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 1996 to 2000, she was associated editor of the Paris quarterly Dialogue concerned with Balkan geopolitics.
''Fool's Crusade''
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" finding unbelievable the response of Chomsky and the others. In March 2006, David Aaronovitch in The Times wrote: "In the sense that the world understood there to have been an act amounting to genocide at Srebrenica... Johnstone certainly, and Chomsky implicitly, had most certainly denied the massacre". In the book "and elsewhere she had argued that the numbers of deaths had been exaggerated, that many supposed victims were in fact still alive somewhere, that Srebrenica had actually been an armed camp, that the Bosnians had deliberately let it be overrun hoping for a anti-Serb propaganda coup, that there had been some regrettable 'revenge' killings, as can happen in wartime". In her own defence, Johnstone has said her critics "reduce book, as they reduce the Balkan conflict itself, to a certain number of notorious atrocities, and stigmatise whatever deviates from their own dualistic interpretation". Richard Caplan of Reading and Oxford University reviewed the work in International Affairs, where he described the work as "a revisionist and highly contentious account of western policy and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. is insightful but overzealous well worth reading—but for the discriminating eye."
Later writing
In April 2012, she wrote about the first round of the French Presidential elections a few days earlier and identified Front National leaderMarine Le Pen as "notably" "basically on the left" while also labelling Le Pen as "demagogic". Describing Johnstone as "an excellent journalist", Alexander Cockburn in The Nation, quoted from an email she sent to him: "There is absolutely nothing attesting to anti-Semitism on the part of Marine Le Pen. She has actually tried to woo the powerful Jewish organisations, and her anti-Islam stance is also a way to woo such groups". Johnstone has contributed to the online magazine CounterPunch.
