George Monbiot and the Guardian on "Genocide Denial" and "Revisionism"

By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson; September 04, 2011 - Znet
http://www.zcommunications.org/george-monbiot-and-the-guardi...

Source: Monthly Review

On Tuesday, June 14, the Guardian of London published "Left and Libertarian Right Cohabit in the Weird World of the Genocide Belittlers."1 In this nearly 1,100-word commentary, the British writer George Monbiot attacked the two of us (among others) as "genocide deniers" and "revisionists" for our writings on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Monbiot also went on to assail Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and the U.K.-based Media Lens group for their association with individuals as depraved as we are.

In response, each of us submitted separate manuscripts to the Guardian by no later than the following weekend (June 17-19). But the Guardian found our submissions problematic, and delayed its decision about their status while it purported to check the accuracy of what we had written -- something that it clearly had not done for Monbiot's error-laden and grossly misleading original.

By July 5, the Guardian had rejected both of our manuscripts.2 But, it also invited us to resubmit a single joint-response, with no guarantee of publication, and requested that we observe a strict 550 word limit -- or half-the-length of Monbiot's original.

Soon thereafter we delivered a consolidated manuscript to the Guardian at exactly 550-words; and on July 20, five weeks and a day after it had published Monbiot's original, the Guardian published an even shorter, 524-word response under our names. But rather than giving it a title that featured our claims about Monbiot's errors, ignorance, and crass name-calling, the Guardian gave it a title that was both plaintive and defensive: "We're Not Genocide Deniers."3

At least two comments posted to the Guardian Response column's web page below our piece by the Canadian media-activist Joe Emersberger provided links to our original responses, which we had posted to ZNet. But Emersberger's comments were removed by the Guardian's intellectual police, never to be restored; a comment by one of us (Peterson) that linked to these same responses also was removed. Eventually, this latter comment was restored, "most likely in response to public complaints," Media Lens believes.4

On the other hand, the first comment recorded by the Guardian after it opened its Response column for feedback on July 20 asked us: "If you say you are not denying the genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, what are you saying? And please, one sentence will suffice."5 This is, of course, an aggressively hostile question, and impossible to answer in one sentence. But it is also a question that we had answered at length in The Politics of Genocide6 and in our original submissions that the Guardian had rejected, and to which its Web site moderator was not allowing anyone to post a hyperlink!

Furthering its protection of Monbiot and its enforcement of a one-sided discussion, the Observer (the Guardian's sister paper, which appears on Sundays to complement the Guardian's Monday through Saturday schedule) published Nick Cohen's "Decline and Fall of the Puppetmasters"7 three days before our response appeared. This was a diatribe against "west-hating" intellectuals (Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy, and a "cranky writer called Diana Johnstone") who in Cohen's words "believe that the lackeys of American imperialism were inventing stories of Serb atrocities to justify the expansion of western power." Then six days after it published our response, the Guardian published "To Claim Tutsis Caused Rwanda's Genocide Is Pure Revisionism" by James Wizeye, identified as the "first secretary at the Rwanda high commission" or embassy in London.8 No offsetting response has since been published by the Guardian that challenged this piece of propaganda from a spokesman for the regime which, we argued, has been the primary mass-killer in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo for the past two decades.9

Some Guardian-Observer History10

The Guardian and the Observer have long been unable to break loose from the standard, politically convenient, Western party-line narratives on both Yugoslavia and Rwanda. This was made very clear in the case of Yugoslavia when their lead reporter there, Ed Vulliamy, proudly asserted his anti-Serb bias and unwillingness to report in neutral fashion. "I am one of those reporters who cannot see this as just another story from which I must remain detached and in which I must be neutral," he wrote in 1993. "[W]ith Omarska and Trnopolje [in 1992] objective coverage of the war became a rather silly notion. . . . I am on the side of the Bosnian Muslim people against an historical and military program to obliterate them."11 On the other hand, hundreds of Bosnian Serbs were killed and raped in the Bosnian Muslim-run prison camps of Celebici, Konjic and Tarcin (to name three major ones);12 but Vulliamy never wrote about them, though in his voluminous reports for the Guardian, he did mention the existence of Tarcin and Celebici once apiece in passing.13 Can anybody imagine his and the Guardian's reaction to a Russian journalist who, having visited only Celebici and Tarcin during the wars in Bosnia, declared that these camps make a commitment to the Serb cause a moral imperative, and objective journalism a silly notion? Or their reaction to this Russian journalist were he to publish this plea under the title: "We Must Fight for the Memory of the Bosnian Muslim Camps"?14

Vulliamy's bias, and no doubt his "journalism of attachment"-derived dishonesty in this theater of conflict,15 have been demonstrated over many years by his serial misrepresentations in the case of Fikret Alic, whom Vulliamy described as a "young Bosnian whose emaciated torso, behind the barbed wire of Trnopolje concentration camp, became a symbol of the cynical slaughter in Bosnia-Herzegovina";16 by his refusal to acknowledge Bosnia's Islamic leader and wartime President Alija Izetbegovic's rejection of a multi-ethnic, tolerant, and secular state and espousal of a closed Islamic polity;17 and by his long-standing commitment to the early inflated Bosnian Muslim death toll in the face of dramatic downward revisions by establishment sources.18 The same bias and dishonesty were also reflected in Vulliamy's violent 2009 diatribe at Amnesty International's invitation to Noam Chomsky to deliver its annual 'Stand Up for Justice' lecture, alleging Chomsky's unspecified apologetics for Serbian atrocities in the Balkan wars, including "spitting on the graves of the dead."19

This Vulliamy perspective and structure of disinformation undoubtedly fed into Emma Brockes's infamous 2005 interview with Chomsky for the Guardian,20 an affair that the Guardian Reader's Editor (ombudsman) concluded had misrepresented Chomsky's expressed beliefs so egregiously that the Guardian expunged the interview from its Web site.21 Although Brockes could have asked Chomsky questions about the many issues on which he is well informed, she focused on Yugoslavia and Srebrenica, and on the analyst Diana Johnstone, whose work on Yugoslavia Vulliamy had in the past called "poison."22 One memorable smear in the Guardian's handling of the interview appeared immediately below its title ("The Greatest Intellectual?"), where by way of introducing it, readers found the following sentences:

Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated?

A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough.

This question-and-answer sequence was nowhere to be found in the published interview. In fact, the answer quoted here was given to an entirely different question, in which Brockes asked Chomsky whether he regretted signing an open letter that protested a Swedish publisher's decision not to bring out a translation of Johnstone's 2002 book Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press); this letter referred to Fools' Crusade as "outstanding," and added that "there are more fundamental issues at stake, namely freedom of expression and the right to express dissenting views."23 Brockes's and the Guardian's language-substitution removed the open letter's focus on freedom-of-expression issues and its broad defense of Johnstone's work, and rewrote Chomsky's actual words into support for "those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated." Thus was Johnstone's complex and nuanced book pigeonholed by its alleged position on the Srebrenica massacre, which Brockes's biased and loaded question oversimplified to the point of absurdity.

Another memorable smear was Brockes's contention that Chomsky uses scare-quotes "to undermine things he disagrees with," and that he used them around the word "massacre" to suggest that "during the Bosnian war the 'massacre' at Srebrenica was probably overstated." All of this allowed Brockes to make the dishonest and insulting addition that, "in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre." But when an external legal investigation pressed Brockes to prove that Chomsky had said what Brockes claimed he did, the audio recording of his verbal exchanges with Brockes was found to have been "partially recorded over" (i.e., erased) some time between the publication of the interview and the Guardian's official inquiry into the matter.24

As noted, these kinds of tactics are in the Vulliamy "journalism of attachment" tradition, and it is amusing to see that in her profile of Chomsky, Brockes misspelled Johnstone's first-name as "Diane" rather than Diana, just as Vulliamy had misspelled it eight months earlier in a commentary for the IWPR Balkan Crisis Report.25 It seems likely that either Brockes and/or her editors had worked from this eight-month-old text while preparing the final draft of the interview, or that Vulliamy himself played a hand in preparing this draft. In any case, no one at the Guardian caught the misspelling of Johnstone's first-name prior to publication of Brockes's interview.

In early December 2005, Ed Vulliamy joined 23 other writers and activists who had long advocated for the Western establishment's version of Srebrenica -- and the "good" versus "evil" portrayal of the wars in Yugoslavia -- in protesting the Guardian's decision to withdraw Brockes's mock interview with Chomsky and to issue a "correction" for the original. The "Guardian has unjustly besmirched Brockes's reputation," these 24 figures stated in an open letter, and "bestowed a stamp of legitimacy on revisionist attempts to deny the Bosnian genocide and minimize the Srebrenica massacre." Among Vulliamy's fellow signatories were David Rohde, David Rieff, Marko Attila Hoare, Oliver Kamm, Nick Cohen, and Nerma Jelacic -- all veteran maximizers of Serb perfidy and Bosnian Muslim victimhood.26

Common to Vulliamy's longstanding journalism of attachment and call to "fight for the memory of Bosnia's camps," the forgeries in Brockes's interview with Chomsky, and Monbiot's attack on "genocide belittlers," has been the unspoken premise that any challenge to the establishment narrative about Srebrenica is beyond the bounds of respectable journalism. Disallowed as apologetics or belittling or spitting on graves is anything that invokes historical context regularly suppressed by establishment accounts or questions official claims about the number of persons executed there. 27 The journalism of attachment is a rigid party-line journalism.

And just as there has long existed a Western party-line on the dismantling of Yugoslavia,28 in which the roles of perpetrators and victims were cast early (1991-) and adhered to with passionate intensity and certitude by the Guardian-Observer's writers, so a party-line on the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda has guided its coverage of this theater of conflict for almost as many years.

Here, again, the casting of perpetrators and victims was clear: These roles paralleled the long-standing U.S. and British hostility towards Rwanda's Hutu-majority government under President Juvenal Habyarimana, and their alignment with the armed forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). But in Rwanda, a third role was cast for the alleged savior of the country from the Hutu "genocidaires," and assigned to the man who, in the words of the Guardian's chief Africa correspondent Chris McGreal, is the "former Tutsi rebel leader who ended the genocide [and] has been heralded as the Abraham Lincoln of Africa"29 -- Paul Kagame.

These assigned perpetrator-victim-savior roles, followed closely by the Guardian since the April-July 1994 period, turn the fundamental realities of the Rwandan conflict upside down, a fact that becomes clearer when one examines the atrocities of those four months within the context of the entire 20-year ascent and geographical spread of Kagame's power. 30

Kagame trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1990. When the RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda on October 1 of that year, even wearing the uniforms of the Ugandan army, not only did the United States and Britain not protest this act of aggression, they also prevented the UN Security Council from taking any action on Rwanda until March 1993,31 following a major RPF offensive that proved its superiority over the Army of the Rwandan government, displaced one million persons, and greatly weakened the Habyarimana government. Through the start of April 1994, it was crucial to what would become the establishment narrative of the "Rwandan genocide" that the RPF's aggression and occupation of the northern part of the country, its rapid increase in troop and weapons strength,32 its political penetration of the Rwandan state under Western-imposed power-sharing agreements, its military offensives, and its massacres and large-scale ethnic cleansing of the Hutu population, all be kept as quiet as possible, and that reporting feature instead Hutu perfidy and Tutsi victimhood. The Guardian (along with the rest of the establishment U.S. and U.K. media) met this challenge.33

The "triggering event" in the mass killings of 1994 and after was the shooting down of Habyarimana's jet during its landing approach to the airport in Kigali on April 6. In standard accounts of the "Rwandan genocide," responsibility for this incident is assigned to Hutu extremists around Habyarimana, who, facing a loss of power and privileges under the Arusha peace and power-sharing accords of August 1993, assassinated their president rather than accept the implementation of the accords and then launched their plan to exterminate Rwanda's Tutsi population.34

But a serious problem for this Hutu conspiracy model arose in 1997, when Michael Hourigan, a principal investigator for the Rwanda Tribunal, found RPF informants who attested to the "direct involvement" of Kagame,35 and then in 2006, when French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière also concluded that Kagame had needed and was responsible for this political assassination.36

In the face of these awkward facts, the Guardian stood by the party-line. Despite its passing mentions of Bruguière's conclusion that "Kagame gave direct orders" to assassinate Habyarimana,37 the Guardian has regularly reported that Habyarimana "probably died at the hand of Hutu extremists opposed to the concessions he had made to the Tutsi rebels,"38 in Chris McGreal's words; years later, when the trial of Hutu Colonel Theoneste Bagosora began at the Rwanda Tribunal in 2002, McGreal wrote that the shoot-down was "probably on Col. Bagosora's orders," and "within hours" Bagasora hosted a meeting at which the "extermination of Tutsis" was discussed.39 More striking yet, Michael Hourigan's name has been mentioned only once in the history of the Guardian-Observer's reporting on Rwanda: By us, in our July 20, 2011 contribution to the Guardian's Response column.40

Apart from the compelling direct evidence that the shoot-down was Kagame's handiwork, there are also the facts that Kagame's RPF mobilized its troops within two hours of the event, and that it was this final RPF offensive that enabled Kagame's forces to quickly conquer Rwanda, rather than face elections in 1995 that he and his minority Tutsi surely would have lost.41 Moreover, the government of Rwanda at the time was a coalition government that had several strategically placed Tutsi members; Alison Des Forges, perhaps the most important advocate for the Hutu conspiracy model, admitted at the Rwanda Tribunal that there was little likelihood that the coalition Hutu and Tutsi government could have planned the assassination and the extermination of the Tutsi, without the knowledge of its Tutsi members.42 But the Guardian never confronts this set of problems. The Hutu conspiracy model is sacrosanct.

In standard accounts, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is taken as a genuine judicial enterprise, not as the instrument of victor's justice and guarantor of RPF immunity that it was and remains. This parallels the establishment treatment of the Yugoslavia Tribunal, both tribunals creations of NATO and closely reflecting its biases and political demands. The ICTR's huge bias has been displayed, first, in the fact that no Tutsi has ever been indicted by it, although vast crimes have been committed by the RPF from 1990 onward.43 In one notable incident, the former ICTR prosecution expert Filip Reyntjens resigned his post in open protest at this unjustified bias and impunity. "It is precisely because the [RPF] regime in Kigali has been given a sense of impunity that, during the years following 1994, it has committed massive internationally recognized crimes in both Rwanda and the DRC," Reyntjens wrote in his letter of resignation.44 Another dramatic illustration of the ICTR bias and role was chief prosecutor Louise Arbour's refusal in 1997 to accept Hourigan's evidence on Kagame's responsibility for the shoot-down of Habyarimana's jet, and the ICTR's failure to address this event to the present. Nevertheless, the Guardian takes the ICTR as a genuine instrument of justice, with Chris McGreal providing testimony for its prosecution of Hutu defendants, just like Ed Vulliamy testified for the prosecution of Serb defendants at the Yugoslavia Tribunal.45

Another parallel with establishment accounts of the former Yugoslavia (and of Srebrenica specifically) is the belief that the U.S. and U.K. governments were guilty of inaction in Rwanda, when a military intervention to protect the Tutsi was in order. But these governments never just stood idly by. Instead, they actively stood by Kagame, shielding his 1990 aggression from international action, vastly expanding his RPF into the armed forces that overthrew the Habyarimana government and conquered the Rwandan state, and preventing the ICTR from bringing any indictments against Kagame's RPF, even firing ICTR chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte in 2003 to terminate her "Special Investigations" of the RPF.46 The United States even used the Security Council to reduce UN forces in Rwanda as the killings escalated in April 1994, in accord with Kagame's desire for unimpeded war-making and his plans for conquest. But the Guardian swallowed the big lie of U.S. and U.K. inaction from the very beginning. "The world said it should never happen again but stood by while genocide took place in Rwanda," David Beresford wrote. "Despite being fully aware of the horrors through television coverage, most countries stood by and allowed the slaughter to happen," Guardian editor Joseph Harker added.47 Here again, journalistic nonfeasance has been crucial to protecting both the Kagame regime and U.S. and U.K. support for it.

A central feature of the establishment party-line holds that the victims of the 1994 mass killing were largely Tutsi and "moderate" Hutu, targeted for elimination by Hutu extremists. "Rwanda's civil war saw 800,000 Tutsis slaughtered by the Hutus," a G2 headline proclaimed over a report by Chris McGreal.48 This is not based on serious evidence and is incompatible with the fact that Kagame's RPF quickly overpowered their Hutu rivals, were soon killing 10,000 Hutu civilians a month to clear the ground for Tutsi resettlement,49 and drove a huge mass of Hutu refugees into the Democratic Republic of Congo, where many more were killed in the years ahead. Christian Davenport's and Allan Stam's research found that a "majority of the victims of 1994" were in fact Hutu,50 and census and survivor data also point to majority Hutu deaths.51

A true picture of the Rwandan genocide would not only acknowledge the predominance of Hutu deaths in 1994, it would recognize that the same pattern of RPF-triggered deaths and displacements stretches from the RPF's invasion of Rwanda in 1990, straight through its major offensive of February-March 1993, its final offensive and seizure of state power in 1994 (Genocide One), and its series of offensives into the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo from 1994 on, resulting in a death toll several times the scale of Rwanda, and creating the greatest theater of atrocities in the contemporary world (Genocide Two).52 But for the past 17 years, no such picture has emerged on the pages of the Guardian-Observer, which continues to toe the party-line in the summer of 2011 on both Yugoslav and Rwandan history.

The Wacky World of George Monbiot

The image of the "Abraham Lincoln of Africa" may have suffered some downgrades over the years, particularly with the August 2010 leak of the draft UN report accusing Kagame's RPF of "premeditation and a precise methodology" in its targeted attacks on Hutu in the DRC, resulting in massive losses of life that "could be classified as crimes of genocide."53 But Kagame's embrace by Western capitals and the UN officialdom remains firm,54 and his minority Tutsi dictatorship relies as much as ever on the myth of his savior role in ending rather than triggering and perpetrating mass atrocities in 1994. Whenever doubts are raised about the reality of this myth, Kagame's many advocates in the English-speaking world are quick to reiterate that the myth is the truth.55 Meanwhile, in Rwanda, Kagame uses his regime's laws against "revisionism, negationism and trivialization of genocide" to intimidate his critics and to jail and even silence permanently anyone who challenges his rule.56

It is therefore striking that when George Monbiot throws the charges of "revisionism" and "genocide denial" against us for our work on Yugoslavia and Rwanda, or when Ed Vulliamy attacks work more honest than his own for sowing "poison in the water supply of history," and smears Chomsky for "giving the revisionists his blessing" and "comfort to Messrs. Karadzic and Mladic, and their death squads,"57 Vulliamy and Monbiot are employing a technique that they share with Kagame.

"The massacre of Bosnians at Srebrenica in 1995 and the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 are two of the best-documented acts of genocide in history," Monbiot writes.58 As our belief to the contrary is that both the "Rwandan genocide" and the "Srebrenica massacre" rank among the most misrepresented events on the past 20 years, it is worth examining the basis on which Monbiot thinks their proof rests.

Monbiot believes (as does the Guardian-Observer) that the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals have been trustworthy searchers for truth and unbiased dispensers of justice, and that the narratives of the conflicts each of them codifies are beyond reproach. The contrast between our view and theirs could not be more stark or clear. Whereas we believe that these are political institutions, operating with the mandate to deliver guilty verdicts to the Serb targets of the U.S.-led NATO bloc in the former Yugoslavia, guilty verdicts to the Hutu targets of the U.S., U.K., and RPF in Rwanda, and to dramatize all of this with faux-legal performances that stick to these two scripts, Monbiot et al. accept the tribunals' indictments, judgments, and guilt assignments on an ex cathedra basis.

Monbiot also takes the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) as an unchallengeable authority on the body count at Srebrenica, even though its staff is 90 percent Bosnian Muslim and operates under U.S. sponsorship.59 He takes at face value the ICMP's claim that, "using DNA screening, [it] has so far identified the corpses of 6,595 of the 7,789 Bosnians reported as missing after the siege of Srebrenica," and adds that the ICMP's "work suggests that the total number of victims is close to 8,100." It never occurs to Monbiot that DNA cannot fix the mode or time of death, so that when those 6,595 or 8,100 individuals died (i.e., in July 1995? or June 1992-March 1993?), and whether they were executed, killed in battle, or perished from natural causes, are legally meaningful differences that in the vast majority of cases remain undetermined. In The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics, one of the two books which Monbiot purports to be criticizing, Michael Mandel shows that, in its foundational 2001 judgment in the trial of the Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic, the Yugoslavia Tribunal itself never found evidence of anything like 8,000 executions at Srebrenica, so it stretched what facts it did have as far as it could, and then stretched them even further in this case's 2004 judgment on appeal 60 -- but Monbiot never mentions Mandel's chapter. In his independent examination of the Srebrenica-related autopsy reports compiled by the Yugoslavia Tribunal through 2002, the Serb forensic pathologist Ljubiša Simic found that these reports covered between 1,919 and 1,985 individuals in total, and that in only roughly one-in-five did the autopsies "indicate that those persons may have been executed."61 The implication that Monbiot draws for his readers, that the 6,595 persons allegedly identified by DNA equals 6,595 persons executed (i.e., murdered in a criminally meaningful manner, and proof of the "Srebrenica massacre"), is false in the extreme.

As noted, Monbiot also fails to recognize that the staff of the ICMP, which represents one side in a violent conflict, might not be entirely reliable gatherers of evidence, whether in producing a Srebrenica-related list of missing persons, assembling and storing the mortal remains recovered from the Srebrenica-related graves, or interpreting possible matches between the DNA extracted from the bones of these remains and the DNA drawn from the blood donated by living relatives. Nor does he mention the inconvenient fact that, though the ICMP has been publicizing its claims about DNA identifications since 2001, to date it has refused to disclose to defense teams for their own independent analysis any of its purported DNA profiles and the physical evidence on which these profiles allegedly were developed.62 We may also be sure that, like Vulliamy, Monbiot has never mentioned the dramatic downward revision by establishment sources in the estimated death toll from the wars in Bosnia, from 250,000 in 1993 to some 100,000 in 2003-2007 63, or pondered what this might suggest about the unchanging stability of the 8,000-figure in the "Srebrenica massacre," a figure first broached by the Red Cross in early September 1995 on the basis of persons reported to it as missing, yet remaining immutable ever since.64

But it is not at all clear that Monbiot actually read The Srebrenica Massacre. He writes, for example, that this book "claims that the 8,000 deaths at Srebrenica are 'an unsupportable exaggeration. The true figure may be closer to 800'." What he doesn't mention is that he took these 11 words from page 8 of the Foreword to the book, which was contributed by Phillip Corwin 65, at one time the UN Civilian Affairs Coordinator in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Monbiot attributes these 11 words from Corwin's Foreword to the collection itself, and asserts that "It" -- namely, the collection -- "claims that the 8,000 deaths at Srebrenica are 'an unsupportable exaggeration' . . ." (emphasis added). As the seven contributors to the book besides Corwin focus on the issue of executions, not simply deaths for which no cause is specified, and as none of them deny the possibility of 8,000 deaths, Monbiot's attribution of these 11 words from the Foreword to "It" is a lie, and suggests that his reading of the book was even less than cursory.66

Monbiot criticizes the British writer Mick Hume for having once said of the May 27, 1992 shelling of a Bosnian Muslim breadline in Sarajevo that "It is quite obvious to anyone objective that Muslims have done it." Later, Monbiot extends this criticism to The Srebrenica Massacre: "Like Karadzic," he writes, "the book claims that the market massacres in Sarajevo were carried out by Bosnian Muslim provocateurs." The "Like Karadzic" is deeply dishonest. Also, it should be noted that there were at least three "market massacres" in Sarajevo during the war: The 1992 incident (15 deaths); the Markale marketplace massacre of February 5, 1994 (66 deaths); and the last on August 28, 1995 (43 deaths). Different contributors to the collection (particularly George Bogdanich 67) have assembled a variety of sources to support the claim that the second and third of these incidents were "false flag" operations carried out by the Bosnian Muslims themselves at critical junctures in their negotiations with Western powers to provoke NATO's intervention on their side. The sources referred to include UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (who himself was citing UN Special Representative for Bosnia Yasushi Akashi and U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher) (p. 233); Lord David Owen and the British General Sir Michael Rose (pp. 53-54); U.S. Lieut. Colonel John Sray (p. 57); a U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee report (p. 35); the then chief Balkans correspondent for the New York Times, David Binder (p. 233); and the Dutch military intelligence expert Cees Wiebes, who interviewed a minimum of 11 NATO military and intelligence figures who told him that both the 1994 and 1995 incidents had been carried out by the Bosnian Muslims, and added that "Even the most important British policy body in the field of intelligence, the Joint Intelligence Committee, . . . came to the conclusion that the shelling of the Sarajevo market was probably not the work of the VRS [the Bosnian Serb army], but of the Bosnian Muslims" (p. 244). But Monbiot ignores these multiple references, mentions an old statement on the subject by Mick Hume, and likens "the book" to Radovan Karadzic because it disputes this establishment truth!

Monbiot writes that "[The Srebrenica Massacre] insists that the witnesses to the killings are 'not credible'," but he immediately drops the matter. But in the passage where these two words appear 68, one of the present writers (Herman) is summarizing the wealth of material collected throughout the book. Herman notes that, in the entire corpus of the Yugoslavia Tribunal's work, the "only direct participant witness claim that ran as high as 1,000 [executed] was that of Drazen Erdemovic," a Bosnian Croat mercenary who at different times during the civil wars in Bosnia served on all three sides, and who in late May 1996, entered the Tribunal's first-ever guilty plea (for "crimes against humanity," as it turned out). Having heard Erdemovic's plea (May 31, 1996), the trial chamber ordered him to submit to a psychiatric evaluation; the three experts who examined Erdemovic concluded that he was "insufficiently able to stand trial at this moment" (June 27, 1996). Nevertheless, just eight days later (July 5, 1996), the Office of the Prosecutor called Erdemovic as a witness in the Tribunal's famous Rule 62, mock-trial-in-absentia of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Now, it appears, he was sufficiently able to testify that he participated with seven other executioners (all of whom he named, but none of whom has ever been called before the Tribunal) "at a farm that was at a place called Pilica" on July 16, 1995, where 15 to 20 bus loads of Bosnian Muslims were delivered, containing between 1,000 and 1,200 persons, all of whom he and his fellow gunmen shot dead in groups of roughly ten at a time.69

Herman comments that Erdemovic's testimony that day "was accepted despite its vagueness and inconsistencies, lack of corroboration, his problematic background and associations, and his suffering from mental problems sufficient to disqualify him from trial -- but not from testifying before the Tribunal, free of cross-examination. . . . This and other witness evidence suffered from serious abuse of the plea-bargaining process whereby witnesses could receive mitigating sentences if they cooperated sufficiently with the prosecution" (p. 281). George Szamuely shows in his chapter the extent to which Erdemovic is a charlatan and a fraud, but one carefully protected over many years by the Tribunal. (Matters also developed at length by Germinal Civikov in his book, Srebrenica: The Star Witness.70) At one point during the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in 2003, Erdemovic testified that "his unit was paid lavishly to participate in crimes at Srebrenica, but [he] could not say who made the actual payment," Szamuely writes, and that he once even told ABC News that "his unit had been promised 12 kilograms of gold" (p. 189).71 In short, not only is Drazen Erdemovic not credible, but as the prosecution's most important witness in advancing its case for the "Srebrenica massacre" and, ultimately, "genocide," his long, 16-year career as a plea-bargaining witness-for-the-prosecution reveals the Tribunal's deeply political and judicially-compromised nature.

Monbiot adds that "[The Srebrenica Massacre] suggests that the Bosnian Muslim soldiers retreated from Srebrenica to ensure that more Bosnians were killed, in order to provoke US intervention." In the endnote that accompanies this passage on Monbiot's website, he laughs off the book's sources for this "astonishing claim," and quotes one paragraph from Herman's "Summary and Conclusions," and two endnotes.72 Clearly, Monbiot believes that he has discovered a disconnect between the "astonishing claim" and the sources that Herman cites to support it.

In fact, there are two passages in this book where different contributors develop this claim, and where they cite multiple sources to suggest that, as one British Lieut. Colonel assigned to the UN Protection Force for Bosnia told the British military correspondent Tim Ripley: "They [the Bosnian government] knew what was happening in Srebrenica. I am certain they decided it was worth the sacrifice."73

As with Monbiot's treatment of the "market massacres," here he pretends that the book hasn't provided adequate sources, and counts on his readers not to check for themselves. George Bogdanich (pp. 56-59) cites the testimony of the Bosnian Muslim General Sefer Halilovic on Sarajevo's orders to withdraw 18 top commanders from Srebrenica, including Naser Oric, in the month before Sarajevo handed Srebrenica over to the Bosnian Serbs; although this diminished the combat readiness of the remaining troops of the 28th Division, Halilovic testified that orders continued to be sent to Srebrenica for its troops to step up "militarily meaningless" attacks on Bosnian Serb positions outside the enclave (p. 58). Herman also points out that, "In his 2004 book, Les Guerriers de la Paix ('Warriors for Peace'), Bernard Kouchner . . . states that on his death-bed, Bosnia's wartime President Alija Izetbegovic acknowledged to both Kouchner and Richard Holbrooke that he had exaggerated claims of atrocities by Serbian forces to encourage NATO interventions against the Serbs." These included the Bosnian Muslim leadership's early and very effective claims in the summer of 1992 about "extermination camps" (recall how well the Guardian and Ed Vulliamy took the bait), but the practice belonged to a much larger, ongoing, Western-P.R.-conscious pattern, used many times throughout the wars, and used as late as July 9, 1995, when Izetbegovic started contacting world leaders, warning them about an imminent "genocide" to be carried out by Bosnian Serb forces (pp. 284-285).

Monbiot seems especially troubled by Herman's contention (also sourced in Bogdanich and Szamuely, a fact unmentioned by Monbiot) that "Bosnian Muslim officials have claimed that their wartime president, Alija Izetbegovic, told them that Bill Clinton had advised him that direct U.S. military intervention could occur only if the Serbs killed at least 5,000 in Srebrenica." Indeed, in referring to Herman's "astonishing claim," this is what Monbiot had in mind. In The Srebrenica Massacre, the oldest source cited for this claim is a 1998 interview with Srebrenica's wartime chief of police Hakija Meholjic, who told the Sarajevo publication Dani that he was a member of a delegation of nine persons from Srebrenica who met personally with Izetbegovic in 1993, at which time Izetbegovic asked them for their thoughts about a possible "swap of Srebrenica for Vogosca [a Sarajevo suburb]?" "We rejected it without any discussion," Meholjic told the interviewer. Then, Izetbegovic added: "You know, I was offered by Clinton in April 1993 . . . that the Chetnik forces enter Srebrenica, carry out a slaughter of 5,000 Muslims, and then there will be a military intervention."74 In the book, the sources provided for this story include Dani (p. 56, p. 189), a Dutch documentary film that was played in court during the Srebrenica-related trial of the Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic (p. 56), and the November 15, 1999 UN report, The Fall of Srebrenica, which both Bogdanich and Herman cite (p. 236, p. 284), and for which Monbiot mocks Herman.75 Perhaps Monbiot finds the use of this UN report "astonishing" because the UN report adds that "Izetbegovic has flatly denied making such a statement," and for Monbiot, Izetbegovic's word more than offsets the other eight witnesses who could confirm Meholjic's story.

There is also no evidence that Monbiot seriously read the other book that he purports to analyze: The Politics of Genocide. "Mis-citing a [Yugoslavia] tribunal judgment," he writes, the book "maintains that the Serb forces 'incontestably had not killed any but "Bosnian Muslim men of military age".'" This time, in an endnote on his website, Monbiot cites nine words from the 2001 judgment in the Krstic case, which he thinks provides a gotcha moment: "In fact the judgment says that 'only the men of military age were systematically massacred'. . . . Can you spot the difference? Herman and Peterson couldn't."76 But contrary to Monbiot, our quote is exact, and there isn't any substantive difference between these two quotes. We should note, however, that Monbiot, a man so sensitive to genocide-related issues, fails to mention that in the same sentence as the one he quotes from our book, we point out that the Bosnian Serbs "had taken the trouble to bus all the women, children, and the elderly men to safety" (p. 47). Doesn't his suppression of this kind of information (and we can be sure that Monbiot never picks it up elsewhere) constitute a kind of genocide-inflation? 77

Further evidence that Monbiot didn't read our book is found where he writes that, in 2004, Mick Hume repeated a "long-discredited denier's claim" that "Paul Kagame's army 'shot down' President Habyarimana's plane." As we also write about the assassination in our book, and contend that the Kagame-led RPF were responsible for it (pp. 59-61), it is revealing that Monbiot didn't extend his criticism of Mick Hume to us as well. But our book doesn't cite Mick Hume -- instead, we cite Michael Hourigan and the French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière (see the previous section). Although this so-called "denier's claim" has never been discredited, it has been vehemently rejected by Kagame and his many apologists.78 So Monbiot repeats the Kagame party-line, attacks Mick Hume (and some of Hume's old colleagues) for highlighting this crucial piece of evidence against Kagame's RPF, and ignores the serious evidence against Kagame that we put forward in our book.79

Monbiot takes strong issue with our assertion in The Politics of Genocide that the "great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million," and he calls this "as straightforward an instance of revisionism as [he's] ever seen. . . ." These objections are laughable. In the book, we report that the U.S. academics Christian Davenport and Allan Stam, who studied multiple mortality estimates for Rwanda, themselves "estimated that more than one million deaths occurred in Rwanda from April through July 1994" (p. 58), with the total on all sides falling within a likely range between 800,000 and 1 million (if not slightly higher). We also write that Davenport-Stam "have been under attack and in retreat since they were expelled from Rwanda in November 2003, when they first reported that the 'majority of the victims of 1994 were of the same ethnicity as the government in power', and have been barred from entering the country ever since" (p. 59). Anyone who looks at Table 1, "Differential attributions of 'genocide' to different theaters of atrocities" (p. 35), sees that we use the lower end estimate of 800,000 deaths in Rwanda, not "two million." But Monbiot takes our single mention of the former RPF military officer Christophe Hakizimana's 1999 letter to the UN, and runs to his readers with the scoop that we are so sloppy in our use of sources, our claims are "comparable in this case only to the claims of the genocidaires themselves"! 80

Monbiot also objects that, in The Politics of Genocide, we place the "Rwandan genocide in inverted commas throughout the text." In fact, we use scare quotes to distinguish between two radically different and incompatible accounts of what happened in Rwanda throughout the period. Thus the "Rwandan genocide" (i.e., inside scare quotes) refers to what in the previous section (above) we call the Hutu conspiracy model -- the false and propagandistic party-line advanced by the U.S., U.K., and Paul Kagame-led RPF, and thereafter enforced by the Rwandan Tribunal, of a "conspiracy" by the majority Hutu around Habyarimana to exterminate the Tutsi minority. We, on the contrary, treat the vast bloodbaths of 1994 as resulting from a pre-planned conspiracy by the RPF, hatched no later than 1990, to seize state power within Rwanda by using aggression, terrorism, and an eventual military takeover of the country. The RPF accomplished this plan by July 1994, after launching its final offensive on April 6, when it shot down Habyarimana's jet and rejected all ceasefire efforts by the remaining Hutu armed forces as impediments to its plan. Our use of scare quotes is therefore a clarification device: By "Rwandan genocide," we mean the ideological construct that fills George Monbiot's (and the Guardian-Observer's collective) mind about the relevant events. Some readers may find it stylistically a turn-off, but this is a separate matter. 81

In both his June 17 and August 4 rejoinders to the Media Lens group, Monbiot urged them to read the reviews of our book published in 2010 by Gerald Caplan and Adam Jones 82, which in Monbiot's words "contain reams of devastating evidence," make it "hard to see how [Media Lens] could still maintain that Herman and Peterson are not engaging in denial," and show that "Media Lens is now supporting an attempt to whitewash two great crimes and to excuse and justify the killers."83 But our analysis of the death tolls was based on serious evidence which we spelled out, but that Monbiot characteristically ignores. Instead, he latches onto two party-line followers on Rwanda 1994, citing their authority on the subject but never a single detail, and suppressing the fact that, in 2010, we drafted extensive replies to both of them.84 Monbiot is a hit-and-run intellectual.

Concluding Note

On first reading George Monbiot's "Left and Libertarian Right Cohabit in the Weird World of the Genocide Belittlers," we drew up a list of his errors, misrepresentations, and regurgitations of party-line lies, so as to better equip ourselves to respond to his commentary. But as the original list kept growing each time we looked at his work, we soon realized that our list might be almost indefinitely expandable, depending on how finely we parsed his errors, and how much time we wanted to devote to the project. We are also aware that this one commentary only gives a glimmer of the past 20 years' worth of Guardian-Observer biased treatment of these theaters of war, U.S. and U.K. intervention, and mass atrocities. But we have made a start.

Still, a few final comments are in order.

The National Security Strategy issued by the Obama administration in 2010 pledged that "in certain instances" the United States would employ "military means to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities."85 From its advocates' point of view, one of the major selling points of so-called "mass atrocity response operations" (a.k.a. "humanitarian interventions") is that, "unlike in many other types of military operations, there is the opportunity to harness true unity of purpose between the humanitarian community and military actors"86 -- more realistically, to compromise the neutrality of humanitarian actors, co-opt their moral credibility, and reduce their ability to counter war and militarism. We, on the other hand, oppose such "unity of purpose," and recognize its destructive potential: The ease with which this year's Western-imperial war on Libya was shepherded through the United Nations under the guise of protecting civilians bears witness to the threat to international peace and security that it poses.87

In The Politics of Genocide, we noted that the "word 'genocide' has increased in frequency of use and recklessness of application, so much so that the crime of the twentieth century for which the word originally was coined often appears debased" (p. 103).88

We added that its usage had become 297 percent more frequent in 2008 than it had been in 1990, with the vast majority of this increase fitting the Nefarious category (most notably in Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Darfur),89 or those theaters in which the alleged "perpetrator of mass-atrocity crimes is our enemy or states targeted by us for destabilization and attack, . . . and their victims therefore worthy of our focus, sympathy, public displays of solidarity, and calls for inquiry and punishment" (p. 103).

We also stated that, "when we ourselves commit mass-atrocity crimes," this principle inverts, and the converse becomes true: then the "atrocities are Constructive, our victims are unworthy of our attention and indignation, and never suffer 'genocide' at our hands," a near-immutable law of the international arena that applies not only to the "Iraqi untermenschen who have died in such grotesque numbers over the past two decades" (p. 103) -- but also to the Hutu of Rwanda and the eastern DRC, the peoples of Somalia, Colombia, Turkey, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon, the Israeli Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Pakistan, to name a tragic few.

Just as the evidence indicates that "genocide" is a crime committed by the enemies of the U.S.-led NATO bloc, it also suggests that "genocide denial" and "revisionism" are thought crimes that can be committed only by those who question these rather tidy and convenient political, military, and legal arrangements.

Hence, questioning the number of Bosnian Muslim execution-victims following the fall of Srebrenica is "genocide denial," but ignoring the Bosnian Serb civilian victims of Naser Oric in the villages outside Srebrenica, where estimates run as high as 2,382 90 is neither genocide denial nor genocide belittling -- it is keeping everyone focused on the preferred (Nefarious) "genocide."

Similarly, ignoring the "10,000 or more Hutu civilians [killed] per month" inside Rwanda by Paul Kagame's forces in 1994 91, the Hutu and other civilians killed on a scale many times greater in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a "direct result of the occupation of the DRC by Rwanda and Uganda 92," and the perhaps one million Iraqi victims of the "sanctions of mass destruction" imposed by the United States and Britain in the 13 years prior to their invasion of Iraq in 2003 (three of the major Benign and Constructive bloodbaths of the past two decades),93 is not "genocide denial," much less a willful and complicit apologetics for genocide -- it is patriotic eye-aversion in the face of the national pursuit of legitimate economic and political interests.

In these and many other cases we find proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that there really is a politics of genocide. This is well reflected in George Monbiot's attack on "genocide denial" and "revisionism."

[To view the extensive endnotes for this article, click on the original version here.]

Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the media. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 1981), The Real Terror Network (South End Press, 1982), and, with Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), and Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 2002). Herman is also the editor of The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics (Alphabet Soup, 2011). David Peterson is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago. Together they are the co-authors of The Politics of Genocide (Monthly Review Press, 2010).