The war continues ex-YUGOSLAVIA • Do the opposition demonstrations in Belgrade and the students' strike mark a turning point in the situation?
The recent demonstrations are very important, but they also show the political fragility of this opposition. Most of the latter has not, for example, disassociated itself
SARAJEVO, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, remains besieged, while the leaders of the world's seven most powerful imperialist countries, meeting at the G-7 summit in Munich, have warned of a possible military intervention in the ex-Yugoslav republic under United Nations colours.
In the following interview Catherine Samary gives her assessment of the current situation and potential future developments. The interview first appeared in the July 2 edition of the French revolutionary Marxist newspaper,
Rouge.
H
OW should we assess what is currently going on in
Sarajevo?
Obviously we should welcome anything which allows humanitarian aid to arrive. But the causes of the war and the massacres are still there: the assimilation of the right of self-determination of peoples to the project of "ethnically pure" states. This implies the carving up of Bosnia-Herzegovina between Serb and Croat nationalists, which will inevitably lead to the rise of
Muslim fundamentalism.
For several centuries there has been a climate of tolerance between all the religious and ethnic communities in Sarajevo.
Today, Serbs, Croats and Muslims are working closely together in a pacifist resistance which is completely obscured by the image of "interethnic" massacres. The Bosnian territorial defence, in which the three peoples are also involved, is very much more numerous than the nationalist paramilitary groups.
The Serb regime and the Yugoslav army have formally withdrawn from the conflict by repatriating those officers and soldiers who are not originally from Bosnia. But most officers are Bosnian and they have kept their army equipment. They provide a powerful logistic support to the Serb paramilitary groups, which are dominated by criminals and far right fanatics.
If the equipment was given to the Bosnian authorities and if the Serb regime and the Yugoslav army disowned the paramilitaries, the latter would be politically and militarily overcome by the Bosnian defence.
Herzegovina is dominated by a Croat paramilitary structure, whose political project is not the maintenance of a multiethnic
Bosnia but an "ethnically pure"
greater
Croatia. In the background, Croatia is pursuing this project.
Only pure blooded Croats have citizenship. This means that Croats from Australia can participate in the elections in August, whereas citizens of Croatia, who were born and work there, will not have the right to vote. • What is the goal of the Serbian dictator Milosevic and how is he going to respond to international pressures?
Milosevic is a pragmatist, capable of brusque turns. His sole concern is to keep power. He was defeated in his initial project of recentralizing all the republics around Serbia.
He is in the process of being defeated today in his desire to reassemble all the Serbs in a greater Serbia.
He has more or less formally abandoned the project by creating a mini-Yugoslavia which federates Serbia and Montenegro. Faced with world disapproval, he has had to disassociate himself, at least verbally, from his Serbian nationalist allies in the non-Serb territories.
The Great Serb nationalist groups are only one part of the Serbian communities. Milosevic has an interest in disassociating himself from their extremism in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for the economic boycott creates very live tensions in Serbia and
Beyond this, he wants international recognition and to benefit from the continuity of the old Yugoslavia in the international institutions. But this "low profile" comes up against the pressures of his own opposition, which boycotted the elections.
Maybe he would still have won them, even with the participation of the opposition. This would be the contradictory effect of the blockade, a problem which is widely
Many Serbs see this blockade as unilateral and unjust, and some could be tempted to make a bloc with the regime. But the big problem resides in the incapacity of the opposition to present an alternative programme to that of Milosevic.
from the policy of Milosevic in the Albanian majority region of Kosovo, or from the project to reunite all the Serbs in the same state. The opposition rather criticizes Milosevic for losing the wars which he has led. It has no social and economic programme. A good part of this opposition takes as its model the old monarchist Yugoslavia, dominated by the Serbs in the inter war periods. This does not cut that much ice in the Serbia of today.
That said, the impossibility of going backwards and the consciousness of the disastrous character of the Great Serb project has affected a part of this opposition in a progressive way. Among the youth in particular, among the students and the deserters, one sees a profound rejection of the war, which goes beyond political divi-
Today, in the universities, it is not the nationalist climate which dominates, but rather opposition to a policy which isolates the Serbs from the other communities with which they have to live, and from world opinion.
Even the current led by Vuk Vraskovic (the Movement for Serb Renewal), the biggest opposition group, has gone through a significant evolution. Recently, Vraskovic explicitly said that he was favourable to immediate dialogue with all the minorities on Serbian territory, that is with the Hungarians of Voivodina and the Albanians of Kosovo. The Serb democratic opposition has also presented several federalist projects, which challenge the anti-Albanian apartheid established for several months now in Kosovo.
This question should be linked to the other aspect of Vraskovic's discourse, which evokes the situation of the Serbs in the non-Serb republics. He demands for them the same rights which he proposes to accord to the minorities of Serbia. This marks the recognition, at the same time, of an ethnic plurality in Serbia and the sovereignty of the other states inside which the Serbs live.
There could be a governmental change in Serbia. But there will be no progressive outcome if the reactionary nationalist regimes are not challenged in all the republics, in Serbia first but also in Croatia. In Serbia, the existence of an opposition demonstrating in the streets could favour the beginning of an affirmation of a programme which breaks with the old nationalist policy. * July 20, 1992• # 233 International Viewpoint
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