U.S. socialists, oppose intervention, support Kosova self-determination Dissolve NATO! This editorial was published in the May-June issue of Against the Currents magazine The carnage in Kosovo and the United States/NATO air campaign pose one of the greatest challenges in a generation to the left's principles, political courage and moral backbone. During most of our lifetimes, it's been unprecedented to confront such a situation of apparent total conflict between competing imperatives: between the need for immediate action to stop genocide, and the need to oppose and halt imperialist interventions...
The crime against humanity perpetrated in Kosovo would have been prevented, years in advance, by the defeat of the Milosevic regime and allied gangsters during their previous war, in Bosnia. What was required then, from 1991 on, was not NATO bombings or invasions, but simply allowing the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina to arm itself against the ethnic cleansing that aimed destroying a small multicommunal state.
The West imposed an arms embargo in the name of avoiding a wider war, which left the unarmed Bosnian civilian population subject to destruction by Milosevic's "Yugoslav National Army" and by Serb and Croat paramilitaries, finally forcing Bosnia into a military alliance with Croatia for physical survival... Throughout the 1990s the West facilitated Milosevic's butcheries and internal repression by treating him as the key to Balkan "stability." The Catastrophe in the Making
The flow of refugees from Kosovo, the reports of mass depopulations and burning of villages, and the all-too-credible reports of separation of male refugees for summary mass executions, all accelerated when the bombings began. But he Serbian regime's campaign for the destruction of the Kosovar Albanian population was already underway... The planning and implementation of this operation was enabled and precipitated not by the bombing of Yugoslavia, but by the West's policies of the previous decade of constant attempts at cynical deal-making with Milosevic...
The admirable anti-war struggles of the Yugoslav democratic opposition, at its height in the early 1990s, organized anti-war mobilizations of larger size, relative to the population of Serbia, than the biggest U.S. anti- war demonstrations of the Vietnam era. And this brave legacy of civic opposition to Milosevic is the first "collateral damage" of the bombing.
But no one could imagine that this opposition today, in its defeated and corrupted state (with some of its leadership now in the Milosevic cabinet), could mount any effective challenge to Slaughter and depopulation in Kosovo.
Again, the main international factor that derailed the once- promising democratic challenge to Milosevic was not NATO bombing. It was, rather, the incessant western policy of copying up to Milosevic, legitimizing his regime, rewarding his adventures in Kosovo (abrogating its regional autonomy in 1989), the war with Croatia, then the ethnic-cleansing rape of Bosnia-Herzegovina, each one more murderous than the previous, culminating in the 1998-99 Kosovo catastrophe.
Throughout this decade, everything the West has done could only make this regime appear permanent and irremovable, even irreplaceable. That, in fact, was the real lesson of the Dayton accords, which consolidated the dis-
The Politics of This War
Our response must begin by noting numerous genocides and crimes against humanity in which U.S. imperialism itself was the perpetrator or sponsor: Guatemala, Indonesia and East Timor, Indochina, the starvation of the people of
Nor should it be forgotten that the United States-organized sadistic torture of the Iraqi population began with the stated goal of liberating Kuwait from the murderous occupation by Saddam Hussein. This case illustrates one fundamental reason for opposing the current war: Any gateway for imperialist "humanitarian intervention" opens onto the most horrific consequences, unanticipated and uncontrollable by wellmeaning folks who may have initially supported the intervention.
What flows from the United States and NATO giving themselves license to be the saviors and the guarantors of stability? Our view is that even worse horrors are the likeliest result.
The current war is a confrontation between two malignant relics, former Cold War partners now become enemies: NATO, the U.S.-organized alliance organized 50 years ago to ensure Washington's hegemony in the anti-Communist Cold War crusade; and the rump Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic, a Stalinist who turned to nationalism, and allied himself to the most vicious elements within Serbia, to advance his own opportunist ambitions.
NATO is not at war with Yugoslovia for humanitarian reasons to Kosovars. Nor is this a war over some direct economic interest. NATO is at war to save itself and its political leaders— because their threats and bluffs failed, and they must now follow through, regardless. As in Vietnam, "we have to destroy Kosovo in order to save it." An Inevitable Wider War
We oppose NATO's war in the former Yugoslavia first, because we are opponents of NATO itself-because by its very nature it is not and cannot be any-
International Viewpoint #312 June 1999 11
* USA thing other than a machine for imperialist NATO humiliates Russia and strengthens dominion. right-wing nationalism there, while the
NATO was created in 1949, at a time bitter example of the Balkans shows U.S when the economic hegemony of the "leadership" morally and politically United States was absolutely unchallen- bankrupt, unable even to foresee let alone ged, when it was the political decision- prevent systematically-organized ethnic maker for Europe, when its military cleansings, dithering and dathering and muscle and nuclear umbrella made blithering and blathering while civilian Washington the guarantor for the recons- populations were left defenseless and truction of capitalism in Europe and the supervisor of the transformation of the Secondly, this war, once having old European colonial empires. begun, almost inevitably must become nothing less than an all-out occupation The New NATO and re-drawing of the map of the
Much has changed in half a century. Balkans. In this process, the rights of The former foe, the Soviet Union, has self-determination of all the peoples vanished, and United States capitalism involved, Kosovars included, will be faces serious economic rivals. Still, brutally subordinated to the goals of through its unique ability to organize a large-scale military intervention, the We recognize that the Kosovars United States seeks in this war with themselves overwhelmingly support rump-Yugoslavia to reaffirm its power to NATO intervention and undoubtedly call the shots. want it to be expanded. Our fundamental quarrel is not with the victims who are
The same desire to maintain U.S hegemony lies behind Washington's understandably seeking help from any aggressive sponsorship of NATO's possible source, but rather with those newest members, Poland, Hungary and supporters of this war who fail to face up the Czech Republic, at a time when a to the consequences of where it is most nearly-shattered post-Soviet Russia likely to lead. cannot be considered any military threat Unlike some apologists for the
Belgrade regime, we don't subscribe to
Ostensibly, U.S. "leadership" is an the notion that this war was all plotted in indispensable ingredient for preserving advance by U.S. imperialism as part of a "stability." Instead, the expansion of plot to "break up" Yugoslavia. If any-
Lawyers for peace
NATO leaders accused
Lawyers from several countries have Mary Robinson in which she says laid a formal complaint with the that "large numbers of civilians
International Criminal Tribunal for have incontestably been killed the Former Yugoslavia against the civilian installations targeted on the individual leaders of all NATO grounds that they are or could be countries and the Organisation of military application and NATO remains sole judge of what is or is The complaint alleges "open not acceptable to bomb..." violation" of the United Nations The group, lead by professors Charter, the NATO treaty itself, the from Osgoode Hall Law School of
Geneva Conventions and the Princi- York University in Toronto has the ples of International Law Recogni- support of the pan-American zed by the Nuremberg Tribunal. American Association of Jurists.
The complaint points to the Professor Michael Mandel, bombing of civilian targets and spokesman for the group of compalleges that NATO leaders "have ad- explains that mitted publicly to having agreed bombing of civilians is not only imupon and ordered these actions, moral, it is criminal and punishable being fully aware of their nature under the laws governing the and effects" and that "there is Tribunal. You cannot kill a woman ample evidence in the public state- and child in Belgrade on the theoments of NATO leaders that these retical possibility that it might save attacks on civilian targets are part a woman and child in Pristina. Even I of a deliberate attempt to terrorize in a legal war you cannot kill the population to turn it against its civilians and destroy an entire leadership." country as a military strategy." *
The complaint also cites a statement of United Nations High Contact: (Toronto) Professor Michael Mandel (Tel. +1
416-736-5039 e-mail <mmandel@yorku.ca>, (Geneva)
Commissioner for Human Rights Alejandro Teitelbaum, <Assemjur@aol.com> 12 International Viewpoint #312 June 1999 thing, the United States was less eager than (for example) Germany to encourage Croatian and Slovenian secession from Yugoslavia-and certainly, to
Washington showed little objection to
Milosevic's ambitions for a Greater
Serbia so long as it seemed attainable without too much "wider instability."
fo
NATO's error
Far from expecting this war, it appears that NATO and the United were surprised by the failures of their diplomatic schemes and military bluff, and have
SE gone to war without the necessary bi
= military or political preparation.
Evidently, the State Department's bI
Balkan experts failed to recognize what was most obvious: If the Serb regime was determined to hold onto Kosovo, against the wishes of its 90% Albanian population, it would have to kill or expel half or more of the two million Kosovars.
Only the kind of "experts" whose
B professional assignment was to work out a deal with Milosevic could fail to see the pre-planned escalation from repression to depopulation in Kosovo.
al
Saving face
Having failed to secure Milosevic's agreement at Rambouillet or to deter him with the threat of air strikes, NATO
W suddenly found itself with a choice between two options, both potentially catas-
It could in essence abandon its stated bD commitment to the Kosovars—a choice that Clinton and his European social democratic partners Blair, Jospin and
Schroeder refused to contemplate, since it would constitute an incredible defeat that would discredit their respective governments and leave in doubt NATO's unity and possibly its very survival.
Or, NATO could begin the air warbut once the first strikes failed to produce a Serb surrender, as again could be predicted by anyone other than a military expert self-hypnotized by Cruise missile al technology, there is no option but to
C( escalate toward an inexorable larger war-or admit defeat.
p
Day by day, as the scope of the horrors imposed on the Kosovars and the
ST unmanageable extent of the refugee emergency unfolded, the war imposed its own logic on the planners, more than the other way around. To save NATO-an
Z even greater imperative than saving the h
Kosovars, obviously—it is necessary now to fight the war and win it.
In the words of the 1980s Reaganaut
Lawrence Eagleburger, "We can't let this pipsqueak nation, Serbia, inflict a defeat on NATO."
If the refugees are to be returned, as
NATO has promised, the Yugoslav military must be absolutely defeated in
Kosovo and prevented from returning
That objective requires the destruc tion of Serb military power and Serbia's capacity for rebuilding that power. Hence
not only must Serbia's existing military infrastructure be wiped out, but its industrial capacity must be bombed back to pre-World War II levels. Ground war
This means that a large-scale ground force must be sent into Kosovo, since air power alone cannot drive out the Serb forces, and to create a NATO protectorate in most of Kosovo (a part may be left for the Serb population in Kosovo to flee to). True, Clinton promises every day not to send ground troops, with the same credibility with which he vowed never having had sexual relations with that womanbut by the time the lie is revealed it will be "too late." British Prime Minister Tony Blair is already calling for a
At war's end, new boundaries must be forcibly imposed on Serbia. Whether or not to join "Republika Serpska" in Bosnia to Serbia; whether or not Montenegro secedes from rump- Yugoslavia; whether to coercively "adjust" the borders of Macedonia to satisfy Albanian ambitions on the one hand or Greek claims on the other-all these are decisions that will be taken by the
It hardly seems likely (though in the world of diplomacy, perhaps a role can be arranged for Russia to play intermediary) that these arrangements can be made with the Milosevic regime and his gangster partners. Hence, although a military occupation of the Serbian heartland is out of the question, the government of rump-Yugoslavia must probably be somehow removed, or else its people subjected to the protracted horrors now imposed on the people of Iraq for their unforgivable crime of being ruled by
Such objectives entail war, and a postwar level of intervention, with casualties and expenses on a scale for which the population of the United States and other NATO powers have been completely unprepared. No wonder that neither Clinton nor any of his European partners have the political courage to do what democratic principle demands—to state openly where their course leads and to ask their Congress or Parliament to debate a declaration of war.
Anyone on the left who favors NATO's actions, regardless of the most honorable and sincerest of desires to stop genocide, must face up to these consequences. The result can only be a more virulent post-Cold War NATO, intervening at will (mainly, U.S. will) wherever its power can reach, ie. practically Kosovo Yes-NATO No!
Given these realities, it is impossible for socialists to want NATO's operation to succeed. Supporting this war, now, can only mean supporting imperialism. In the real world, we cannot pick-and-choose
THE INHUMAN TERPEST SCUM! DLODD QN MA TiposeRs! between ostensibly benevolent military interventions, carried out in the name of humanitarian rescue, and those conducted for naked military-political aggrandizement or profit-because inevitably, inexorably, the former becomes the pretext for the latter.
That is the case even in Kosovo, a war the United States and NATO didn't "provoke" but actually tried to avoid through a criminal policy of appease-
Once having begun, this is inevitably a war for NATO to occupy and re-configure the map of the Balkanseven though the war itself, should it end in yet another "political settlement" with Milosevic or should it produce military debacles and serious casualties for the invaders, may prove to be NATO's own
For us, the ruin of NATO is the only possible good that can come from this horrific human holocaust. Our small contribution to NATO's defeat must be to do all we can to politically expose and discredit it inside our own country. We
"constructive alternative" to propose for NATO except its dissolution.
Whatever happens next, the Kosovar and Serb peoples have lost. The Kosovars, if NATO accepts defeat and deals yet again with Milosevic, will be left a landless and homeless people-the Palestinians and the Kurds of the Balkans. If NATO ultimately overwhelms Serbia and establishes a military protectorate in Kosovo, the refugees may return, but their survival would then depend upon an indefinite occupation with all the consequences that entails for
For the Serbs, ten years of Milosevic's Greater Serbia campaign have produced a national catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs who lived for centuries inside Croatia, whose welfare was Milosevic's pretext for invading Croatia in 1991, were brutally expelled from their homes in the Krajina region when Croatia regained the territory. Serbs in "Republika Serpska" are ghettoized, Serbs in Kosovo will have no future in a NATO-occupied zone and Serbs in the heartland of Serbia have suffered economic ruin and the destruction of the hope for democracy. What Can We Do?
We support the Kosovar Albanians' right of self-determination. No-one with democratic values can deny the legitimacy of their struggle, which is a fight for physical and cultural survival as well as political rights. Even further, under circumstances of threatened annihilation or mass dispersal of the population, an independent Kosovo is the only real-life
But the Kosovars' absolutely legitimate struggle is only one element in what has become a much larger and reactionary imperialist war. The United States always regarded the Kosovars as bargaining pawns, never supported Kosovo independence—-and even welcomed the defeat of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998, when the Yugoslav military launched its first
Yet even aside from that, we do not support "liberating" Kosovo through NATO destruction of Serbia's cities and
In this tragic situation, we believe there are several "wars within the war" where socialists with consistent democratic loyalties can take sides and, in some cases, small practical steps.
Obviously, we cannot influence in any way the struggle between the Kosovo Albanians and the Yugoslav Army. But as a matter of principle we uphold the right of the Kosovars to struggle for their survival by any means available to them, whether through the pre-war movement of civic resistance or the struggle of the KLA.
The KLA itself is no left-wing force: It appears to be politically incoherent at
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