Goodbye Goldberg

The ambassador has had an interesting career. He worked at the Bosnia desk at the State Department and was special assistant to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, President Clinton’s designated mediator in the war there. Those negations, if you remember, lead to a racist division of the country.

“Holbrooke’s crowning achievement was the 1995 US-engineered Dayton partition plan of Bosnia, which ended the war on Serbian terms. In half of Bosnia, a ‘Serb Republic’ was recognised, despite Serbs being only 30% of the population, and despite this territory having been ethnically cleansed of about a million non-Serbs, about half its pre-war population. This included the whole of east Bosnia, formerly overwhelmingly Muslim in population, which had suffered genocide at the hands of Milosevic’s thugs in 1992. Holbrooke’s “peace” plan recognised this genocidal disappearance of this Muslim majority (along with 1700 mosques destroyed to make sure no-one suspected the Muslims were ever there).

“Holbrooke’s partners in the Dayton crime were Milosevic and his Croatian partner Tudjman, in fact it is often called the Holbrooke-Milosevic-Tudjman plan. The biggest losers were the Bosnian Muslims and mixed Bosnians, who had fought to retain a multi-ethnic constitution, reflecting the multi-ethnic reality that had been Bosnia, and the population spread of Muslims throughout the mixed republic.

“Even Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave in east Bosnia which had just been overrun by Serbian general Mladic in July 1995, a couple of months before Dayton, where 8000 Muslim captives were summarily slaughtered in Europe’s largest massacre since World War II, was ceded to the Serb Republic.”

(from Bolivia Rising‘s “Bolivia, Yugoslavia and US Ambassador Philip Goldberg“)

Between 2004 and 2006, just before he came to Bolivia, Goldberg was chief-of-mission in Kosovo. In February 2008, Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia.

The man has a lot of experience with the breakup of countries, and that may the reason he was selected to this post. Since his arrival, rumors have been spreading about the U.S.’s clandestine support for those in the media luna advocating for more autonomy and diversion of funds derived from the sale of natural gas from the central government to the departmental government. Both of these moves, particularly the latter, would weaken the government of Evo, which may have led to his announcement this week.