This documentary is rather familiar Serb propaganda, and is essentially useless for anyone who actually wants to find out about the wars during the 1990s. However, for those of us who actually know about the wars, this film has its uses; it shows us how Serbian propaganda has evolved over the years. Rather than the outright denial of Serb atrocities in earlier Serb propaganda films, Malagurski realises that the evidence for them is too strong, so instead he resorts to obfuscation and relativization to spread blame around to take as much guilt off Serbia as possible.
The way in which Malagurski portrays the rise of nationalism is highly disingenuous. He portrays it as though all three nationalisms arose at the same time, and were all equally guilty for the breakup. Thus, he talks about Izetbegovic (claiming he was a Nazi collaborator, a serious charge for which he neglects to provide any evidence), before Milosevic. Watching this, you would not know that before Tudjman and Izetbegovic were elected, Milosevic had already illegally and unconstitutionally ended the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina, crushed the Kosovo Albanians, held a series of nationalist rallies to coerce the other Yugoslavs and the Federal authorities, toppled the government of Montenegro, attempted forcibly to recentralise the Federation, imposed an embargo on Slovenia and driven the Slovene and Croatian Communists out of the 14th Congress of the League of Yugoslav Communists.
Malagurski repeatedly takes facts and events out of context to suit his agenda. He asserts that Croatia armed itself illegally under Tudjman, yet neglects to mention that this was because the JNA, illegally and without Federal authority disarmed the Croatian TOs in April 1990, before Tudjman even took office, sponsored a Serb rebellion in August 1990 and prevented the democratically elected government from responding. Malagurski also presents Operation Storm in a vacuum. Falsely claiming that it was 'the largest single act of ethnic cleansing' during the wars (the Serb assault of East Bosnia was an ethnic cleansing operation far larger in scale), he would like us to believe that it was simply waged against an innocent body of Serb civilians. He would like us to forget that it was waged against Serb rebel military forces who had ethnically cleansed the territory of all non-Serbs, and who were using that territory to shell Croatian cities and attack the Bihac enclave in Bosnia, threatening the inhabitants with a second Srebrenica. He also attempts to minimize Srebrenica by pointing to the long disproved claims of atrocities committed by Naser Oric involving attacks out of the Srebrenica enclave; yet wholly neglects to mention the incomparably larger scale Serbian offensives and atrocities which preceded his actions, and which led to Srebrenica becoming an enclave in the first place. Oric's attacks only took place anyway due to Serbian bad faith by blocking humanitarian convoys and shelling the enclave with artillery.
It distorts the rebellion of the Krajina Serbs, saying that they merely wanted control of the lands they populated. Malagurski does the same for Bosnia, but anyone who has looked at the ethnic maps of these two countries and the areas which the Serbs attacked, will know that this is a falsehood. If they merely wanted to control lands they populated, why did the JNA and the Serb militias spend so much time attacking and ethnically cleansing Slavonia and Eastern Bosnia, where they formed a small minority? Why did they besiege and destroy Vukovar and Sarajevo (which Malagurski wholly neglects to mention), when they did not form anywhere near a majority in either of these cities?
Malagurksi presents the Serb nationalist sound-byte 'If the Croats can separate from Yugoslavia, why can't the Serbs separate from Croatia?' This is an easy argument to refute; 'the Croats' were not given the right to secede from Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was recognized as being 'in the process of dissolution', and the six constituent republics were recognized as the entities that inherited its sovereignty. Thus, it was the six republics – including Serbia – not 'the Croats', whose right to independence was recognized. Serbia was not treated differently from Slovenia, Croatia or Bosnia in this respect, and was entirely free to seek and receive international recognition of its independence, just as they did. In fact, the only group on the territory of the former Yugoslavia whose carving out of a wholly new entity has ever been recognized by the international community is the Bosnian Serbs.
Malagurski tries to present the war in Bosnia as a 'civil war' in which Belgrade had little if any direct involvement. He does not mention the fact that the Uzice Corps, a JNA corps based in Serbia, was centrally involved in the Serb conquest of East Bosnia in 1992. Or the fact that all regular Serb forces in Bosnia were under the exclusive and formal control of Serbia and Montenegro until 19 May 1992; or the fact that Serbia's former representative on the Yugoslav Presidency, Borisav Jovic, admits in his own published diary that the VRS was organized by the leaderships of Serbia and the JNA; or the fact that Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic was handpicked for the role by the leaderships of Serbia and the Yugoslav army; or the fact that Vojislav Seselj admitted that his paramilitary forces were under JNA command during their early operations in East Bosnia in 1992 and that their ethnic cleansing operations were directed from Belgrade, or that the JNA illegally and unconstitutionally confiscated the arms of the Bosnian TOs in April 1990 (months before any nationalist party was elected) and redistributed their arms to Serb paramilitaries; or the fact that an officer from Serbia, Momcilo Perisic, directed the JNA's bombardment of Mostar in April 1992, or the fact that the JNA attacked Tuzla and Sarajevo in May 1992.
Unfortunately, space prevents me from addressing any more of the distortions in this documentary, but this should give a good picture of what the documentary is like.
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