This is a remarkable article. On the one hand, it contain a shocking revelation - that Slobodan Milosevic's intelligence chief was also a CIA spy. (Actually, the revelation itself is some weeks old, and it is now alleged that he also worked for Russian intelligence, which is not mentioned in the Herald article). This is not the first time that the CIA has been found to have high-level involvement in the former Yugoslavia. Their involvement in training KLA militias in 1998-99, while working as OSCE officers, was revealed in 2000. Still, the implications of this are obviously sweeping. It would suggest that the US government not only had some unseen leverage in the war on the Serbian side, but that it had insight that enabled it to decisively influence negotiations at key points with a reasonable expectation as to the outcome. So, if Zimmerman told Izetbegovic to scuttle the Lisbon agreement, he probably had reason to know that it would lead to years of war. It means that when the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs was supporting militias such as Arkan's Tigers or the Red Berets, the US government knew before anyone else did. What did it do with this information? On the other hand, the article is so full of inaccuracies and absurdities that it is hard to take it seriously.

First of all, Jovica Stanisic is not facing charges at the International Criminal Court, but at the ICTY. There is a huge difference in terms of the standing and legitimacy of each court. Secondly, even the ICTY does not charge that genocide took place in Croatia, or Kosovo, or anywhere outside Srebrenica, and even then it doesn't say that it was driven by Slobodan Milosevic. Yet, the reporter just keeps repeating 'genocide' as if this is supposed to have a hypnotic effect on the reader. What the indictment [pdf] actually alleges is an ethnic cleansing campaign in Krajina, and BiH. And at this point the key word remains 'alleges'. I don't doubt that substantial portions of the indictment are accurate, by the way, or that they would be shown to be such even in a court that wasn't as ridiculously biased as the ICTY. But that is hardly the point. The point of these falsehoods is to convey yet again that the fall of Yugoslavia is essentially a narrative of Greater Serbian expansionism checked only by exiguous 'peacekeeping' constraints, and that the current judicial process has more legitimacy than it actually possesses.

The story also asks us to believe that the CIA's influence was entirely benign, that it sought only to attenuate the causes of war, and that it used Stanisic to do so. This is because the CIA has taken the step of submitting classified documents to the ICTY to, er, 'clear up' their role in this affair. Obviously, we are not going to be told the truth either by the CIA, or by Stanisic in the context of a plea-bargain. But is a sign of the CIA's successful management of the news agenda that the revelation has produced not radical questioning but a further regurgitation of the propaganda memes of the 1990s, in a way that pro-actively whitewashes the CIA. The only question that the reporters asks is whether the US let the world down by being so 'equitable' to the Serbs at Dayton, as if that was the major problem with that lousy settlement. Should the US not have "unmasked" Karadzic and Milosevic and "demanded their surrender"? This would, of course, have entailed an invasion, and potentially quite a bloody one - but implicitly it would only have added to America's righteousness.

Hoare begins by accusing me of a tautology: "Seymour is unable to provide any evidence that any of his liberal targets did, indeed, support ‘murder’" in the cases of Croatia and Bosnia, there being no notable instances of "bloodcurdling war cries", "unless simply being in favour of Western military intervention automatically makes one a supporter of ‘murder’". In fact, the argument in the book is that in misconstruing the situation in Yugoslavia, and by calling for intervention, pro-war liberals helped to justify political and military interventions that did indeed contribute to ‘murder’, and prepared the ideological ground for supporting future wars. I do not characterise everyone who (to my mind mistakenly) bought the 'humanitarian intervention' argument as a defender of 'murder'. And at no point do I argue that liberal imperialism is simply characterised by "bloodcurdling war-cries". The whole point of liberal imperialism as an ideology is that it doesn’t work that way. The accusation of "tautology" rebounds on the reviewer: it is his tautology, not mine.

I do not argue against military intervention on the grounds that "the Croatians and Bosnians were not worthy of being defended by Western military intervention, because their governments were just as bad as Milosevic’s - possibly worse - and were guilty of the same atrocities." I argue that liberals and leftists misconstrued the facts of the matter, demonised the Serbs and paid little or no attention to comparable crimes by Croatian and Bosnian forces. I do not argue that anyone is "not worthy" of "being defended". The reviewer just assumes that military intervention would, in fact, constitute 'defence'. In outlining the grotesque disinformation in the coverage of the conflict, he further assumes, I mean to imply that Croats and Bosnians were unworthy of a form of 'solidarity' that I might extend to others, suggesting that he has not read/understood the rest of the book. Nor do I say, or imply, that Croatian and Bosnian governments were "possibly worse" than "Milosevic's". This a tautology followed by a non-sequitur, crowned by an invention.

I do not argue that the proper response "to news and images of Serb ethnic-cleansing and atrocities (which Seymour does not deny took place) is not to demand action in defence of the victims, but to ensure that the perpetrators of this ethnic cleansing and these atrocities get a fair coverage and are not condemned in too strong terms". I argue that "action in defence of the victims" of any atrocity is not identical to calling for states to engage in military aggression, and that humanitarian solidarity is not to be confused with hysterical propaganda. It is because Hoare doesn't notice such distinctions that he is able to conclude that "what Seymour has written is a defence of the Milosevic regime and Serb ethnic-cleansing from their liberal critics". (Emphasis in original). If only I were as litigious as the Hoares. It would be far more realistic to say that much of Hoare's output constitutes a defence of the Tudjman regime and Croatian ethnic cleansing.

I would prefer to leave aside the matter of Hoare's taking umbrage on behalf of his mother, but Hoare's misrepresentations make it impossible. Firstly, interviewing former friends of those one wants to evaluate, even if in passing, is not the disreputable technique that he appears to think it is - it is normal practise. Secondly, Hoare claims that Branka Magas only supported Croatian secessionism in the same sense that Socialist Worker did. Magas supported secession, Socialist Worker supported the right to secede - a distinction that made all the difference when Magas denied the ‘systematic persecution’ of the Krajina Serbs, and husband Quentin Hoare defended Tudjman from claims that he was an antisemite and Holocaust-denier.

I reject the evocations of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust with reference to the Serbian government. This is not because the Serbian government lacked for authoritarianism or because it was not interested in expanding its power – with brute violence when all else failed. It is because that system of allusions was the basis for propaganda that denied the atrocities of other powers and legitimised the highly destructive interventionism of the United States, including its diplomatic sabotage and its subcontracting of reactionary Wahabbi fighters. Serb camps were compared to Belsen, in a sense, so that one didn't have to mention camps run by the HDZ and BiH. In that context, I ironised about Finkielkraut’s deployment of the Nazi-Jew homology in the context of the Croatian war by pointing out that Tudjman was more apt to vocalise pro-Nazi sentiments than Slobodan Milosevic. It is true that I didn’t mention that a number of Bosnian Serb paramilitaries embraced the symbols of the far right, but that was because it not germane to an argument about the Croatian war. I will spare Hoare’s blushes by not meditating too long on the topic of the BNP’s Nazi proclivities, which he denies exist. I will merely say that if it was possible not to see the antisemite in Franjo Tudjman, it is possible to miss the Nazi in Nick Griffin.

Hoare is scandalised that I impute "political motives" to the International Court of Justice: the problem is that I don't. He is referring to page 204, which explicitly references the ICTY, a wholly different (and highly politicised) body. Hoare is also vexed by my claim that "Izetbegovic’s Bosnian regime was the party favoured by ‘Western imperialism’". My claim is actually that US imperialism backed Bosnia. I note that the French government of Mitterrand, for example, was sympathetic to the Serbian side. The reason for this distortion on Hoare's part is that he wants to establish a 'gotcha'. Thus, citing alleged 'false flag' operations by the Bosnian side in Markale, I note that the accusations originate from UN personnel. According to Hoare, this means that the "representatives of Western imperialism" were maligning Bosnians, blaming them for "their own suffering". Even if those UN witnesses were in an uncomplicated way the imperialist delegates that Hoare takes them to be, the point would be one of 'evidence against interest': if those UN witnesses were representatives of US power, they were undermining the narrative industriously promoted by their bosses. Further, the point about 'false flag' operations is precisely that those responsible for them are not the victims. The implication of such an operation would be that the Bosnian government was using the populace as a bargaining tool in its negotiations. Only by assuming that the Bosnian government was the bearer of the volksgeist, in a way that is congruent with his support for Croatian nationalism, could Hoare fail to understand this point.

What seems to annoy Hoare more than anything else is my habit of citing left-wing dissidents, especially those who are either sympathetic to Slobodan Milosevic or sceptical of the claims surrounding the Srebrenica massacre. I make no apology for doing so where they have something interesting to say, and they are more than outnumbered by the usual texbooks, scholarly articles, news reports and so on. But Hoare's undignified indignation leads him to yet another pratfall. Thus, belabouring me for citing Diana Johnstone on Izetbegovic’s deathbed confession, as related by Bernard Kouchner, he complains: "Kouchner’s French government was aiding and abetting Milosevic’s destruction of Bosnia, and maintaining an arms embargo against the Bosnians". And so, he wonders, why should we take his word at face value? Had he read the 22 pages he focuses on properly, he would have been aware that Kouchner was not a supporter of that policy, and worked to get it overturned (see p 199). This would be one more case of 'evidence against interest'.

Those extensive mis-readings and gaffes to one side, there are a number of criticisms where I think Hoare has a point. And it would be grossly unfair, given how much effort he put into his review, to ignore them, so I conclude with those. I cite a quotation from Tudjman that was reproduced in Michael Parenti's To Kill a Nation in which genocide is described as "permitted", and even "recommended". Hoare, who has read the original text from which the quote has been extruded, says that it is taken out of context. I am quite prepared to take his word for it barring better advice, and correct it in the paperback edition. Accusing me of mis-stating casualty figures, Hoare notes my claim that in the run up to the Srebrenica massacre, "a wave of terror, including rape, by Bosnian Muslim forces in surrounding areas had killed thousands of Serbs.’" This was based on a number of neglected news reports from the time, found on LexisNexis. His rejoinder is that statistics from the Research and Documentation Centre, whom I cite elsewhere, put the number of Serb civilians killed in the surrounding area at 879. I did say "Serbs" and not "Serb civilians", and the total number of Serbs killed in that area, according to Hoare's source, is 5573. He might have been more attentive to what he was reading. Still, let us concede that it would have been better to measure those news reports against the RDC’s stats and to make a clear distinction between the killing of military men and civilians in the UN-protected enclave and surrounding areas. There would have been no damage to the substantive point that forces loyal to General Naser Oric were using their numerical strength over the Serbs to harrass, rape, and kill locals, and that little attention was paid to these and other atrocities by Bosniak forces. And I will also give Hoare the point that having opposed the use of inflated figures for civilian casualties, my use of Kate Hudson’s maximal figure for the number of Serbs expelled during Operation Storm (which may well be the total number displaced during the whole of the war from 1991 to 1995) does not sit well – and at any rate wasn’t essential to the point that what Hoare refers to as "the liberation of Krajina" was a bloody and repressive operation.

All the rest, I am afraid, is just futile bluster on Hoare’s part.

Ed Vulliamy is not going to tell you anything different. Of course it was a "concentration camp", only slightly less "satanic" than Omarska and other such institutions. Of course the emaciated Fikret Alic, "behind the barbed wire", "embodied the violence unleashed on Bosnia's Muslim civilians at the orders of Radovan Karadzic". And, as we recall, it was necessary to establish the facts of the matter, and what one might say about them, by prosecuting a tiny sectarian publication and driving it out of business. (Never mind what became of said sectarians - the principle established is that it was proper for the state to determine what amounts to truth in the public domain, and what may be censured.) The trouble is that, as Phillip Knightley wrote at the time, the imagery that Ed Vulliamy is citing as evidence in itself for what the newspapers dubbed "Belsen 92", is a deception. Knightley pointed out to The Guardian in 1997 that the key symbols in the image, the ones that Vulliamy evokes here - the barbed wire and the emaciated condition - were inaccurate because a) the other prisoners were clearly not starved, and food could be brought to the prisoners by villagers (Alic's own account of his condition appears to be that he was both poorly nourished and suffering from an untreated illness), and b) while Alic and others clearly were in fact imprisoned (others were not), what was imprisoning Alic was not barbed wire but armed guards. It was, in short, an image settled on to convey what could not be said openly - that these were Nazi-style concentration camps. Former ITN producer Bruce Whitehead wrote, in a trenchant review of ITN's conduct, that "the report that aired gave the clear impression that these men were being forcibly starved behind barbed wire". This was part of a context in which Roy Gutman won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Serbian "death camps" with metal cages in which thousands of prisoners were being killed and their bodies cremated for animal feed (evidence for which is scarce). The French organisation Medicins Du Monde, set up by Bernard Kouchner as a split from Medicins Sans Frontieres in 1980, launched a mass campaign advertising death camps, comparing Milosevic with Hitler, inviting audiences to believe that the Nazi holocaust was taking place all over again.

To linger with the obvious for a moment, there was in fact a system of camps intended as prisons for those deemed suspect by forces deputised by the Republika Srpska. They also functioned as deportation camps for those being driven out by those forces, as places where Bosnian men could be drafted to fight on the side of Republika Srpska, and as the basis for 'prisoner transfers' between the hostile forces. Many were closed down in 1992, with thousands of prisoners transferred to UN control. Trnopolje was a transit camp for detainees, although as Phillip Knightley elsewhere wrote (see below), it was also a place where refugees could go. These camps were promulgated in the context of a brutal, ethnicised civil war, which included the deliberate terrorising of civilian victims, and indiscriminate murders by all sides in the conflict. In those camps, murders, beatings and gang rapes took place. It is worth noting that, as Vulliamy points out, he and his journalistic confederates were able to report about these camps because Karadzic had enough bravado to challenge them to find atrocities during a bus-tour of the camps arranged by himself. Bosnian and Croatian forces were not so stupid as to invite journalists to inspect their detention camps, and I bet that most readers couldn't even name one. You know of Omarska, Trnopolje and at a stretch Manjača. The camp at Bugojno run by the Bosnian army is hard to find details about, and while there are extensive wikipedia articles and press discussions of those run by the Republika Srpska, there is nothing on wikipedia about this camp. Try finding out about the Orašac Camp, also run by the Bosnian army. One or two individuals have been brought before the ICTY in connection with acts committed in those camps, but I don't think a single journalist ever thought to try to visit them, much less tell the world that they were death camps. A Lexis Nexis search discloses less than a dozen news stories specifically about the Orašac Camp, all from Croatian news sources. These pertain to investigations into the ritual beheadings, beatings and torture of Serb and Croatian detainees, among other things. Only a few sources outside Croatia can be found mentioning the Bugojno camp, belatedly, even though the area in which the detention camp was sited was frequently reported on during and after hostilities. No one cared, it seems. Journalists had effectively become co-belligerents with the Bosnian army and the their mujahideen auxiliaries, and anything that didn't fit the script contrived by PR companies such as Ruder Finn, which was employed by both Croatian and Bosnian governments, or that of Washington and its allies, was out of the picture.

At any rate, here is a passage from Knightley's evidence intended for the ITN/LM trial:

The most likely explanation is that Trnopolje was both a refugee camp and a detention camp--there were at least two different groups of people there--and that this is what has confused the issue. Refugees had come there of their own free will and could leave at any time. But there were also Bosnian Muslims like Fikret Alic who had been transferred there from other camps, who were awaiting identification and processing, and who were not free to leave.

But even this group was not confined by barbed wire. The out-takes show them in the main camp, outside the agricultural compound, and the main camp was not surrounded with barbed wire, as the War Crimes Tribunal agrees, but by a low chain-mail fence to keep schoolchildren off the road. As well, the barbed wire fence was no deterrent to anyone determined to escape because it was poorly constructed with wide gaps. What confined the Bosnians at Trnopolje, the War Crimes Tribunal says, was the presence of armed Serbian guards. So ITN was right in that the men in the film were detained in Trnopolje, but the image used to illustrate that was misleading because it implied that they were detained by the barbed wire. The barbed wire turns out to be only symbolic.

Were all the inmates starving? No. Fikret Alic was an exception. Even in Marshall's report other men, apparently well-fed, can be seen, and the out-takes reveal at least one man with a paunch hanging over his belt. Phil Davison, a highly-respected correspondent who covered the war from both sides for The Independent says, "Things had gone slightly quiet. Suddenly there were these death camps/concentration camps stories. They were an exaggeration. I'm not excusing the Serbs but don't forget that there was a blockade on Serbia at the time and there not a lot of food around for anyone, Serbs included."

It is a peculiar irony that just when reporters are most integrated into state propaganda (which is usually the case during a war), that is when they become the most arrogantly assured of their absolute, uncompromising integrity and intrepidity. The very fact of their presence at the scene of the crime, their ability to bear witness, even where their attention has been very carefully directed and framed in advance by assumptions elaborated by intelligence and PR agencies, is enough to make them think they are changing the course of history, humanitarian agents enacting la justice de Dieu. (Sometimes the reputation might be warranted. Apparently, the photographer and reporter Janet Schneider, who liked to stare down the "corridor of death" and coolly stated that she had endured rape "more than once" in the course of securing a story, was directly involved in assisting Fikret Alic after his escape from Trnopolje). The sheer irrational fury unleashed when their role is challenged is indicative of the intense narcissism that has been channelled into the enterprise. So, here we are, back to Trnopolje, the barbed wire, the body eaten by hunger and disease, and the spectre of Belsen. And though the montage is a crude specimen of revisionism in itself, it is of course those who do not assent to such vulgar redactions that are labelled revisionists.

At last, the truth will emerge. With Radovan Karadzic's capture and imminent trial, by a US-sponsored junket known as the ICTY, we will get to know the full facts about mass rape and genocide. Or will we? Forget for a moment the effrontery of a 'court' that effectively acts on behalf of the occupiers of Iraq dispensing wisdom on war crimes. And let's leave aside the fact that - whether or not Karadzic is guilty, as I think he is, of war crimes - trials of this nature are farcical and tend not to disclose much in the way of official responsibility. The more obvious point is that the verdict was reached, so far as official liberal opinion was concerned, some time ago. And that verdict has it that the Bosnian war was purely the result of a Serb nationalist pact of aggression against the remaining components of Yugoslavia, and that Radovan Karadzic, as a 'mastermind' of the war, strove to exterminate Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

Vulliamy's article puts it like this:

After 13 years on the run, Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, is on his way to The Hague to face charges of genocide and masterminding the bloodiest carnage to blight Europe since the Third Reich. ... And that man looking like Santa Claus was him, Karadzic! The man who arranged the mass murder of 100,000 people and the enforced deportation of two million? All those incinerated homes, the mass rape camps, the mass deportations at gunpoint.

This, to be frank, crazed nonsense is unlikely to be met with as much derision as it deserves to be, if any at all. Let me enumerate the falsehoods: Karadzic is certainly likely to be charged with genocide, now that the ICTY has ruled that Srebrenica was a genocide and Karadzic is believed to have ordered that attack, but he is not going to be charged with 'masterminding' the war; Karadzic may be accused of 'arranging' the mass murder of 8,000 Muslim males, but I know of no serious source that holds him responsible for 'arranging' the mass killing of 100,000 people, which is on current estimates close to the total number who died in the war on all sides, civilian and military; at the end of the war, a total of 2.2 million Bosnians of all kinds were displaced, one million of those internally, but it is absolutely not the case that Karadzic 'arranged' the 'enforced deportation' of two million people. These are just matters of fact about which Vulliamy is either deceived, or dissembling. How is it even possible to have a sensible discussion about this if the facts are so obscured by propaganda that - and I bet you this is true - hardly any Guardian reader will notice that the prize-winning senior foreign correspondent Ed Vulliamy is just ranting out of his blowhole? How is it possible that anything that did emerge from a trial would be weighed, if not dispassionately, then at least with an attempt at honesty?

I raise all this not because Karadzic is entitled to any defense from me (I am sure he is more than adequately protected by his amulets). So much is obvious. And I don't raise it because even my reasonably well-grounded suspicions about his culpability are not enough to persuade me that the facts should be settled by a lawless court which refuses to investigate the crimes of its sponsors. I raise it because, well, here we are in the middle of an epic and ongoing war crime with death rates, torture chambers, and mass rapes that are certainly much worse in their totality than anything that happened in Bosnia. All of this is the direct responsibility of the American state, which unarguably launched a war of aggression without any provocation whatsoever. And, somehow, the volume is decidedly muffled. While there are great independent journalists exposing much that is going on, the field is not exactly crowded. The liberal journalists and opinionators who were so vocal in advocating for Izetbegovic, so eager to bear witness, are hardly visible. And where they have not just enthusiastically backed the enterprise, they are at the very least circumspect on the matter of the evident criminality of the war's planners and prosecutors. Even those who are not backers of the war in Iraq constantly apologise for the United States government (usually referred to by the abstraction, 'America'), constantly seek consolation amid its crimes, and assert repeatedly that it still does some good in the world. Well, forgive me, but if that's the trend, shouldn't you be ashamed to talk about Bosnian war criminals? If you find yourself struck by a curious aphasia on the matter of trying to prosecute not only American officials but British ones too, what right have you got to exult about the capture of one lowly thug by the agents of the world's biggest thugs? If you can't match with honest reporting the level of hysteria and propaganda that you generated over Bosnia and then Kosovo, is there no point at which abashment sets in? I ask merely for information.