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
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Reviewed by Panayote Dimitras (Greek Helsinki Monitor, Greece; and Central European University, Hungary), Email: panayote@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?