Yugoslavia, the Avoidable War
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A few years ago, during an anti- NATO rally in Daley Plaza, demonstrators wore photocopied posters decorated with big bull’s-eyes and the legend “I am proud to be Serbian / Kill me.” A similar if less histrionic sense of victimhood suffuses George Bogdanich’s 165-minute video documentary Yugoslavia, the Avoidable War, which details the breakup of the Balkan state between 1991 and 1999. Funded in small part by Milan Panic, a Serbian-American industrialist defeated by Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia’s 1992 presidential election, the video, showing this week at Facets Cinematheque, depicts the Serbs as oddly passive bombing targets who were smeared by American public relations firms, demonized by the international media, and scapegoated by Bosnian Muslim soldiers who blew up their own civilians in Sarajevo. Bogdanich, former executive director of the Serbian American Media Center in Chicago, concludes by charging that a “conspiracy of 19 NATO governments” violated international law when it bombed the Serbs. He dedicates his video to “all the victims of the war in and against Yugoslavia.”
Bogdanich’s video argues that Americans bought into that myth as well, which allowed President Clinton to send in the cavalry in March 1999 when NATO began its aerial bombardment. David Owen, former European Union mediator for Yugoslavia, tells Bogdanich that Americans prefer dualities like “cowboys and Indians, good and bad….They like to see things in simple terms, there’s no doubt about that.” David C. Hackworth, a former military correspondent for Newsweek, concurs: “This is a part of our history, part of our culture. It’s promoted by the entertainment industry….We had a good guy and a bad guy, and we like to have a victim. So it was very easy to say, ‘Wait a minute–the Muslims are the victims, the Serbs are the bad guys, the Croatians are sort of the good guys because they’re like us,’ and so on.” John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s, adds: “It’s a simpler story if it’s a Serb holocaust against the Muslims than if it’s a civil war with atrocities on both sides.”
