon] threw rocks at Israeli soldiers, who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets."  —From report by correspondent David Hoffman on fighting and mobilization along the Lebanese-Israeli border following the raid, Washington Post, June 4, 1994

WATCH: The Hebron protests described were the second day of demonstrations against murders in the adjoining Ram district of Jerusalem by Israeli death squad members who followed a wanted Palestinian Hamas activist off a bus and executed him and a companion in front of witnesses on the previous day (see report on p. 61). The first day's Hebron protests in which some 60 Palestinians were injured also were widely described in the U.S. media without any reference to the Israeli death squad activities they were protesting.