[Prishtina-E] FW: [balkanhr] Book Review: Takis Michas "Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic's Serbia in the Nineties"

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-----Original Message-----
From: Greek Helsinki Monitor [mailto:office at greekhelsinki.gr]
Sent: Tuesday, May 07, 2002 5:56 AM
To: balkanhr at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [balkanhr] Book Review: Takis Michas "Unholy Alliance: Greece and
Milosevic's Serbia in the Nineties"


Book Review:

Takis Michas "Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic's Serbia in the
Nineties"
Texas A&M University Press: Eastern European Studies (College Station,
Tex.), No. 15; ISBN: 158544183X
Hardcover - 200 pages (May 2002)
UK List Price: £24.95, US List Price: $29.95, Amazon.co.uk price: £18.54
Can be ordered at
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/158544183X/qid=1020761780/sr=1-1/re
f=sr_1_0_1/026-5717662-4778065

Reviewed by Panayote Dimitras (Greek Helsinki Monitor, Greece; and Central
European University, Hungary), Email: panayote at greekhelsinki.gr

---------------------------------------------------

Takis Michas' "Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic's Serbia in the
Nineties" is a "book combining personal observation, exhaustive
investigation, humanitarian concerns and political analysis" (Samuel
Huntington), "a courageous work" (Roy Gutman), a "devastating critique of
Greece's reactive ethnonationalism" (Nicos Mouzelis) that "should be read
not only by Balkan specialists but by all those interested in issues of
nationalism and human rights" (Adamantia Pollis). This review fully
subscribes to these back jacket comments.

Michas' book provides indeed compelling, irrefutable evidence that help
explain the frustration of Zoran Mutic, an anti-nationalist Serb
intellectual and translator of Greek literature in Serb-Croat. In September
1995, Mutic exclaimed: "When I hear so many Greeks -journalists, academics,
politicians, intellectuals- expressing their admiration for Karadzic, what
can I say? How can they consider as a hero a criminal, somebody who bombed
hospitals, who placed snipers to kill kids on the streets?" Karadzic was
honored in an open-air mass meeting in Piraeus, in the summer of 1993,
attended or supported by all political parties, trade unions, media and the
Orthodox Church: the handful of demonstrators who opposed the meeting were
even arrested...

The convincing answers provided by Michas will make this book hard to
swallow by the mainstream Greek political, media and intellectual
establishment, notorious for its refusal to accept criticism and engage in
self-criticism (as former socialist Minister of Justice Professor Michalis
Stathopoulos has repeatedly said). It is expected that, if they decided not
to ignore it, most of them will find harsher words for it than those of the
former conservative foreign minister Michalis Papakonstantinou in the book's
odd foreword: "Michas ... wrote the book ... more from the viewpoint of a
human rights activist and critic trying to bring justice to the side he
supports than that of an objective observer" (p. xi). Because indeed, in
Greece, advocating for human rights, civil society, and, in the end, an open
democratic society is perceived as a biased enterprise even by the most
moderate members of the establishment, like M. Papakonstantinou. It is no
accident that the book's author -like a few others with similar views- has
more than once lost journalistic jobs for having expressed views that in
most traditional democracies would not even be considered radical. Michas
indeed starts the book with one such experience: losing his column in a
financial daily, yet owned by a typical "globalization" entrepreneur, for
having printed in April 1993 the bank account for support to the then
hard-hit Sarajevo daily "Oslobodjenje" (pp. 3-4)...

Michas substantiates clearly at the outset the second part of the book's
title: "what seemed incomprehensible during the Bosnia and Kosovo wars was
not so much that Greece sided with Serbia, but that it sided with Serbia's
darkest side" (p. 4). Indeed, the book provides a detailed documentation of
how Greece sided with Milosevic and scorned the Serbian opposition even
through 2000. It helps explain therefore how Greece also sided with Karadzic
when the latter disagreed with Milosevic, and with the Pale Serbian-Bosnian
self-proclaimed parliament when it rebuffed pleas by Greek Prime Minister
Constantine Mitsotakis, Milosevic and Karadzic during the ill-fated effort
to settle the Bosnian crisis early on in 1992. He is correct, moreover, to
point out that this attitude was not inspired by politicians and/or media
but was a bottom-up event. "Media people and politicians simply gave in to
this overpowering popular demand" (p. 5). Michas correctly explains this
attitude by the weakness of Greek civil society and the prevailing
intolerance in the society at large, which is indeed a much worse situation
than that of a "merely" intolerant state.

He attributes this characteristic to the prevalence to this very day of a
militant and rather primitive form of ethnonationalism in Greece. In the end
of the book, he develops this theoretical argument, and also explains the
role of the Orthodox Church as a component of Greek nationalism; he looks
for the roots of anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism of the left and of the
right, a major element in Greek society's "irrational" attitude; and he
recalls the consequent and continued persecution of dissident voices and
refusal to recognize minorities, that go hand-in-hand with the prevailing
intolerance. Many nationalism theorists may disagree with the author, or
find some of his arguments rather weak: however, even here, it is the
evidence he provides that is essential to the understanding of modern
Greece, in this investigative piece that is not a rigorous academic study.

The book comes out at a time when the publication of the Dutch report on the
events of Srebrenica has caused serious waves in the Netherlands and beyond.
These waves have not reached Greece, though, a country that was rejoicing
after the "fall" of Srebrenica in July 1995 at the hands of Bosnian Serbs
and their allies, Greek paramilitaries. The latter in fact raised the Greek
flag in Srebrenica after its capture: for those who may try to contest this
fact, a photo is provided (p. 22), alongside another immortalizing the
ensuing award of medals to the paramilitaries by Karadzic (p. 23). The other
major indicted war crimes suspect, then General Ratko Mladic, was equally
popular in Greece. So, when the Hague Tribunal indicted both of them, two
million signatures were reportedly collected by the Greek-Serbian Friendship
Association to oppose their prosecution. Another revealing part of the Dutch
report on Srebrenica is the reference to the support of the Bosnian Serb
army by the Greek (alongside Israeli and Ukrainian) secret services which
provided them with arms and ammunition. Michas' book makes this look even
more credible when it reveals that NATO military secrets on the August 1995
air strikes were passed on to Mladic on direct orders of then socialist
Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou: the author's source is none other than
Papandreou's personal intermediary with Karadzic and Milosevic, the -then
and now-President of Greek-Serbian Friendship Association, who was carrying
out the mission (pp. 38-39).

One would therefore not be surprised that Michas recalls also the refusal in
Greece to condemn Serb atrocities in all recent wars and to accept that
rapes were used as an ethnic cleansing weapon by Serbs; as well as the
eagerness to refute any such allegations, and challenge the credibility of
the Hague Tribunal or other international expert commissions, even by
Greece's top human rights official. Besides, the book provides information
on many business activities involving Greeks and Serbs to break the embargo
against Serbia, acquire companies in Kosovo, launder Milosevic money, all
that with full state support.

This phenomenon of "fundamental irrationalism," as Salonica-born leading
French sociologist Edgar Morin called it, had its culmination in 1999 with
the Kosovo bombings. A near unanimity of Greeks opposed them; almost all
Greek media reported events along the official Serb government line; and
anti-Americanism reached a new high during the same year's US President Bill
Clinton state visit, which triggered unparalleled street demonstrations,
quite unlike previous or later visits by a long list of communist or other
authoritarian leaders.

In the end, Michas recalls how even the supposed pro-European Costas Simitis
socialist government, and its foreign minister George Papandreou, tried to
help Milosevic when, in October 2000, the Serbian masses and the
international community demanded that he recognized his defeat by Vojislav
Kostunica and stepped down: Milosevic's insistence that a run-off be held
had one supporter, Greece -and personally even its foreign minister.

Another important contribution of the book is the account of the sustained
efforts throughout the 1990s by Greek diplomacy to destabilize or at least
to prevent the international recognition of the Republic of Macedonia at
all, or, later on, under its constitutional name. Afraid -correctly- that
such a development would only make inevitable the acknowledgment that a
Macedonian minority exists in Greece -which it does, but that is Greek
society's major taboo-, these efforts included even exchange of views with
Milosevic to "swallow up" Macedonia, perhaps within the context of a
Greek-Serb Confederation.

Michas concludes the investigative part of the book with a related sarcasm:
"Surely Milosevic feels sorry that he did not pursue this matter further.
Had his plan for a Greek-Serb federation materialized, he might well have
won the 2000 election. The majority of Greeks would have voted for him at
any rate" (p. 106). How can one contest it, when his popularity rating in
Greece, to the very end of his rule, was many times higher than that of all
Western leaders and even than his popularity among Serbs? Or when a few
hours after his extradition to the Hague, in June 2001, 79 of the some 100
Greek deputies present in Athens signed a petition opposing it and all other
extraditions of Serbs to the Hague Tribunal?


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