Review of "Fools' Crusade", by Diana Johnstone

Nebojsa Malic "...it was the Badinter Commission, an ad hoc advisory committee of European lawyers, who declared in 1991 that Yugoslavia had simply ceased to exist, and that its republics should be recognized as independent states. This decision, entirely in contradiction to the Yugoslav constitution, escalated the secession crisis into open warfare.

When, as a consequence of the Badinter ruling, Bosnia seceded – and immediately exploded into civil war – in 1992, Western journalists and activists who visited the region created a "Bosnia cult." Having condemned a multicultural Yugoslavia, they suddenly elevated an allegedly multicultural Bosnia into a paragon of modern virtue.

"A real aversion to war might have led journalists and writers to find in Bosnia merely the destructive chaos that can result when human beings fail to manage their collective affairs in a sensible way." (p. 48)

Instead, searching for the Great Cause of their generation, they created an idea of Bosnia as a multicultural paradise under threat:

"The notion that 'Bosnia' represented the model for Western Europe's integration of its Muslim immigrants helps explain the vehement hostility that arose against the Bosnian Serbs, accused of destroying this model society out of sheer racist nationalism." (p. 49)

In the end, Bosnia – and later Kosovo – were not at all about the people who suffered there, but about the Westerners who could cast themselves as their saviors and liberators.

(...) when Kosovo came under UN/NATO occupation. NATO continued the war through other means, eventually establishing in Serbia an acceptable client government through the "revolution" in October 2000. Since then, the cornerstone of NATO's policy towards Serbia has been straightforward:

"It was not enough to bomb Serbia and detach part of its territory. The Serbian people must be made to believe – or to pretend to believe – that they deserved it." (p. 258)

Interventions in Yugoslavia were subsequently used as a template for conquest: economic crisis (debt, blockade, "reforms") impoverishes the nation, aggravating ethnic and/or regional tensions. Ethnic conflicts are then dubbed a "human rights crisis," at which point the U.S. intervenes. The resulting destruction only deepens conflict and bitterness. The region is then placed under the protectorate of the "International Community," which crushes any local government with potentially independent ideas. (p. 262)"