Diana Johnstone

Diana Johnstone (born 1934) is an American political writer based in Paris, France. She focuses primarily on European politics and Western foreign policy.

Johnstone gained a BA in Russian Area Studies and a Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Minnesota. She was active in the movement against the Vietnam War, organizing the first international contacts between American citizens and Vietnamese representatives. Most of Johnstone's adult life has been spent in France, Germany, and Italy.

Johnstone was European editor of the U.S. weekly In These Times from 1979 to 1990. She was press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament from 1990 to 1996. From 1992 to 2000, she was associated editor of the Paris quarterly Dialogue concerned with Balkan geopolitics. Johnstone also regularly contributes to the online magazine CounterPunch.

After the 2003 publication of her Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions, Johnstone became the centre of controversy over her claim in the book that there is "no evidence whatsoever" that the Srebrenica massacre of the Bosniaks was genocidal. The historian Marko Attila Hoare called it "an extremely poor book, one that is little more than a polemic in defence of the Serb-nationalist record during the wars of the 1990s—and an ill-informed one at that".

The book was rejected by publishers in Sweden, prompting an open letter in 2003 defending Johnstone's book—and her right to publish—that was signed by, among others, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali and John Pilger. The signatories stated, "We regard Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition."Ed Vulliamy, who reported for The Guardian during the Bosnian War, called Johnstone's book "poison" in response to the letter from Chomsky and the others. In her own defence, Johnstone has said her critics "reduce [her] book, as they reduce the Balkan conflict itself, to a certain number of notorious atrocities, and stigmatise whatever deviates from their own dualistic interpretation".

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