Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/11/24 Nebojsa Malic on Biden’s Aggressive Posturing Towards the Bosnian Serbs

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

Scott is joined by Nebojsa Malic to discuss the U.S. flying F-16s over Bosnia and Herzegovina in a threat to the Bosnian Serbs. Malic lays out the historical context before he and Scott dig into what���s happening now. Discussed on the show: “US Flies F-16 Fighter Jets Over Bosnia in Threat to Serbs Who Want Secession” (Antiwar.com) Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator and on Twitter @NebojsaMalic This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show hey you guys introducing nebozsche malich and he is a bosnian sir but he's an american and he was for a very long time a regular writer at antiwar dot com where he wrote the column balkan express and now he writes for RT and I have a lot of questions

welcome back to the show after a very long time without speaking. Good to have you back, Nabozza. How are you? Good. Thank you for having me back and I hopefully have answers for you. Yeah, man. Well, I've been reading and writing a lot about the Bosnian War lately

and including hopefully not you know, plagiarizing your article too heavily, uh, from anti-war.com as I go through and, and do my research. Well, I already did all that like a year ago. I've been reading books lately, but anyways, so I got a lot better handle on the thing than I ever did. And it's always, I think I probably told you this in 2003 or four when I first interviewed you was, um, I was just too young for Bosnia. I paid attention during Kosovo. And I was good on it. But, uh, not just against it, but I understood it pretty well. I followed it pretty closely and all that and cared about it and stuff. But Bosnia, I was

just too young and in high school and too many consonants in those names, too hard to memorize all those different provinces and complications. But I feel like I got a good handle on it now. And I really hope that I did a decent job of conveying what happened there in the chapter that I wrote about it in my new book that I'm working on that'll come out someday. But anyway, so now that I know a lot more about it, I'm also a lot more interesting. in it and also i've read some scary headlines about people threatening to kill each other over there and joe biden flying f-16s around and i thought oh no man don't kick off another one of these crises in this term here um but i don't know nearly enough about what is going on so could

you give us the basic thumbnail sketch of the relationship between the bosnian serb republic and the Bosian-Muslim Republic and the Bosn-Croatian Republic and whatever, however it is there now and what the crisis is about? Okay. So, super, super brief sketch because this is, it bores me to tears when I go into detail. There was a, back in 1992, Yugoslavia still existed. And Bosnia was one of its six constituents. republics, kind of like the Soviet Union or to 50 U.S. states.

And the three communities who live there, because there isn't a single majority community, you basically have people whose ancestors accepted Islam came to identify as Bosnian Muslims. They've sort of had a long and winding identity road, but they eventually, the majority of them settled on this identity called Bosniak, which was introduced in 1993. And then you have people who were Orthodox Christians, they consider themselves Serbs. And just about everybody who had any sort of connection with Catholicism ended up getting classified as Croats. And in 1991, 92, there was about 52% Christians and about 44% Muslims overall, Christians

combined, I mean. And there wasn't really a way to create a nation state out of this. And the three ethnic, because democracy ended up being census, the three ethnic nationalist parties who ended up winning the first democratic election after communism, ended up in a power sharing agreement. And they signed this deal brokered by the EU that they would, you know, okay, the Serbs and the Kurds would accept Bosnia's independence, but the Muslims would have to accept power sharing and sort of a provision. you know, decentralization. And the U.S. ambassador shows up in March of 1992 and tells the Bosnian Muslim leader, if you don't like it, why sign it? And basically, according to multiple people I've spoken to, including the former Canadian

ambassador to Yugoslavia, this is exactly what happened in the Bosnia Muslims. The leader of the Bosnian Muslims, Ali Zabegovic, took this as the U.S. being willing to fight his war for him, just like they did in Kuwait, two years, in 1990. 1991 against Iraq. And he reneged on the peace treaty, declared independence unilaterally, kicked off the civil war. Fast forward three years later, this is November 1995, and the U.S. now needs a peace deal. And it needs a peace deal in Bosnia on its own terms in order to sideline both the U.N. and the EU. And so Richard Holbrook, the late Richard Holbrook, is sent by Bill Clinton to browbeat people into doing this.

and the U.S. and NATO bomb the Serbs. They give Muslims and Karat's guns. They somewhat changed the reality on the ground through ethnic cleansing. And then they call everybody to this Air Force base in Ohio and say, okay, now you have to sign this deal that we drew up for you. This is called the Dayton Peace Agreement. And after many, many dramatic episodes, which Holbrook recounts in his own memoirs, that quite contradict to conventional wisdom on the entire war. The peace treaty is signed. The Bosnian Serbs accept control of half of Bosnian territory, 49% to be specific, because you know this was drafted by a lawyer. And this half of Bosnian

territory is called the Republica Serbskauer, a Serb Republic. And the other half is called Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which, but also in conventional parlance was known as Federation of Bosniaks and Croats, same spelling in the local language. And the Federation is subdivided into these 10 provinces, each of which acts kind of like an independent state of its own. It's a completely dysfunctional entity. It was drafted up in Washington in 1994 as a battle alliance against the Serbs. It's never worked.

That's a separate story. I'll circle back to it in a minute. So this is the setup. This is the Mison Saint. And it has been, what is it, 2024? So almost, almost 29 years, 28 years since this happened. And throughout these 28 years, Bosnia has been a protectorate of the U.S. and NATO, effectively, not even the EU, in which a random foreigner, usually a failed European politician, is appointed the vice royal, as they style themselves, high representative, and basically imposes the laws, alters the Constitution, does whatever the hell he wants, based on these powers. that were delegated to him at this conference, but nobody knows what these powers are.

There's no document to this. There's, there were, nobody had the powers to delegate to him. It's all very, very highly irregular. I mean, a U.S. constitutional lawyer would get hives from just hearing about this. And the whole, for the past 28 years, there's been this huge push to basically annulled the date and agreement without outright doing so and alter it so that Bosnia would become the centralized state run by the Bosnia Muslims, basically. And the Serbs are having none of it because they're pointed to the actual written document

that says otherwise and say, that's not what it says here. And so you have the situation which the U.S. Embassy is saying that the Serbs are behaving unconstitutionally by abiding by the actual constitution and protesting the unconstitutional act by a randomly appointed foreigner whom the U.S. Embassy supports. And this whole F-16 episode the other day is directly related to this because for the past several years, one faction of the Bosnia Muslims tried lawfare and basically filed a complaint before this newly invented constitutional court that is not actually in the date of agreement and said that, you know, the Serbs celebrating 9th of January as their anniversary is discrimination

on a religious basis because that's a major Orthodox patron St. Holiday and Therefore, that's unfair to, you know, non-Serbs and non-Orthodox. And the Serbs said, well, this is absurd. I mean, this is the anniversary where our people met and declared what would become Republic of Serbska. We can't change that. And it's also an Orthodox patron saint, and we happen to be Orthodox. You're denying our religious rights.

But, you know, this fake court and this fake viceroy basically said, no, you're discriminating. This is against human rights. your band. And the Serbs ignored it and just went ahead and celebrated anyway. So the Americans, and their infinite wisdom or lack thereof, decided to clarify here, they weren't trying to force Catholic, Croats and Bosnian, Bosniac Muslims to celebrate their holiday. Were they? No, no. In fact, the whole thing is, like, there is no, like, central government law on holidays. Well, wait, and let me ask you this. Is this seriously a provocation? like you hear in Northern Ireland, like these guys marching through those guys' neighborhood and this kind of thing, you know?

Well, so the Serbs are celebrating in their own neighborhoods. It's not like they, you know, walked into a Muslim city and stage anything. You basically had a really, really stark contrast on 9th of January. You had this big Serbian celebration in Banja Luka with, you know, a parade, some drones up in the sky, displaying various things, including the dove of peace. And then you had an impromptu riot in one of the Muslim cities called Zenitsa, where people were waving like the black flag of jihad, chanting al-Ahu Akbar killed the infidels and, you know, burning a Serbian flag. And I mean, that's, you know, and you had people in Sarajevo smashing up bakeries on Thai-Bosnia and Serb. Like, and they talk about tolerance and multi-ethnicity and, you know, secular civic human rights stuff. And I'm like, you're clearly, you know, saying one thing and doing. the other what the heck and of course the embassy is like oh we condemn all violence well i'm sorry but you're both siding this issue while you're explicitly endorsing one of the sides here and it's not the side that's that's celebrating peacefully it's the side committing violence all right now let me let me ask you this because someone was tweeting to me um i had written some stuff i forget what the context

was on twitter with some facts out of my book that i had found about some of the sense of the bosnia Muslims during the war. And so I got a new Serbian fan who sends me things now. And he was saying, look at this attack on the bakery. And then someone else said, yeah, but the guy that owned the bakery had done some terrible thing, whatever it was. So I was wondering if you could elaborate about that story. And then also like, in fact, who attacked it? And is that, it's like an official pogrom where the cops are standing around approving a gang of Tufts doing a thing? Or it's really just a gang of Tufts doing a thing? Or can you elaborate? exactly because and really the point being the level of tension that this represents or whether

this can be okay again I mean you mentioned um acts by the Bosnian Muslims where they're intruding more more or essentially in fact I think if I remember the context right it was kind of defining the state as more and more centralized under Sarajevo's authority against the Serbs so just elaborate on that more if you could All right. Well, less people think that, you know, I'm being unduly partisan here. I am an ethnic Serb who grew up in what is today Sarajevo controlled by the Muslims. So I've got experiences on both sides of this. But in no universe, is it okay to attack a man's property based on his speech? The owner of this bakery hasn't done anything. He may have said things that the Muslims got offended by. But you don't smash a man's bakery for that, ever. Like, that's not, you know, according to U.S. rules, according to European rules, according to these all civilized Western rules, according to libertarian principles of non-aggression that you and I are largely in alignment with. That is not something you do.

Now, if you're looking at the whole Ottoman Empire Sharia rule in which, you know, if any member of a community behaves in a way offensive to Muslims, collective punishment is immediately authorized. And yes, this is what would be acceptable. except Sharia law is not actually implemented in Bosnia and, you know, in the Bosnian constitution. If they want to implement it, they can sure try, but that's what the war was fought over. Let me, let me circle back to this here. Personally, I think Aliyuzid Degovitch is the biggest criminal in Bosnian Muslim history because he managed to get these people in blood feuds with everybody. including themselves.

There's a faction of Bosnian Muslims who disagreed with him, and he declared them traitors and organized a hunt on them. And he has made them perpetually miserable, perpetually antagonistic to everybody, and completely unable to functionally live. Because from 1991 onward, they've always blamed everybody else, never tried organizing their own life around any sort of principle,

And it's always, oh, the Serbs are to blame or the Croats are to blame or the Europeans are to blame or the Americans are to, well, not so much Americans. Every so often when the Americans don't do what they want them to do, they start criticizing sort of a thing like this Ukrainian sense of self-entitlement. You know, you don't, you're not doing enough for me. How dare you? But he created this incredible psychological dependency and to the point where, you know, it's been 28 years system. war. Republica Serbska is functioning as if they don't have a whole lot of money, but they're they have a functional state and they've structured their own lives in a coherent manner. The federation is completely dysfunctional. Every province does whatever the hack it wants. It is completely unable to set up any sort of government. Meanwhile, people are just, you know, bureaucrats

are destroying salaries and strangling what little remains of the economy there, extracting everything through taxation and abuse. But that's somehow the Serbs fault. And they always run to the embassies, to the EU and the US, and, you know, whined that their poverty and their problems and their social issues are somehow the fault of somebody else. And if only we had a centralized government and all these laws that we insist on, everything would be great.

You know, it's statism on steroids, and it's disgusting. If they want, if they could have organized themselves normally, they would have by now, But again, as Vegovitch's ideology of we are entitled to everything and everything bad that happens in somebody else's fault is what's holding them back. And so what's happening now, one of the worst thing that's happening now is this whole F-16 overfled by the embassy and this entire American agitation is more comical than threatening in the sense that it's trying to intimidate the Serbs. Serbs are the ones who shot F-16s before during the 90s, at least two occasions. Asked the former Air Force Secretary, Air Force Chief of Staff, I think Goldfein was his name. He was a pilot and an F-16 that got shot down over Serbia. He survived, but he remembered it.

This is not going to intimidate the Serbs. What it's going to do with this kind of irresponsible behavior by the U.S. embassy that's replicating the mistake of 1992, is it's going to encourage elements among the Bosnian Muslims to believe that it's okay for them to start another war because somebody else is going to fight it for them. Last time they tried this, it led to 100,000 people dead, about 60,000 of them Bosnian Muslims. So it's not just a stupid idea. It's an evil idea. And the American embassy is directly responsible for helping encouraging. And it's shameful and it's disgraceful and needs to stop. Hey, y'all, I got a new coffee sponsor, Moondose Artisan Coffee at Moondosartisan Coffee.com. When I wake up in the morning, I feel like my brain is all dried out.

I need to pour a hot mug of rich, tasty coffee all over it to get it back working again, like 10W30 for the Noggin. Though not necessary, it helps if the coffee tastes good. Well, Moondos Artisan coffee does taste good. They get the best beans from all around the world, and they don't burn them. Support the show and support your brain at moondose artisan coffee.com. Just click the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house.

So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault or anything else you buy from Amazon.com. by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at scott horton dot org so keep that in mind and don't worry about the mess your wife will clean it up well folks sad to say they lied us into war all of them world war one world war two korea vietnam iraq war one syria afghanistan iraq war two libya syria yemen all of them but now you can get the e-book all the war lies by me for free.

Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Hey, can you talk a little bit about the leadership of the Republic Serbska now? Because I read, there's a report by Dave DeKamp

at anti-war.com where the quote was either brave or foolishly, ridiculously defiant where he just said, hey, I'm not afraid of you, basically, which is, you know, the U.S. Empire can be very violent and it sure would suck to get this thing kicked off. Like, he might have said something like, hey, I'll have my guys talk to your guys and we'll figure this out or something instead, you know?

So here's the thing. I've met Miller-A-Doddick many years ago at a diplomatic reception. He's a man who very carefully chooses his words. And he has always been, he started out diplomatic. Back in the 90s, he was sort of the American-backed reformer guy. And when he saw that the Americans were not serious about this and they would say one thing and do the other and it didn't really matter what they said, but what they did, he decided that, you know, they're not to be trusted. And when he came back into politics as a, again, he's a social, he's a self-proclaimed social Democrat.

He runs the largest party, its strongest party in Bosnia by sheer numbers, all of Bosnia, not just Republic of Serbska. He went with the platform of, I'm going to defend the Constitution, I'm going to defend the interests of Republic of the Serbska against people who are trying to approach on it. And if people are offended by this, that's their problem. And he's been very, very blunt. undiplomatic even, but others have been more diplomatic and it didn't avail them at all.

It doesn't matter, like, his behavior is not what's triggering this. His behavior is a response. And the fact that he's basically telling people to F off without saying those exact words yet, you know, that you can't, you can't blame that for the tensions because, Because, again, he started doing this as a response to this constant encroachment of the U.S.-backed, so-called international community, 20 years ago. Yeah, but you know what, Nabors? I mean, look who's the president right now. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Joe Biden. I mean, he was the worst guy. He might have been worse than John McCain and the Senate at the time on all of this stuff, right? Right. And he said things about the Serbs, you know, that I can't, I can't show.

share on a family-friendly radio show. I'm just saying, listen, man, you know, it would be wise to not unreasonably provoke a worse escalation with this kook sitting there with his finger on the button. Because once the secretary defense gets out of the hospital, then the president can tell him to tell guys to blow that place up. Right, with what? That's the issue. Have you seen what happened off the coast of Yemen lately?

there was just supposed to be this big armada that was going to secure freedom of navigation and the reds, how's that going exactly, Pentagon? Like, you know, I mean, that's like going to the Houthis and saying could you guys be a little bit more polite? That's not going to happen. I'm not saying the servers are the Houthis,

but, you know, they've been pushed far enough. I certainly understand, like, would I want them to be more diplomatic? Maybe, but has that accomplished anything? It has to. Well, don't get me wrong. I mean, I'm not saying that, he would win again, you know, make the Houthi's been to his will any more than he could make the Serbs bend to his will, but you can still drop high explosives all over you anyway, you know?

Well, I mean, they can try. I'm not, I'm not so confident about NATO's ability to wage war at this point, not after two years of sending every scrap of ammunition they've had to Kiev. But honestly, here's the thing. And this is, this is maybe me speaking as an ethnic Serb, who, you know, whose ancestors live in Bosnia and who've been exposed to various benefits of European civilization as administered by the Austria-Hungary and benefits of oriental civilization as administered by the Ottoman Turks, there comes a point where you just have to say no. And the basic, you know, liberty begins with

freedom begins with the ability to say, no, I won't. If you're not, if you're unable to disagree. If you're if you're unable to withdraw consent, are you really truly free? You're not. And the Bosnian Serbs value freedom over their lives. And that's always been so and Dotyka spelled it out. So maybe this is a radical idea for a lot of people around the world. Yeah. But what they're saying right now is they've explicitly said, we don't want more. We don't want anybody else's land or powers or, you know, authorities. We just want what is our own. What is our own? What is guaranteed by this constitution, what has been usurped illegally by people who are not, who have no authority to do so, who are falsely claiming to be things that they're not,

specifically this German politician, former agriculture minister, Christian Schmidt, who claims to be the high representative of the international community. But what is this? What is the international community? You know, who appoints him? What powers do they have in order to delegate? None of this actually exists. It's all a mirage.

And, you know, people have tolerated it for years because they had, you know, they were told they had to. Well, they've come to the end of their rope and decided, no, we don't have to tolerate this. You have no power here. And he's sitting and sorry about it, but what is he going to do, start a war? Yeah, I hope not. I'll tell you when this Israel-Palestine stuff kicked off again more. worse in October and I was just saying cease fire just stop the thing and someone was saying how unreasonable that was and a Bosnian Serb entered the chat and said hey look Bosnian Serb here let me

tell you step one is just stop killing people you know we could get up every day and nurse that grudge from that time that our brother or our brother-in-law or whoever it was got killed that we could go slit a throat and keep this thing going or not and so that's the thing that's the thing just keep everything below that pitch and figure out a better way to proceed and then so this is my last question i'm sorry because we are pretty short on time but i wonder they because obviously what you say richard holbrook and dayton and all that i mean they did throw the muslims under the bus on zepa and said bernica at least and some other things you know so it wasn't everything the muslims wanted but i understand you know as you described at the beginning it's nato power

that basically holds the thing together. But so what's a reasonable way forward? You let the Bosnian Serbs finally join with Serbia and keep their independence that way? Or what do you have in mind? I mean, literally just enforced the Constitution as written is it seems, it's not even a reasonable compromise. It's literally the only solution for this to keep working. You know, again, it's the U.S. and their, you know, NATO puppets in, Sarajevo, probably off the reservation. I don't even know if this is the official policy

at the State Department or the Biden administration, or if it's somebody in Sarajevo running his own private man who would be king type of foreign policy. But, you know, all it takes is enforcing the Dayton Constitution as written. That's all. Nobody wants war. Nobody wants a session. Nobody wants, you know, conflict with either NATO or the EU or anything. All people want is for the law to be enforced as written without any of these emanations in penumbras or the spirits or you know bond powers or you know there's german tourists posing as the new viceroy you know people are sick of this crap if if you know if the eu could create prosperity at home it would have it can't if the u.s was able to create peace and prosperity it would have done so starting at home

but also elsewhere in the world it can't so what what gives the american ambassador the right to go to another country and orders them around how to live their lives and how to organize their affairs. It's preposterous. The embassy has overstepped its bounds. The Germans have overstepped their bounds.

People need to calm down and figure out, do they want to fight a war? No, they don't. And people on both sides who are like, let's fight this out, these are people who have no idea what war was really like 30 years ago. I don't want to go through that ever again.

Nobody should. Nobody's been through what I wants to go through that ever again. But as long as you have these people to whom war is what they see on television or video games, whose sorts of information is things like CNN and propaganda coming out of Ukraine, and who are getting inspired by the American embassy with these stupid stunts featuring 2F16s and some forward air controllers simulating bombing runs and think, oh, we're going to have a 24-hour war and we're going to kill all the Serbs and establish a glorious Islamic State. insane and it's the u.s embassy promoting this and it's brussels promoting this it's washington

promoting this and they're the ones who can make it stop yeah well man good luck to us all especially you um hey i read this thing before i let you go i searched your name up and i found an article from was it august 1995 in the new york times and the war is over and you just got drafted into the Muslim army, or you got your notice that prepared to be drafted or something? Do I have that right? Yeah, I think it was the New Republic, actually. But, yeah, yeah, it was, that was accurate. I did get my draft notice.

They never, eventually never invoked it. But, yeah, I was supposed to be conscripted and sent to basic training in, like, October, right when the ceasefire was signed. right ahead of Dayton so yeah I was I was 18 in the year to war ended I was 15 when it started I again been there the entire duration I was in Sarajevo I have stories for different occasion we're out of time now but I I've experienced war firsthand and I don't wish it upon anybody yeah and you started writing for anti-war dot com in the year 2000 yes I did I wrote about 15 years before I stopped writing exclusives when I joined RT, but I still from time to time send something in. It's a great website, noble cause, and I wish everybody would support it.

Yeah, man, I wish everybody would go site, colon, anti-war.com, Balkan Express. And in fact, no, just search Malik. It's Malich, but, you know, there's no age, but, you know. and because after a while we i guess we took the titles off everybody's column and it was just the nabotse malich column you know so uh but search antiwar dot com or i think your name's in the right hand margin there somewhere anyway should be should be still all right well look man thank you so much for coming back on the show it's great to talk to you again and um let's hope everything stays uh only this bad and then less worse than that

I hope so I hope and pray for peace because there are people out there who know better and there's there's going to be hotheads everywhere at all times we just the trick of civilization is not letting them prevail yeah totally right all right well listen man thank you so much for coming back on the show no bush so great to talk to you man thanks for having me the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psrador dot com antiwar.com, Scott Horton.org, and libertarian institute.org.