Mumia and Yugoslavia
Two fronts in the same war
By Fred
Goldstein
Anyone who wants to understand why the U.S. ruling class is
trying to silence Mumia Abu-Jamal need only read a few excerpts
from the recent statement he issued opposing U.S. imperialist
aggression against Yugoslavia.
"As a deadly rain of high-tech bombs falls on Yugoslavia,"
writes Abu-Jamal, "a deadening rain of propaganda falls on
Americans--media manipulated lies designed to prime the
populace into supporting harsher military measures against a
sovereign nation, in the name of protecting human rights.
"NATO is but a fig leaf for American `interests' and the
bombing of Yugoslavia is but a global demonstration of the
ruthlessness of the American empire," continues Mumia. And he
debunks the "human rights" argument of the White House, the
State Department and the Pentagon.
Mumia cites the fact that the U.S. has been condemned by
Amnesty International for "persistent and widespread" human
rights violations which "disproportionately affect people of
racial or ethnic minority backgrounds."
He then points out that "When fighters for Puerto Rican
independence began to raise their voices, the U.S. didn't
support this `ethnic minority,' they sought to crush,
incarcerate and silence them.
"Consider the case of the Palestinians, the Kurds, the East
Timorese, the Colombian rebels--who has the U.S. consistently
supported, the oppressed or the U.S.-armed governments?"
Abu-Jamal argues that "This isn't about `ethnic minorities.'
And it also isn't about `genocide.' It's about establishing
who's `boss' in the next century. It's about keeping Russia in
its place. It's about keeping the European Union under the
thumb of Wall Street."
Mumia relates how "our brilliant and revered nationalist
leader Malcolm X taught us to examine history" and that the
U.S. empire, just like the Roman empire, rules "not by reason,
but by ruthless terror." And he cites "the brilliant
revolutionary, Dr. Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther
Party, who explained in 1973 that `The United States was no
longer a nation ... We called it an empire.'
"Huey was right then," concludes Mumia, "and our response
then was to oppose the empire. We must do that now. Down with
imperialism! Stop the bombing! NATO/U.S. out of
Yugoslavia."
From his 6-by-10-foot jail cell on death row, with his
access to information severely limited by the racist prison
authorities, Abu-Jamal in a few paragraphs has written more
wisdom on the question of the war against Yugoslavia and the
nature of U.S. imperialism than can be found in all the reams
of confusion written by apologists for the war.
One thing that stands out so clearly in the statement is
that Mumia establishes the continuity between what the U.S.
government does to oppressed people at home and its wars
abroad.
Oppressors at home and abroad
Revolutionaries have always understood that foreign policy
is an extension of domestic policy. And nothing illustrates it
quite so clearly as the war against Yugoslavia.
Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, NATO and the Pentagon
claim that the war is because the Yugoslav government refused
to be "sensible" and sign the Rambouillet accords. But why did
the Yugoslav government refuse to sign them? Because it opposed
autonomy for the Kosovo Albanians?
No. The Yugoslav government agreed to autonomy for Kosovo.
The government of Slobodan Milosevic refused to sign because
the U.S. government said it must submit to an imperialist
occupation force of its territory by NATO. In other words, it
must surrender its sovereignty.
The Yugoslav people of all ethnic, language and national
groups--Serbs, Montenegrins, Croatians, Slovenes, Roms and the
many other nationalities that live in the confines of
Yugoslavia--have been oppressed for centuries. The oppressors
have been the Ottoman empire, czarist Russia, the
Austro-Hungarian empire, German, French, Italian and British
imperialism, and more recently U.S. imperialism.
The people of the Balkans, and of Yugoslavia in particular,
are all oppressed peoples whose lands have been partitioned and
repartitioned over and over again and whose labor and resources
have been controlled by the same great powers that dominate
NATO.
The occupation and partition of Yugoslavia means a return to
the condition of oppression.
It means giving General Motors, IBM, Citicorp,
Daimler-Chrysler, Siemens and all the multinational
corporations the right to march in, trample on the rights of
the workers, take over the economy and make Yugoslavia into a
neocolony--the way they have done in Croatia, Slovenia and the
rest of the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
Rising anti-racist struggle
In the U.S. today, one of the main struggles is against the
occupiers of the Black community--the police. There is no
social difference between the occupation of the Black and Latin
communities here and the NATO occupation of Bosnia, or the
attempt to occupy Serbia.
Black people were brought here in chains to be enslaved. The
Civil War abolished chattel slavery, but for a century and a
half there has been a ruling class policy of racist
discrimination that has maintained Black people in a state of
poverty and deprivation--all to the benefit of the bosses and
bankers.
The Chicano people of the Southwest were subjugated after
the U.S. stole the northern part of Mexico. They have also been
subjected to racism and discrimination.
The Native people were subjected to genocide and forced onto
concentration camps called reservations.
All over this country there are communities of oppressed
people from around the globe--the Philippines, Central and
South America, India, eastern Asia--who feed the economy of
U.S. capitalism and suffer racism and discrimination. And
everywhere they face police brutality by a racist occupation
force.
In New York, what has become a rebellion against the slaying
of Amadou Diallo, the torture of Abner Louima, the murder of
Anthony Baez, and other police crimes is really a rebellion
against an occupying force that holds the community down. This
armed occupation forces the communities of oppressed to accept
conditions of poor housing, dilapidated schools, low wages,
inferior medical care, poor sanitation, unemployment and all
the ills that go along with national oppression.
The uprising in Los Angeles against the release of the cops
who beat Rodney King was also a rebellion against the
occupation forces of the brutal LAPD.
What the U.S. ruling class wants to do in Serbia is no
mystery. It is what they have already accomplished in Bosnia,
in Macedonia where they have troops, in the Philippines, in
South Korea. It is what exists in every oppressed community in
the United States today, from Harlem to Watts to East Cleveland
to South Chicago.
They want to put in an armed body that will enforce the will
of the exploiters. In fact, Abu-Jamal, a Black journalist who
is known as "the voice of the voiceless" and is a former member
of the Black Panther Party, is on death row precisely because
he fought to expose such an occupation force in the city of
Philadelphia. And his struggle has not ceased for a moment
through all the years on death row.
The ruling class wants Abu-Jamal silenced for the very same
reason that it wants to destroy Yugoslavia. Mumia represents
the heritage of a great struggle that took place in this
country against national oppression--in the same way that
Yugoslavia is the last country in eastern Europe not to become
a neocolony of imperialism since the collapse of the Soviet
Union.
One class war, two fronts
In the post-World War II era, the overriding objective of
the U.S. ruling class in foreign policy was to destroy the
USSR, China and the socialist camp as a whole. It was a class
war that they called the Cold War. During the same period the
overriding objective of the bosses in domestic policy was to
contain the struggles of Black and other oppressed peoples at
home. Both struggles were in the service of defending
domination of the multinational corporations and the banks.
The Yugoslav regime was the product of a profound
revolutionary war for national liberation. It was forged in the
mass struggle against the fascist forces of Hitler and
Mussolini. This struggle finally united the nationalities of
the region under a socialist regime, led by Marshal Tito.
While the U.S. and Western imperialism were able to overcome
the USSR and the eastern European countries, and also made
inroads in eroding the Yugoslav Revolution, the spirit of
resistance among the people of all nationalities in Serbia and
Montenegro is still alive. They are determined not to
surrender.
The Yugoslavs have told the U.S. and NATO "you shall not
pass." In this they have joined the ranks of Cuba, Iraq, the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the peoples of Iraq,
Palestine, Lebanon, the revolutionary forces of Colombia, the
Philippines, and others in the gathering worldwide resistance
to imperialism.
In the same way Abu-Jamal, together with others like
Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), and many who still languish in jail,
represent the profound liberation struggle that shook U.S.
imperialism from the end of World War II up until the early
1970s.
The momentous civil-rights movement of the South, which
swept away segregation, and momentous rebellions in the cities
of the North, which gave rise to Malcolm X and the Black
Panther Party, changed the political face of the U.S. They
forced major concessions from the racist ruling class, such as
affirmative action and voting rights.
Abu-Jamal's spirit and outlook were forged during this
heroic struggle against the police, the courts and all the
instruments of state repression. He stands not only for the
struggle against police brutality but also the struggle against
the racist death penalty, the prison-industrial complex, and
for the solidarity of all those fighting oppression.
Although Abu-Jamal is an individual revolutionary fighter
and Yugoslavia is a country heroically defending its
independence against the merciless onslaught of imperialist
bombing and threats of invasion, they are both targets of the
same ruling class. It is hopelessly trying to stamp out the
results of past accomplishments by the movement of the workers
and the oppressed.
But in fact, just the opposite is already happening. At this
very moment the struggle against racism and police brutality is
gathering new momentum in this country. At the same time new
forces, which can see past the lies of the big business media,
are rapidly entering the anti-war struggle. As Clinton,
Albright and the Pentagon seek to widen the war and drag the
masses into the bloody aggression, this will inevitably bring
together these two great movements and awaken a whole new era
of struggle and resistance.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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