YUGOSLAVIA
Washington's history of 'regime change'
By John Catalinotto
Iraq is not the first country where Washington has demanded
"regime change."
A collection of related articles in the Jan. 27 Christian
Science Monitor compared U.S. threats of "regime change" by
warfare in Iraq with its successful overthrows of governments
in Guatemala, Chile, Panama, the Dominican Republic and
Grenada, and some less successful attempts, as in Cuba.
To accomplish its goals, Washington has used economic
sanctions, diplomatic pressure, trade embargoes and support for
local forces trying to overthrow the targeted governments. It
has also used bombing and military invasion.
The Monitor articles mention another brutal regime change
the United States carried out, in Yugoslavia. What is
significant is that this establishment newspaper is now
exposing some of the lies it and other media told about
Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2000 to demonize the Yugoslav
government and its president, Slobodan Milosevic.
In 1999, only a few tens of thousands of people in this
country, about half of them Serbian immigrants and their
families, actively protested the Pentagon's brutal bombing of
the Balkans.
Today, protesters in the hundreds of thousands in the United
States, and millions more across the world, are actively
demonstrating, signing petitions, writing letters and marching
in the streets in an attempt to stop a murderous U.S.
aggression against Iraq before it begins. Probably few are
sympathetic to or supporters of the Iraqi government. But they
know that the Bush administration's plan to invade Iraq has
nothing to do with improving the Iraqi government and
everything to do with oil profits and geo-strategic power.
In 1999, however, the media-industry propaganda machine
managed to mislead a large section of progressive public
opinion into believing that the Clinton administration's war in
the Balkans had to do with ending dictatorship and stopping
genocide against some of the non-Serbian peoples of Yugoslavia.
It was successful in hiding the real goal of the United States
and Western European big powers:turning all of Eastern Europe
back into a colony of Western imperialism. At that time, the
European imperialists supported the U.S. war.
The Monitor articles give an opportunity to re-examine that
period and to reinforce resistance to future propaganda
offensives.
Admits Milosevic no dictator
Four years ago, as the countdown for war against Yugoslavia
was on, the corporate media in the United States and Western
Europe depicted Serbs as beasts and Milosevic as a Hitler. Now,
the Monitor admits that far from being a brutal dictator,
"Milosevic never resorted to dictatorial repression of his
political opponents at home.
"Indeed, opposition parties ran all the country's major
towns and cities after municipal elections in December 1996;
independent radio and TV stations managed to broadcast;
opposition-leaning dailies and weeklies published."
The Monitor doesn't add a relevant point here. After a
U.S.-backed coup overthrew Milosevic in October 2000, the
so-called Democratic Opposition of Serbia, which took over,
turned out to be not so democratic. It took over the media that
had been favorable toward the then-ruling Socialist Party of
Serbia and its allies, while keeping control of all the
non-government media.
These had been described in the West as an "alternative"
media, but in reality were funded by U.S. and Western European
imperialism. The biggest source of funds was billionaire George
Soros's Open Society Institute. This group opened up shop in
Belgrade in 1991, "and over the next nine years distributed
more than $100 million. ... The money bought newsprint for
independent papers, kept publishing houses alive, and funded
the growth of [anti-Milosevic radio station] B-92 as it set up
local stations in towns controlled by the opposition."
The U.S. Congress voted additional funds. U.S. agents pushed
the 18 political parties in the DOS to unite for the election.
As the Monitor put it, "U.S. diplomats knocked their heads
together until they formed a cohesive and united coalition"
that was a "credible alternative." They picked Vojoslav
Kostunica to run against Milosevic because he was "reputed to
be honest, and sufficiently nationalistic to broaden the
opposition's appeal."
It took nine years of subversion and economic sanctions--and
three months of bombing that targeted Yugoslavia's economic
infrastructure--before the U.S. succeeded in "regime change."
During the first six of those nine years Western
European--especially German--and U.S. imperialism were
undermining and tearing apart Yugoslavia by fostering the
breakaway of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia, leading to civil
war.
The Monitor now admits that the overthrow of Milosevic in
October 2000 "brought to fruition a three-year campaign by the
U.S. and other Western governments to dislodge the Yugoslav
leader by strangling his country's economy with sanctions and
rocking it with bombs during the Kosovo war." This is an
admission that the effort to bring down the Yugoslav government
began at the latest in 1997, before the struggle in Kosovo that
was allegedly the reason for U.S. intervention.
Since the overthrow, two-thirds of Yugoslavs have sunk below
the poverty level. The suicide rate among elderly people has
reached new heights. Health care has become unaffordable for
most.
And so few people voted in Serbia's presidential election
that it was voided twice last fall. Kostunica became virtually
without power after outright Western puppets like Serbian
Premier Zoran Djindjic took over.
Role of Milosevic
Some of the recent media attacks on Workers World Party,
centering on its participation in the anti-war movement, charge
WWP with being followers of Milosevic. Yet any serious
researcher could find WWP articles in the early 1990s that
raised criticisms of the Milosevic leadership in Yugoslavia
from a socialist perspective.
Once U.S. imperialism and its NATO partners--who are also
rivals--targeted Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav leadership
resisted having their country turned into a colony, WWP
supported Yugoslavia against NATO. WWP would defend any
government's resistance to being colonized by the imperialists.
This is in the best internationalist traditions of the left,
which supported the feudal emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie,
when he led the resistance to an invasion by the Italian
imperialist government in the 1930s.
Since Milosevic was captured in 2001 and kidnapped to The
Hague to stand "trial" in a NATO court for alleged war crimes,
he has conducted a political defense, with very little outside
support, that has skillfully bared the intrigues of the
imperialists to dismember his country. Washington meant the
farce in The Hague to be a show trial, but the former Yugoslav
president has effectively turned it into an exposure of
U.S./NATO war crimes against Yugoslavia.
That's why it gets so little media coverage here--and why
Milosevic has earned the respect of working-class activists
worldwide.
The writer is co-editor of a book about the 1999 war on
Yugoslavia entitled "Hidden Agenda: the U.S.-NATO
Takeover of Yugoslavia," published by the International Action
Center in 2002.
Reprinted from the Feb. 13, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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