War in Europe
The end of Communism?
EVERY left wing activist will have been asked over and over again in recent days: what are you going to do now that Communism's finished?
YUGOSLAVIA is due to take place on September 7 and the Serbian regime wants to be in a position to back up its territorial claims by a military under Serb hegemony, Mil-
ON AUGUST 28, 1991 the village of Kijevo
Most, no doubt, will have answered:
"more or less what I was doing
(population 1,000), a Croat enclave in the middle of the so-called Serb Autonomous
The notion that it was possible to
Region of Krajina, ceased to exist, having
"construct" a new stage of human been razed to the ground by the so-called civilization by cutting one state off
Yugoslav People's Army deploying from the rest of the world, murdering critics and forcing people to repeat aircraft, tanks and howitzers. Following a lies over and over again has, with-
12-hour bombardment the population fled out doubt, been dramatically disto the nearby mountain of Kozjak, proved by history - or, rather, rejected by human beings as contrapursued by the vengeful aircraft. The dicting their needs. As the absurdity village was then looted and set on fire.
of "socialism in one country" lands in the dustbin of history, so all the suppressed realities burst through - shown most dramatically in the tumultuous rise of nationalist demands and movements in these countries. But what could be more absurd than to proclaim this, as some pro-capitalist thinkers have tried to do, as the End of History? In fact, it would be truer to say that history is restarting, in the sense that real social questions are once again being openly posed in a vast area of the world where they were suppressed but not resolved.
But, if Stalinism could not abolish social reality by police measures, nor can capitalism's apologists convince people that the daily waste of human lives and potential or the periodic outbursts of barbarism in our world - not to speak of the damage to the environment, are acceptable. And it is social needs and social realities that have made and will make the Marxist tradition an essential resource for those who want to understand and change their conditions. In it they will find the accumulated thinking of all those who have striven for a society where the "free development of each is a condition for the free development of all", flowing, as
Marx explained from the "real movement that abolishes the existing
So, what will International Viewpoint do after the "collapse of Communism"? We will continue our efforts to give an accurate picture of social reality and of the "real movements" that arise to change it, but with the difference that our task will be far easier as far as the countries newly liberated from Stalinism are concerned. *
MICHELE LEE
A BRITISH TV cameraman
filmed an army officer tearing up the board with the village's name and stamping on it with his boots to the cheers of the men around him — men under the command of Martic, once a local police chief and member of the League of Communists and now the Krajina strongman. Characteristically, the destruction of Kijevo had been promised two days earlier in the Belgrade press. The village's only "crime" that, like so many towns, it spoiled the image of a Serb-only "Krajina"
In any war, there comes a point when its nature becomes so blindingly clear that only those complicit with the aggressor can henceforth deny it. This point was reached in Kijevo. Kijevo proved beyond all doubt that the war raging on the territory of Croatia is not an inter-ethnic conflict, pitting the rights of minority against the hegemonic aspirations of the Croat majority, but a war of conquest designed to create a greater Serbia extending over parts of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Vojvodina, Kosovo, Montenegro and northern (at least) Mace-
Croatia has become the target of an all-out war of a kind not scen in Europe since minority, but because it is the biggest obstacle to the plan hatched by the Serbdominated Chiefs of Staff and the leaders
If Croatia falls, then the war will spread into the rest of Yugoslavia. Indeed there are already reports of the war being extended into Bosnia-Herzegovina. The generals are in a hurry. The European Community sponsored peace conference osevic's regime, aided by the Chiefs of Staff, has opted for a Greater Serbia. It welcomes the coup in the Soviet Union, not just for above all because it feared that the new Union treaty transforming the federation into a confederation of sovereign states would be used as model for Yugoslavia as well, since it is more or less exactly what Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia had been advocating for a year. This was openly stated on Belgrade TV by Mihajlo Markovic, Milosevic's main spokesperson. The Serbian regime does not wish to be part of any structure that it cannot dominate.
Methods similar to Hitler's
Milosevic has justified the annexation republics and provinces by his concern for the fate of Serb minorities. This is how Hitler once justified the annexation of Austria, the partition and occupation of Czechoslovakia and the attack on Poland. Like Milosevic, Hitler also spoke of the need for all Germans to live within a single state. The methods used to de-stabilize these countries prior to attacking them were the same: official protests, mobilization of a section of the minority, blocking of any alternative to war and assurances to the European powers that this was the way to a lasting peace.
To be sure, Serbia does not have the clout of Hitler's Germany and its victims are "only" small local states. Yet, unless the Serbian regime is stopped and stopped soon, the war will engulf the whole of Yugoslavia and spill beyond its borders. Why should Serbia, its neighbours will ask themselves, be the only one allowed to expand? 600,000 Serbs living in Croatia form a much smaller percentage of the total population than 2,500,000 Albanians living in what used to be Yugoslavia, or 2,000,000 Hungarians living in Romania. Pressure on the Hungarian government to protect the Hungarian minority in Yugoslavia (thousands of whom have already fled into Hungary) is growing by the day. The Albanian intellectuals in Kosovo speak of a Serbian-Albanian war in 1992 as inevitable. There are many such poten-
International Viewpoint #212 • September 16, 1991
YUGOSLAVIA tial claims throughout Central and East Europe. If Serbia is allowed to expand by force of arms, then an arms race in the region as a whole will become inevitable, destabilizing much of Europe for the foreseeable future.
Milosevic's regime came into being in 1987, following a coup within the then ruling party, the League of Communists of Serbia. A purge of thousands of party and state functionaries, liberal intellectuals, and independently minded enterprise managers, was conducted in close synchronization with the overthrow of the governments in Vojvodina and Montenegro (then similarly purged) and a military occupation of Kosovo, and government were simply eradicated.
The ideological argument for this entire aggressive strategy was provided by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, which insisted that Serbs were threatened by their neighbours and that the post-war federal system was inimical to Serb
Morbid propaganda
Ever since then, the Serb population has been exposed to a morbid propaganda in which the allegedly "tragic" Serb history and Serb war graves are prime ingredients. The Ottoman invasion, the Balkan Wars, the First and Second World Wars - all are presented as little more than a plot against the Serb nation.
Dobrica Costa, a writer of turgid historical "epics", often proclaimed as the spiritual "father of the nation", announced to all Serbs that now their last chance had come, and missing it would lead to their obliteration as a nation for ever.
After Kosovo, Slovenia and Croatia will come Bosnia-Herzegovina. Such facts as that 90% of the Kosovo population is Albanian, or that only 17% of the population of the Croatian province of Eastern Slavonia - scene of the most intense fighting over the past month - is Serb make no difference. Nor does it matter that the "Krajina" is an ethnically mixed area, which does not even border on Serbia; that Bosnia-Herzegovina is in the majority non-Serb; that 70% of the inhabitants of Montenegro declared themselves non-Serb at the last (April 1991) census; that northern Macedonia contains only a handful of Serbs. In the eyes of the Belgrade regime these are all "ethnic and historic" Serb lands. This means war now and war in the future.
In those parts of other republics earmarked for inclusion into Greater Serbia, the conflict cannot but escalate into total war, targeted directly and in the main against the local population. A BBC report of the army attack on the Slavonian town of Osijek describes the devastation of this city of 150,000 people wreaked by incessant bombardment from heavy artil4 tematically destroyed and there are many lery and air attacks. The city is being syscivilian casualties. The targets are all civilian: hospitals, and ambulances trying to reach
The war now being waged by Serbia and the Serbian-dominated army is a classic "dirty war" of the kind practised by CIA-funded armies in the Third World. Its aim is twofold: to expel from the designated area the "wrong" (that is, Croat) population, and to break the will of the population as a whole to resist, thus enabling Serbia to establish its "peace".
Milosevic's strategy is unlikely to work since it offers nothing but slavery to at least two thirds of the Yugoslav population. Indeed, to all of them, since such a "peace" could only be maintained by a military dictatorship.
What is unique about the Serbian regime — at least as far as contemporary Europe is concerned — is its particular combination of strident nationalism with a recidivist Stalinist ideology, embedded above all in the only structures of the Yugoslav "Communist" state that managed to escape the process of democratization: the Serbian Communist Party and the army high command.
The Serbian party avoided the modest democratization undertaken from 1988 onwards in Slovenia and Croatia, where the principle of multi-candidacy for all party posts was introduced. It is this unreconstructed party-state machine that was used by Serb generals to engineer the 1987 coup within the party, with the inevitable consequence of a large-scale purge of all political opponents of the hardline
Last ditch struggle against
The possibility of any liberal comeback was cut off by the great nationalist surge after 1987, which the partycontrolled media instigated and kept going. The Stalinists' victory in Serbia was then used to marginalize and replace all liberal officers of whatever nationality in the Yugoslav army. It is this nationalist back-up which the Soviet plotters lacked. In Yugoslavia, however, the special relanationalism and political reaction was sufficiently strong to challenge the post-war political settle-
But a price was also paid: first the
Party (March 1990) and then the Yugoslav state were torn apart, opening the door to outright military aggression. Serbia has been using the army to expand its borders, but it is the generals who will inherit Greater Ser-
It is important to recall that the "Serb question" in Croatia was opened not with the electoral victory of Tudjman's party, the Croatian Democratic Union, in April
75 mue HUNGARY 12U M Lacter HOMANI. > VOVODINA UGOSLAV A I BELGRADE BOSNIA hEHeCCOVINA SERBIA BULGARIA ADRIATIC SEA
MACEDONIA 1990, or even four months earlier with the Croatian Communists' decision to institute a multi-party system. It was exploited for the first time in the summer of 1989, as a crucial component of the Serbian mafia's plot to bring down the liberal wing in the Croatian party.
Had this plot succeeded, a wide purge of Croatian party and state institutions would have followed, which would have aligned Croatia with Serbia thus ensuring a Stalinist triumph throughout Yugoslavia. It was in order to avert this threat that the liberals in the Croatian party presidency conducted their own minor coup in the Croatian party, leading it to accept electoral reform.
The liberals' victory in Croatia ensured that the Stalinists could not win by political means alone. The seeds of the current war were thus sown in December 1989, when the League of Communists of Croatia followed the Slovene example and decided to hold multi-party elections in the republic — a decision which, in turn, led to multi-party elections elsewhere in
Unable to prevent multi-party elections, the Stalinist mafia opted for a different strategy. In Serb-inhabited areas of Croatia an immediate local rebellion against the new government was organized by local Communist structures aided by the army, which supplied them with weapons. This gave birth to the Knin whose territory was then extended step by step using threats and manipulation of the population's fear of the unknown.
Something similar also happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina, municipality with a Serb majority — be it relative or absolute — political control was established by strong-arm action. This was then used as a basis to create two further Krajinas, declared themselves independent of the Bosnian government.
As in the case of the Croatian Krajina, these new structures were immediately militarized, preventing any possible challenge to the new regime, either by the non-Serb minorities or by Serb opponents. The same pattern has since been applied to areas of eastern Slavonia controlled by the army and local Chetnik [Serb national-
After the conservative coup
The liberal coup?
It is significant that foreign journalists are not allowed to visit these areas, and that the reason for the failure of the EC "troika" mission in late August was Serbia's unwillingness to allow foreign observers into the so-called "liberated ter-