In this shocking and incredibly informative take on the Yugoslav Wars, Michael Parenti reveals a conflict that was deliberately designed to serve US and Western European interests. The breakup of Yugoslavia, a relatively socialistic country, saw a rise in poverty, economic destitution, and rampant political violence and corruption within the Republics that broke away from it (barring the violent ethnic wars). While there were legitimate violations of human rights on the side of the Serbs, Parenti reveals that the Croats, Bosnians, and Kosovars were also guilty of human rights violations, and yet those forces never received any reprimands from the US and Western Europe (all under the military “defense” treaty, NATO). On the other hand, NATO and its human rights organizations turned a blind eye on the Croats, Bosnians, and Kosovar forces and over-exaggerated and sometimes made-up the atrocities committed by the Serbian forces.
Why did NATO desire a balkanized Yugoslavia? For the majority of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was at an awkward position, where it was a socialist state not completely centralized like the Soviet Union (and other Eastern European states) while having economic ties with the US and Western Europe. Put it simply, the US tolerated the Yugoslavs due to the quagmire that was Cold War politics (the Yugoslavs were seen as the US as a sort of potential wedge into the Warsaw Pact). When the Cold War ended, the NATO bloc no longer had any use for Yugoslavia and pressured the country to abandon its socialist policies under the convenient excuse for the Yugoslavs trying to pay back its IMF loans. This, combined with a whole host of other problems within the country (notably the sorry economic state within the country that caused high unemployment rates that spurred nationalist sentiments within each of the Yugoslav republics that could not be countered due to a lack of leadership within the federal Yugoslav government), was what caused the dissolution of Yugoslavia. But the simple dissolution of the republic did not satisfy the NATO bloc, as Parenti points out. Each of those former Yugoslav republics were required to pass free market reforms that completely destroyed the social welfare system that Yugoslavia had, crush any working-class opposition towards these reforms, and destroy any sentiments of “brotherhood and unity” (to borrow a slogan from the former socialist Yugoslav government). Slovenia, the first to break away from Yugoslavia, tried to maintain its socialistic economy but was pressured into adopting the free market reforms in early 1999, which saw a rapid decline in the standard of living of a previously prosperous Republic (both within and without Yugoslavia). Croatia was more than willing to adopt the free market reforms, what with its leadership spearheaded by anti-Serb and anti-Semitic fascists (both figuratively and literally). It was in Croatia where the violent ethnic wars got its name, with the Croat military ethnically cleansing its Serbian population from Krajina (a region where Serbs lived in for generations) with whatever violent means; and NATO barely raised a word about their Croat ally’s atrocities (while overexaggerating the atrocities that the Serbian side committed). The break-up of Yugoslavia took a further violent turn when Bosnia-Herzegovina broke away, with its secessionist leadership (led by a former fascist with Islamic Fundamentalist thinking) committing even more violent ethnic cleansing against whatever Serbian villages were within the Republic. Bosnia created a problem for NATO, as the region was an ethnically-diverse region within the already ethnically-diverse Yugoslavia. How diverse? No single ethnic group has a majority within Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Serbs within the region had no intention from separating from Yugoslavia. So, NATO tolerated an ethnically diverse region ruled by Bosnian Islamic Fundamentalists while at the same time crushing the Serbian groups within the region. Even with almost every Yugoslav republic breaking away from itself, the leftovers of Serbia and Montenegro refused to break away nor throw away its socialistic policies. Thus, from the late 1990s, NATO funded a Kosovar extremist group (an Albanian minority group within Serbia), whose leadership is debatably Serb-Albanian (as in, Albanians who had lived their entire life in Serbia) so an insurgency can be waged within Serbia while NATO drums up anti-Serbian propaganda in the international media. This ultimately culminated in the inhumane NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999, where the targets had little (if any) military significance. Despite NATO ripping away Kosovo from Serbia (which, as of 2021, is still not recognized by more than half of the world), Yugoslavia still persisted with its Yugoslav-era domestic policies despite it being near-completely destroyed.
What makes To Kill A Nation an interesting read comes form its sources. Parenti does not exclusively rely on the Serbian press for his information (although he does cite them on occasion and has even travelled to the country in the aftermath of the 1999 bombings), he relies on sources from Western media. Parenti would often poke holes at official press statements and then counter those statements with other sources within Western media. For example, in the leadup to the 1999 bombings, US media (notably the New York Times) often reported of “mass graves” of Kosovars, yet some European media like the London-based Sunday Times or international organizations like the International Criminal Tribunal reported that the stories were incredibly exaggerated, when it turns out that only single-digit to low double-digit bodies were found in some of those burial sites (if anything, Parenti suggests that some of those “mass grave” sites were probably hasty burials of people who did not die from conflict).
To Kill A Nation provides a much-needed breath of fresh air within the Western mainstream consensus as well as a lesson in debunking western lies that would start wars for profit. The only thing that brings the book down is its age. It was published in 2000, though the book read as if it was published the year before. In that same year, the Yugoslav government (led by the left-leaning Serb nationalist Slobodan Milosevic) was overthrown by pro-Western forces in what was considered to be the first “Color Revolution.” After that, the socialistic programs of the country were successfully dismantled along with the idea of a Yugoslav nation: Montenegro finally broke away from Serbia in 2006. Despite what happened afterwards, Parenti still allows the reader some thoughts on the present media while also making them more aware of their surroundings, which is a definite plus in my book.
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A short, crisp, eye opening account of the end of Yugoslavia.
Reviewed in India on June 25, 2023