First Do No Harm:
Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, by
David N. Gibbs
Reviewed by Josip Glaurdic, University of Cambridge, UK
International Affairs, Vol. 86, Issue 2 (March, 2010) 555-56
The West's policies in former Yugoslavia have been
criticized in many quarters, but nowhere as vociferously as on the
political left. A number of books committed to leftist ideals -- most
notably Michael Parenti's To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia
(Verso, 2000) and Diana Johnstone's Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO
and Western Delusions (Pluto, 2003) -- have provided strongly
worded, yet deeply flawed, alternative narratives of the dissolution of
Yugoslavia and the West's interventions. David Gibbs's book is the
newest and most sophisticated addition to this burgeoning literature. In
spite of its impressive academic veneer of extensive notes and lengthy
bibliography, First Do No Harm suffers from the same shortcomings as its
predecessors. It is selective in its treatment of sources; it distorts
the record of events; and it demonstrates a profound lack of
understanding of former Yugoslavia, partly stemming from the author's
inability to read sources in the South Slavic languages.
Gibbs's motivation is to expose how Balkan interventions were used to
perpetuate US militarism after the Cold War. His aim is to challenge the
humanitarian interventionists and their claims that the West became
involved in Yugoslavia reluctantly and without real power interests. In
his view, it was the West's intervention that actually tore the troubled
federation apart in the first place. According to Gibbs, Yugoslavia's
economy was destroyed by the International Monetary Fund's measures
during the 1980s, the death knell being Germany's encouragement of the
republics of Slovenia and Croatia to secede. What followed thereafter
was a series of messy, ill-advised and biased interventions, which
satisfied real power interests of important western players, but left
the region ravaged. In Gibbs's view, Washington -- as the principal
architect of the post-Cold War order and the West's policies in
Yugoslavia -- based its actions on four strategic goals: strengthening
America's worldwide dominance; finding a new role for NATO; dissuading
the European Community/European Union from pursuing independent foreign
and security policies; and satisfying the US military-industrial
complex.
This line of reasoning might not be original, but Gibbs gives it some
freshness by wrapping it into an argument on America's post-Cold War
pursuit of hegemony. His chapter on 'US predominance and the logic of
interventionism' manages to challenge some dominant opinions on
Clintonian multilateralism and America's relations with the European
Union. Once Gibbs abandons his ideological forte and takes on the events
in former Yugoslavia, however, his book collapses and reads as little
more than a collection of the conspiracy theories so popular in
Milosevic's Serbia.
The problem lies not only in Gibbs's claims that the West was hostile
towards Milosevic because of his anti-capitalism; or that Croatia's then
President Franjo Tudjman had neo-Nazi sympathies; or that Bosnia's then
President Alija Izetbegovic was an Islamic extremist (whose support for
multiculturalism was apparently suspect because during the Second World
War, as a 15- to 19-year-old youth, he merely 'lived in areas of Bosnia
that were controlled by the pro-German Ustasa movement, essentially a
Nazi puppet state', pp. 114–15); or that Germany favoured Croatia on
account of sympathies for the Second World War liaisons between the
Croatian Ustase and Nazi Germany. The author supports these and
similarly dubious claims with spurious, distorted or already discredited
evidence -- or with no evidence at all. In his discussion of the role of
Germany in Yugoslavia's dissolution, Gibbs repeatedly promises 'new
evidence' which will prove that the German government not only
encouraged Slovenia's and Croatia's independence, but also helped
initiate the war. However, this 'new evidence' is nothing more than a
February 1994 report produced by the Washington NGO International
Strategic Studies Association (ISSA) and a September 1994 Jane's
Intelligence Review article, which to a large extent recycles the
ISSA claims of Germany helping Croatia set up its intelligence services.
These were questionable allegations, for which the two publications
provided no proof; more importantly, they were made 16 years ago. How
they constitute new (and credible) evidence of Germany helping initiate
the Yugoslav wars, Gibbs fails to explain.
Another example concerns Gibbs's repeated use of the March 1994 'Report
on the historical background of the civil war in the Former Yugoslavia'
by Professor Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni's UN Commission of Experts. The
problem is: there was no March 1994 report by the Bassiouni Commission.
The report which Gibbs refers to was drafted by the Milwaukee lawyer and
vice-president of the Serbian Unity Congress David Erne, who printed it
on UN stationery and distributed it to the press. This propaganda piece,
extolling for example Radovan Karadzic as a respected poet-dissident,
was never an official UN report. The real Bassiouni report was
published in May 1994. On more than 3,000 pages it outlined the crimes
committed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially in the Serb
campaigns of summary executions, mass rapes and concentration camps.
This report and its findings are not even mentioned by Gibbs.
Such shortcomings are the trademarks of First Do No Harm. Gibbs
repeatedly claims to be setting the historical record straight, but does
so only in order to create a smokescreen for his distortions. He, for
example, makes no mention of the Belgrade-instigated 1990 mutiny of the
Krajina Serbs and, as a result, we are led to believe Croatia was to
blame for the 1991–2 war. He downplays what the Bosnian Serbs were doing
in 1991 -- arming and creating para-state structures -- and, as a
result, we are led to believe that 'there is no evidence that the Serbs
were bent on war' in Bosnia in March 1992. Or, in his discussion of the
Second World War in Yugoslavia, he only mentions the communist partisans
and the Croat Ustase collaborationists (who are repeatedly portrayed as
the forefathers of contemporary Croatia), but there is no mention of the
Serb collaborationist Chetniks. Surely it is possible to write a book
with a leftist critique of the West's policies in the Balkans without
such glaring omissions and distortions. Unfortunately, such a book still
has to be written.