As Yugoslavia resists
NATO finds celebration is premature
By Fred
Goldstein
Whatever the ultimate outcome of the present war with its
murderous bombardment by U.S./NATO forces, each day that goes
by without the surrender of the heroic Yugoslav people is
another day of humiliation and defeat for the mad ambitions of
Western imperialism, led by Washington.
This fact hung like a pall over NATO's 50th anniversary
celebration in Washington. All the rhetoric about "we shall
win" and "we are united"--after a whole month in which the
combined forces of 19 countries have bombarded a country of 11
million people--was designed to paper over the growing sense of
frustration and disunity within the camp of the imperialist
aggressors.
Many in the gang of thieves are now asking themselves, what
did Washington and the Pentagon get us into? This was to be the
post-Soviet era, when the U.S. would lead its NATO subordinates
into successful battle as a global strike force. The others
would play their role as supporting actors in the Pentagon-Wall
Street scheme for world domination.
Washington expected a quick war. It thought it would get a
repeat of 1995, when it led NATO in a 22-day bombing of Bosnia.
After arming the Bosnian Croat army and sending in retired U.S.
generals to direct "Operation Storm"--all in violation of a UN
Security Council resolution that prohibited sending arms to the
area--the U.S. succeeded in getting the Dayton Accords. Rammed
through by Richard Holbrooke, they included severing Bosnia
from Yugoslavia and installing a NATO occupation force.
That's what Washington expected when it went into the
Rambouillet meetings with a demand for total capitulation by
Belgrade. Yugoslavia would have to consent to an occupation
force in Kosovo. But, according to the scenario cooked up by
President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
and Holbrooke, the war to occupy Kosovo would be even quicker,
based upon the "credibility" of the military threat established
in Bosnia.
Hatred of NATO
Just a month later the government of Yugoslavia, backed up
by the masses, has upset all the calculations of the Clinton
administration and other NATO governments. It has refused to
capitulate, despite enormous sacrifice of life and economic
wealth. Even if the Yugoslav government were not able to hold
out completely under this terrible, Hitlerite bombing, that
could not change this fact. It all bodes ill for the future of
NATO as world policemen.
Professor Ron Hatchett, who spent 20 years in the Air Force
and three years in the Pentagon as a military analyst, and
participated in arms control talks in Geneva, interviewed
President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade on April 24 for
C-Span.
Milosovic said that 500,000 workers have lost their jobs as
a direct result of the NATO bombing of factories making
everything from tobacco to vacuum cleaners and furniture. Some
2,000 civilians have been killed.
Hatchett noted, however, that in all his discussions in
Serbia, whenever he tried to elicit criticism of President
Milosevic the unanimous reaction was support for Milosevic's
resistance to NATO. In attempting to convey to the U.S.
government what it was up against, Hatchett spoke of a young
man he met who said, "I'm glad I'm only 20 because it means I
have 70 more years to hate NATO."
Cracks in the alliance
The imperialist alliance is beginning to crack in different
places, according to each country's interests and designs, as
Washington becomes more desperate and drags them into a
conflict with world implications. As the U.S. commits and
threatens more war crimes, the governments of Europe grow more
nervous.
The New York Times of April 26 said that in the second month
of bombing "the storied unity and cohesion of the alliance are
being put to ever more rigorous tests. The governing coalitions
of Germany, Greece and the Czech Republic are wobbling under
the pressures of escalation. Allied controversy over a proposed
campaign to embargo Serbia's ship-borne oil supplies is
deepening. The expectation of a prompt allied victory by air
power has long since been frustrated, forcing the United States
and other allies toward the hot-potato issue of ground troops.
The Russian factor has its own potential for strain among the
allies."
The bombing of Yugoslav television and the killing of its
night shift was so outrageous that the Greek government had to
condemn it. Polls indicate that 95 percent of the Greek people
are sympathetic to Serbia in the war.
As the air war fails to bring victory and a ground war seems
more necessary, the German and Italian governments, in fear of
being unseated, are resisting, even though all the military
leaders tell them you cannot win an air war. But the German and
Italian social-imperialist political leaders--socialist in name
but imperialist in deed--Gerhard Schroeder and Massimo D'Alema,
are willing to place their hopes in Supreme NATO Commander Gen.
Wesley Clark, who counsels bombing without end as the
strategy.
Meanwhile, the British are sending troops to Macedonia. And
the Clinton administration is playing it both ways--refusing to
discuss ground troops even as the Pentagon sends troops to
Albania, together with Apache helicopters, tanks and armored
personal carriers, spotter aircraft and other military
supplies, in preparation for the first stages of a ground
intervention.
Russia in the middle
The most controversial and potentially dangerous element in
the present situation, as far as the imperialist allies in
continental Europe are concerned, is the relationship to
Russia. It is humiliating for the U.S. and European
imperialists to have to lean so heavily on their
counter-revolutionary creations in Moscow. But having failed to
win quickly, and seeking to avoid a ground war if possible,
they have been driven to seek the services of the Yeltsin
regime.
All the Russian leaders have strenuously denounced the
bombing of Yugoslavia--not out of international solidarity, but
because they recognize this move to crush Yugoslavia is another
move in their direction by the U.S. and German military
machines. They want to stop the bombing and the U.S.-NATO
offensive, but most preferably by a compromise, regardless of
how it affects the interests of the Yugoslavs.
But each time Russian emissaries have met with the Milosevic
government, they have come away with no concessions on the
essential matter of armed NATO occupation, which is the stated
central aim of the U.S. and its imperialist junior partners and
the basis of all Yugoslav resistance.
Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov went to Belgrade in the
early stages of the war and came away with nothing on this
matter. The U.S. was quite perturbed because Primakov, on his
way home, stopped to see Schroeder. Although Schroeder rejected
the Yugoslav position, just as did the U.S., he nevertheless
agreed to meet with Primakov and get a private report. This
flirtation was offensive to Washington.
The next emissary was former prime minister Victor
Chernomyrdin, who is closer to Washington. He claimed to have
gotten concessions on the question of an armed presence in
Kosovo, but this was repudiated by the Milosevic
government.
In truth, the Russian capitalist government is deeply in
debt to imperialist financial institutions. It has recently
defaulted on some loans and is asking for another handout from
the IMF. It has no desire to bite the hand that feeds it. But
the aggressiveness of imperialism is pushing it in the other
direction.
Struggle over oil embargo
The most incendiary issue is the oil embargo at Montenegro's
seaports. Russia relies on oil exports as its greatest single
source of foreign exchange. It supplies 40 percent of
Yugoslavia's oil. Just prior to the NATO meeting, Washington
shook up most of the allies, even stalking horse Tony Blair, by
proposing a naval blockade on oil shipments. That's an act of
war. A struggle broke out in NATO over how to carry it out.
The Pentagon had a ready answer. "Although details of that
blockade must be worked out," wrote the New York Times of April
25, "the Pentagon said today that allied warships would search
tankers and divert those found to be carrying oil to
Yugoslavia. A Pentagon official said the allied ships would
fire on any vessels that defied the blockade, first as a
warning, then to disable, if not sink violators."
Between the time that these unnamed Pentagon officials
announced their willingness to go to war with Russia and the
end of the NATO conference, Washington was forced to back down.
And by the time Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott went
to Moscow to talk to Chernomyrdin, it had been toned down to a
"visit and search" concept, according to Gen. Klaus Nauman,
outgoing chair of the rotating NATO military council. It "does
not give us the right to force anyone to abandon his course. We
cannot stop a merchant vessel by use of force," said Nauman,
according to the April 27 Washington Post.
Nevertheless, NATO would board ships to make them "think
twice" because "no one likes to be stopped at sea."
But General Clark then overrode Nauman and all of NATO. On
April 27 he told a Brussels news conference that "Any
visit-and-search regime, of course, has to have the appropriate
rules of engagement to be able to use the threat of force. It
has to be an enforcement regime.
"There's going to be an effort to make it a cooperative
regime," he said. "We're going to encourage shippers to contact
us for preclearance. But essentially a naval regime like this
is precisely what it suggests."
The Yeltsin regime has repeatedly told its paymasters in
Washington that it has no intention of intervening militarily
in Yugoslavia. But it would be open to playing a treacherous
role there, the way Gorbachev tried to get Saddam Hussein to
capitulate during the Gulf War. For example, it could decide
not to ship oil to Yugoslavia.
State Department spokesperson James Rubin said, referring to
the Russian role in resolving the war, "When you hear about
diplomatic solutions, what you are hearing about is the
diplomatic ways and means to implement the requirements that
NATO has set forth." (New York Times, April 26) This is
Washington's interpretation of Russia's role.
Furthermore, the capitalist counter-revolution has left the
military there demoralized and in a deplorable state, hardly
ready for combat with imperialism.
But at the same time, Moscow cannot but note that the
Pentagon's plan for the blockade was primarily directed at
them. Nor can it fail to note the placement of U.S. troops in
Hungary, which are directed at Yugoslavia now but could be part
of an invasion of Russia tomorrow. Nor can they ignore the plan
to consider the entry of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, former
Soviet Republics, as well as Romania into NATO in the year
2002.
At the end of World War II the Soviet Red Army went into
eastern and southern Europe not only to help liberate the
people there from fascist occupation, but also to establish a
military buffer zone against future invasion by Western
imperialism. What the U.S. and NATO are doing is openly
planning to militarize an iron front on the borders of Russia
while conducting military operations against Yugoslavia.
Not only the Russian government is following the war. It is
also of great concern to the political sectors of the Russian
masses and the parties of the left. Should the provocations and
demands of the U.S. become too outrageous and menacing, no one
can predict the outcome.
Whatever the course of the struggle, the expansionist aims
of the U.S. and NATO in Yugoslavia are the early stages of a
world process in which imperialism is attempting to redivide
the world in the post-Soviet period. Such attempts have
historically involved the Balkans because of their location and
fragmented nature. But they have ultimately involved wider war
and conquest and the drafting of the working class into
conflict on the ground.
The working class movement should see the war as a threat
not only to the Yugoslav people but to all workers in the U.S.
and Europe, whose fate is being planned by the generals and
admirals of the ruling class.
This article is copyright under a Creative
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