Joshua Micah Marshall makes some pretty strange remarks about some recent history on his blog.
But let’s go back to 1992 and ’93. Back then, one of the contested areas was the part of Croatia called the Krajina. This was essentially an ethnic Serb enclave within the borders of Croatia and as you might imagine this became a volatile crisis point in the fighting between Serbs and Croats. In any case, United Nations peace-keepers were sent into the region in the beginning of 1992 to maintain the peace. And did a reasonably good, though by no means perfect, job at it. For a while, the matter was thus placed in suspense, until 1995 when then-Croatian President Franjo Tudjman gave the UN Mission an ultimatum to leave. Eventually the Croatians rolled in and retook the region with some quite ugly consequences.
Let me set him straight on a few points: The UN had nothing to do with the reduction in fighting in Croatia in 1992. The reason the fighting died down was that the Croatian National Guard (ZNG) and the Serbs had fought each other to a standstill. The front line stabilised because that was as far as the Serbs could get once Croatia’s ad hoc army was able to dig in. However the Croatians, due to the criminal and immoral arms embargo that favoured the heavily armed Serbian Yugoslav Army, lacked the ability to mount offensive operations to retake Krajina…therefore stalemate. The UN was utterly irrelevant to that outcome.
Thereafter, the Serbs shifted their attention to Bosnia i Herzegovina whilst the Croatians used whatever means they could to build up their army, now called the HV. The UN did not ‘keep the peace’, it just presided over the stalemated front line in Croatia while Croats armed and trained their army and Milosevic, Karadzic, Mladic, Arkan, Seselj etc. and the people who were willing to follow their orders got on with raping and murdering their way across Bosnia i Herzegovina whilst the international community subjected them to grimaces and intermittent clucking sounds.
So the fact that the Croatia, subjected to the criminal arms embargo that had impaired its ability to defend us, took measures to ensure that political forces in the USA would not continue to act against our interests, is bad exactly how? I assume Joshua is equally against Israel’s vast lobbying efforts in the USA as well. Does Joshua expect Croatians to accept that we were not entitled to retake Krajina? Sorry but I see it rather differently. I am from Glina and one of the ‘quite ugly consequences’ of the Serbian cetnic’s arriving was Croats like me getting killed in their homes because they were Croats. I didn’t see this on CNN or read about it in the newspapers, I saw it out of my fucking bedroom window before my family and I managed to get out of town and ended up as refugees.
So if Joshua expects us to feel bad about taking Krajina back and trying to manipulate US political forces which were originally a party to the embargo against us, he is going to be disappointed. Certain US political forces helped keep us weak so why should we not try to change that given the harm we suffered as a result? I wonder if Joshua thinks the nice Mr. Arkan and nice Mr. Seselj would have eventually admitted it was all just a big misunderstanding and let bygones be bygones if only us mean old Croats had not come back with guns blazing and tanks rolling? One of the ‘quite ugly consequences’ of the Croatian Army expelling the UN and then the Serbian Army from Krajina was my family and I got to go home. I take this matter a little personally. If you have a problem with that, go fuck yourself.
