SPIRIT OF RESISTANCE
Yugoslavia's past becomes present
By Fred
Goldstein
The people and government of Yugoslavia have demonstrated
enormous heroism and self-sacrifice in the face of the criminal
air bombardment by the U.S.-led NATO forces.
As of the moment, all the cruise missiles, B-2 bombers,
F-117 Stealth fighters, A-10s, and other instruments of terror
from the sky have only strengthened and united the Yugoslav
masses in their determination not to surrender their
sovereignty to an imperialist occupation force.
This small, poor country of 11.5 million people--which has
suffered dismemberment, impoverishment through economic
sanctions, and previous NATO military aggression--is standing
up to an alliance of great powers with a combined population of
550 million people, combined economies of more than $12
trillion annually, and trillions of dollars of military
hardware.
Their heroism has inspired anti-war protests from Athens to
Sweden, Rome, Brussels, Paris, Bonn and Australia, from Los
Angeles to San Francisco and New York. It has also added the
force of Yugolav resistance to all those around the globe
resisting similar U.S. aggression, intervention, sanctions,
embargoes and demonization--from Iraq to Cuba, the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea, Iran, Libya, the Palestinians, the
Kurds, and all the countries and peoples struggling to maintain
their independence from imperialism.
Rambouillet and Dayton
Their resistance has also stunned the Clinton administration
and knocked all its calculations for a quick capitulation off
course.
According to Washington's plan, the Rambouillet scenario was
supposed to follow the pattern of the Dayton accords. At
Dayton, President Slobodan Milosevic was forced to give up
Bosnia and permit U.S. and European military forces to occupy
the country and run its politics. That "agreement" came after a
murderous NATO bombing campaign, backed up by a U.S.-trained
Croatian invasion force.
The Dayton accords and the NATO bomb ing campaign--also a
U.S.-led operation--were intended by Washington to grab the
leadership away from German imperialism in the drive to detach
Bosnia from Yugoslavia.
The Kosovo Liberation Army mercenaries, for example, had
gotten their start in Germany. Indeed, the initial leaders of
this counter-revolutionary terrorist group spoke German as
their first language.
The Rambouillet talks, in which the U.S. dictated the terms
and twisted the arms of the Kosovo delegation to make them sign
on, were supposed to take the initiative away from the German
imperialists and give Washington the upper hand.
The accords that were supposed to come out of Rambouillet
were framed in a similar fashion to the Bosnia agreement,
except that autonomy was substituted for independence. The
major difference this time was that Washington had mobilized
all of NATO behind its threats--in accord with its program to
make NATO an instrument of Wall Street's worldwide
expeditionary forces.
Clinton's calculation was that if the Yugoslav government
wouldn't sign the agreement, then it would cave in to the
threat of overwhelming force after a series of merciless
bombing raids.
Neither has happened.
The miscalculation of the Clinton administration and the
Pentagon is one that all ruling classes make over and over
again. They have underestimated the determination of the
masses. In trying to dismember Serbia, the core of the Yugoslav
state, they have struck the rock of militant resistance to
national oppression and imperialist exploitation that is alive
and well among the Yugoslav masses, especially the workers.
This is the same rock that Hitler struck.
Auto workers vote to defy bombs
Buried at the end of an article in the New York Times of
March 28 was the report that Politika magazine "ran a full-page
ad in Serbo-Croatian and English from workers of the Zastava
automobile and weapons factory in Kragujevac, north of
Belgrade, which has been a NATO target."
The New York Times claims it is a weapons manufacturing
plant, thereby justifying NATO strikes.
"The Zastava employees," continued the Times, "announced
that 38,000 people worked there and informed NATO that an
attack at any time would kill several thousand people working
on wartime shifts. The ad gave the longitude and latitude of
the factory and said workers and their families would hold
rallies there, to make any death toll higher."
U.S. television networks briefly showed pictures of militant
mass rallies in Belgrade mid-day on March 30, the sixth day of
bombing. Reports of a rock concert with a defiant anti-NATO
spirit have appeared in the capitalist press. "State-run
television," according to the Miami Herald of March 28,
"carries reruns of old Partisan movies showing young communist
fighters destroying the German aggressor."
A Washington Post report in the March 29 edition tried to
give a flavor of what the U.S. is up against. It cited a
conversation with an electrician named "Milan" who is not
pro-Milosevic. "A year ago, Milan's son did everything he
legally could do to evade military service. Today, Milan said,
his son intends to volunteer to fight in Kosovo."
The Post reporter said Milan recited what the reporter
thought was a Serbian proverb--"Better war than capitulation,
better the grave than being a slave." Actually, this is not a
Serbian proverb but a version of the slogan, "Better war than
pact, better a grave than being a slave."
This slogan was raised by the Yugoslav Communist Party in
March 1938 in mass demonstrations in Belgrade when the royalist
government signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany,
Fascist Italy and Japan. The regent, Paul, who signed the pact
was branded a traitor and the government fell after that.
Surrender or be bombed
This sheds light on NATO's demands at Rambouillet. The
imperialists gave Milosevic a choice: be a traitor, accept an
occupation army and give up your national independence to an
imperialist force that has bombed you, dismembered your country
and tried to destroy you with sanctions--or we will bomb you
again.
To the Yugoslav masses this can be nothing but a rerun of
the Hitler-Mussolini axis that occupied and dismembered their
country 60 years ago. Is it any wonder that at this time of
crisis, the government and the people are reviving the slogans
and experiences of the heroic period of the Yugoslav
Revolution, led by Tito and the Partisans organized by the
Communist Party?
The Yugoslav workers and peasants of many nationalities
accomplished a two-fold struggle: they drove out Hitler's
occupation forces and also won the power for the working class.
This heroic war of national liberation was simultaneously a
class struggle fought against the internal
counter-revolutionaries. Its lessons are still alive in the
memories and nerves of the Yugoslav people.
That is a monumental material factor in the struggle that
imperialism can never fully take into account in its
calculations. It is what gives Milosevic and the Yugoslav
government the basis for defying imperialism and standing firm
against occupation.
This historical reflex to escalate their resistance to
imperialist aggression has caused the Clinton administration to
escalate its aggression and its rhetoric against the Yugoslav
government and Milosevic. Hysterical, jingoistic gutter
journalism is emanating from the networks, the tabloids and the
most "respectable" organs of capitalist journalism alike.
Wave after wave of reports, mostly "unconfirmed" but
reported anyway, of alleged atrocities are filling the airwaves
and news pages. Pictures of refugees running away from war--how
strange!--are adduced as absolute proof of "ethnic
cleansing."
The New York Times of March 28 quoted an observer as asking,
"where are all the men from 16 to 60," as if to imply they had
all been killed off. The observer should simply watch CNN or
any other network to see men of all ages in the vanguard of
most refugee contingents.
This dangerous hysteria, coupled with claims by Washington's
British mouthpieces that Yugoslav officials are war criminals,
is a clear signal that the U.S and NATO are preparing to
escalate the war and are contemplating an invasion or some
genocidal escalation.
Escalation to ground troops?
There are undoubtedly excesses by both sides in Kosovo. But
the wildly exaggerated stories of so-called genocide are
calculated to pump up the population in the U.S. to a state of
belligerence preparatory to ground intervention or the bombing
of Belgrade.
Of course, there will be great conflict over this in the
ruling class and within the NATO alliance. Fear of resistance
by the population at home may overcome the temptation to invade
for now. But sooner or later, the Pentagon is going to take the
plunge.
They may not do it in the present situation. But the working
class must know that the appetite of the bankers, the bosses
and their military machine for conquest is insatiable and must
ultimately involve the commitment of troops to battle.
The military experts of the ruling class have all stated
again and again that air power has its limits and wars must be
won on the ground. Yet Clinton and the Joint Chiefs of Staff
have flatly declared that they are not contemplating sending
ground troops and can achieve their objectives by air
power.
But this dictum on the limits of air power has been proven
again and again. The militarists who are responsible for
expanding and protecting the ruling class's spheres of
exploitation will be the first to cast aside their own advice
when driven by the need to dominate the world. The resistance
of the Yugoslav masses is forcing the Pentagon and the Clinton
administration to deal with this contradiction.
The desire, in the post-Soviet era, of Wall Street and the
Pentagon to crush every remaining manifestation of
revolutionary and anti-imperialist resistance on the globe,
from Iraq to Cuba to North Korea, is driving this struggle to
destroy Yugoslavia's national independence and make it a
satellite in the mold of Poland, Hungary, Albania or the Czech
Republic.
But Yugoslavia is distinct from the other countries of
Eastern Europe. The Eastern European socialist countries that
fell with the collapse of the USSR had a different history.
They were liberated from fascism after World War II largely by
the external inter vention of the Soviet Red Army. Most of
their native revolutionary forces had been exterminated during
the Axis occupation.
It is an irony of history that Yugoslavia, which was not
part of the powerful economic and military bloc led by the
Soviet Union, by the mid-1980s had gone further than the others
in abandoning socialist institutions and becoming entangled in
the financial web of the IMF and Western banks. Nevertheless,
modern-day Yugoslavia came into existence in 1945 as the result
of a profound revolution which fully involved the masses in
virtual hand-to-hand, village by village, combat with the
Nazis, the Italian fascists and the domestic
counter-revolution. The other countries of Eastern Europe never
had that experience.
What is happening in Yugoslavia at the moment, regardless of
the final outcome, demonstrates a fundamental tenet of Marxism
concerning the decisive role of the masses in history. That is
the basis for all revolutionary optimism. The Yugoslav people
at this moment are at the cutting edge of resistance to
imperialism.
All the workers and the oppressed of the world must stand
with them in unconditional solidarity and demand that U.S./
NATO stop its criminal aggression and get out of
Yugoslavia.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS ::
SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page