Guerrilla History - Sanctions & Nation-Breaking Yugoslavia w/ Gregory Elich - Sanctions As War

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

This episode of Guerrilla History is a continuation of our Sanctions As War miniseries (check out the intro episode if you've not already!), and is our first case study of the series.  In this episode, we hear the simultaneously heartbreaking and infuriating story of the sanctions on Yugoslavia from Gregory Elich.  Gregory, in addition to being a committed anti-imperialist and keen analyst of world events, was on the ground in Yugoslavia to investigate NATO war crimes, and this is truly an excellent conversation!  Stay tuned for upcoming episodes of the series as well! Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and a board member of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea and the Task Force to Stop CIJJD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. In 1999, he joined a delegation visiting Yugoslavia to investigate NATO war crimes. His website is https://gregoryelich.org, and you can follow him on twitter @GregoryElich Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a (free!) newsletter you can sign up for, a great resource for political education!

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No, the same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare, but they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. Podcasts that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

This is a guerrilla history intelligence briefing and part of our ongoing Sanctions as War series. If you want to know more about the Sanctions as War series, you should check out the previous episode of the series, which was an introduction to the series with Professor's Emmanuel Ness and Stuart Davis. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hustain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today?

I'm doing well. It's great to be with you, Henry. Yes, nice to see you as well. And also joined by our other co-host, Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing today? Doing good. Happy to be here and excited for this conversation. Absolutely. We have a fabulous guest and a really interesting conversation coming up about a topic that doesn't get talked about even within the left in the West, particularly often. We have Gregory Illich joining us to talk about his chapter in Sanctions as War. Hello, Gregory. How are you doing today?

And how are you ordering? Great. So your chapter in this book is Sanctions and Nation Breaking Yugoslavia, 1990 to 2000. I'm wondering if you can give a brief biography of yourself for the listeners, let them know who you are. and then also why you wrote this chapter about Yugoslavia. Okay, so I'm an associate member of a Korea Policy Institute, and I'm also a board member of the Yersenovas Research Institute, which focuses on a World War II era concentration camp

that's not gotten much attention. I've written for a number of publications throughout the world, but most commonly I write for counterpunch. And so I was asked to write this chapter by one of the editors, and this is a subject that's actually close to my heart. It's a subject that has gotten very little attention. And as it happens, I've been collecting a lot of information over the years that's not been translated into English or readily available. So I wanted to get some information out that people won't normally get exposed to. Tremendous, and we're happy to have you here.

So, Brett, I'm going to turn things over to you, because. Because very recently, relatively recently anyway, you released a pretty in-depth dive into Yugoslavia on Revolutionary Left Radio. And I'm going to encourage listeners, if you haven't already heard that episode, to pause this one, go back to that other episode and listen to that first, so that you understand a little bit more about Yugoslavia as a nation and then come back to this. So, Brett, since you did that episode already, why don't we turn things over to you to open the conversation and get the first question in?

Sure. And yeah, just for those wondering, the episode is called Yugoslavia Socialist Construction in the Balkans, and it basically covered the period from World War II, up to 1990 or the end of Yugoslavia and the breakdown of Yugoslavia. Of course, the term volcanization comes from this part of the world and makes you think of Yugoslavia and its breakup. And a lot of people that have any understanding of this issue kind of see that the Balkanization of Yugoslavia more or less as a product of fighting. But as you point out in this wonderful article, it was actually a concentrated Western goal led by the U.S. and the Western imperialist apparatus. So starting there, what were the U.S. and Western allies' motivation and their interests in the Balkans at this time? So first of all, it was a matter of bad timing. So in 1989, there was a collapse of socialist countries in Eastern Europe. And Mikhail Gorachov was in the process of dismantling socialism. So it was a time of a real crisis in socialism. A lot of people who had previously been committed to communism or socialism were starting to question themselves and abandoned their beliefs.

Excuse me. And unfortunately, that also had its effect in Yugoslavia. So there were elements within the League of Communists who also wanted to move into a transformation of society into a capitalist system. And there are also other elements in the League of Communists who adamantly opposed to that. They want to maintain a socialist path. Of course, with the demise of the socialist countries in East Europe and Soviet Union on its way out, U.S. Lobby has sort of stood out as a sore thumb, you could say. It was made itself an obvious target in U.S.Is and Western European eyes. And they wanted the transformation of the society in line with the rest of Eastern Europe, and they made no secret of that.

So Western officials meeting Uyoslav officials constantly emphasize the point that they wanted transformation of society. They also threatened sanctions if they didn't start implementing neoliberal economic measures. Again, that didn't get very far because most of the Uflav government system was opposed to that plan. there was a tension there as the U.S. kept playing more and more pressure in Yugoslavia to implement these neoliberal programs and there was growing resistance. So that's, that was basically motivating the initial U.S. and Western European targeting of Yugoslavia. Yeah. Thanks so much for giving us that background. I'm interested also in the various

forms that the early threats, even before the sanctions regime comes in that you discuss in the late 80s and early 90s with IMF loans, the debt crisis, attempts at reform by certain political actors in Yugoslavia and the kind of resistance that takes place there. And what role, even before official sanctions come in, U.S. meddling took, in particular, the consequences of freezing Yugoslavia's assets. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about this period and how there was pressure put on Yugoslavia through this foreign interference and what its consequences were. Because this is before the collapse of Yugoslavia.

So I'm sure you would see it as playing a major role in the fragmentation of the Yugoslav state. Maybe you could tell us about that period. Yes, of course, during the 1980s, the Yugoslav economy was not growing at the same rate that it had in earlier decades. And the path they chose to address that was to take out Western loans, which of course, exposed them to vulnerabilities. And so the IMF and World Bank were demanding neoliberal measures as conditions for carrying up for getting more loans, right? And another vulnerability was that Yugoslavia had a lot of its finances in foreign banks. So they had $3.5 billion in the Federal Reserve Bank, right?

Which that could be frozen, and that would be devastating impact on Yugoslavia. The prime minister of Yugoslavia, Ante Markovych, was very much in favor of a neoliberal economy. So he'd travel around the country giving these incredibly long-winded speeches about the neoliberal measures he wanted to implement. And, but he, but the rest of the government was, was really unhappy with, with the path that he was planning and the general, most of the people were also in the country were unhappy with that as well. So, Yugoslavia planned, the assembly planned to have a vote of no confidence in Anten Markovic in order to remove him from power because they felt he was doing more

damage than anything else. So U.S. Ambassador Warren Zimmerman, Ambassador Yugoslavia, threatened to oppose Yugoslav access to international financial institutions if they went through with this vote and no confidence. So the mere threat

of sanctions force Yugoslavia to drop the plan to carry out that vote. I guess I just wanted to mention here that you make a big point, and of course the whole volume, does about how the political goals of sanctions typically are to effect regime change in another country. In this case, the people wanted to affect a regime change through constitutional

and parliamentary measures and vote out an unpopular leader, and they were prevented from doing so by the threat of sanctions. Sort of like the, you know, we have to understand, it seems, from the case you have that it's not just about regime change, but it's also keeping and maintaining people who are doing the work of external financial interests and imperial powers as well, that threat of sanctions. Yes, thanks for pointing that out. And actually, in addition to the prime minister, there was also a collective presidency. So after Tito passed away in 1980, there was an eight-person presidency with one representative

from each of the six republics and the two autonomous provinces. And their direction was very much at variance with Ante Markovitch's. So there was that ongoing tension as well. But as you point out, the United States was basically threatening sanctions in order to favor Markovych's goal rather than the presidencies. And in many ways, as you point out, this immediately precedes the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia. You mentioned that there was a walkout by the delegations of Slovenia and Croatia. And as listeners who have previously listened to Brett's episode of

Rev Left Radio will know, these are particularly in Slovenia's case, the richest parts of what was Yugoslavia at that time. I'm wondering if you can just briefly talk about how this happened, because this is basically where that episode of Rev. Left leaves off with the beginning of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. So what was pushing? these walkouts that eventually affected the end of Yugoslavia as this large federal republic.

Okay, so as you mentioned, Slovenia, nationally Croatia as well were the two more well-to-do republics in Yugoslavia. And there were some elements in those two republics who thought that they'd be better off on their own

because they're more wealthy and why should they be supporting these poorer areas of Yugoslavia. There was that kind of narrow-minded attitude in some people. And again, as I mentioned before, there were some people in the socialist movement who were losing confidence in that path and who wanted to move to a more capitalist-oriented economy. And they were concentrated more in the League of Communist parties of Croatia and Slovenia as well. So there was a regular conference

of the League of Communists. There was that's where the Slovenians and Croatians walked out because there was no agreement whatsoever on what path Yugoslavia would be taken. So they just basically walked out and that led to the dissolution of the League of Communists altogether

and they broke up into separate parties. And then this was eventually followed up by multi-party elections that took place in the remaining constituents of what was remaining, the four remaining republics. And you mentioned that Bosnia and Macedonia had capitalist parties that were victorious in these elections. But the offspring, I'm quoting you here, the socialist parties that were the League of Communists' offspring retained

power in Serbia and Montenegro, which was the antithesis of U.S. hopes and determined who would be marked for regime change. Can you pick up on this a little bit and then take us forward to how the U.S. itself began to exert pressure to affect this change. Okay, so after the Slovenian and Croatian delegations walked out at the League of Communist meeting, the Croatian-Slovenia started moving towards independence, and they held multi-party elections, and U.S. officials were regularly meeting with a secessionists and supporting these electoral programs, right? So at the same time, after the victory of capitalist-oriented parties, actually in the case of Croatia, a very right-wing party,

there were armed shipments coming from Germany and Austria, primarily into Slovenia and Croatia, and quite large numbers of weapons. And in Slovenia, in Slovenia, in Slovenia, Slovenia, they started attacking units of the Yugoslav People's army, and the same thing happened in Croatia as well. And so you basically have the outbreak of violence. So basically, as you say, the capitalist-oriented parties won in four of the republics in Serbia, the Socialist Party of Serbia, which is the offspring of the League of Communists and the Democratic Socialist Party and Montenegro won their elections. Can you kind of talk about the sanctions themselves, sort of as they begin to be applied and the conditions in which they're applied,

and then maybe some of the things beyond just mere sanctions that are thrown at Yugoslavia during this period of time as well. Okay, thank you. So before we switch to that, I guess there is something I do want to add relating to the previous question. I wasn't sure that we were going to go that far yet. So anyways, in Yugoslavia's collective presidency, it rotated on a yearly basis. So there would be representation from each republic and autonomous province. Borisovievich was the president of the presidency at this time. And he traveled to Moscow to see if Mikhail Gorbachev would be able to supply any help to

Yugoslavian. Gil Gorbachev told him that the U.S. was trying to do the same thing to the Soviet Union and break it apart into smaller countries, and they couldn't even help themselves. So basically, the JNA, that's the USLA people's army, met with the collective presidency and proposed state of emergency because as a way to prevent civil war and to keep Yugoslavia together.

But again, because the presidency was divided, he had secessionists and people who wanted to do Yugoslavia to stay together all in the same presidency, Nobody could, they couldn't get a majority vote in favor of the state of emergency. So in May 19, May 15th of 1991, it was time for the presidency to rotate to the next person, Steppe message, who is from Croatia. But the collective unanimously voted him down in accordance to Yugoslav constitution. And they voted him down because he promised to be the last president.

of Yugoslavia, he had taken part in decisions involving illegal armed shipments into Croatia. And, but the United States threatened sanctions again if they, if Yugoslavia did not appoint message as a presidency. In return, for agreeing to accept message, the European community got to Croatia, Slovenia, to suspend independence plans for three months, which, of course, meant nothing because it's kind of like on paper only. Message refused to convene any meetings of the presidency whatsoever.

So at this time of extreme crisis in Yugoslavia, the presidency was paralyzed. They couldn't meet. He refused all requests to meet. So eventually, by October, the presidency, again in line with the Constitution, voted to resume functioning without message, since he wasn't willing to meet.

that they wouldn't go ahead and govern without him. And so Vice President Bronco Kosteach was acting in its place. The United States announced this as a coup and applied more pressure on Yugoslavia and more threats. And so the only thing that the collective presidency could agree on is to accept the European community's proposal to convene a conference on Yugoslavia, to determine the fate of the republics in Yugoslavia. So at first, the Kosteach was speaking at one session, and Lord Peter Kerikton, who was the conference's chairman,

shut off his microphone and went let him speak. Then Yugoslav officials were barred altogether from speaking federal officials, and then federal officials were not allowed to even attend the sessions of the conference on Yugoslavia. So you had Western European officials and mostly secessionists meeting to decide what's the fate of Yugoslavia. The federal government of Yugoslavia had no choice in the matter. They were basically excluded.

And as a result, it's no surprise that Comf decided on independence for the four republics. Excuse me for Bosnia. Not Bosnia yet. Can we redo this part? So inevitably, the conference decided to recognize the independence of Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia, and thereby breaking apart Yugoslavia. And now, Brett, to get to your question on sanctions. Sanctions were imposed on Yugoslavia first during the meetings of the conference on Yugoslavia because it was claimed they were uncooperative. You know, they weren't, they wouldn't just accept the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

And so everything except food and humanitarian aid were excluded, were sanctioned, excuse me. And immediately panicked residents swarmed through the stores to basically buy up all the goods they could because they knew they'd be hard to get. But by the time a war was breaking out in Bosnia in 1992 and May, at the end of May, more sanctions, more severe sanctions were applied in Yugoslavia. And there was also a naval blockade on the aid of the attic. A naval blockade is an act of war, but they were trying to cut off all trade. Yugoslavia was banned from all trade except medicines, right? But even medicines were hard to get.

So there was a UN monitoring committee, a sanctions committee that was supposed to review requests for humanitarian aid to Yugoslavia. In virtually every single case, any request for humanitarian aid, including medicines, was denied. It turned out that it was not the UN Sanctious Committee making this decision, but it was in some case of British officials, but mostly American officials. So by late 1994, there have been 550 requests for humanitarian aid that were basically rejected. the United States. Pharmacies were running out of medicines. Hospitals were also very short on supplies and equipment was failing because they couldn't get spare parts. Factories were basically shutting down because they couldn't operate without oil, right, or spare parts again. People were being thrown out of work. So there was inevitably high inflation, right? So by the end of 1992,

the inflation was practically 9,000 percent. And the government implemented price controls on key commodities, right? But then speculators would swarm into stores and buy up those commodities and sell them in the black market. So that didn't help any at all. By the time 1993 wrote around, the hyperinflation accelerated dramatically and by the end of the year is a 116 trillion percent. So if you're going to imagine what that means, say you have a toothbrush that you're buying at the beginning of the year for $1. By the end of the year, that same toothbrush would be $116 trillion. You know, it's just unbelievable. Wow.

And of course, by the time people would receive, say, their paychecks or their pension payments, they'd lose almost all their value the moment they receive them. So they had to start paying people on the pensions and the paychecks on a broken up throughout the month, right, in segments, right? People were constantly trying to exchange their money for foreign currency as fast as they could because the money was basically worthless by the time they got there. In some cases, in the worst cases, people would find that their paycheck would buy nothing more than a roll of toilet paper or, maybe three eggs. That's the monthly pay, right? So basically, if you had family in the countryside, you can rely on them for helping you with food, or if you had a space where you're living, where you could have a little plot of ground where you could grow some vegetables

or something, you could have some food that way. Otherwise, you're basically out of luck, so people were going hungry. At the same time, there was a, the naval blockaded on the Adriatic, the U.S. considered that wasn't sufficient, so they implemented a blockade on the River Danube as well. So people were trying to smuggle in oil so that you could at least people in Voivodina, which is the northern part of Serbia, where it was more of an agricultural area, so they would have oil to at least run their tractors, right? But that could only be smuggled in, and that was a very dangerous operation. where people were losing their lives and trying to smuggle this oil in through the Danube. People had to try to cross over the border into, say, Romania and Hungary and Macedonia

to get gasoline just to run the vehicles. And again, the U.S. tightened those sanctions and threatened those governments that if they didn't stop the trade. So anybody going to Romania would have to try and evade police being arrested by the police. gas station owners were threatened with shutting down their operation altogether if they gave gasoline to somebody from Serbia. So by late in 1994, the situation was so desperate that U.S. Latvia launched a anti-inflation program. So they pegged the dinar to just put hard currency and gold that they had on stock, which was not much. So they did bring down, inflation dramatically, but it imposed a really severe austerity. So many, many people were

thrown out of work. People were suffering. And if you look at the CIA documents throughout this period, they were constantly complaining that, yes, the sanctions are posing hardship on people, but it's not enough hardship. They're not ready to overthrow the government or implement neoliberal program economic measures. So what's needed is more hardship, you know, tighten the sanctions even more. It's sort of reading the verbiage in the CIA documents that comes across as a statistic, really. And also, Montenegro was on the sea, on the Adriatic Sea. So a lot of their income was from their merchant fleet.

So their ships were banned from even sailing. So if they were at a foreign port, their ships were basically taken prisoner at these foreign ports. They weren't allowed to sail out, right? But so whether they're trapped at these ports, they're also charged more fees, right? So they weren't there by choice, but still had to pay for being there. And there was no money. And since U.S. I was banned from making international payments, the only way they could pay for this was basically selling off the merchant sheet and the money went directly to the creditors. So this is a way of basically decimating Montenegro's entire sailing. There's more that I go

into in the chapter, but that kind of gives people, I think, a flavor of the, uh, severity of the sanctions. Yeah, absolutely. And I have a specific quote from this chapter that, I mean, it really struck me, especially considering the baby food crisis that we have right now in the United States, which I know, Brett, you are facing quite severely right now personally. So you write, Gregory, requests to the United Nations to provide humanitarian aid were habitually denied. In one case three tons of assistance from Nestle intended for orphans were rerouted to Peru when the UN refused to allow delivery to the FRI, which is Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Similarly, Austria turned back at its border in Italian donation of children's food meant for a Belgrade orphanage. I find this to be absolutely obscene. And then we have a question that comes out of this. You know, we see these kind of sanctions that they seem to only be. for the intention of hurting the population, to hurt the populace. I mean, even targeting orphans and children. Just think of the depravity

that comes along with a strategy like this. So Adnan, I know that you have a follow-up question here. So why don't I turn it over to you now? Well, just, I mean, this is just so stunning because so little attention, as I think you pointed out

at the very beginning, Gregory, that this has faded into obscurity in the midst of time. People don't really think of the severity of the sanctions on Yugoslavia. And so the details that you were giving about the incredible inflation is just absolutely stunning. I mean, it reminds me very much of the hyperinflation in Germany as a result of, you know, after World War I, as a result of the economic crisis and also, of course, the kinds of sanctions that were, you know, in place for war reparations and so on. So this obviously

has a long history, but people don't really think of the ones in Yugoslavia. And this seems like the real birth of this modern sanctions regime was tried out on the people of Yugoslavia because they, you know, weren't fitting into the neoliberal order. But I guess the question I have is what were the sanctions when they were being put in as a regime, these sanctions? completely suffocating sanctions. What was the rationale for and justifications for why this should be used? Like what were the political goals that they at least stated were stated as the objectives besides just regime change. Were there other kinds of specific points raised for the purpose of these sanctions? I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about these

kind of political objectives that were the targets, even though the CIA keeps saying, well, it hasn't achieved the goal of regime change. What were they really saying was just, you know, how were they trying to justify the use of these sanctions to accomplish which kind of political purposes? What were they objecting to and trying to enforce through the use of these sanctions? Yeah, before I get into that, I just mentioned you brought up the hyperthinkers. in Germany in 1923, actually the sanctions of Yugoslavia in 1993 surpassed that of Germany by far at a much higher rate. As far as the motivation versus the stated purpose of sanctions, those were sometimes at variance.

Initially, again, during the conference in Yugoslavia, it was because Yugoslavia was supposedly uncooperative, right? they wouldn't agree to the destruction of the country, oddly enough. So then in 1992, as war broke out in Bosnia, initially, the Muslim Croatian territory units were attacking the Yugoslav People's Army in asparagus, and the U.S. and European leaders were demanding that the U.S. people's army withdraw from Bosnia, and that wasn't so easy to do since they were basically blockaded in their barracks. Eventually, they were able to depart except for people, except for the soldiers who lived in Bosnia, then they both stayed, but everybody else went through to Serbia and Montenegro. So these, but sanctions were applied on Yugoslavia all the same.

So if initially was well because the Yugoslav people's army was in Bosnia, we have to apply sanctions. JNA, the Yugoslav people's army left. We have to apply sanctions because somehow another, the Federal Republic of Yugoslia, consisting of Serbia and Montenegro, are responsible for what's going on in Bosnia. So you have to keep applying sanctions on there. And the U.S. official, U.S. law officials would say, this is something unprecedented in the world history that sanctions are applied on a country for something that's happening outside of borders. In fact, in talks between Bosnian Serb officials and Yugoslav officials, the Yugoslav officials constantly pressured the Bosnian Serbs to come to an agreement.

We don't care if it's an imperfect agreement. Just come to an agreement that war has got to stop. And when the war continued in Yugoslav, you actually applied its own economic blockade on the Bosnian Serbs as a way to try and encourage them to come to a quick agreement. That still wasn't enough. Even more sanctions are being piled on Yugoslavia, even after that point. But behind the scenes, though, U.S. officials were saying that whatever the case is,

we have remained focused on regime change. So the bottom line was basically that, and we have to make sure that they carry out neoliberal economic measures. The bottom line was in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. They were still on the socialist path. They were not conceding. And the U.S. and the Western European officials didn't like the leadership in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to begin with, because these were people belonging to socialist parties. They wanted a clear-cut change of the system, period.

And they didn't care how many people had to suffer in the process. that was their goal. And you could say even on the year 2000, just to jump ahead when there were elections in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, U.S. and Western Europe, and officials were saying, unless the opposition, the very conservative opposition came to power, if you don't vote for these people under power, sanctions will remain. So basically, the people are being threatened. Vote our way or sanctions will remain on your country.

you continue to suffer. And it's funny because they called it anti-democratic, right? Like, that's what the U.S. always says as their justification to sell it to the people. It's like, we have to do this stuff because this is an anti-democratic or authoritarian regime. And at the same time, they're saying, you know, if you don't vote for our candidate, we're going to continue to apply these brutal sanctions. And it's, you know, how more anti-democratic can you get? So that's just another pierce in the veil of U.S. rhetoric when it comes to this stuff.

but. And it goes beyond that in the 2000 election, Voislav Kostunisa was the candidate running against Lobo than Milozovic for President of Yugoslavia. So who chose Kostunisa as the opposite candidate? The United States did. They ran a poll in U.S. Liber to see who's the most popular opposition candidate? That was the guy that the poll said. So there are a number of their opposition parties and they pretty much all hated each other. So getting them together was

it was a trial. So U.S. officials were, as one official said, they read them the Riot Act. You have to basically coalesce behind the Kostunitsa. That's our guy. CIA opened training centers in neighboring countries like Hungary and Bulgaria, where they trained the opposition. And they funded them with many tens of millions of dollars, right? So it's basically in the United States, also the opposition, any statement that they made, Any advertisement they made had to be approved by the United States. The U.S. officials basically gave approval for what you can and cannot say. The U.S. ran the campaign.

This is no democracy at all. And so the final result was the first round of election, neither candidate won 50% of the election, the vote. So there would have to be a runoff. Well, the U.S. didn't want to run off. They claimed throughout these false claims of voter fraud, which bore, people on the ground who were monitoring the vote said there's no such so no such fraud and so then there's basically where the CIA had this long planned coup put into operation as so they had organized basically a violent overthrow of the government and so people were were being attacked and police were

being attacked they had basically threatened or or bribed officials not to oppose the coup um yeah again U.S. democracy, right? Well, that's what's interesting is that's usually the way it's portrayed and represented sanctions are used to, you know, affect an authoritarian regime that is violating human rights and repressing its population from democratic free expression. This is the way it's usually framed. But in the entire period that you've studied here of pressure being applied externally through freezing of their funds, or at least the threatening of freezing of their funds to actual

formal sanctions. These are all to subvert the democratic will of the people and to subvert and interfere in Yugoslavia's political process. It's elections. I mean, they're following parliamentary procedures. They're having regular, you know, elections and so on. And the U.S. is using, from your telling, very strictly using these financial pressures and blockades. of trade and sanctions in order to affect the actual elections. So, you know, when usually it's often thought that like, well, regime changed. They want the people to just rise up and topple the government. But they wanted to affect, it seems, even intermediate steps like, you know, democratic elections.

They wanted to try and pressure people to vote a certain way. It's really quite a stunning story of the many ways in which the sanctions were used to have political outcomes in Yugoslavia over the course of this entire period. And I think you also mentioned that the goldposts, or at least the stated political objectives of justification, were constantly moving and changing as well. So you would conclude, would you conclude? Well, what's your conclusion? That is basically that they wanted to, you know, affect a neoliberal kind of economic regime in the only way that they could do, that was to break up the country and then put pressure on the resistant components that

remained to try and dissolve that government. It sounds like that's basically the attempt. Yeah, and I think that's also what was behind the, at least it was behind the breakup of the Soviet Union as well. Obviously, the smaller the country is, the easier it is to dominate and control. And US lobbyists formed after World War I because the people had long experience under oppression from either the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Ottoman Empire. So they felt that by banding together as one people, they'd be stronger and more independent. And, of course, that same lesson was not lost in the United States. It's like, you want to control this last holdout of socialism in Eastern Europe, break it apart, make it easier to dominate. As far as control, also another thing I'd like to mention is a U.S. impact on the media in Yugoslavia.

So they'd set up, during the Clinton administration, they had set up transmitter stations in neighboring countries. And they broadcast on the same frequencies as U.S. loud radio and television programs. So basically, you turn on the radio and instead of what you would normally hear, your normal station, you get BBC or C. CNN or you'd get the Western programs on the same frequencies in violation of international law. The one thing that was did get an exemption on from the UN Sanctious Committee was a request by the United States to supply television equipment and so forth to opposition television station, right? So there then you can make an exception. When I was in Yugoslavia in 1999, a brand new, very big building that was funded by the United States was given to an opposition

television station, and the equipment was supplied to them, whereas the state television station had basically was in a rundown building. But it was referred to in the United States as a media dictatorship, right? You had opposition television, opposition radio all over the place. You go to a newsstand there and you'd see one, you know, one government paper, Politica and maybe one newspaper, one or two newspapers that were sympathetic to government. The rest of the magazines and newspapers, there's just a flood of opposition periodic or newspapers, each newsstand. But this was portrayed in the U.S. media as like, oh, they're suppressing a freedom of speech. There's a media dictatorship. again, the reality is different than how it's portrayed in U.S. media and what U.S. officials were saying, but who would know that here?

Yeah. So, Greg, you were talking about, this whole interview, we've been talking about sanctions, asset seizure, blockades. We talk about media control now. Other methods that the United States and its NATO allies were utilizing to exert maximum pressure on Yugoslavia for their geostrategic aims, there is one other thing that I'm going to quote again, from your book here, two different sections that was utilized by NATO. And of course, most people know this, but I think that it's interesting to go through it anyway. The first section, it says on August 26, 1995, European Union envoy Carl Bilt, who, by the way, is in the media quite a bit right now with regards to the situation between Russia and Ukraine. Acting on behalf of the five-nation contact group met with Bosnia and Serb officials. He presented a more even-handed peace proposal than was customarily the case. Three days later, the Bosnian Serb People's Assembly adopted a statement in which it welcomed the plan and announced that it would join peace negotiations.

The next day, this is where we're getting to the point that I'm trying to drive towards here, NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force, a three-week-long bombing attack on the Bosnian Serbs. Official U.S. mythology informs us that the bombing campaign brought the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table, never mind the inconvenient fact that acceptance predicts. military strikes. And then if we skip forward a few years to 99, I guess, you write, NATO demonstrated limited interest in striking military targets, destroying only 13 Yugoslav tanks, many of which were obsolete models deliberately left in the open as decoys. NATO instead focused most of its attention on destroying economic and civilian targets. Typical of the targets NATO selected was D-I-N, a tobacco factory, which was one of the largest employers in the city of Nice, which I'm probably mispronouncing. It was bombed on four occasions causing an estimated

$35 million in damage, etc., etc. War acted as a multiplier effect on sanctions, accelerating the effect. In a mere 78 days, NATO inflicted $100 billion in economic damage on Yugoslavia, half the amount it had taken sanctions years to achieve. So what I was driving towards with these two readings, which I admit might have been a little bit too long for an audio medium like a podcast, is that the maximum pressure strategy, they really were looking for maximum pressure in every way possible, which included outright bombing with no justification. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, and then we can talk about your time in Yugoslavia in 99, what you were looking for there. Okay. So as you mentioned, it's contrary to the official mythology, it was not

bombing that brought the Bosnian service to negotiating table, but an actual example of diplomacy where the contact group brought out a plan that was more even-handed. It wasn't the usual one-sided approach before. In other words, if you want somebody to negotiate, you have to offer them something. You can't just demand unilateral surrender, right? So that was a real lesson, but it's not the lesson that we're told emanated from that occasion. If I may sidetrack them into another example, in August, 1995, Croatian military forces who had been trained by U.S. non-official supposedly military program and who had been armed by the United States, launched an attack on the Ukraine region of Croatia, which had a serious. European majority, U.S. warplanes and NATO warplains bombed the Croatian Serb radar, anti-aircraft radar, to open up the Croatian offensive. So basically, the United States was

taking part in this attack. And that left the Croatian airplanes free of any danger of being shot down, where they basically, the whole point of Operation Storm was to drive out the entire Serbian population of Krydena, or as much many of them as possible. So they drove out anywhere from 200,000 to 250,000 people in this attack. It was the greatest single example of ethnic cleansing in the entire Balkan wars. 2,500 people were killed, and 500 people were still missing to this day. We presume dead. So anyways, without any threat of the anti-aircraft,

because the U.S. planes had bombed the anti-aircraft sites. Croatian planes were, basically, the roads were packed with people fleeing for their lives, right? And Croatian planes bombed and strafed these fleeing refugees. So they were free to basically massacre people in large numbers, thanks to the United States getting rid of these anti-aircraft sites. So again, in Yugoslavia in 1999 with NATO bombing, basically there was no military function that I could see in the sites that were bombed there. So basically, businesses of all sorts were bombed. We can talk about that in a bit.

I'd also want to mention briefly that there was in Rambure, France, before the NATO bombing in 1999. And there was a meeting that the United States had organized, supposed, and peace negotiations. But Madelnaudbright had designed these negotiations in order to fail. So the two sides, there was a U.S. Slav delegation that had represented every ethnic group in Kosovo. And they were ready to offer the widest ranging autonomy possible, but they insisted upon retaining Sauras as part of Yugoslav territory. And there's an ethnic Albanian delegation. They had a couple of moderate members who were reasonable, but Albright basically ignored them and gave preference to the Kosovo Liberation Army, which was a more extreme element there. We basically wanted an ethnic exclusivity and separation from Yugoslavia.

The two sides were never allowed to even talk to each other. And basically, Albright presented a plan in piecemeal fashion that was intended to force the U.Slav delegation to not to reject the plan so that they'd have an excuse the bomb. As Albright told some U.S. journalists, we deliberately set the bond. We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs can accept. They needed a little bomb. Yeah. So turning towards, again, 1999, you went to Yugoslavia on a peacekeeping delegation to look for evidence of NATO war crimes.

This is not related to what you wrote in the chapter, but I think that it will be very interesting for the listeners nonetheless. And also will perhaps give them some understanding of why you felt motivated to write this chapter for the book. So can you just talk a little bit about how you got involved with this delegation to Yugoslavia to look for NATO war crimes, what you found and your experiences there as well as how that perhaps shaped your impressions of the conflict that was taking place? You know, of course, as I recall, I think the news media were talking about, you know, how accurate the U.S. weapons are and, you know, they're taking very good care not to

he had civilians and so forth. And military targets are being hit. It was exactly the opposite. The operation was led by U.S. General Wesley Clark. And there was one meeting where he was not happy about there being because he felt there was insufficient damage being done to the infrastructure. So some meeting he had with other NATO generals and he basically hit his fist on on the desk, went with a maximum violence out of this campaign now.

And anyway, so when we went there and we traveled throughout all of Serbia, and every single town we were in, without exception, you saw civilian targets that were bombed. So for instance, in the Novi Sad, in northern Serbia, all the bridges across the Dania were were bombed. Well, what did it have to do with Kosovo, for instance? There was no military point of that. We saw our apartment buildings that were bombed, entire residential neighborhoods that were completely flattened. Factories, every kind of factory that you could think of was bombed. These were all civilian factories, right? Zastava automobile factory, which is one of the major employers in Yugoslavia. That was bombed. completely leveled.

So many of the buildings, highly enough. In addition to the automobiles that Zostovar produced, there was one factory that produced automatic rifles that was not bombed. I'm not sure what the logic of that was. I guess the whole point was this is meant to reflect economic damage. We saw, you know, it's very moving to go to these neighborhoods where they're completely destroyed. And you talk to neighbors who had survived.

had survived. And they talk about the people who have been killed, you know, their family members, their neighbors, their friends who died in the bombing, right? And the emotion that they felt is, you couldn't help me moved, even to this day. We saw what was left of a passenger rail station, a passenger train, right? That was bombed at GERDA reached a gorge. And it was hardly anything left of the passenger cars. Many people died. And I remember one old man was walking by and he saw us up there filming these damaged cars.

And he struggled up the hill to talk to us with his cane. And he said, uh, this was. mass murder. There's no way you can not agree with that. Office buildings. We saw office buildings bombed. I know so much sorrow. So much sorrow. And we also talked to people who had fled from Kosovo, including ethnic Albanians. So the Kosovo Liberation Army, was a very extreme organization. It did not represent all ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. It only represented the most extreme element.

So we talked to ethnic Albanians who had fled Kosovo, and they said there were 100,000 ethnic Albanians in Serbia who had fled. Some of them were threatened to be killed if they didn't leave. One of them we talked to said he was homesick, but he didn't feel safe to return. A year later, I read in Serbian news how he had returned to Kosovo and KLA soldiers burst into his home and shot him down with automatic rifles in front of his wife and friends. We also talked to Roma, who usually referred to as gypsies in the United States, who were also targets of KLA violence and so many of them talked about how KLA soldiers would come and threaten them and you know like you leave now or you'll be killed and they do so and in the meantime killer soldiers are looting their homes one woman talked about how their son was stabbed in the back another woman said their houses are being burned down and were being threatened people are being killed and And at this time, this was after the 1999 war, so NATO was occupying Kosovo at that point.

And they'd run to nearby British or American soldiers and say, can you help us? These people are being killed and our houses are being down. And the soldiers would say, oh, now, everything will be okay. Don't worry. They wouldn't do anything. They wouldn't intervene at all. So, and again, we also talked to Serbian refugees who have also been similarly threatened. And as they were fleeing the country, they had arms.

They had the weapons to protect themselves because they're being shot at along the way. And NATO caught up with this one column of refugees and took away the weapons. And as one woman told us, it made us easy prey. And some of the stories of what happened to particularly individuals are particularly horrific. Again, we saw damage everywhere. all civilian targets. We never saw a military target that was hit. I saw a retirement home and a hospital for lung patients in civil release that was bombed.

And they told us the power of the bombs is so powerful that there was blood dripping from the leaves of the nearby trees. And body parts and clothes were thrown as far as half a kilometer away. And when we were there, we could still, it had been cleaned up. We still saw clothes hanging from the windows, excuse me, from the trees. And because we also saw the Chinese embassy that was bombed, where three people were killed and several wounded. The United States claimed there was an accident. First, they said, well, it looks just like the Federal Directorate of Procurement and Supply, which is nearby. So that's what we attended the bomb.

As if it was unacceptable to kill Yugoslav civilians instead of Chinese civilians. So when you're there, the building did not look even remotely similar. The excuse was totally bogus. So the Chinese embassy was a very modern, nicely designed building. And the federal directorate was a very old run down building. The other excuse that the United States gave was, well, we were relying on an old map. And that's why we bombed the Chinese embassy by mistake. Well, the Chinese embassy was a very new building.

So O-MAP would have shown an empty field, which is all that was there beforehand. You'd have to believe that NATO wanted to bomb an empty field, which is also bogus. I think the independent, the British publication, the Pennant interviewed some British soldiers involved in the operation and they said that the Chinese embassy was deliberately bombed,

because it had an electronic profile. And there's a Hong Kong publication that came out a little while later after that and said that the Chinese embassy was indeed liberally bombed because the Chinese had this electronic equipment and the US was afraid they were learning too much about US military capabilities by watching the planes in action. So they took out the embassy.

I guess I could go on and on, But it was a very emotional experience for me. And when I got back to the United States, it was months before I could bear it to listen to the U.S. media again and all its lies. It's not easy even now, actually, but it was particularly difficult then. Those are absolutely harrowing stories. I really can't even imagine having to experience that myself. And it's absolutely critical what you were doing there in terms of documenting that

and making sure that at least some. Somewhere people were able to hear the stories that were taking place there because you know that that wasn't going to be carried on the media in the U.S. As you mentioned, it was just lies that was being spread here. And in most of these struggles between the imperial hegemon and their lackeys and countries that are opposed to them within the geostrategic and geopolitical order of the globe, when there is these conflicts, the media. media is by and large controlled by the imperial hegemon's. And so you never get to hear the perspectives of the people that are being butchered by the imperialists. And so it's very critical that you were there, you were doing this work with your delegation,

and that you're able to and willing to share these harrowing stories, both through your writing as well as on platforms like ours. So I really do thank you for sharing those. I know that I can't imagine having to recount that. I mean, the utter horror and the depravity that you had to witness. So I really do appreciate you bringing that to our program. Brett, why don't I turn this over to you now? Before we do, I'm sorry.

Before you do, actually, this another thing I'd like to mention if we could add it to what I just said. No, no, no, just go ahead, go ahead. So we also NATO dropped cluster bombs. civilian targets. So we were in niche in southern Serbia and went to a small hospital where they had dropped incendiary cluster bombs on the parking lot and they killed several people and caused part of the hospital to collapse. And there was also a neighborhood totally civilian. There's nothing within miles that was military where they dropped cluster bombs on a market day. There's a a market at the end of the street, and it was a very busy day, and they dropped cluster bombs

on the civilians. And we saw the buildings were pockmarked with thousands and thousands of holes and the walls and so forth. And if your listeners don't know what a cluster bomb is, it's a bomb that's designed to open up, say, at a certain height above the ground, and it releases, if I remember correctly some like 200 smaller bombs over a wide area as wide as a football field and then these each one of these explode and as and uh sending out hundreds of pieces of sharp shrapnel right it's not uh not designed to do damage to uh say military equipment it's strictly an antipersonal personnel weapon is designed basically to tear a human being into pieces and we were shown photographs of people who have been killed by this i'm sorry you can't imagine what a cluster bomb can do to a human

being you just can't imagine it um anyway that was maybe one of the hardest moments uh Yeah. What sounds so particularly vicious about this was that it was military attack that wasn't used in the conventional military to fight some other army, its military capacities or to hit bases or other military targets. It seems so much like it was meant to punish the people in much the same way that sanctions were meant to punish the people. to do economic damage, to force them into, you know, utter distress, to kill them, et cetera, all, and in some ways, it's almost as if when we say sanctions as war. In fact, actually, the sanctions were the war, and then the military was used to reinforce the sanction regime and its own political goals. And that's just absolutely stunning to kind of realize. I think that's something people should really realize that the example you've given us shows, that the military was almost an adjunct to the sanctions. And if you want to talk about the war crimes,

you mentioned all of these specific cases of war crimes because it's attacks on civilian infrastructure and on civilian populations. I mean, that's really what sanctions does as well. I mean, so if we're talking about war crimes, sanctions are a war crime is what I would take away from this incredible example you've documented. yeah absolutely and i just wanted to kind of chime in there and um it just say like you can tell

even after you know over two decades this is still something that impacts you emotionally and i think all of us are impacted emotionally just hearing about it and the fact that most people especially most americans don't have any clue about any of this um is is an extra layer of tragedy on top of insane amounts of tragedy and it just reinforces this idea that you know nato in my estimation is a terrorist organization and this idea that they are this vehicle for freedom and democracy and justice and now they're fighting

the bad guys in Russia right now and it's just such bullshit and always has been so yeah thank you for being so open with us about that and for informing our audience about the realities of that historical event it's absolutely tragic I guess as a way to wrap this conversation up

I wanted to talk about how this sort of hybrid war in Yugoslavia as you say created the template for future foreign policy adventures and a couple things certainly come to mind you can see some of this echo with the way that the U.S. has treated and talked about Venezuela, you know, accusing them of voter fraud when a, you know, a representative of the Bolivarian Revolution gets in, even though international agencies say these are free and fair elections in some ways as or more so than even happen in the United States. And then with Russia, we really see this unprecedented escalation of the exact sanctioned logics that have happened here to the point where you're trying to cut them out from the entire global economy. And I think there's like, yeah, it is unprecedented in some ways, but you can trace it back through what happened in Yugoslavia as well. And this is another reason why China is on the international stage constantly beating the drum of national sovereignty because they know goddamn well how the U.S. operates, how NATO operates, how, you know, their allies. operate and nobody can argue with national sovereignty in the abstract, but China wants to continue to put that out there to beat back this, you know, the inevitable attacks coming their way already and then in the future around Taiwan almost guaranteed. So with all of that

in mind, and I threw a few examples out there, but can you just kind of talk about how, what they did in Yugoslavia created the template that we're still seeing today? No, I think that's exactly it. I mean, it's the United States. regards that as a success story. It provided a template. I think that for all of these future interventions that the U.S. has been involved in, they think if it succeeded that time, they'll just keep following the same plan. It's like a menu of options for them. You try sanctions first. If that doesn't work, try buying the media, try bribing officials, try funding and training opposition forces,

try making false claims about a little reliability of elections, try arming groups who are anti-government, so you create an actual military conflict. If all fails, send in the bombers. So it's like a menu of options. They can try whatever, you know, they can select from. And they regard this as a success story. And it never, it never ends, you know, as you say.

So I think we're really in a dangerous moment now. The U.S. arrogance is unsurpassed right now. So going back to Serbia, current Serbian government, is constantly being threatened because they're politically neutral. They're a member of the non-aligned movement. And in line with that, they consider sanctions as a form of warfare, which it is. So they support the territory of Ukraine. And they voted to deplore the invasion.

of Ukraine, and they have provided money in support of refugees and internally displaced people. But at the same time, they want to maintain normal relations with Russia. They have good relations to Russia, and they do not want to impose sanctions. So they say, we don't want to get somebody else's war. You know, we're not aligned nation. We're not going to be part of the sanctions regime. And so U.S. officials and Western European officials are constantly, going to Serbia and threatening them in an extremely rude manner.

I mean, it's extremely rude threats. And at one point, they actually threatened to cut off Serbia's supply of oil unless they played the game. So how this ultimately plays out, I don't know, but Serbia is the only country in Europe that has not gone along with the sanctions against Russia. And the U.S. basically demands obedience of everyone. Going over to South Korea, they got that in the new president, Yun-Sukyo, and they're building up the Indo-Pacific strategy with South Korea and Japan

as part of alliance, what they call force multipliers. Basically, Japan and South Korea are supposed to be able to intervene anywhere in the Asia-Pacific in support of U.S. military operations. you know and ukrain you know ukrainians are dying for the united states goes so that's that's what a force multiplier is you have other people do the dying for you yeah amazing i think that that's a great note to end on so again uh our guest was gregory illich you can find this chapter that we've been talking about in this episode sanctions and nation breaking Yugoslavia 1990 to 2000 in the book sanctions this war which

should be coming out from Haymarket in December. We're timing this series so that it'll be wrapping up right around the time that you can pre-order it. So if you do want to find that chapter, be sure to pre-order your copy from Haymarket when you are hearing this episode coming out. Gregory, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing all of this information. Thanks for sharing your personal stories and your experiences when you were in Yugoslavia.

Can you tell the listeners how they can find you and more of your work if they want to follow you and what you're doing? So I basically, where I'm published, I duplicate the work on my website. So there's a one source people can go to to see what I've done. And that's my Gregory, E-L-I-C-H-O-R-G, and they can find all my work there. And I'll be sure to link to that in the description box below. So listeners, if you want to just be able to click on it, look down below in the episode description, click on it. You'll be able to find everything that Gregory does.

Brett, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcasts that you do? Sure, huge, huge thank you to Gregory. Thank you so much for coming on. And you can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. Highly recommend that all of the listeners do that, of course. And hopefully you have heard that episode on Yugoslavia that Brett has already made by now. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other podcast? Well, likewise, thanks so much for coming on and sharing this analysis, this important research

and those personal stories with us. You can follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-H-U-S-U-S-A-I-N. And if you're interested in the Middle East, Islamic World, I have another podcast called The Munchless, M-A-J-L-I-S, deal with topics like Islamophobia and, you know, what's going on in the Middle East and so forth. So check that out. It's on all the platforms.

As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter. at Huck 1995. You can find the other show that my partner and I have just started called What the Huck. It has all kinds of different topics planned for it, as well as a few things that we already have out, and we're just going to have fun with it. So be sure to look that up. You can find it on any podcast app or on YouTube. And you can follow Guerrilla History on Twitter by looking for at Gorilla underscore

pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Sore pod. And you can support the show monetarily, help us continue to do the work that we're doing by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. Again, guerrilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Until next time, listeners, solidarity. Thank you. Thank you.