The Balkans
Nato's Ugly War
As A World To Win goes to press, the US imperialists and
their European junior partners have just completed the second month
of the biggest military campaign since the 1990-91Gulf War. One
of the smallest and poorest countries in Europe, Serbia, is being
bombed day and night by NATO's massive military machine. The country's
infrastructure is being devastated, hundreds of civilians killed
and thousands wounded. One Western official boasted that the Yugoslav
economy would be set back to its World War 2 level.
NATO's brutal stomping of Serbia is being waged under the banner
of "humanitarianism", namely "saving the Kosovar
Albanians". Non-stop footage of the plight of thousands of
Kosovar refugees is flooding the world's airwaves. The genuine misery
and anguish of those who have lost family members and homes, suffered
rape or brutalisation, is being marshalled with all the dispatch
and energy that the West's enormous media machine can muster in
order to portray the murderous bombs they are raining down on Serbia
as a "humanitarian intervention".
Let us be clear from the start: the unceasing pounding of Serbia
by NATO has not and will not save any lives. If the first eight
weeks of war have shown anything at all, it is that the persecution
of the Kosovars has been intensified by the NATO intervention. Indeed,
Western political strategists, including NATO commanding General
Wesley Clarke, admit that they knew before the first bomb fell that
a new wave of "ethnic cleansing" was the likely result
of the air war they were planning. The fact that they chose to proceed
with their strategy regardless of this, at the terrible price now
being paid by thousands of Kosovars, and Serbs as well, is a first
telling indication that "saving lives" was not and is
not their driving concern.
The US and its NATO allies claim that this war is a product of age-old
ethnic tensions in the Balkans, and that more powerful forces "above
the fray" have the moral duty to intervene, like some altruistic
big brother stepping in to stop a fight among the little kids. As
the section excerpted hereafter from the Revolutionary Worker,
voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, makes clear, this
war is not the result of some mysterious age-old tensions flaring
up, it is the product of the contemporary workings of a capitalist
social order in Yugoslavia and its interaction with recent shifts
in the alignment of regional and global forces. As the RW
notes, NATO's portrayal of the source of the war "turns history
upside down" and "blames the masses for the suffering
imposed on them by capitalism".
Everything about the way NATO is waging this war - its objectives,
strategy and tactics - ensures that the bloodshed will continue,
and that the post-war future of the Kosovo region will rest on a
foundation of forceful suppression, with the threat of renewed conflict
ever present. Indeed, such is already the situation of neighbouring
Bosnia, following the Western-sponsored "peace" settlement
there. This is because, as the RIM Committee said upon the war's
initiation, "the imperialists can only rule the world by means
of gangsterism". The way they fight reflects and reinforces
a world order where the few rule the many, where the domination
of a handful of rich exploiters rests on a vast arsenal of armed
forces and police. Anytime anywhere their rule is challenged, their
response ultimately relies on their monopoly of military might,
whether the challenge is posed by a revolutionary struggle like
that waged by the Vietnamese masses who tried to unite their country
and liberate it from Western colonialism, or by a petty tyrant like
Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whose regional ambitions grew a bit too big
for his imperialist masters, who thus decided to chop him down to
size.
A REACTIONARY
WAR IS AN UGLY WAR
One feature of an unjust war is the employment of unjust reactionary
methods of warfare.
Like the Gulf war, this is yet another case of a massively unequal
war, where the modernised, high-tech arsenal of the biggest military
alliance in human history is relentlessly pummelling a country whose
GDP is no greater than that of a single large Western city like
Frankfurt. Based on its overwhelming military superiority, NATO
is conducting its war by massive bombing from the air, incorporating
the use of cluster bombs that shred human bodies like a meat grinder,
and warheads tipped with depleted uranium which were used in Iraq
and have led to levels of leukaemia in children there equal to those
found in Hiroshima. Is it really possible to believe that this is
an undertaking driven by concern for human life!? The NATO air war
targets cities and other population concentrations from miles up,
blasting hospitals, buses, trains; most recently, the target list
was expanded to include the entire Serbian economic infrastructure,
cutting off the population's water and electricity, driving millions
into a daily battle simply for survival. And then NATO's spokesmen
boast that not one of their airmen has lost his life. As a possible
ground intervention looms, the US media oozes with nauseating chauvinistic
concern for the potential loss of American lives, while they
coldly affirm that the loss of Serbian civilian lives is
"collateral damage" that is "the inevitable cost
of war". They crow that for the first time in human history
a type of warfare is being waged where those carrying it out can
do so "at a distance", in almost complete safety, or,
as one US commentator put it, "the only ones who feel anything
are on the ground". Here are the bloody fangs of imperialist
"humanitarianism".
The imperialist media is engaged in a huge effort to bring public
opinion behind the war. It is a battle-hardened apparatus with vast
experience in sweeping under the covers gigantic massacres that
are in its interests - such as the hundreds of thousands killed
in Indonesia in the CIA-backed coup in 1965 - or blowing up the
most minor attacks on its interests into "the greatest atrocities
in history". Thus they portray the petty reactionary Milosevic
as a big-time criminal like "Hitler" in an attempt to
put the kind of blinders on the people that coachmen put on horses,
so that they do not look backwards in history nor left or right
to other parts of the world where they would inevitably see the
far greater crimes committed by the genuine world-scale criminals
that rule the planet today. Instead they are to see only what the
imperialists want them to see.
In the same manipulative fashion, satellite dishes dot the Kosovar
refugee camps as Western journalists vie for pictures of another
suffering refugee to broadcast home, while the families of the imperialists'
Serbian victims - now numbering in the thousands - are rarely if
ever seen or heard. It is little known that after the West demanded
that Serbian TV broadcast six hours of Western footage on the war
daily, the Serbian regime retorted that they would agree if the
Western media would show just six minutes of Serbian footage
daily - the West did not take up the offer, but instead blasted
Serbian TV off the air.
To justify the mechanised mass killing-at-a-distance, the Western
media are engaging in ugly chauvinism. The French daily newspaper
Le Monde has carried front page articles about the "innate
barbarism" of the Serbs, and the American Time magazine
recently published a piece entitled "Vengeance of a Victim
Race" that described the Serbs as "Europe's outsiders,
seasoned haters raised on self-pity".
The Milosevic regime's response to NATO has been true to its reactionary
character. Those who have been longing to see some real blows inflicted
on the Western war machine will have to look elsewhere than Mr Milosevic's
reactionary army - the most serious counter-attack they seem to
have been able to muster has been not on NATO, but on the largely
unarmed masses of oppressed Kosovars. Despite having a more modern
military force than Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and more favourable fighting
terrain, the Yugoslav high command's efforts thus far have not outshone
those of the Iraqi regime - it is likely that, like Hussein, their
hearts are not really in fighting imperialist powers whom they only
recently made no secret of admiring.
What Slobodan Milosevic is doing to the Kosovar Albanians is a vicious
crime, there is no doubt - but anyone who thinks that this is what
concerns the Western imperialists is not squarely facing the fact
that all over the world dozens of petty tyrants just like Milosevic
routinely treat their subjects in much the same way. Why the Milosevic
regime suffers B-52 carpet-bombing while the others receive Western
military aid has to do not with any humanitarian concern on the
part of the imperialists, but rather their strategic interests.
KOSOVARS -
SACRIFICIAL PAWNS IN NATO'S GAME?
Negotiations over the post-war agreement to be imposed on the
Serbs and Kosovars are usually reserved for the imperialist masters
alone - the Kosovars are not even allowed to watch. And on those
occasions when they are permitted to attend, the big powers have
systematically subordinated Kosovar interests to their own plans
for the region. The Rambouillet Agreement, for instance, which NATO
says is the framework for an end to the war, recognises Yugoslavia's
national integrity and calls for disarming the Kosovar guerrilla
forces. This means the Kosovars may well continue to live under
the boot of the Serbian regime. Similarly, US policy on the Kosovo
Liberation Army has shifted dramatically, depending on US interests
- one day the KLA are denounced as "terrorists", the next
they are portrayed as "heroes". One NATO commander has
already warned that, after the war, the biggest problem facing the
West may not be the Serbs but Kosovar guerrillas.
To the US and its NATO allies, the Kosovars are nothing but pawns,
good to be trotted out on satellite TV to garner sympathy for their
bloody crimes, and to be used as bargaining chips when coming to
terms with Milosevic and other regional forces. The NATO war was
not started to save Kosovars, they are not even consulted in determining
its outcome, and their conditions will not improve as a result.
There are striking parallels between the way that the imperialists
are using the Kosovars' plight and their cynical efforts to manipulate
the Kurds, particularly in Iraq. US policy on the Kurds has consisted
of great fanfare of so-called humanitarian assistance, while in
practice coldly subordinating Kurdish interests to the region's
"power realities". This has meant a policy of fostering
dependency on handouts so as to ensure that despite the enormous
sacrifices of the peshmerga fighters, their struggle has remained
confined within limits that do not threaten fundamental Western
interests in the region. Few would argue that there has been any
substantial alleviation of the national oppression of the Kurdish
people. Indeed, the same Turkish military forces that are being
described today by NATO propagandists as "one of the 19 democracies
participating in the effort to save the Kosovars" are pursuing
a vicious counter-insurgency policy in Turkey of "drying up
the sea" of popular support for the PKK Kurdish guerrillas,
resulting in hundreds of thousands of refugees, thousands killed
and many more tortured and imprisoned. (See the excerpt hereafter
of an article by the Communist Party of Turkey [Marxist-Leninist]
on Turkey's role.)
At this point, it seems that NATO's plans for the area involve some
mixture of partition and protectorate status, somewhat like the
"safe haven status" for the Kurds in Iraq. One of the
main points of the NATO plan to install tens of thousands of NATO
"peacekeeper" soldiers would be to ensure that the big
powers will be in a position to handpick a Kosovar regime subservient
to their interests. And even in the unlikely event that the Kosovars
gain independence as a result of the NATO war, what would that amount
to? To answer this, one need go no further back than Afghanistan
a couple of years ago, where US "aid" helped bring fundamentalist
Islamic forces to power there, resulting in the rise of their Islamic
Taleban proteges, with all the attendant horrors of that regime.
Whatever the result of the NATO war for the Kosovar people, it will
not be an end to oppression, for those waging the war "on their
behalf" are the greatest oppressors in human history. Theirs
is a system whose routine functioning means back-breaking labour
that drives millions to early graves, where 40,000 children die
every single day of preventable disease or malnutrition, because
routine medical treatment for Third World children isn't profitable
for the pharmaceutical giants like Bayer, Glaxo and Upjohn. It is
a system that enforces its rules with scant regard for human cost.
In Iraq, the former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations
announced that 5,000 children die every month due to the impact
of Western-imposed sanctions, which even embargo basic medicines.
When this was pointed out to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
(today one of the key architects of the NATO war), she coldly declared,
"the price is worth it".
This imperialist world is a land of double-speak, where "peacekeepers"
enforce oppression at gunpoint, where one power's "ethnic cleansing"
is another power's military "collateral damage", and where,
as one US military spokesman infamously remarked during the Vietnam
war, "we had to destroy the village in order to save it".
The NATO imperialists are now declaring a new era where they will
fulfil "their duty of humanitarian intervention" anywhere
at any time. The French political establishment, world leaders in
human rights hypocrisy, have vigorously championed a universal "duty
to interfere" wherever "humanitarian interests" are
threatened. But everyone knows that no NATO smart bombs will be
falling on the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, or on British
occupation troops in Northern Ireland, no armour-piercing shells
are going to rip through Turkish tanks in Kurdistan, no cluster
bombs are going to take out the Israeli stormtroopers in the West
Bank, and no elite SAS hit teams are going to liquidate the Indonesian
death squads sowing terror in East Timor.
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair recently argued that the NATO war is
being waged by "a new generation of leaders in the United States
and Europe… who hail from the progressive side of politics…. In
this conflict we are fighting not for territory but for values."
(Newsweek, 19 April). In fact, not even the hype is new. As Lenin
observed of World War 1, "the bourgeoisie of each country…
is asserting that it is out to defeat the enemy, not for plunder
and the seizure of territory, but for the liberation of all other
peoples except its own." Indeed, this proclamation of a "universal
duty of humanitarian intervention" is a modernised version
of Rudyard Kipling's 19th-century argument that it was "the
white man's burden" to "civilise" the Third World
peoples, which essentially meant forcibly subjecting them to Western
colonialism.
THE GOALS
OF THE US/NATO IMPERIALISTS
As the excerpt hereafter from the Revolutionary Communists (RK)
of Germany points out, "NATO is an imperialist war alliance".
The various powers co-operate on certain goals while pursuing their
own different and often conflicting national interests, including
through NATO itself. Overall, under the US baton the NATO allies
today have a working agreement to come up with some arrangements
in Yugoslavia that put an end to the conflicts that threaten to
enflame the Balkans and draw in countries even more widely, especially
Greece and Turkey. Yet the actions of a NATO member, Germany, were
a key factor triggering the outbreak of the various waves of Yugoslav
wars in the 1990s, when it made a power grab for Slovenia by unilaterally
according it diplomatic recognition to encourage its break away
from the Yugoslav Republic. As the stitches holding together the
patchwork of ethnic, linguistic and religious groupings that made
up Yugoslavia began to unravel with the collapse of the Soviet bloc
and shifting power alignments in Eastern and Central Europe, Germany
was in fact simply leading the rush of imperialists and regional
kingpins who each sought to grab as much as possible in the fluid
situation prevailing then.
Yet while there is some agreement on trying to work out more definitive
arrangements that stabilise and contain the Yugoslav conflicts,
each power is vying vigorously to ensure that this is done on a
basis that is as favourable as possible to its own interests. NATO
thus acts through a complex mixture of allying and jockeying for
position amongst the various powers, where each one is compelled
to repeatedly re-assess its own position in regards to constantly
shifting realignments in the alliance as a whole, including in relation
to various regional forces, especially Serbia, and most importantly
to the leader of the imperialist wolf pack, the US. As for Russia,
Yeltsin's menaces of a "third world war" and his bellicose
reminder that Russia still possessed the world's second-largest
nuclear arsenal were more designed to throw his country's weight
around to ensure a favourable position in post-war "peacekeeping"
arrangements, rather than to signal any looming intentions to annihilate
New York to save his "little Serb brothers". Nonetheless,
this kind of gangster brinkmanship can slip out of control, with
unpredictable consequences.
The US and its NATO allies also have agreement on acting to ensure
the viability of NATO as a military force. With the break-up of
the Soviet social- imperialist camp and its military alliance, the
Warsaw Pact, the decades-old rationale for NATO largely ceased to
exist. The war against Yugoslavia is an effort to expand its role,
including to what the Western imperialists call "out of area"
operations. The US in particular wants to use the war on Yugoslavia
as a key means of extending its influence in the Balkans and eastward.
For its part, the "New Labour" governors of Britain are
displaying sickening levels of nostalgia for the old empire. UK
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook proclaimed that, "nowhere in the
world is so far away that it is not relevant to our security interests",
simply rephrasing the old imperial slogan, "the sun never sets
on the British Empire". (On the Italian state, see the excerpts
hereafter from the statement by the RedWorkers Organisation.)
Finally, the US-led imperialists intend their war on Yugoslavia
to be a show of military and technological prowess to intimidate
not only their own lesser puppets, as they attempted in the Gulf
War, but also the peoples of the world. The US has made sure that
the point has not been lost on anyone that it stands alone at the
summit of this kind of high-tech warfare. It aims to use this to
further shore up its position as leader of the pack, and is warning
everyone that it can and will inflict brutal punishment for defying
US interests. Indeed, this is a key reason the US turned so quickly
to waging war in the first place: because intensifying diplomatic
efforts to resolve the Kosovo situation would inevitably have allowed
a greater role for the Europeans and especially the Russians. With
a military arsenal far superior to that of any other imperialist
power, the military option was a stronger hand for the US imperialists,
so they played it, not because of humanitarian concern, but heedless
of it.
THE INTERNATIONALIST
ALTERNATIVE - OPPOSING ONE'S OWN BOURGEOISIE
Some critics on the left have declared that opposing the war is
"posturing" and a "futile exercise"; they deride
the impact such a stand can have on the actual course of the war
today, when those opposing it are small and scattered, and there
is no major revolutionary internationalist force in the Balkans
itself. In their logic, there is no choice but to line up on one
side or the other - usually this means with their own bourgeoisie,
under the "practical" appeal that "the best we can
do is hope to help the Kosovars".
Whether born of desperation or cynicism, this "practical"
path can only lead to strengthening the hand of the imperialists
who are responsible for this war in the first place, and whose rule
will only lead to more wars to defend their exploitation and oppression.
Revolutionaries and anyone who wants to stand against this reactionary
war must expose the imperialists' hollow claims of humanitarian
concern for the Kosovars, their hypocritical targeting of Milosevic
and their real war aims, and must mount opposition to this war.
Anything else amounts to abdicating responsibility to draw a line
between the reactionary interests of the imperialists and the interests
of the people. Doing this thoroughly requires a proletarian internationalist
stand, exposing and opposing the predatory interests of one's own
ruling class and bringing to the fore the common interests of all
the oppressed of the region and the world. No other stand is worthy
of those who represent the class whose destiny is to eliminate all
oppression and exploitation.
Nor is this stand some kind of pure but impractical duty. In the
early days of World War 1, when the chauvinist hurrahs for the campaigns
of the various European powers had drowned out the voices of any
opposition, and the revolutionary communists were small in numbers
and in disarray, Lenin prophetically pointed out that, while the
war had begun between two blocs of equally reactionary powers, it
was not written in stone that it had to end that way. Indeed, the
NATO imperialists are not all powerful, and everything is not under
their control. Their arrogant declarations of their own invincibility
are belied by the fact that, at the outset of this war, they repeatedly
proclaimed that their vast air superiority would force Milosevic
to the bargaining table within a matter of days. They were wrong
then, and they are quite anxious not to make any bigger mistakes.
Powerful forces have been unleashed whose mix and interaction is
unpredictable. War, as Clausewitz pointed out, is the most chaotic
of human endeavours. While they may well succeed in imposing their
will in some form on the region for a certain time, it is also possible
that they will get bogged down and be forced to send in ground forces
in unfavourable conditions, raising the stakes of their venture,
and confronting revolutionaries with greater responsibilities and
opportunities to mobilise against them.
It is of course not NATO's intention to get bogged down in Serbia
- the spectre of their ground troops spending the winter in the
Yugoslav mountains undoubtedly fills them with concern. But they
have already put a great deal on the line in this war, not least
of all the credibility of NATO itself. As US imperialist guru Henry
Kissinger put it, "the cohesion of NATO is threatened".
Whatever hesitations the various imperialists may have had about
getting involved, all agree now that failure to win, and "to
be seen to win", would be a disaster.
In these circumstances, and in a world situation marked by rapid
changes, it is crucial in the NATO countries to defeat the view
that there is no "realistic" choice other than the NATO
imperialist war alliance on the one hand or Milosevic and his Albanian-bashing
reactionary regime on the other, in order to mobilise the masses
to combat the predatory interests of their own bourgeoisie, whose
efforts to strengthen their power over the oppressed in the Balkans
will only strengthen their power over the oppressed "at home"
as well. It is urgent to raise high the standard of proletarian
internationalism in order to forge the broad unity needed to fight
against this war and spread among the people the understanding that
every setback to this reactionary war effort, every blow that NATO
suffers, including resistance to the war machine at home and abroad,
weakens their own imperialist masters. In the Balkans, too, this
kind of proletarian internationalism is vital in order to cut through
the dense fog of competing reactionary interests that obscures the
common interests of all the oppressed of the region, so as to help
bring into being a revolutionary internationalist core. Proletarian
internationalism here means opposing not only the main enemy, the
NATO imperialists, but also the Serbian regime's oppression of the
Kosovars. It is not possible to effectively combat NATO's bullying
of Serbia while accepting Serbia's bullying of the Kosovars - or,
as Marx put it, a nation that oppresses another cannot itself be
free.
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Building this kind of revolutionary internationalist opposition
to the ugly war NATO is waging brings closer the day when through
its own revolutionary war, the international proletariat
can pave the way for humankind to do away with class society, and
in so doing rid the world of what Mao Tsetung called "this
monster of mutual slaughter among men".