Facing threats and
bribes
Will Yugoslavia resist
U.S.-backed counter-revolution?
By
Sara Flounders
The
corporate media would like everyone to believe that an authentic, national
popular movement independent of the U.S. and NATO is rising up against the
Yugoslav government, and especially President Slobodan Milosevic. But to believe
this would be a serious
mistake.
That's
because the media leave out that Washington and its European allies have
subsidized this movement's leadership with huge sums of money, bolstered them
with enormous political support, exhausted the Yugoslav population with war
threats and sanctions, demonized Milosevic by spreading lies and false charges,
and goaded the opposition to Milosevic to risk civil war.
The
U.S. leaders don't just want to remove Milosevic, they want to smash Yugoslavia
with a counter-revolution that overthrows whatever remains from the 1945
socialist
revolution.
The
opposition, though it led the first round of the presidential election by 49
percent to 39 percent, has as of Oct. 4 refused to participate in the runoff
election scheduled for Oct. 8. Instead it is trying to force a confrontation
with the government through strikes and
demonstrations.
Washington
tries to buy
election
The
U.S. government has admitted to authorizing $77 dollars to bankroll the
opposition movement. On Sept. 25 the U.S. House of Representatives voted another
$105 million to fund the "democracy movement" in
Yugoslavia.
In
comparison George W. Bush has raised $177 million to fund his presidential bid.
Al Gore has raised $126 million. (Federal Election Commission data compiled by
the Center for Responsive
Politics.)
Yugoslavia
is about the size of the state of Ohio, with a population less than 4 percent of
the United States. If you also account for the difference in average income,
this would be comparable here to a $30 billion donation from a foreign enemy to
a U.S. presidential candidate. And this is in an economy that has been strangled
by U.S.-led
sanctions.
As
in the U.S. election campaign, there are also lots of soft money donations. The
congressional appropriation is just the tip of the iceberg. Both the Sept. 20
New York Times and the Sept. 19 Washington Post describe the suitcases of money
handed over at the border. Advisers, pollsters, TV, radio and newspapers are all
paid for by the U.S. government.
And
this sum omits whatever the Soros Foundation or Germany and other West European
powers pumped
in.
Despite
all this foreign funding, the opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica claims
that he is an independent who would refuse to turn over any government official
to the Hague Tribunal. He promises Serbia will remain intact.
Kostunica
counts on the U.S. and European Union's promises to lift sanctions if Milosevic
is no longer president. He seems to have forgotten that the U.S. also promised
Milosevic that if he signed the 1995 Dayton Accords on Bosnia, the sanctions
would be lifted. Milosevic signed. The sanctions
remained.
Washington
clarifies its goal:
counter-revolution
A
new bill before Congress makes Washington's aims in this election clear. HR
1064, called the Serbian Democratization Act of 2000, stipulates that sanctions
will remain in place until Yugoslavia agrees to "cooperate fully with The Hague
and hand over anyone charged." A new government must agree to detach Kosovo,
grant "autonomy to Vojvodina"--the region in the north of Serbia--and "give up
any claim to previously owned property of the Yugoslav Federation, including its
missions, offices and consulates."
U.S.
intervention is hardly limited to funding the opposition and planning for its
administration after the election. Part of Yugoslavia--Kosovo--is under military
occupation by the very forces funding the opposition. The Pentagon held joint
military maneuvers with Croatia--whose government is hostile to Yugoslavia--and
a landing invasion exercise on an island off shore in the Adriatic Sea during
the Sept. 24
elections.
Washington's
goals go far beyond gross interference in an election campaign against one man,
Milosevic. That's why the U.S. strategists wanted Kostunica to refuse to
participate in the runoff election. They are not satisfied with an orderly
transfer of some government positions if Milosevic's Socialist Party-led
coalition would still command the Yugoslavia Parliament, whose control it
retained in the Sept. 24
election.
Strikes
and shutdowns organized by the opposition show that Washington's real aim is
fomenting a civil war and the violent overthrow of the whole government
apparatus, replacing it with a weak government completely compliant to U.S.
demands. The U.S. especially wants to destroy the Yugoslav Army, which has its
roots in the socialist revolution of
1945.
Kostunica
and
G17
Why
are all the imperialist forces throwing such enormous support to
Kostunica?
Kostunica
is backed by a coalition of 18 parties called the Democratic Opposition of
Serbia. DOS embraces the reconstruction plan of a group of Yugoslav economists
called the Group of 17-Plus. The mission statement of the G17 openly brags that
many of the groups' economists work for the World Bank and the International
Monetary
Fund.
For
anyone who holds illusions that the NATO countries--the imperialists--might
actually be supporting a "democratic alternative," it would help to review the
economic plan of the G17 to understand the enthusiasm of U.S. and West European
banks and corporations for
Kostunica.
Michel
Chossudovsky is a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa and the
author of a well-known book on IMF policies, "The Globalization of Poverty."
Chossudovsky showed that the G17 is funded by the Washington-based "Center for
International Private Enterprise" which is an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce. In an article co-authored by Jared Israel and available on
www.tenc.net, and developed in depth in the book "NATO in the Balkans,"
Chossudofsky shows the role of the IMF in dismantling
Yugoslavia.
This
whole apparatus is directly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy,
which the U.S. Congress created in order to finance operations that the Central
Intelligence Agency used to fund clandestinely. This is not speculation. Allen
Weinstein, who planned the NED, said, "A lot of what we do today was done
covertly 25 years ago by the
CIA."
The
G17 is wholly committed to capitalism, free markets and the dismantling of the
public sector. They are committed to doing away with programs that subsidize
food, rent or transportation, along with free medical care. World Bank and IMF
policies in country after country force businesses, both public and private,
into bankruptcy. Then foreign corporations buy them out at rock bottom prices. A
dependent colonial economy is the
result.
IMF
experiment led to
breakup
Yugoslavia
went through a wrenching experiment with IMF privatization in 1989. Professor
Veselin Vukotic, now elder statesman of the G17, was then the minister of
privatization under Yugoslav Premier Ante Markovic.
Vukotic
worked on a World Bank plan to privatize Yugoslav industry. Yugoslav companies
were selected for bankruptcy or liquidation. This plan orchestrated the breakup
of 50 percent of Yugoslav industry, wiping out 1,100 industrial firms. Over
614,000 industrial workers were laid off, out of 2.7 million. Industrial output
shrank by 21
percent.
As
social programs were unraveling, unemployment skyrocketing and wages plunging,
Yugoslavia as a federation began to unravel. There were strikes and worker
actions. But the economic chaos also gave rise to separatist tendencies among
the six republics that made up the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia.
In
the 1991 elections Serbia and Montenegro tried to reject these disastrous
economic policies. The regimes in other republics cast their lots with the plans
of the Western bankers.
In
January 1991 U.S. Foreign Appropriations legislation ordered a cutoff in trade,
loans or aid to any republic that held elections that the State Department did
not approve. The Foreign Appropriations bill each year legislates all manner of
strangulation against the economy of any country not moving fast enough toward a
capitalist market economy. For attempting some resistance to the plans of the
World Bank, Serbia was
targeted.
In
the years of economic strangulation caused by the sanctions that the West
imposed on the two remaining republics of Yugoslavia, many of these economic
plans have been reversed, increasing public ownership. The G17 promises that
Kostunica's election would mean Yugoslavia would quickly adapt "free market"
policies and privatize the entire
economy.
The
miners'
strike
Reports
in the Western media on the Kolubara miners' strike indicate that the government
has lost at least some of the support it once had in the working class, and that
workers are dissatisfied with the decline in their living standards.
No
one sympathetic to the workers' struggle can be pleased that police have to be
sent in against workers. The world should remember, however, what happened to
the Polish shipyard workers in Gdansk who led the struggle against the Polish
government. The new neo-liberal regime shut the shipyard as it was no longer
profitable on the world market, and all the workers lost their jobs. Miners in
Russia and Romania faced the same IMF
shutdowns.
It
would be foolish to believe that the U.S. government, which has suppressed
democracy and overthrown legally elected popular governments from Guate mala to
Iran to Greece to Chile to Grenada to Haiti, is interested in democratic process
in Yugoslavia. What it wants is to impose savage capitalism on Serbia and
Montenegro.
Kostunica
claims Yugoslavia under his administration will become a "normal Western
government." But what does that mean when there are only two kinds of status for
countries in Europe
today?
Yugoslavia
can't join the imperialist powers like Germany, France or even Austria, which
held colonial empires and whose economies today have a global reach. Its only
choice is to share the fate of Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Ukraine.
The
economy and the standard of living in these countries is worse than it is in
Yugoslavia, even after 78 days of NATO bombing and eight years of international
sanctions. The people in these countries are the victims of 10 years of economic
restructuring. Colonial subjugation and the dismantling of industry have been
imposed on them. And that's the choice Kostunica and his U.S. tutors offer
Yugoslavia.
What
to
do
The
International Action Center has issued a call directed to those in the United
States who want to show solidarity with Yugoslavia and its struggle to resist
counter-revolution and a U.S./NATO
takeover.
In
response to the U.S. and Western Europe's blatant use of funds to influence the
Yugoslav election, the IAC and its founder, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey
Clark, have called for a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the full extent of
U.S. intervention in the Yugoslav elections. It is seeking evidence of this
intervention and hopes to expose it as a crime, just as it did with the war
crimes the U.S. and other NATO forces committed against Yugoslavia in
1999.
Interested
readers can contact
the IAC
at (212) 633-6646 or
e-mail
[email protected] Information is also
available
on
the Web site www.iacenter.org.
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