Alfred Sherman - Views On The Balkans

Views On The Balkans

In the 15 years of his life, Sherman was an outspoken critic of western policy in the former Yugoslavia. In 1994 he co-founded The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies as a research institute. In Sherman's words, it was "designed to correct the current trend of public commentary, which tends, systematically, not to understand events but to construct a propagandistic version of Balkan rivalries, designed to facilitate the involvement of outside powers".

In 1992, writing in London's Jewish Chronicle, Sherman warned against "the lapse of logic" in confusing the Bosnian Muslims with the European Jewry under Hitler.

"It does us no good to claim a locus standi in every conflict be equating it with the Holocaust", he wrote, "or when third parties in their own interests take the name of our martyrs in vain; Bosnia is not occupied Europe; the Muslims are not the Jews; the Serbs did not begin the civil war, but are predictably responding to a real threat.... Since 1990, the independent Croatian leadership—with its extreme chauvinist and clericalist colouring—and the Bosnian Muslim leadership—seeking, in its Islamic fundamentalist programme, to put the clock back to Ottoman days—have threatened to turn the Serbs back into persecuted minorities".

By the end of the decade Sherman saw the U.S. policy in the Balkans as inseparable from the drive for global hegemony. In 1997, he noted that the American century began with the Spanish-American War, and that it was ending with American penetration of the Balkans. But in contrast to the Spanish-American War, he argued, U.S. intervention in the Balkans has no clear strategic aim, but is allegedly a moral crusade on behalf of the "international community":

"This begs many questions. First, is there such a thing as 'the international community'? Do people in China, which accounts for a fifth of the world's population, and the Buddhists, who account for another fifth—among others—really want the U.S. and its client states to bomb the Serbs or Iraqis? And who exactly, and when, deputed the U.S. to act on behalf of this 'world community'?... Secondly, can the blunt weapon of force, of whose use U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright boasted, balance contlicting and competing ethnic, religious, economic and political interactions over this wide and conflictive region? Can the U.S. raise the expectations of the Albanians and Slav Moslems without affronting Macedonians, Greeks, Italians, Bulgars and Croats, as well as Serbs?... Thirdly, can force be a substitute for policy? It was a wise German who said that you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. The same goes for gunships, the modern equivalent of gunboat diplomacy. Bomb and rocket once, and it has an effect. But if the victim survives, the second bout is less effective, because the victim is learning to cope."

Well before the September 11 attacks and the Iraq War, Sherman argued that Washington had "set up the cornerstone of a European Islamistan in Bosnia and a Greater Albania, thus paving the way for further three-sided conflict between Moslems, Serbs and Croats in a bellum omnium contra omnes.... Far from creating a new status quo it has simply intensified instability." The U.S. may succeed in establishing its hegemony, in the Balkans-Danubia-Carpathia and elsewhere, "but it will also inherit long-standing ethno-religious conflicts and border disputes without the means for settling them." As he wrote in May 2000,

"The power and prestige of America is in the hands of people who will not resist the temptation to invent new missions, lay down new embargoes, throw new bombs, and fabricate new courts. For the time being, they control the United Nations, the World Bank, most of the world's high-tech weapons, and the vast majority of the satellites that watch us from every quadrant of the skies. This is the opportunity they sense, and we must ask what ambitions they will declare next.... Instead of rediscovering the virtues of traditionally defined, enlightened self-interest in the aftermath of its hands down cold war victory, America's foreign policy elites are more intoxicated than ever by their own concoction of benevolent global hegemony and indispensable power.