Once again the echo of gunfire in the Balkans is sending nervous shudders through Europe's corridors of power, as Yugoslavia sinks into a violent civil war of nation against nation. This war is horrible, unjust and reactionary on every side. But it did not come about, as Western spokesmen say, because Yugoslavia "got lost" on the path to Western-style democracy. Nor is it merely the explosion of long-simmering national antagonisms in the Balkans. This war is above all the product of the deep crisis of the world imperialist system; it is imperialism's latest earthquake, the surface movement of the profound fissures that rend this exploiting system's very foundations, that in only the last two years have toppled governments and hurled tens of thousands into rebellion in the streets of the world's remaining superpower. Only a brief two years ago Bush and his cronies promised a "new world order" and a "peace dividend". Instead, their system is exploding with ever greater force into crisis and wars. Theirs is truly a "new world disorder".

This crisis of the imperialist system already shattered the Soviet social-imperialist ruling structures, as the former Soviet rulers, re-baptized as Russian imperialists, desperately seek to preserve their domain through a new accommodation with the Western imperialists. This new situation burst weak links in and around the former Soviet empire: under prodding by imperialist and regional powers, various local bourgeoisies, from Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia and Moldova to Yugoslavia, have been fighting desperately to carve out a position for themselves, or at least to stave off the devastation and dismemberment that even now threaten Bosnia-Herzegovina's elite. Despite their claims that "communism" bears responsibility for this war, Yugoslavia had long been a rotting corpse of the social democratic model in Eastern Europe. Ever since Tito repudiated Stalin and the international communist movement shortly after World War 2, Yugoslavia had set up its own independent brand of social democracy, reformist capitalism, with its much-hailed system of "self-management", and was part of the worldwide imperialist economy. But the Yugoslav model didn't last long. Its primary export became its own proletarians, millions of whom went to swell the lower ranks of the proletariat in Germany, Switzerland and France. From the early 1980s economic crisis had gripped the country, which had the highest inflation rate seen in Europe since World War 2.

Ruled by an exploiting bourgeoisie, Yugoslavia could no more solve its national question than could the U.S. or Britain — indeed, national antagonisms grew even sharper. The Serbs clawed to keep on top, the Croatian and Slovenian bourgeoisies chafed at Serbian domination, and Kosovo's Albanians were everyone's "whipping boy". For several decades, these conflicts were contained within the centralized Yugoslav state. What has changed today is that the old Yugoslav structures that institutionalized this hierarchy of national oppression have been ripped apart by the imperialist crisis and the turmoil in international imperialist relations following the collapse of the USSR, as well as by the new balance of power in Europe and the world and by the sharpening contention among the Western imperialists.

Yugoslavia, rotting with economic decay and teeming with nationalist antagonisms, did not, however, disintegrate spontaneously — it was dismembered. The claws that ripped into Yugoslavia's carcass first were not Serbian, Croatian or Slovenian, but the more deadly talons of the Western imperialists. What, after all, was the significance of Germany announcing to the world before war broke out that, if Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia, it would recognize them — an announcement that the European Community quickly supported? Imagine the howls of indignation if they announced their willingness to recognize a unilateral declaration of independence from, say, Great Britain's Scotland or Canada's Quebec!

This war is a war born of the imperialist system; its death camps and all its other horrors are theirs. Thus even while they genuinely fear the continuation of the war and hope it will subside, each imperialist power is looking out above all for its own interests. Helmut Kohl & Co. have continued to throw their weight around, showing the U.S. that in this region, long a privileged feeding ground of the German ruling class, they should be boss. Germany has secretly armed Croatia, including with the most modern artillery in the world; dramatic efforts to catch up have been made by the French, who have offered the first troops for open intervention on the ground, and by the U.S., which has brought into the Adriatic Sea part of its naval armada that rained death and destruction on the people of Iraq.

For the imperialists, whether there is peace or war in the region, the most important point is that each one protects and expands its own imperial interests; thus no matter what "solution" is attempted — UN, EC or other — each imperialist is positioning its forces to ensure that it must be reckoned with, both now and in the future.

All are disguising their intervention as "humanitarian aid". But this "aid" is a Trojan horse; what counts is not the blankets but the imperialists' missiles and troops that inevitably come along to "protect" the aid. The United Nations with its "impartial humanitarian concern" has illustrated in Iraqi blood that it is nothing but a marionette of the imperialists. And as for the capacity of the U.S., Germany & Co. to resolve Yugoslavia's ethnic tension, how could these, the greatest oppressors and exploiters of peoples around the world, serve as a model? Perhaps the U.S. will send the Los Angeles Police Chief to give lessons in ethnic relations!

Yet intervention scares the imperialists. They say this is for military reasons, especially the mountainous terrain and the proliferation of decentralized, heavily armed forces. It is true that this would mean the imperialists would take casualties. But the main problem lies in their own ranks. Their unity on what to do about former Yugoslavia is fragile and contradictory, and might well crack under the strains of a highly unpredictable war. And unlike in the war against Iraq, imposing a settlement in the Balkans directly affects the balance of forces in Europe itself. The risks of error are the extension of an armed conflict that has already only a couple of hours down the motorway from Venice and Vienna.

As for the Yugoslav peoples, what solution does imperialism offer them? The imperialists decry the "irrational nationalism" that results in neighbor killing neighbor, yet in fact they promote nationalism. The Germans have been encouraging it directly in Croatia and Slovenia, and in general the highest goal held out to these peoples is becoming small, independent states allied with bigger more powerful partners.

This is the grandiose dream imperialism offers the millions of proletarians of former Yugoslavia — to slaughter each other for the right to have an exploiter who speaks in their own dialect! The national inequality and oppression in the Balkans can never be resolved by competing nationalisms. The vicious deeds of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's stormtroopers as they carry out their program of "ethnic cleansing" by pillaging and raping their way through Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina or Kosovo must be opposed. But however just this resistance might be, so long as it is led by petty nationalist reactionaries the people will only remain pawns in the hands of local exploiters in alliance with one or another imperialist power. Nationalism in the Balkans is the nationalism of small capitalist European nations, whose bourgeoisies want to carve out their own exclusive markets, but who can do so only as junior partners of the bigger imperialist powers. Winess Croatia's ultra-nationalist President Tudjman who, even as he spews chauvinist venom against Serbians, cuddles cooingly under the protective wing of his German big brothers, whose crimes in the Balksans are notorious. And one of the first legislative acts of "civilized" Slovenia's new rulers was a blanket pardon of former Nazi war criminals.

What is needed is to break with this nationalism and take the path of armed internationalist revolution — to find the ways of uniting the exploited of every nationality who see beyond the horizons of the eat-or-be-eaten jungle of Balkan nationalism, who have no stake either in the fake-socialist Yugoslav past or in a future of even smaller, imperialist-dominated nations, but who seek instead to overthrow all exploiters, foreign and local. People whose highest dream is not having Serbian workers exploited by Serbian bourgeois and Croatian workers by Croatians, but having the masses themselves genuinely seize power and uproot the entire system of capitalist exploitation that enforces national oppression and all other inequalities. People who support the right of self-determination for oppresssed nations, but whose aspirations go much higher — to a world without classes or national antagonism, where peace does not inevitably give way to reactionary wars, but is the by-product of the destruction of class society. This is the path of revolutionary communism, of Marx, Lenin and Mao Tsetung — a path that has never been taken in Yugoslavia — and it is coming alive right now in the people's war being led in Peru by the Maoist Communist Party of Peru. It shows how a small force can grow and win liberation step by step by relying on the masses to defeat the local exploiters and all imperialists.

The horror of this war has shocked the world, but the Maoists understand that the most important point is that Europe, this hoary old monster that has purchased social peace through its exploitation of worlwide empires where such horrors are part of daily life, is threatened. The old order is ever more fragile. In this situation, the proletarians have no interest in trying to restore some reactionary and illusory peace, and every interest in seizing on the disorder and outbreak of armed conflict to form Maoist revolutionary organizations. It is not easy to embark on this path amidst such fratrcidal civil war. But there is no other way to raise the banner of internationalism that is read with the blood of the proletariat and oppressed of all countries, and to launch a revolutionary war to overthrow the vicious patrons of this reactionary war, local and foreign, and place power in the hands of the proletariat and all the oppressed.