Month: October 2023
Stevenson’s army, October 14
– US & Egypt agree to temporary opening of border checkpoint.
– NYT reports what some Hamas fighters knew about their targets.
– Australia rejects indigenous referendum.
-NYT tells of Egyptian spies in DC.
-HuffPost says State limits Gaza terminology.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here, with occasional videos of my choice. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Dredging history to justify the present
Friends at the Helsinki Commission in Belgrade have sent out this:
HELSINŠKI ODBOR ZA LJUDSKA PRAVA U SRBIJI
HELSINKI COMMITTEE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN SERBIA
Belgrade, 11 October, 2023
Rehabilitation of Draža Mihajlović morally unacceptable
The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights strongly condemns the renewed campaign geared towards the rehabilitation and glorification of Dragoljub Draža Mihailović, a convicted war criminal and collaborator of the occupier. The opening of a private museum and the construction of a monument in Belgrade dedicated to the leader of collaboration with fascism and commander of the movement that committed genocide against the Muslim population during World War Two represents a kind of shrine, and we consider this to be another step towards accelerated fascismization of society. Many factors are responsible for these negative trends – primarily the current Government and the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, as well as the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) and parts of the academic and cultural elite.
We must also point out that glorifying Draža Mihailović further provokes our neighbors in the region, it will inevitably increase the level of insecurity of all non-Serb nationalities in Serbia, and will have a particularly negative effect on the fragile region of Sandžak. In this context, the revisionist film about the rescuing of US pilots in World War Two – even though it, unfortunately, received the undivided support of the American Embassy – is a step backwards both in the stabilization of the region and in the democratization of Serbia.
One must not forget that troops that followed the command of Mihailović – who is being rehabilitated and turned into a hero without hindrance and with the consent of the entire society – were also responsible for serious war crimes against civilians in occupied Serbia. The Chetniks killed hundreds of civilians and peasants, and the biggest killing sites were the villages of Vranić near Belgrade and Drugovac near Valjevo. Serbia’s authorities need to explain these trends of rehabilitating fascism and glorifying war criminals and quislings to the descendants and survivors of those massacres.
It is also concerning that the rehabilitation of Draža Mihailović and an uncritical attitude towards fascism deviate from the liberal values on which modern Europe allegedly rests, values that Serbia is allegedly striving towards.
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Israel doesn’t have good options
@DanielSeidemann says: “A lone protester now I’m Tel Aviv: Bibi in exchange for the hostages.”
From what I hear on NPR this morning, the Israelis have now focused their Gaza objective to destroying the military capability of Hamas, rather than destroying Hamas altogether. That is good news, as the latter objective was unachievable. It would have required not only a massive deployment of Israeli troops but also a post-war effort to rebuild governance. Like it or not, Hamas provides health, education, social welfare, and other civilian services to the more than 2 million people who live in Gaza.
The traps
There is still however a question of whether an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza is a trap, as Hussein Ibish has argued. Hamas will have prepared carefully for that eventuality. Booby traps, small-unit resistance, organized and spontaneous protests will prolong the Israeli presence. That will provide ever greater opportunities for murder and mayhem. Israel was already stretched thin maintaining its external embargo on Gaza before the Hamas assault. Re-occupying the territory is bound to lead to a prolonged and bloody mess.
It could also lead to a wider war. There has been some exchange of fire across Israel’s northern border with Hizbollah in southern Lebanon. But the lid is still on that front. An Israeli effort to eradicate Hamas could well lead to a green light from Tehran for Hizbollah, and possibly also Iranian proxies in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen. All could launch missiles and drones against Israel from the north and south.
The Israeli government is still a problem
The Israeli army no doubt knows all this. But the Israeli government, even with the addition of a few more moderate opposition figures, is still hard right. Their constitutency will demand revenge and more. They were already blood and territory thirsty before the Hamas attack. The wave of settler violence in the last year against Palestinians on the West Bank was no accident. The Israeli government allowed it.
Hamas’ intentionally brutal and deadly assault and its taking of hostages will unhinge Jewish supremacists. They may well retaliate against West Bank Palestinians. Or even seek to drive many Gaza Palestinians into Egypt, which has agreed to partially reopen its Rafah checkpoint. Even with the best of intentions, the Israeli army is likely to make deadly mistakes in its air attacks on Gaza. But intentions are not the best.
What are the alternatives?
We can hope that the Israeli deployment of ground forces around Gaza is both preventive and intimadatory. It could incentivize Hamas into surrendering at least some of the hostages. Their number is unclear, but it may be 100 or more, which is a lot of people to hide, house, and feed. Hamas is not above offering to return some women and children, in order to gain credit with at least some in the Muslim world. Prospects for the men however are grim, as the history suggests the they may be kept for a long time.
Israel could consider a much tighter embargo on Gaza than it maintained in the past. It had allowed money, supplies, electricity, and water into Hamas-ruled Gaza. Some Gaza residents were allowed to work in Israel. Cutting those connections would amount to a siege of the civilian population, which is arguably a war crime. Even the current siege might be considered both unnecessary and disproportional to the military objective, which is to end Hamas’ military capabilities.
Israel could also try to implant in Gaza a less hostile governing capability, presumably an offshoot of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that has helped to maintain order in the West Bank. But the PA is widely discredited with the Palestinian population. It is hard to picture how it could gain traction in Gaza, where any effort to do so would likely lead to a deadly fight with the remnants of Hamas. Letting the Palestinians fight it out however might be an appealing scenario to some in Israel, even if there is a risk that Hamas might win.
Pie in the sky
Israel might conclude from recent events that its policy of denying the Palestinians a state and making their lives hard by occupying the West Bank and embargoing Gaza was the wrong approach.
It could instead decide to entrust a large portion of the West Bank to unrestricted but democratic PA rule and help the Palestinians to achieve a much higher level of security and prosperity. This would aim mto revive the Palestinian political project, as Paul Scham has suggested. Having achieved success in the West Bank, Israel could then hope to move Gaza in the same direction.
The United States is in a tough spot too
That would be hard and it won’t likely happen. Israeli politics for decades have pointed in the opposite direction. Israel under Netanyahu and his mostly likely successors is committed to a one state reality with unequal rights. Jews get full rights, Palestinians and other minorities who live in Israel proper get less. Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza get little.
This reality puts the United States in a difficult spot. So far, the Biden Administration has shown no inclination to rein in Israeli behavior towards the Palestinians. But what is about to happen in Gaza could test that restraint.
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Stevenson’s army, October 13
– Israel demands Gazans move to south; Egypt won’t open its border.
– NYT reminds of earlier Israeli debates over Gaza.
– US & Qatar re-freeze Iranian funds.
– WSJ has details of Hamas planning.
– Reuters has authenticated some Gaza videos.
– Tuberville holds affect 12 Centcom officers.
– Scalise is out, nobody’s in. [If the GOP can’t compromise among selves, dare they compromise with Democrats?]
– Politico notes history of conservative media dominating GOP Congresses.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here, with occasional videos of my choice. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Breaking up Bosnia is not the thing to do
Ismet Fatih Čančar is an independent researcher, a former Partnership for Peace Fellow at NATO Defence College, and a former advisor to the Minister of Security of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes:
On August 30, The Spectator published an article by Swansea law professor Andrew Tettenborn in which the author exults in the break up of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He believes this is a natural course of events, the inevitable ending of “the pantomime horse democracy.”
He is wrong. The break up of Bosnia is not a safe roadmap to sustainable peace in the Balkans. His argument is consistent with nationalist Serb and Croat actors who claim Bosnia is an aberration with no future, due to its ethnic differences and diversity.
Ignoring the law…
The complexities of the constitutional and political system of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the power-sharing structure under the Dayton Agreement, and the division of the society along ethno-national groups are well-known. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled against this system August 29 in Kovačević vs Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Court identified a series of systemic, institutional discriminations that need to be amended if Bosnia wants to progress on the Euro-Atlantic path.
Critics oppose implementation of this verdict, stating that any implementation, or even the mere thought of reforming or upgrading the Dayton Agreement, will lead to conflict and Bosnia’s break up. Discarding such a landmark decision is a brazen attempt to undermine the significance of the verdicts of an international court, in this case the highest legal and judicial institution in Europe in charge of implementation and protection of basic human rights.
The opinion of the ECHR in the case of Kovačević vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a lethal blow to the foundations of the discriminatory, ethno-national, backward oriented, immoral social contract embodied in the Dayton Agreement, which deprives a large number of Bosnian citizens of their basic civic rights. This is the greatest strength of the verdict: it directs Bosnia and Herzegovina to reject a system that subordinates individual citizens’ rights to the priorities of the country’s three major ethnic groups.
The argument that Bosnia cannot exist if it is not strictly an ethnic electoral system is a lazy, watered down excuse of anti-Bosnian actors who receive support from Moscow and wish to keep the country trapped in the chains of ethno-national politics. The alternative, a citizen-based civic model for Bosnia and Herzegovina, requires more political will and resources, but it is the best path towards a functional constitutional democracy like those other European citizens enjoy across the continent.
…and the facts
In an attempt to make the idea of Bosnian break up more digestible, domestic actors and international observers often display ignorance towards basic historical facts. Contrary to the statement that Bosnia and Herzegovina is “an entity set up following Bill Clinton’s brokering of the Dayton Accords in 1995,” Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina derives its continuity from the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina accepted into the United Nations three years earlier, in 1992. Before that it was for centuries a stable European state with borders defined by natural geographical features and state structures. It was the Bosnian Kingdom in the Middle Ages, Bosnia during Ottoman rule, a Corpus separatum during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and one of six republics within Socialist Yugoslavia. The claim that Bosnia’s diversity has produced animosity of “historical memories” lacks substance. Its civilizational space and international subjectivity are historic constants. Diverse religions and beliefs have coexisted in Bosnia and Herzegovina for centuries in peace and harmony.
The problems come from Serbia and Croatia, not Bosnia
The constant effort to break Bosnia up comes mainly from Serbia and Croatia, which have throughout history sought to annex parts of its territory. The source of the problem in the Balkans is not the allegedly irreconcilable religious, ethnic and national differences among people, but rather the “Greater-state” ambitions of Serbia and Croatia.
A series of judgments of international courts have unequivocally established the fact that the war pillage and destruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina resulted from the political projects of Belgrade and Zagreb to ethnically clean territories. They used both ethnic and religious factors to inflame interethnic hatred, mistrust, and instability, culminating in mass war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
These ambitions continue to serve as the political focus of Serb and Croat nationalist and secessionist actors, thus slowing nationbuilding in Bosnia. To save peace in the Balkans, the US and EU should raise their voices against the ethnonationalists, who deny genocide and glorify war crimes and their perpetrators.
Bosnia and Ukraine
The main reasons to reject the idea of breaking up Bosnia are not historical, but moral and political. Accepting Bosnia’s breakup would legitimize genocide and ethnic cleansing, posing a dangerous precedent for similar campaigns of killing and persecution. Such a precedent could also serve as a potent initiator of militant ethnocracy on European soil, which can easily consume other hotspots across the continent in pursuit of ethno-national exclusivity. The logic of blood and soil would return Europe to the 1930s.
It would be hypocritical for the democratic world to insist on defending democratic ideals under attack in Ukraine, while permitting the break up of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Ukrainian struggle is also the Bosnian struggle. The secessionist leader of the Bosnian Serbs has openly praised and publicly awarded Putin for the atrocities he has committed against Ukrainians. The recent visit of members of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Kiev conveyed the right message. The campaign of Russian “denazification” of Ukraine is a campaign that Bosnia and Herzegovina also went through in its struggle towards freedom and international affirmation.
Principles of justice and legality, inviolability of sovereignty and territorial integrity, respect for human rights, and the promotion of peace and security are of crucial importance for the European continent. They need to be defended in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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Stevenson’s army, October 12
–None for Scalise right now; no full House session set.
[ I agree with Vox article that Congress is becoming too much like a parliament.]
– US said to be working with Egypt to get humanitarian corridor for Gaza.
-NYT says intelligence shows Iran surprised by Hamas attack.
– Administration notes Trump also allowed Iran to tap frozen assets.
– Amy Zegart examines Israeli intelligence failure.
– NYT describes the tactical failures.
– CBO says US military personnel are well paid compared to civilians.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here, with occasional videos of my choice. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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