Comment by Allen Myers
The US/NATO military assault on Serbia represents a significant escalation of the attempt by the US and its allies to establish their role as "cops of the world". The war is intended, not only to strengthen the imperialists' control over the Balkans, but also to establish their "right" to intervene with military force wherever and whenever they choose, to impose an "order" that guarantees no disruption of the flow of profits.
The attempt to cloak the US/NATO aggression in supposed concern for Kosovar refugees is the purest hypocrisy. Imperialism cares nothing at all about the welfare of the Kosovar, or any other, people; its only concern is what will maintain and increase its profits.
However, it would be foolish to deny that this cynical propaganda campaign has had considerable effect on public opinion; it seems even to have fooled some on the left who, "reluctantly" or otherwise, have endorsed the bombing.
The effectiveness of the propaganda is largely due to the fact that it is partly based upon fact. The Kosovar people are nationally oppressed within the Serbian state. The Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic is using the opportunity provided by war to "ethnically cleanse" parts of Kosova with an eye to gaining the best deal in a future partition.
The sight of tens of thousands of Kosovar refugees terrorised into fleeing, often with little more than the clothes on their backs, also revives memories of the Milosevic government's role in Bosnia, where it deliberately inflamed Serb nationalism and aggression in an effort to create a Greater Serbia out of the break-up of Yugoslavia. It is easy for imperialism to demonise Milosevic for the same reason it was easy to demonise Saddam Hussein. (In both cases, previous imperialist backing for the "demon" was only a minor embarrassment.)
Opposition to the US/NATO aggression, if it is to be effective, needs to take account of these realities. It is particularly important that imperialism not be able to portray opposition to its schemes as indifference or even hostility to the needs and well-being of the Kosovar people. Respect for the national rights of the Kosovars is both a demand of simple justice and an indispensable condition for building public opposition to the war.
Unfortunately, some on the left have taken a different approach. The Communist Party of Australia, and its newspaper Guardian, are trying to campaign against the imperialist war in a way that evades or denies the crimes of the Milosevic regime. Worse, they justify Serbian national chauvinism and its hostility towards the Albanian-speaking majority of Kosova.
One-sided history
The April 7 Guardian carried a two-page feature entitled "The criminal dismemberment of Yugoslavia". The unsigned article, which made extensive use of a paper by Canadian academic Michel Chossudovsky, purports to provide the "background to the NATO aggression". In fact, it presents a one-sided account that sanitises the role of Milosevic and the Serbian Communist bureaucracy in Yugoslavia's dismemberment.
Chossudovsky's paper, and the Guardian's quotation from it, give an overview of Western interference in Yugoslavia. This interference, as elsewhere in eastern Europe, was intended to overthrow the Yugoslav socialist state and bring about a restoration of capitalism. It succeeded. But it didn't do it all by itself.
Chossudovsky documents the role of international financial agencies like the International Monetary Fund, which imposed austerity plans that savaged the Yugoslav economy and the living standards of workers. As in Russia, workers sometimes went for months without wages while their enterprises were converted into private property.
But what is missing from the Guardian's account is any indication of the role of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and its constituent republics.
It is not only a matter of how Yugoslavia became deeply indebted in the first place, thus giving the IMF the leverage to impose its "solutions". (Again as in most of eastern Europe, as bureaucratic mismanagement caused economic growth to slow, the bureaucrats borrowed partly to maintain consumption and partly in the hope that the borrowings could be invested in industries that would find markets in the West.)
Large parts of the bureaucracy did more than mismanage. Many of them actively collaborated in privatising the economy, for their personal benefit:
"The restructuring programme demanded by Belgrade's creditors was intended to abrogate the system of socially owned enterprises ... The 1989 Enterprise Law required the transformation of [those enterprises] into private capitalist enterprises with the Workers' Council replaced by a so-called 'Social Board' under the control of the enterprise's owners including its creditors. 'The objective was to subject the Yugoslav economy to massive privatisation and the dismantling of the public sector. Who was to carry it out? The Communist Party bureaucracy, most notably its military and intelligence sector, was canvassed specifically and offered political and economic backing on the condition that wholesale scuttling of social protections for Yugoslavia's workforce was imposed ...'"
The Guardian's writers ought to be familiar with this information: the passage is taken from the same article by Chossudovsky that they make use of. (Within the passage, Chossudovsky quotes from Ralph Schoenman.)
Here is another passage from the same article:
"Moreover, the leaders of the newly sovereign states have fully collaborated with the creditors: 'All the current leaders of the former Yugoslav republics were Communist Party functionaries and each in turn vied to meet the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the better to qualify for investment loans and substantial perks for the leadership ... State industry and machinery were looted by functionaries. Equipment showed up in "private companies" run by family members of the nomenklatura' [quoting Schoenman]."
Of course, the Guardian is not obligated to agree with Chossudovsky's analysis. But it reveals bad faith to say nothing about these comments, and thus to leave the impression that Chossudovsky shares the Guardian's view of the Yugoslav bureaucracy's innocence.
Nationalist poison
The Guardian also omits Chossudovsky's quotation from Dimitrije Boarov on the bureaucracy's culpability in fostering national hatreds:
"When [Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante] Markovic finally started his 'programmed privatisation', the republican oligarchies, who all had visions of a 'national renaissance' of their own, instead of choosing between a genuine Yugoslav market and hyperinflation, opted for war which would disguise the real causes of the economic catastrophe."
In the Guardian's retelling of history, "ethnic tensions" (the term it uses in place of the more accurate "national conflicts") in former Yugoslavia are mostly the product of Western "financing" of the Kosova Liberation Army. There is not so much as a hint of any of the national grievances of the Kosovars within Yugoslavia, going back to 1946.
Instead, the Guardian provides abuse of the Kosovars. In its April 14 issue, another unsigned article attempts to discredit the KLA. It begins:
"The Albanians of Kosovo are not new arrivals on the international scene. As long ago as 1985, the Wall Street Journal was reporting on the activities of the 'Kosovo-Albania Drug Mafia' in New York City ..."
Let us silently pass over the "Communist" Guardian's touching faith in the reliability of the Wall Street Journal's reporting. The Journal, as the Guardian writer quotes without understanding, does not report on "Albanians of Kosovo", but about people of Albanian Kosovar birth or ancestry in the United States.
Moreover, the KLA, according to most reports, has been in existence for only about two years. It can therefore hardly be responsible for anyone's drug-running in 1985. But this doesn't stop the Guardian from continuing:
"Today, according to some estimates [whose?], 25-40 per cent of all heroin in the US is being supplied by the Kosovo Cartel. Kosovo-Albanian dealers are in jails in Switzerland, Italy and Germany as well as the US."
Readers can search the rest of the article in vain for any evidence connecting the "Kosovo Cartel" or jailed drug runners with the KLA. The fact that "Kosovo-Albanians" are involved is all that the Guardian writers consider necessary.
Branding people in one place or time with the crimes of people in another place or time, because they share a common nationality, is racism and nothing more. Presumably this is not what the Guardian intended, but that is where its search for any mud to throw at the KLA has led it.
On the facing page to this article is its mirror image. This is written by Josef Haubelt, "Chairperson of the Czech Humanists". It begins: "The Serbs, a generous people, are among the bravest of the Slav nations. For centuries they fought tirelessly against the Ottoman threat to European civilisation."
Such words have no connection even with humanism, let alone with Marxism. They are purely an appeal to nationalist, and even religious, chauvinism. They are the weapons of imperialism, not weapons to defeat it.