Â
SA HOME
socialist action
YSA HOME
youth 4 socialist action
NEWS & VIEWS
articles, fliers, statements and opinions
THEORY
what is socialism, reading lists and study guides
LINKS
socialist, youth, activist, labor, feminist, anti-racist, and other important sites
a response to the international action center
NATO intervention in the Balkans threatens to mark a fateful turning point in world history. It represents a shift to active military operations by an expanded NATO to assure the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe. It points toward a series of regional wars of increasing scale and danger. However, this confrontation is above all a political one. In order to achieve their aims, the United States and its allies have to justify the use of massive military force, with all its human and material costs. Conversely, to be effective the opponents of this capitalist and imperialist drive have to politically disarm the U.S. and NATO governments.
To defeat the NATO war drive politically, it is necessary to lay the basis for building a mass opposition to imperialist intervention in the Balkans. We have to take the struggle from the initial small scale actions that have often been marred by neo-Stalinist and Serbian chauvinist elements to the stage of broad based actions appealing to substantial sections of the population.
In this effort, the heritage of Stalinism that remains in some parts of the movement is a serious obstacle. This involves the practice of apologizing for the ruling totalitarian bureaucracies that have now given the United States and the other capitalist powers their opportunity in Eastern Europe. It goes hand in hand with trying to brand all those who struggle against these bureaucracies as tools of capitalist reaction and with conspiracy theories designed to explain away all the failures of these regimes as a result of the plots of capitalist secret serviceslike the CIA.
Unfortunately, one of the forces that has taken the initiative in organizing anti-intervention protests, the Workers World Party and its associated group, the International Action Center (IAC), has followed the old Stalinist road. This is a group that defended the Ceascescu dictatorship in Romania, supported the crushing of the Chinese democratic movement in Tien Anmin Square, and hailed the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and orients to neo-Stalinist groupings in Eastern Europe.
The IAC has distributed a 'fact sheet' at the demonstrations it has organized. It is a classical example of Stalinist propaganda, apologizing for the Milosevic regime and throwing mud at the Kosovar forces that are fighting against this regime for the survival of their people. The Milosevic regime is one of the principal example of the neo-Stalinist formations that have emerged from the breakdown of Stalinism. Like other such groups either in power, such as the Lukashenko regime in Byelorussia, or in opposition, such as Zyuganovıs Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the post-Stalinist rulers in Belgrade combine an acceptance of capitalist restoration with demagogic populism and an alliance with chauvinist and fascist-like forces.
The government in Belgrade in fact is a coalition including the Radical Party of Vojeslav Seselj, a rightist group that identifies with the tradition of the anti-Communist Chetniks who collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces against the Communist-led partisans. The Radical Party maintains a paramilitary organization. Under the protection of the Yugoslav army, such rightist paramilitary organizations have done the dirtiest work in the campaigns to terrorize and expel the Albanian people of Kosovo.
The so-called fact sheet passed out by the IAC in the early April demonstrations against U.S.-NATO intervention in Yugoslavia concludes in its Point 7 by declaring that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is "a terrorist force similar to the CIA-funded Contras used by the U.S. in Nicaragua in an effort to overthrow the [Sandinista] government. NATO uses the KLA to justify sending troops to occupy and further break up Yugoslavia. Suddenly, it [the KLA] has the latest high tech weapons." This is Stalinist slander and conspiracy theory. The first clear evidence of KLA activity appeared last spring. The Yugoslav government response was massive terror. Whole families were executed in their homes on or their doorsteps. To defend themselves, the Albanians organized village defense groups that came under the aegis of the KLA. Before the Yugoslav army launched a search-and-destroy offensive, the KLA controlled 40 percent of Kosovo territory.
The KLA has continued to fight against the Yugoslav mass terror and expulsion campaign. It is clearly a militia of an entire people. Since when has the CIA been able to organize a force like that? How exactly is it supposed to have accomplished that? The KLA has a web page with almost hourly dispatches from inside Kosovo (Kosovapress). Since the beginning of Milosevicıs ³ethnic cleansing² campaign, it has reported constant KLA clashes with theYugoslav army and police, as well as with the fascist-like paramilitary gangs. While the KLA has reported the typical successes of a guerrilla force, killing a few members of the Serb forces here and there, it has made it clear that it is not equipped to deal with the Yugoslav armyıs tanks, artillery, and helicopters. This was also the message given by a local KLA commander quoted by a correspondent in the May 2 issue of the London Times. "We don't want NATO troops," said Doc during a quiet moment in the mountain camp. "We are fighting for our freedom. You can't understand the happiness of fighting for freedom because you have grown up free. If we had the right weaponswe have enough guns but we need anti-tank weaponswe could fight our way to Belgrade. Even though we don't want Belgrade; we just want Kosovo." At the end of the article, the correspondent quoted another KLA leader as saying: "We are going to fight, Haradinaj said. If NATO helps us, we will move more quickly. But it does not really matter. If NATO does not help us, we will still fight. Until the end." Where are these "high tech weapons" such as those that were given by the U.S. military to the Muslim guerrillas in Afghanistan? Why ignore the obvious source of the KLA's arms, the Albanian revolution of 1997? That uprising against a right-wing pro-capitalist government shattered an army that had been rebuilt, rearmed, and reeducated by NATO, and brought large numbers of military weapons into the hands of the people. The response of the NATO governments to this crisis was to send in troops to serve as a police force and to try to get the people to turn in their arms. To a large extent, they failed. Many of these weapons flowed over the border into the hands of the KLA. Why did the IAC writer not consider the coincidence in time between the Albanian revolution and the emergence of the KLA? Was the Albanian revolution also the result of a CIA plot? The CIA has been around and plotting for a long time. Why did the KLA emerge precisely in 1998? Nor did the IAC writer consider, apparently, that by 1998 Albanian people had suffered almost ten years of a regime that denied all their national and democratic rights. What kind of socialist or revolutionist would think that a people would endure such oppression forever?
In an escalating war situation, it is possible that NATO may in fact decide to collaborate with the KLA and offer its poorly armed forces some weapons. But if that happens it will not change the historic origins of the KLA and the legend that its fighters have created in the eyes of the Albanian people.
When capitalist powers try to impose their politics on the Kosovar forces, they will face the resistance of KLA fighters who have proved their courage and their devotion to their people. The Kosovars and we can trust their principles more than those of corrupt Yugoslav bureaucrats allied with fascist-like forces.
The U.S. may also play a double game with the KLA as it did with the Bosnians. It imposed an arms embargo that favored Serb chauvinist inheritors of the Yugoslav army, but it also allowed some arms to pass to the Bosnians via the Iranian government. This by no means counterbalanced the negative effect of the embargo on the Bosnians, but it did help the U.S. to maintain sufficient influence on the Bosnians to entrap them into accepting the Dayton settlement.
So far, despite the obvious advantages that NATO could gain militarily by collaborating with the KLA in Kosovo, it is clear that the Western governments have been very reluctant to accept an alliance with the KLA, who have rebel origins and have been decried as "terrorists" and "hard-line Communists" by some U.S. officials.
In view of the real history of the KLA and the role it played, if antiwar forces slander the Kosovar fighters as the IAC as done, they will render themselves completely odious in the eyes of the Albanian people. They will find themselves unable to talk to any force that defends Albanian national rights and therefore be incapable of helping them resist manipulation by the U.S. other NATO powers.
The IAC writer asks, "What kind of a liberation struggle calls for the bombing of its own people and for a foreign army of occupation on its soil? This is the KLA demand." This is demagogic. The KLA is not calling for the bombing of its own people. It has supported the NATO campaign purportedly aimed at the Yugoslav military. The KLA has been led by desperation to place hopes in an outside savior. This is a terrible mistake. But it is a tragically flawed response to an equally terrible dilemma. The KLA has been reporting the execution of about 100 Kosovars a day by Serbian forces, providing the names and often the age of the victims. The names indicate the extermination of whole families.
Perhaps one third of the nearly two million-strong Kosovar people have been driven from their country. Hundreds of thousands roam the mountains and woods in bad weather without food or water and prey to epidemic diseases and murderous attacks by the Serbian military and the paramilitary gangs. If the IAC wants to know what kind of liberation movement would call for bombing an occupying enemy, they need only think of the Yugoslav partisans themselves during World War II or of any resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe.
"Myth #6" that the IAC "fact sheet" claims to expose is that the "Albanians who make up 90 percent of Kosovo's population" are oppressed and have no rights." It maintains, "All minorities in Yugoslavia have much greater rights than national minorities have in the United States or Europe." The United States and the West European capitalist countries certainly do not have a clean record with respect to their own minorities. But give us a case, please, where more than a third of any of these minorities are fleeing for their lives or being murdered en masse. This argument is an obscenity that could be uttered only by someone steeped in a totalitarian mentality, who has no qualms about saying that black is white, or vice versa. Ninety-nine percent of Americans would be revolted by it. What use does it have therefore in the political confrontation going on for the NATO intervention? It can only discredit those who oppose this intervention. In fact, it is symptomatic that the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe attempt to defend their oppression of nationalities by arguing that such states as Great Britain, who have similar problems in Northern Ireland, for example, should sympathize with their position. Yugoslav spokesman have compared the Albanians to people of Mexican origin in the U.S.
The "fact sheet" argues that the "deteriorating conditions for Albanian Youth" have occurred because "Albanian separatists pushed a boycott of the government school system and health care system." That is, according to the IAC, for close to ten years Albanian youth have been trying to get some kind of education in private homes with only their own resources because of some pig-headed campaign by "Albanian separatists"!
You would have to be a 100-percent admirer of Milosevic to swallow that one. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of Albanians have supported the parallel institutions set up when the Yugoslav Stalinists deprived them of the right of cultural autonomy and self-government in 1989. The"³fact sheet" denounces the myth that the U.S. media are balanced and impartial. The capitalist media certainly serve the interests of the ruling class and slant the news in accord with its interests. But who is going to accept criticism of the capitalist media from people who are trying to push shameless totalitarian-style total lies? Especially after the experience of the U.S Communist Party, which long tried to deny the existence of the concentration camps in the Soviet Union by arguing "you can't trust the New York Times." Of course, you couldn't trust the New York Times, but unlike the Stalinist publications the capitalist press needed to maintain its credibility by reporting that bore some relationship to the truth. It could not just say black is white and vice versa as the Stalinists did. According to Stalinist mythology also, all the problems of the bureaucratic regimes were the result of capitalist plotting. Similarly, Point 3 of the IAC "fact sheet" claims that "the United States, Germany and other NATO powers played a key role in breaking up Yugoslavia in 1991-92, arming and supporting secessionist movements." The fact is that it is Milosevic himself who is responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia. He deliberately chose a greater Serbia over continuing the Yugoslav confederation on the basis of equality for the republics. Croatia and Slovenia seceded after Milosevic began to disregard the Yugoslav federal constitution. He then sent the Yugoslav army to occupy them in complete disregard of the federal constitution.
The Slovenians defeated the Serbian invasion because the local authorities had managed to maintain control of the regional defense forces set up by Tito in 1968 when he feared a invasion on the model of the Soviet-led occupation of Czechoslovakia in that year, imposed to crush the rising democratic movement in that country.
The Croats were almost completely unarmed and took a bad beating in the first episodes of Milosevicıs war. But they armed themselves and stopped the drive of the Yugoslav army by a last-ditch defense of the city of Vukovar by militias.
Even though the city fell, the cost its lightly armed militia defenders forced the Yugoslav army to pay was so high that Milosevic halted his invasion. All the defenders of Vukovar captured by Milosevicıs army when the city fell were summarily executed.
The Bosnians were reluctant to declare independence but were forced to avoid being involved in the Serb war against Croatia. They had no arms in the beginning and therefore were unable to resist mass expulsions and massacres at the hands of the Serb forces.
It is true that in the context of the long wars initiated by Milosevic, the U.S. gave limited military help to the victims of the Serbian onslaught. But unless it wanted to openly back Belgrade, which it could not do politically, it had to offer at least token aid to the victims of the Greater Serbian wars. Otherwise, it would have been unable to maintain any political influence over them or any justification in the eyes of its own public opinion, which had good reason for sympathizing with Milosevicıs victims, for intervening in the region.
The Macedonians themselves were not enthusiastic about breaking from the Yugoslav federation and did so only in the context of the shattering of this federation by the Greater Serbian wars of Milosevic. The fact that the United States hoped and sought by the political means available to it to maintain the Yugoslav federation with Milosevic as the best guarantor of stability and capitalist restoration in the area is well documented. (See, for example, Nationalism and Federation in Yugoslavia, 1962-1992, second edition, by Sabrina P. Ramet.)
This point of the "fact sheet" concludes with a statement of monumental disregard for the truth and a revealing failure to look at the implications even of the IAC's own assertions. It says that the "biggest single act of 'ethic cleansing' was the forced removal of 600,000 Serbs from the Krajina region of the former Yugoslav republic of Croatia by the U.S. trained and armed Croatian military in 1995. More than 55,000 of these Serbs, who were resettled in Kosovo, are among the hundreds of thousands of people made refugees by NATO bombing and the conflicts in Kosovo."
The 600,000 figure cited is not the Serbian population of the Krajina, which was about 200,000. It is the roughly the total number of Serbs living in Croatia at the time of the breakup of the federation. Most of these people lived scattered among the Croatian majority as a whole. In two areas, there were large concentrations of Serbs, the Krajina and Eastern Slavonia.
In Krajina, a rebel Serb government was set up that participated in the war against independent Croatia. This region is an enclave that threatened the route between the heart of Croatia and its Dalmatian coast. It also isolated the northwest corner of Bosnia where Bosnian army units were surrounded by Serbian chauvinist forces.
The 1995 offensive of the Croatian army ended the Serb threat to the country and relieved the siege of the Bosnian army. It marked the turning point of the Bosnian war and the beginning of the implosion of the Bosnian Serbian republic, which was only saved from total collapse by the Dayton accord.
After the Serbian conquest of Eastern Slavonia, the Croats were systematically driven out and their property given to Serbs. After the return of this area to Croatia as a result of negotiations, many Serbs have left.
Most tellingly, why does the IAC "fact sheet" not raise the question of why 55,000 Krajina Serbs, about a fourth of the total, were settled in Kosovo? This is the poorest area of the former Yugoslavia. The local Serbian population has been leaving it for generations for that reason. Successive Serbian governments, including the present one, have tried to settle Serbs in this area in order to maintain a base for Serbian control. This is a colonialist policy similar to the Zionist project, which the Serbian vice premier Vuk Draskovic so much admires.
Since the IAC writer did not ask this obvious question, we really could not expect him or her or they to inquire into the attitudes of the Krajina refugees settled in Kosovo. The fact of the matter is that many rebelled against being used as a military colony and fled to other parts of Serbia. It is unlikely in the long run that Milosevic will be any more successful in building a Serbian colony in Kosovo than the previous Yugoslav governments, from the monarchy through Tito.
The IAC argues "for 45 years after World War II, the many nationalities that made up Yugoslavia lived together in peace.
The above text was written by Gerry Foley in April of 1999.
