NOAM CHOMSKY AND GENOCIDAL CAUSALITY
Marko Attila Hoare

Bosnian Institute News
ewsid=2624
Aug 31 2009

Dissection of Chomsky’s sophistry on the issue of who was to blame
for Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosova

It is with some hesitation that I comment on the exchange between
Noam Chomsky and Ian Williams over the question of responsibility
for the bloodshed in Kosova in the late 1990s. Chomsky has no
expertise and nothing interesting to say on the topic of the former
Yugoslavia, and it is only because of his status as the world’s no. 1
‘anti-imperialist’ guru that his utterances on the topic attract as
many responses as they do. Chomsky epitomises the ‘anti-imperialist’
ideologue who believes in two things: 1) that the US is to blame
for everything; and 2) that everything the US does is bad. If you
share this worldview, then nothing said by Chomsky’s critics, such
as Williams or Oliver Kamm, is going to convince you that he may
be wrong on Kosova. If, on the other hand, you do not share this
worldview, and are not star-struck by the celebrity Chomsky, then his
rambling comparisons between the Western response over Kosova and the
Western response over East Timor can only appear extremely tortuous
and boring. It is tiresome yet again to point out, for example, the
absolute falsehood of Chomsky’s claim that ‘the crimes in East Timor
at the same time’ as the Kosovo war ‘were far worse than anything
reported in Kosovo prior to the NATO bombing’ – it simply isn’t true.

I am using Chomsky, therefore, only to open a discussion on the
question of genocidal causality, and the insidious nature of the
sophistry employed by Chomsky and his ‘anti-imperialist’ comrades:
that Serbian ethnic-cleansing in Kosova occurred in response to the
NATO bombing and was therefore NATO’s fault. As Chomsky put it: ‘The
NATO bombing did not end the atrocities but rather precipitated by
far the worst of them, as had been anticipated by the NATO command
and the White House.’ The thrust of Chomsky’s argument is that
since NATO commanders predicted that the NATO bombing would lead
to a massive escalation of Serbian attacks on the Kosova Albanian
civilian population, and since this prediction was borne out, then
NATO is responsible for having cold-bloodedly caused the atrocities
that occurred after the bombing started.

The falsehood of this logic can be demonstrated if we ask the following
questions:

1) Chomsky claims that the bombing precipitated ‘by far the worst’
of the atrocities, but what precipitated the bombing ?

The answer is that the NATO bombing of Serbia in March 1999
was precipitated by Belgrade’s rejection of the Rambouillet
Accords. Belgrade was aware that rejecting the Rambouillet Accords
would precipitate Serbia being bombed by NATO, but rejected them
nevertheless. By Chomsky’s own logic, therefore, Serbia’s own actions
precipitated the NATO bombings, and were consequently responsible for
those bombings. Since, according to Chomsky, the bombings led to the
atrocities, that means that Serbia was responsible for the atrocities
after all.

What Chomsky would like us to believe, is that if a US or NATO
action produced a predictable Serbian response, then the response
was the fault of the US/NATO. But if, on the other hand, a Serbian
action produced a predictable US/NATO response, then the response
was still the fault of the US/NATO. This is self-evidently a case of
double standards.

2) Chomsky claims that the bombing precipitated ‘by far the worst’
of the atrocities, but what would have been precipitated by a failure
to bomb ?

>From reading Chomsky and his fellow ‘anti-imperialists’, one would
almost believe that the bloodshed in Kosova had been – in Edward Said’s
words – a ‘Sunday school picnic’ prior to the NATO bombing. Yet this
is what Human Rights Watch reported in January 1999, more than two
months before the bombing began:

The government forces intensified their offensive throughout July and
August [1998], despite promises from Milosevic that it had stopped. By
mid-August, the government had retaken much of the territory that had
been held by the KLA, including their stronghold of Malisevo. Unable
to protect the civilian population, the KLA retreated into Drenica
and some pockets in the West.

Some of the worst atrocities to date occurred in late September, as the
government’s offensive was coming to an end. On September 26, eighteen
members of an extended family, mostly women, children, and elderly,
were killed near the village of Donje Obrinje by men believed to be
with the Serbian special police. Many of the victims had been shot
in the head and showed signs of bodily mutilation. On the same day,
thirteen ethnic Albanian men were executed in the nearby village of
Golubovac by government forces. One man survived and was subsequently
taken out of the country by the international agencies in Kosovo.

The government offensive was an apparent attempt to crush civilian
support for the rebels. Government forces attacked civilians,
systematically destroyed towns, and forced thousands of people to
flee their homes. One attack in August near Senik killed seventeen
civilians who were hiding in the woods. The police were seen looting
homes, destroying already abandoned villages, burning crops, and
killing farm animals.

The majority of those killed and injured were civilians. At least
300,000 people were displaced, many of them women and children now
living without shelter in the mountains and woods. In October, the
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) identified an estimated
35,000 of the displaced as particularly at risk of exposure to the
elements. Most were too afraid to return to their homes due to the
continued police presence. [our emphasis]

(Contrary to what Chomsky says, the number killed in Kosova prior
to the start of the NATO bombing was greater than the number of East
Timorese civilians killed by the Indonesians and their proxies during
the whole of 1999).

Chomsky is saying that if – instead of presenting an ultimatum
to Belgrade at Rambouillet and then proceeding to bomb Serbia when
Belgrade defied that ultimatum – the NATO powers had given Belgrade a
free hand in Kosova, then Serbian repression in Kosova would simply
have continued at what he considers to be an acceptable level. Of
course, there is no way of proving one way or the other what would
have happened in Kosova if NATO hadn’t gone to war in the spring of
1999, but given the catalogue of horrors in the former Yugoslavia
that were demonstrably not ‘precipitated’ by Western military
intervention – the destruction of Vukovar, the siege of Sarajevo,
the Srebrenica massacre, the killing of at least 100,000 Bosnians,
the ethnic-cleansing of 300,000 Kosovars, etc. – the evidence suggests
that it would not have resembled Edward Said’s ‘Sunday school picnic’.

3) Chomsky claims that the bombing precipitated ‘by far the worst’
of the atrocities, but even if this were true, would this make those
atrocities NATO’s fault ?

Genocides are invariably ‘precipitated’ by something or other. The
Armenian Genocide was ‘precipitated’ by the outbreak of World War I and
Tsarist Russia’s military advance into Anatolia. The Rwandan Genocide
was ‘precipitated’ by the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s offensive against
the Rwandan Army, the Arusha Accords and by the shooting down of the
plane carrying Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana. Of course,
it is entirely legitimate for historians to interpret instances of
genocide as having been ‘precipitated’ by something or other, but
anyone who uses such explanations to shift the responsibility away
from the perpetrators – whether Ottoman, Hutu, German, Serbian or
other – is simply an apologist or a denier.

On 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler gave a speech to the Reichstag in
which he stated: ‘If the world of international financial Jewry,
both in and outside of Europe, should succeed in plunging the nations
into another world war, the result will not be the Bolshevisation
of the world and thus a victory for Judaism. The result will be the
extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.’

Hitler therefore made it explicit that the outbreak of a world war
would result in the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Indeed,
the outbreak and course of World War II ‘precipitated’ the
Holocaust. Britain and France, when they declared war on Germany
in September 1939, were by Chomsky’s logic responsible for the
Holocaust. Some ‘anti-imperialists’ have, in fact, attempted to make
this very point.

In sum, Chomsky’s case is a disgrace at the level of plain reasoning,
never mind at the level of ethics.

Let there be no mistake about this: atrocities, ethnic cleansing and
genocide are the responsibility of those who commit them. Whatever
‘precipitates’ them, they are the fault of their perpetrators. And
it would be a sorry world indeed if were were to allow perpetrators
to deter us from taking action to stop atrocities, ethnic cleansing
and genocide, by their threat to commit still worse crimes in the
event that we do take action.

This comment was posted on the author’s Greater Surbiton website,
25 August 2009