Behind the imperialist war on Yugoslavia
By Fred
Goldstein
At the beginning of every imperialist war the ruling class
always goes to the wildest extremes to overcome the natural
antipathy of the masses to the war. As always, the main task is
to demonize the object of imperialist aggression and depict the
imperialists as saviors and liberators.
In order to justify the war crimes of the military in
advance and to prepare the working class and the oppressed to
shed their blood and the blood of other workers, the aims of
imperialism must be concealed behind a shield of lies.
The pictures of refugees from Kosovo coming across the
borders into Albania and Montenegro are being used to inflame
public opinion while Washington escalates its truly criminal
bombings of Yugoslav cities. The Clinton administration is
inching closer and closer to the introduction of ground
forces--with 2,600 "back-up" troops to accompany the 24 Apache
helicopters--its denials notwithstanding.
In Hitler's footsteps
The pictures are meant to mask the mission of the criminal
U.S.-NATO offensive. The Clinton administration and the
Pentagon are leading the NATO alliance into the hateful and
unenviable position of following in the footsteps of Hitler.
They are following in the footsteps of German fascism not only
militarily, with criminal bombing of Belgrade, but politically,
in that Hitler and German Nazism's goal was to wipe communism
from the earth.
After all is said and done, it should be obvious to everyone
who has retained the ability to think independently of the
capitalist propaganda machine that the Rambouillet meeting
devised by the U.S. was the attempted crucial step in the final
dismemberment of the multinational Yugoslav state.
It comes after the detachment of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia
and Macedonia under a steady onslaught of bombings, military
interventions and economic sanctions. Each country was detached
on the grounds of "liberating" it from Belgrade.
Why Yugoslavia? Because Yugoslavia is the last country in
Europe to retain elements of a socially-owned economy and
political and economic rights for the working class inherited
from its socialist revolution.
It is the only country in Eastern Europe to hold out against
the counter-revolutionary wave that swept through with the
collapse of the USSR. This has not been done on the basis of a
revolutionary working-class ideology or an anti-imperialist
political position. But on a strictly bourgeois nationalist
basis, what is left of Yugoslavia has refused to become a
satellite of imperialism.
The anti-communist aim of the U.S. has been put forward by
NATO Commander Gen. Wesley Clark, by President George Bush who
began the U.S. participation in Yugoslavia's dismemberment, and
by numerous U.S. strategists.
This aim--to destroy the last elements of socialism and the
last politically independent regime in central
Europe--coincides with the broader strategic aim of expanding
the U.S. military throughout the region and especially toward
the East and the Caspian Sea. The struggle over oil profits to
be extracted there represents a new stage of competition among
the imperialist powers.
It is also consistent with the incessant need of the U.S.
military-industrial complex and the Pentagon to keep alive
their bloody mission in the post-Soviet era. They must find a
war, a field of operations to use, test and perfect their
high-tech instruments of death and destruction. They must try
to intimidate the governments of the world into submission.
They must liquidate their inventories of bombs, cruise
missiles, ammunition and supplies. And their replacement will
mean highly profitable military contracts at the expense of
building schools, hospitals, day care centers, housing and all
the socially useful things that the masses need.
The Big Lie
The defeat of the U.S.-NATO war drive and the defense of
Yugoslavia are absolutely fundamental to the interests of the
workers and the oppressed of the world, including the workers
right here. One of the most important strategic aims of the
capitalist media in the present crisis is not only to lead the
masses in the direction of war, but to intimidate, divert and
demoralize the anti-war movement and all forces of resistance.
They try to do this with a barrage of propaganda about
"genocide" and "ethnic cleansing," comparing the scenes of
refugees to those in World War II fleeing Hitler's fascism.
The media are literally turning reality on its head. The
U.S. made this war inevitable. It told the government of
Yugoslavia to peacefully accept the destruction of its
sovereignty by a NATO occupation force or be bombed. When
Yugoslavia declined the offer, Washington gave the orders to
bomb.
The U.S. is setting the bombing targets, including the
biggest and most important cities in Kosovo: Pristina, the
capital, and Pec, one of the largest cities in the region,
which is now in rubble. The U.S. carpet-bombing has leveled
vast areas of the most densely populated region of all the
Balkans. It is hardly surprising that hundreds of thousands of
refugees are running from the bombing.
But furthermore, the U.S. has promoted a
counter-revolutionary separatist guerrilla insurgency, the KLA,
which even U.S. spokespeople have referred to as "terrorists"
and "thugs." It is using the Albanian population as shields in
its ground war. The KLA had dug in along a wide arc in central
and southern Kosovo, stretching from Urosevac in the east to
Prizren, Rosgovo and Djakovica in the west. These U.S.- and
German-backed contras have created a zone of military warfare
in populated areas.
The Yugoslav military, which is fighting for the life of its
state against a U.S.-backed invasion force, cannot be held
responsible for this brutal ground war and the inevitable flow
of refugees.
In a war to the death there are inevitable excesses. But
excesses on either side do not change the class character of
the war. Nor should they influence the anti-war movement in
taking a firm stand to defeat imperialism's war aims: the
dismemberment of Yugoslavia.
No one should be buffaloed by the selective "humanitarian"
sympathy of the capitalist media. The same reporters and
editors virtually ignored the expulsion of at least 500,000
Serbs from Bosnia because it took place with the encouragement
and approval of Washington.
The predators of Wall Street and the Pentagon have no
intention of protecting the people of Kosovo. The worst thing
that could happen would be for them to be put under the
"protection" of imperialism or any of its puppet states in
Eastern Europe or the Balkans.
Whatever one's position is on President Slobodan Milosevic,
the movement is duty bound to defend the resistance of his
government against U.S-NATO aggression. In that resistance he
represents the masses of people of all nationalities in
Yugoslavia, including the workers and peasants.
Imperialism in the Balkans
Clearly a section of the bourgeois political leaders of the
Albanians in Kosovo have become instruments of the imperialist
powers and have victimized their own people. They have lent
themselves to the long-standing campaign aimed to promote
national antagonisms in Yugoslavia in order to weaken the
central government. It is the progressive forces of all
nationalities, including Albanians, in Yugoslavia that have
united and are resisting the current aggression.
The crisis over Kosovo cannot be understood outside the
history of the crises in the Balkans. This is not the first
time in history that the people of Kosovo, as well as the rest
of the nationalities, have been victimized by reactionary great
powers.
Every war crisis in Europe in the era of imperialism has
been reflected in a crisis in the Balkans. The tragedy of the
Balkan countries is that their late development and their
geography has prevented them from being united in a larger
state in which capitalism and the working class could develop.
As such they have historically been rural, semi-feudal and prey
to the great powers. The equilibrium among these powers has
always been expressed in their predatory division of spheres of
domination over the various Balkan nationalities, language
groups, religious groups and states.
Whenever there has been a change in the relationship of
forces among these great powers, it has been immediately
expressed in a redivision of their Balkan colonies. The
Albanian peoples, including those in Kosovo, have been subject
to these oppressive redivisions time and time again. This
occurred during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s,
prior to and during World War I, and during World War II.
This latest development has been precipitated by the
collapse of the USSR and the expansionary impulse it set off in
the camp of imperialism, which is now engaged in a classic
scramble for spheres of exploitation and domination in the East
and around the globe.
As regards Kosovo, its landed, conservative ruling class
allowed its people to be victimized by the Ottoman feudalists
in 1870 and by the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire in their
struggle to subdue the Slavic Balkan independence movement.
They were similarly victimized first by the Italian fascists
and then by the Nazis in World War II.
The gallant struggle by the Albanian communists of Kosovo to
hold onto proletarian internationalism and the progressive
aspects of Tito's heritage in the post-World War II period was
ultimately overcome by bourgeois nationalist forces. These grew
strong on the basis of retreats in Yugoslavian socialism and
the penetration of imperialist finance capital via the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
The result is that Washington is trying to follow in the
footsteps of the Ottoman and Hapsburg feudalists and the
Nazi-fascist imperialists. It thinks it can utilize the plight
of the people of Kosovo as a cover to enslave all the peoples
of Yugoslavia.
No anti-imperialist can refuse this battle or sit it out by
saying a plague on both your houses. One is the house of
imperialism; the other is the house of those who have been
oppressed for centuries.
Imperialism is at the door. Everyone must defend
Yugoslavia.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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