National Self-Determination in the Balkans and the Middle East: What About When More Than One Nation Inhabits the Same Spot?

By Michael Karadjis

August 26, 2005

Contents:

1. Right to Self-Determination, the Asia-Minor Catastrophe, Cyprus and Palestine
2. Titoist Yugoslavia and the Bosnian ‘Post-Capitalist Nation’
3. Alleged Different Interpretations of the Right to Self-Determination in the Break-Up of Yugoslavia
4. Croatia and the right to self-determination
5. Reactionary ethnic dismemberment of multi-ethnic Bosnia
6. Imperialist Intervention Against Bosnia
7. The Right of Return in Bosnia and Croatia
8. Kosova – The Right of Return and the Right to Self-Determination

This essay arose out of a discussion on the Green Left Discussion list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion/) about issues related to the national question in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. In particular, given my recognition (in common with most of the left) of the right of the Kosovar Albanians to self-determination, the question arose of to what extent the Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia, and the Croat minority in Bosnia, should have the same right, in which case the Serbian nationalists in Croatia and Bosnia and Croatian nationalists in Bosnia were fighting for ‘national liberation’. In my response below, I show that this ignores the difference between oppressor and oppressed, ignores the ethnically mixed nature of the regions in question, and is at odds with the actual realities in these conflicts. As an introduction to the question, I will look at Marxist attitudes to certain other historical conflicts where the populations were ethnically mixed.

1. Right to Self-Determination, the Asia-Minor Catastrophe, Cyprus and Palestine

Despite the Luxemburgian tendency among sections of the left today to dismiss the Leninist view on the right of nations to self-determination as being no longer relevant, this paper will not aim to get into these polemics. On the contrary, I start from the standpoint that the right of nations to self-determination is not only fundamental to Leninist and socialist politics, but also simple common sense.

Trying to militarily suppress peoples who inhabit largely contiguous areas to prevent them from their right to exercise their statehood is unlikely to succeed, violates fundamental norms of proletarian internationalism, and can only lead to catastrophe to all concerned, regardless of the allegedly “progressive” nature that some may grant the oppressor regime or the “reactionary” nature that they imbue to the oppressed. Attempts for a quarter, a half or a full century to suppress struggles of Palestinians, Kurds, Kosovar Albanians, Kashmiris, Eritreans, Timorese, Tamils, Irish, Basques, Chechens, Moros etc are strong enough evidence of that. The worry that the issue may give an opening to imperialist countries to intervene not only does not alter this, but strengthens its importance – it is precisely violations of the rights of oppressed nations that give these openings.

One of the problems, however, is how to apply these general principles in cases where populations are mixed, as in Palestine, Bosnia, Cyprus etc. In an ideal world, we would advocate that they remain mixed, live together in peace, working class unity! The realities of capitalism, however, tend to pull peoples apart. In some cases there is clearly an oppressor nation, while in other cases there is not, but in all cases if a socialist movement is not powerful enough to fight bourgeois nationalist tendencies, then catastrophe, ethnic cleansing and partition results, as we have seen between Greece and Turkey in 1922, India and Pakistan, in Cyprus, Bosnia etc.

With the break-up of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, for example, there were many Greek communities in what is now Turkey and Turkish communities in what is now Greece, while in the remaining Ottoman-held parts of the Balkans, a great mixture of nationalities coexisted. The Balkan socialist parties informed the eighth congress of the Second International in 1910 that ‘a free federation of all the Balkan republics’ was the only proletarian solution, and at the Belgrade conference, the Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Turkish and Romanian Social Democratic parties agreed on this view. It was accepted by the Second International in 1911 and endorsed by Lenin, and a Balkan Socialist Federation was founded at an illegal conference in Bucharest during World War I.

However, while this was a correct proletarian ideal, the reality was that the Turkish national bourgeois state was consolidating itself out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire, first under the ‘Young Turks’ and then under Kemal Ataturk after 1919, and the Greek national bourgeois state, which originally formed from a revolt against the same Ottoman empire, was consolidating in its main ethnic areas and ready to lash out in expansionist schemes for the ‘Megali Idea’, ie the ‘Big Idea’ of a ‘Greater Greece’.

At the same time, new small bourgeois states in the Balkans like Bulgaria and Serbia had similar expansionist aims. Allying with Greece, the three countries attacked Ottoman remnants in Europe in 1912-13 (Macedonia, Thrace, Kosova etc) and subjugated non-Greek, non-Serb and non-Bulgarian peoples (particularly Macedonians and Albanians) to violent repression, forced assimilation and ethnic cleansing. These conquests were blessed by the imperialist powers with whom they were allied in World War I. In 1918, the first ‘Yugoslavia’ was set up as a ruthlessly Serbian-dominated capitalist state, when the expanded Serbia of 1913 joined together with Croatia and Slovenia which had been freed from the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire.

Following Ataturk’s revolution that overthrew the Ottoman Empire and established modern Turkey in 1919, the new regime was confronted with imperialist hostility and a campaign to divide it amongst the various imperialist powers. With open British encouragement, the Greek nationalist regime of Venizelos attacked deep into Turkey, attempting to establish the ‘Megali Idea’ via claiming to defend the rights of the Greek minority. However, the invasion went far beyond minority areas and even came close to Ankara.

The attitude of Greek Communists of the early 3rd International was to oppose adventure into Asia Minor, and advocate a socialist federation of the Balkans including Turkey, with full rights for all minorities and the rights of ethnically compact regions to join ‘motherlands’. However, to the extent that a socialist federation of equal peoples was not about to happen in reality, they proposed that all ethnically disputed or mixed regions have the right to a referendum on whether to join the Greek, Turkish or other states (‘The Anti-War Conference of Thessaloniki in 1918’, in ‘Without Borders: Anti-War Pages’, Anti-War Anti-Nationalist League, Athens, 1993). While no solution is perfect, this was the best internationalist position in the circumstances. Of course, that is not what happened as capitalist barbarism triumphed with the expulsion of 1.5 million Greeks from Turkey and 500,000 Turks from Greece and the consolidation of two bourgeois national states, both of which maintain ruthlessly chauvinistic regimes and dominant ideologies to this day.

A much later expansion of this catastrophe was the failure of the Communist slogan ‘Greek and Turkish workers unite’ in Cyprus and the attempt to create an independent multi-ethnic republic there, with the Greek colonels coup and Turkish invasion of 1974 leading to complete ethnic partition along lines which did not previously exist. While then issue is far too complex to deal with here, again there was a conflict between bourgeois nationalist and proletarian orientations. When the struggle against British colonialism broke out in the 1950s, the Greek nationalist leadership of the majority Greek population fought not for independence, but for ‘Enosis’, or union, with Greece. This was supported by the US, trying to break up the British empire, and seeing the strongly right-wing Greek regime as a dependable client. This naturally was opposed by the Turkish minority, and the Turkish nationalist leadership, with support from Britain and Turkey, instead put forward the slogan of ‘Taksim’ or partition. Only the slogan of independence for a multi-ethnic Cyprus could have avoided the catastrophe, and this was the only way the two peoples could exercise self-determination in a democratic rather than catastrophist way. The Communist Party (AKEL) had this orientation, but very inconsistently; when independence resulted anyway, it was soon torn apart by the bourgeois chauvinist forces.

Today in the Middle East, Israel has been carved out as a colonial-settler state which now serves as a national state for the Israelis, a nation that did not previously exist, but was formed by migrating people of the Jewish faith from various nations. Where they formed their nation in 1947-8 was not empty, they had to ethnically cleanse the majority of the Palestinian population to create a ‘Jewish’ state. Quite a separate issue from the post-1967 occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, which had been left out in 1948, is that the ‘Jewish’ character of this ‘1948 Israeli’ state can only exist as long as the Palestinian refugees are denied the elementary democratic right to return to their homes, and the Palestinian minority remaining are denied equal rights.

Therefore, we cannot support a ‘right to self-determination’ for the colonial settler stratum of Israelis (and any other Jew in the world under the ‘Law of Return’) where this ‘right’ is expressed as the right to displace other people. If Palestinian refugees returned there would be as many or more non-Jews than Jews and therefore if normal bourgeois-democratic rules apply, there would be no ‘Jewish state’. That is why nearly all of the organised left, with the curious exception of Workers’ Liberty, has long supported the original program of the PLO of a ‘democratic, secular Palestine’ where Jews, Christians and Muslims (and for that matter atheists and whoever) live together with equal rights, including rights to develop their cultures etc. The transitional stage of supporting a Palestinian mini-state, as envisioned by the PLO, does not negate this, because this call is together with continually calling for the right to return of refugees to ‘Israel proper’ as well.

In other words, the reality on the ground does not allow for a territorial division into two ethnic states without recognition of ethnic cleansing. Aside from the peculiar situation of Palestine, where the oppressor nation was formed in this particular way, there are other situations where the only democratic alternative, and certainly the only alternative that could be supported by socialists, was similarly a democratic, secular, multi-ethic state, aiming at maintaining and strengthening whatever unity the working classes had achieved via their living together. One of the most obvious of such places was in the former Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia.

2. Titoist Yugoslavia and the Bosnian ‘Post-Capitalist Nation’

Tito’s Communist post-1945 Yugoslavia was an attempt – bungled and bureaucratic to be sure – to bring different nations together in the form of a federation and under the ideological slogan of proletarian ‘Brotherhood and Unity’. This included the right of each national group – except the Albanians in Kosova – to have its own republic within the federation, with a right to self-determination including secession if it chose.

There were two main anomalies, both in regions with large Muslim populations. One was Kosova, where Albanians – though the third largest nationality in the federation – were denied a republic and instead were granted mere autonomy within the Serb republic. Even this autonomy did not amount to much in the first 30 years, but after Tito’s new 1974 constitution autonomy was upgraded, though they were still denied the formal equality of a republic. This was combined with the economic level in Kosova being around a quarter of the Yugoslav average. As Tito’s Yugoslavia made enormous socio-economic advances, becoming a highly industrialised country by the 1960s with living standards approaching the west, Kosova remained unambiguously part of the 3rd world. All this was combined with the fact that the Albanians, who had been ruthlessly conquered in 1913 by bourgeois Serbia with Anglo-French backing, had never accepted incorporation into either this first Serb-dominated capitalist ‘Yugoslavia’ or the second, Communist Yugoslavia. Thus in every respect, Kosova was unambiguously an oppressed nation within Yugoslavia, for which we support the right to self-determination, including either independence or union with Albania, as the people choose. And as the bulk of Albanians, whether in Albania, Kosova, or as minorities in north-west Macedonia, south-east Serbia or parts of Montenegro, live in largely compact majorities over a contiguous region, this right to form an Albanian state covering all these peoples, if they wished this themselves, was feasible and supportable, regardless of whether we thought it was the best solution to the Albanian problem.

The second anomaly was in Bosnia, where Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims – all speaking the same language but divided by religion, culture and national identity – lived either in mixed communities in many cities or in mixed localities, or in localities with a dominant group but which were interspersed among others dominated by another group. Thus this republic had no one dominant nation, and was officially a republic of all three nations. This was possibly the best proletarian solution in the circumstances.

However, as industry developed and an urban working class grew, the “three nations” in Bosnia living next to each other in the same blocks of units, working together in the same factories, producing for the same economy, intermarrying and producing mixed children, were becoming “one nation”: Bosnian, or ‘Yugoslav’. There was a category called ‘Yugoslavs’ in the census, but was not encouraged, possibly due to below the surface Serbian and Croatian nationalist sentiments, who both had a claim on Bosnia. A large percentage of ‘Yugoslavs’ in earlier surveys were Muslims, before Tito recognised their own ‘nation’ in the 1970s, but it also included mixed Bosnians and Serbs and Croats who associated more with the Yugoslav ideal.

In my opinion, the Bosnian nation was a kind of ‘post-capitalist’ nation formed via the real unity of the working class in the region where they were most inter-mixed. While the ‘Yugoslavist’ ideal did not succeed throughout Yugoslavia, it came closest to success in the Bosnian working classes in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica etc, the big industrial cities of the central Bosnian region.
This fact, plus the very ethnic mix throughout the country, was a crucial aspect in how Marxists viewed the national question as Yugoslavia broke up and Bosnian independence was posed. But before that, we need to briefly look at the national question as it had unfolded before that in the break-up of Yugoslavia.

3. Alleged Different Interpretations of the Right to Self-Determination in the Break-Up of Yugoslavia

One alleged difference of interpretation of the right to self-determination of Yugoslav nations was over whether this right applied to the constituent republics in their present borders, or to the constituent peoples, hence implying a change of borders. It is alleged that the Serbian nationalist leadership under Milosevic advocated the right of ‘peoples’ rather than that of the republics, in order to claim Serb minority populations in Croatia and Bosnia for part of a greater Serbia which would keep the name ‘Yugoslavia’, if republics like Croatia and Bosnia exercised their right of self-determination and seceded. Therefore these other republics should be partitioned between their Serb populations and others, based on the alleged principle of the right of the constituent ‘peoples’ rather than republics.

This may sound very democratic, but there were a number of problems and inconsistencies. The medievalist, reactionary Serb nationalist movement headed by Milosevic, Draskovic, Seseljand others was in fact applying the exact opposite principle everywhere else that it could – and it could due to the overwhelming domination of the central apparatus and military high command by Serbs, and thus the use of the Yugoslav military for nationalist Serb aims. When the autonomy of Vojvodina – a multi-ethnic province within Serbia (which, like Kosova, had federal representation) – was crushed in 1988, merely being incorporated into ‘Serbia proper’, there were no allowances made for the right of northern half of the province, which was dominated by its Hungarian, Croat and Slovak minorities, to form another republic or maintain its own autonomy.

More seriously, Kosovar autonomy itself was crushed in the blood of dozens of striking Albanian miners in early 1989. Clearly, if it was the ‘peoples’ principle that was to apply, Milosevic and co would have shed northern Vojvodina and almost all of Kosova (aside from the fact that Kosova should have been a republic anyway, so would have had both ‘rights’, of majority people and of republic). The Kosovar Albanians organised their own unrecognised referendum in 1990, and 99 percent of Albanians, the great majority in the province, voted not for a return to some “autonomy” nonsense under Milosevic’s jackboots but for independence. All imperialist powers comprehensively ignored this declaration of independence by the Kosovars, and the apartheid Milosevic imposed on them, for the next decade, and continue to oppose their universal demand for independence.

It is curious that many on the left, due to some strange nostalgia for what they think was only Serb Partisan resistance to the Nazis in World War II (in fact all nationalities included both Partisans and collaborators), oppose this right of self-determination for the absolute Albanian majority in Kosova, yet call for the right of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to have their own states or unite with Serbia. This is inconsistent to say the least, and so the question I am here answering in reverse should in reality be for them to explain.

But furthermore, these same leftists almost never refer to the autonomy referendums among the Muslim minority in the Sanjak region of Serbia and Montenegro in 1991, and that of the Albanian minority in the Presevo valley of south-east Serbia in 1992. Both these referendums were comprehensively ignored by Milosevic and the “international community”, as well as by the pro-Serbian wing of the left, despite their heavy focus on referendums among minority Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia.

Surely, if “the Serbs” (which many confused leftists apparently think is the name of a territorial region rather than a scattered ethnic group) in Croatia and Bosnia had the right to split from their republics and join Serbia, then they should also grant this right to Albanians where they live as a compact majority in the Presevo valley in south Serbia, contiguous with Kosova, to unite with Kosova (and Albania if they choose)? And they should also recognise the same rights for the Sanjak Muslims, where they live as a majority community in a region which would almost cut Serbia off from Montenegro, to autonomy, independence or union with Bosnia, as they might choose? And of the Vojvodina Hungarians to autonomy or unity with Hungary, or the Vojvodina Croats and Hungarians to autonomy or unity with Croatia. In fact, they say nothing about whether they support the right of these minorities to dismember the Serbian republic, in the same way as they advocate the dismembering of the Croatian and Bosnian republics, or in some cases openly oppose this same right for non-Serbs as they demand for Serbs.

4. Croatia and the right to self-determination

Getting back to self-determination for republics rather than ‘peoples’, what of the right of Slovenia and Croatia to self-determination? The Serb nationalist movement had no problem with Slovenia, as there was no Serb minority there. In fact, they also had no problem with Croatia, as long as they could seize regions from Croatia for Serbia, on the basis, allegedly, of self-determination for ‘peoples’, while supporting the idea of Croatia doing the same with Croat minorities in Bosnia. Alleged enemies Milosevic and Tudjman met in April 1991 to organise the partition of Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia. However, many in the western left – an entirely different group to the far-right Serb nationalist movement which some of them tailed – believed Croatia did not have this right, because they believe that Croats are genetically wicked people due to their confusion between nations and political currents in World War II half a century earlier.

First of all, despite this odd “left” position, let us affirm that, in principle, Croats have the same rights as everyone else, to self-determination up to independence. The fact that Croatia was not an oppressed nation like Kosova is not relevant here. Croatia and Serbia were both highly industrialised sections of former Yugoslavia, both with highly modernised agricultural sectors in the most fertile parts of the country.

It is true that many Croats saw themselves as oppressed, because of the overwhelming domination of the central Yugoslav apparatus and military hierarchy by Serbs, the extensive domination even of the Croatian League of Communists by the Serb minority (in a country where this was the only legal party and party membership was the route to jobs in officialdom), the domination of the Croatian republic police force by the Serb minority etc. On the one hand, Yugoslavia did have many of these Serb-dominated aspects; on the other hand, the institutional set-up under Titoism was based on theoretical equality. There was an active tension between the two.

Was Croatia thus oppressed, and Serbia an oppressor nation? I would not put it that way. Serbs, like Croats and Muslims, were mostly workers and agricultural proletariat, and there was no Serbian national bourgeoisie. However, this Serb domination of the bureaucracy in an era when the bureaucracy was in the process, as elsewhere in E. Europe, of transforming itself into a capitalist class, must be taken into account

With the unravelling of Yugoslavia and the ongoing destruction of the Yugoslav federal set-up by Milosevic and his reactionary, violently anti-Titoist nationalist movement, including sacking the governments of Montenegro, Vojvodina and Kosova, control of the central state and of the massive military machine could have been turned into the creation of a state, like bourgeois Yugoslavia in 1918-41, where the Serbs became the oppressor nation. Other nations had the right to escape from this if they found no other solution (and if no multi-ethnic, proletarian alternative was able to resist Milosevic).

(One participant in the discussion, named Jim Yarker, tries to make Serbs the oppressed by bringing up ancient history: “The agrarian reforms undertaken in the 1st Yugoslavia (ie in 1918) in fact distributed land from a mostly Muslim landed gentry in Bosnia to Serb sharecroppers.” This is the same kind of irrelevancy as pointing out that the British in Sri Lanka long ago favoured the Tamil minority to help rule over the Sinhala majority, as if to say therefore the Tamils should be damned for ever after, though they were clearly the oppressed in post-independence Sri Lanka. The same participant also brought up the fact of the Kurds being used by the Ottomans in the Armenian genocide as somehow relevant to the debate on Kurdistan in the 21st century. For some on the left, the Serbs’ “600 year struggle against the Ottoman empire,” where the latter takes the form of living Bosnian Muslims and Albanians, is the centre of modern Balkan politics, mimicking the right-wing Chetnik-inspired Serb nationalist ideology).

Nevertheless, if Croatia had the right to self-determination, then surely I must also answer whether the Serb minority in Croatia had the same right as the Croat majority to independence, whether the left should have supported their right to set up the Serb Krajina republic, and Serb republics in Western and Eastern Slavonia, three regions of Croatia taken over by the Yugoslav army and massively armed Croatian Serb rebels in 1991.

Firstly, I believe Serbs had a right to autonomy or independence in the Krajina region, on the simple basis that it had a Serb majority – based on the same principles that I put at the beginning about the Asia Minor catastrophe. This is despite the fact that Serbs were a majority of only 69 percent – much smaller than the majority status of Albanians in Kosova – and the far-right SDS (Serb Democratic Party) leaders ethnically cleansed the Croat minority of 60-70,000 people from the Krajina, an abominable act that we must oppose despite supporting a general right to self-determination. The SDS was the Chetnik-inspired party set up by Milosevic cronies in Croatia and Bosnia to steal minority Serb support away from the Croat and Bosnian Communist Parties, which had had the support of all nationalities, including Serbs, based on their opposition to national chauvinism.

As for the small enclave of western Slavonia, the region taken over was overwhelmingly Croat in composition, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of another 100,000 or so Croats. There was not one region in all western Slavonia with a Serb majority, so the SDS had no right to conquer it as a ‘Serb state’. However, one problem was that the part of this region with more Serbs was further away from the border of the Bosnian Serb ‘republic’ it was carving out around Banja Luka in northern Bosnia. So late in the 1991 war, the Serboslav army (the ‘Yugoslav army’ was by now completely Serb at both the officer level and among the ranks) ordered the withdrawal of its troops from the northern sector of Western Slavonia, where there were more Serbs, allowing the ethnic cleansing of 70,000 Serbs by the Croatian armed forces, while keeping the southern part, where Serbs had not formed a majority in any one of the eleven municipalities. Meanwhile, even those expelled Serbs were not re-settled in the southern part of Western Slavonia, but sent to another region, Eastern Slavonia, where they needed more Serbs because they were also in a minority there, but was more strategically important because this was the only of the three reasons bordering Serbia. Confused? No doubt. But clearly enough, ‘self-determination’ had nothing to do with it.

As for Eastern Slavonia, the population of the whole region originally conquered in 1991 was only 14 percent Serb, and making this region a ‘Serb state’ meant the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Croats. Late in 1991, Croatian armed forces and nationalist militia managed to take some of this back and drive out the Serb minority, but at the end of the war, the ‘Serb state’ still covered a region that was only 30-35 percent Serb, so some 100,000 Croats and tens of thousands of other non-Serbs remained expelled.

Thus the carving out of a ‘Serb republic’ in Croatia meant the expulsion of some half a million Croats, the big majority of the population of the three regions altogether, and even as Croatian forces retook some of it by late 1991, there remained at least 250,000 Croats ethnically cleansed. It is astonishing that the great majority of the left, even the better sections of the left who later sympathised with Bosnia’s Muslims and have no sympathies for Serbian reaction, almost never make mention of the right to return of hundreds of thousands of Croats brutally expelled by the ‘Serboslav’ army and its SDS creation from various parts of their own country, including Croat-majority regions, in 1991. This is despite the fact that they almost always, when talking about the Balkans, correctly condemn Croatia’s ethnic cleansing of 150,000 Serbs when it retook the region four years later, as if this later terror was not directly connected to the former. Croats are simply not politically correct.

The importance of Croat-majority Eastern Slavonia is that here is where the bulk of the Serbo-Croatian war of 1991 took place, as it was strategically on the Serbian border but inconveniently populated by the wrong people. The famous 3-month siege and destruction of the historic multi-ethnic, Croat-majority city of Vukovar was in Eastern Slavonia, as was the systematic destruction of Croat Osijek, later recaptured by the Croatian forces. Vukovar, with its Croat majority, became part of the ‘Serb republic’. Was this ‘self-determination for the Serbs’? Did the Croat majority have the right of return to Vukovar? Why did ‘self-determination’ for Serbs involve destroying the largest industries, where Serb and Croat workers had led militant multi-ethnic strikes and demonstrations against IMF-Milosevic austerity drives? In reality, it was such symbols of proletarian multi-ethnic unity that was exactly what Serbian reaction aimed to destroy. As for the similarly massive Serboslav army bombardment of historic Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast, its population was about 2 percent Serb.

THIS was the war – Vukovar, Osijek, Dubrovnik etc. Harping on about Krajina misses the point that this was not a major area of war in 1991, except where the Serb nationalist forces there actually lashed out to conquer many other Croat-majority regions within Krajina, such as Kijevo, which they more or less completely destroyed. This ethnic cleansing was not only of villages inside Serb-majority areas, which would have been more or less inevitable, but also of entire Croat-majority regions inconveniently situated so as to prevent all of “Krajina” being in one solid piece.

To be sure, after the SDS had expelled the one third Croat minority from Krajina, and the two-thirds Croat majority from Slavonia, these expelless became a force which the Croatian regime and Croatian chauvinist militia could also mobilise, which led to terrorist acts like the brutal massacre of Serbs at Gospic on the outskirts of the Krajina in late October 1991, following 3-4 months of massive slaughter and large scale ethnic cleansing of Croats by the Serboslav army. However, there was no concerted Croatian attempt to re-take Krajina during that war, it had effective autonomy; it was guarded by the major military/police/security formation dominating Croatia – not the lightly armed Croat territorial defence forces, but the massively armed Serboslav army.

The fact that most of the war was actually where the Serboslav army and SDS were conquering Croat-majority regions but not where Serbs lived as a majority in Krajina tells us about the real relationship of forces and who was oppressing who in practice.

However, Serbs, to be sure, had good reason to revolt against Tudjman’s reactionary chauvinist regime, which was more or less a carbon copy of that of Milosevic, except appearing on the scene three years later. Tudjman’s blatant chauvinism, combined with the return of some symbolism which reminded Serbs of the genocidal Utsashe regime of World War II (even though Tudjman had been a Croatian Partisan) and the links the regime was creating with various far-right Croat exile leaders, naturally propelled a certain sector of Serbs in the direction of Milosevic and SDS chauvinism, likewise derived from reactionary World War II Chetnik antecedents.

What both Milosevic and Tudjman represented was the rising pro-capitalist forces within the national bureaucracies, expressing themselves in the language of bourgeois nationalism as they attempted to divide Yugoslavia between them. Just as Serbian chauvinism was first and foremost anti-Albanian and anti-Muslim, Croatian chauvinism was initially anti-Serb, soon taking on the same anti-Muslim nature as its Serbian cousin as they joined forces in Bosnia.

Therefore, the fact that regions with overwhelming Serb majority wanted autonomy or independence or the right to join Serbia was understandable and justified (and the same right should have applied to regions of Vojvodina that wanted to join Croatia, though Croatia did not have the same power to push its will), as there was little room for multi-ethnicity crushed between two national chauvinist giants, in the same way that the Asia Minor catastrophe and the Cyprus catastrophe resulted from being crushed between Greek and Turkish nationalism. However, was it the best road for Croatian Serbs?

Supporting the RIGHT of Krajina Serbs (obviously not Slavonia) to separate does not make it a good idea. Krajina could not join Serbia because it was the furthest point within Croatia from the Serbian border, inconveniently separated from the fatherland by the entire republic of Bosnia. It was an economic wasteland on the Dinaric ranges, of no more than 150,000 Serbs, so had little basis as an independent state without good relations with Croatia surrounding it. It contained only one quarter of Croatia’s Serbs, and all three conquered zones contained only 45 percent of Croatia’s Serbs. Most Serbs lived in cities like Zagreb, working and living with Croats. The conquest of a third of Croatia weakened Croatia’s remaining Serb minority against Tudjman’s chauvinist regime, by cutting out its major concentrations. There was a large Croatian Serb constituency opposed to both the chauvinism of Tudjman AND of Milosevic and who furiously condemned the attack on Croatia and ethnic cleansing and conquest. This working class Serb constituency, which found a natural ally in Croat opponents of Tudjman, like the former Communist, now Social Democratic, Party, was gravely weakened by the triumph of reactionary separatism led by the far-right SDS, which consolidated the reactionary chauvinism of the Tudjman regime.

Even where Serbs were a major concentration in the Krajina, they were only part of a cynical game. The fact that Milosevic allowed Tudjman to overrun this region in 1995, without putting up even the pretence of a fight (despite the Krajina Serb leadership being massively armed with napalm and cluster bombs which they had liberally used against Bosnian Muslims), as part of a greater Milosevic-Tudjman-US deal to partition Bosnia and the region in a ‘neater’ way, is evidence that Milosevic and co. had cynically set up the Krajina Serbs for this later catastrophe, being merely a bargaining chip in the meantime – they were simply in the wrong area to be really of interest as part of greater Serbia.

But getting back to 1991, as Croat forces went on the offensive attempting to re-take some lost ground late in the year, the confrontation lines inside Croatia were frozen in favour of Serbia and its clients by US intervention in the form of the Vance Plan in early 1992, named after former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

This US intervention against Croatia reflected US policy. Till the outbreak of war in July 1991, all imperialist governments, including Germany, insisted absolutely on maintaining the unity of Yugoslavia “at all cost”. IMF policy dictated strengthening the central government against the republics in order to better suck out the massive debt and drive through an austerity and economic liberalisation program, being driven by Milosevic. Despite common left perceptions, as Germany was the largest investor throughout all Yugoslavia, its interests were strongly opposed to break-up of its zone, civil war, economic turmoil and new borders cutting free economic activity across the region. However, the US, UK and France feared the newly united Germany and gave strong support to Milosevic and the centralisers, partly, in my opinion, to consolidate a greater Serb ‘Yugoslavia’ bloc to stem the German advance.

In June 1991 on the eve of the massive Serbian attack on Croatian cities, Bush’s Secretary of State George Baker had been in Belgrade, where he publicly demanded that Yugoslavia stay together “at all cost” and condemned the “illegal” independence referendums in Croatia and Slovenia, a green light to Milosevic. A couple of months later, UK Tory Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd visited Milosevic and recommended Yugoslavia put a motion for an arms embargo on itself to the UN, a motion strongly supported by the UK, the US and France. As Yugoslavia was the fourth largest military power in Europe, this prevented Slovenia, Croatia and later Bosnia from getting arms to balance the equation.

Germany was more realistic and began to see that the large-scale slaughter taking place had buried Yugoslavia, so began advocating recognition of Croatia and Slovenia to consolidate its share in the north. France and Germany advocated an EU peace-keeping force to stand between their respective allies, but this was vetoed by the UK which opposed European security arrangements independent of NATO. Germany recognised Croatia and Slovenia in late December 1991, as the war was coming to an end. Much talk about ‘early’ German recognition provoking the war is inconceivable nonsense – this recognition was 6 months after the Croatian and Slovene referendums overwhelmingly endorsed independence, and followed 6 months of Europe’s largest war and slaughter since 1945. Whatever illusions western leftists may have had, Croats were not about to rejoin a state that had just massacred 10,000 of their people. Moreover, German recognition was only 3 weeks ahead of EU and Russian recognition of the two states in January 1992 (though of course they were recognising a Croatia which had lost one third of its territory). However, the US insisted on recognising “only one government in the region of Yugoslavia” (ie Serbia) for months after EU and Russian recognition.

5. Reactionary ethnic dismemberment of multi-ethnic Bosnia

With the end of the Croatia war, Milosevic and Tudjman and their right-wing nationalist proxies in Bosnia turned to active cooperation, drawing up a plan for the partition of Bosnia, which was sandwiched between them. In early 1992, the European Union put forward this Serbo-Croatian plan as the Carrington-Cultheiro Plan for the ethnic dismemberment of multi-ethnic Bosnia.
Of this appalling imperialist plan to dismember a small country, Jim Yarker makes glowing references, demanding to know “Did you support the Cutilheiro Plan which would’ve averted war in Bosnia and which honoured the principle of self-determination equally for all its nationalities and which was initially supported by all the sides, and also Milosevic, and which was dashed when Izetbegovic reneged on it with U.S. encouragement?” The answer is I certainly did not support this outrageous imperialist intervention into Bosnia’s internal affairs.

Lord Carrington, representing the very pro-Serbian British Foreign Office, was on the Board of Henry Kissinger Associates, Kissinger’s multinational security consultancy which directed a lot of investment into Yugoslavia, particularly Serbia. When Bosnian leader Izetbegovic decided not to support this legalised imperialist destruction of his country, Carrington, the old English aristocrat, retorted that Izetbegovic was “a terrible little man.” Both Carrington and Kissinger were in full agreement with the view of a part of the left that the war was all Germany’s fault.

What of the amazing assertion that this imperialist plan “honoured the principle of self-determination equally for all its nationalities”?

This plan partitioned Bosnia into three ethnic-based “constituent units”, ie a Serb, Croat and Muslim state within a state. This was in conflict with the Bosnian reality described above – there were few contiguous areas with clear ethnic majorities, and in addition about a quarter of the population was ethnically mixed. In the 1990 elections, 28 percent of the population had voted for non-ethnic-based communist or social-democratic parties, regardless of whether they were Serb, Croat, Muslim or ethnically mixed, they wanted to live in a multi-ethnic, secular Bosnia. This plan thus disenfranchised 28 percent of Bosnians. The number of Bosnia’s districts with no ethnic majority was 25 percent of the total, with a population also about 25 percent of Bosnia. These populations were strongest within the working class and industrial centres. The ethnic partition thus cut up these mixed regions between ethnic states, a recipe for massive ethnic cleansing. Above all, this imperialist partition plan aimed at smashing up the Tito-era working class ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ where it was at its strongest and realest, in its Bosnian heartlands.

Aside from the mixed districts, even many districts with ethnic majorities were very tenuous. Yarker even comes close to admitting this, claiming Serbs “formed a demographic plurality over 60+% of Bosnian territory immediately before the civil war.” While this is a gross exaggeration, even the fact that he says “plurality” rather than “majority” (as Serb fascist leader Karadzic and his imperialist supporters like Britain’s Lord Owen or America’s General Charles Boyd liked to claim), indicates he is a bit more honest. Serb “plurality” means that there was also a non-Serb “plurality” in 60 percent of Bosnia, according to these figures. He does not explain why all these non-Serbs should be shoved into a ‘Serb’ state.

This concept of ‘plurality’ is also often described as ‘relative majority’. These terms are used to describe a MINORITY, but the largest of a number of minorities. Thus, if in a given region, Serbs make up 35 percent of the population, Croats 30 percent, Muslims 30 percent and mixed/other/Yugoslavs 5 percent, this is declared as having a ‘relative Serb majority’ or ‘Serb plurality’, and even though the MAJORITY of the population might be non-Serb, it becomes part of a ‘Serb republic’ in this schema. Of course there is a problem here – since Muslims made up 44 percent of Bosnia’s population, and were thus by far the largest minority, and are hence a ‘relative majority’, then according to this logic, all of Bosnia could be made a ‘Muslim state’, something no-one advocated.

Yarker kindly sent a map of Bosnia to the list showing ‘relative majorities’ in three colours, representing Serbs, Croats and Muslims. Such a map is quite useless. If all the areas with no ethnic majority were put onto the map in a fourth colour, the map would look different – about 25 percent of it would be this fourth colour.

Based on exactly the same 1991 census that his map was based on, but analysing the figures, we see that Muslims, 44 percent of Bosnia’s population, formed a majority (which simply means over 50 percent) in 31 of Bosnia’s 100 districts, Serbs (31 percent of the population), were a majority in another 31 districts, and Croats (18 percent of the population) were a majority in 13 districts. That leaves 25 districts with no majority, and in most cases so-called ‘relative majorities’ were very tenuous (eg Mostar was more or less evenly divided into three). A good article describing more of this detail overlooked in amoeba-type views of Bosnia, including the census details, is ‘How Not to Divide the Indivisable’ by Stjepko and Thomas Golubic and Susan Campbell, in Rabia Ali and Lufschultz, L (eds), ‘Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War’, The Pamphleteers Press, Connecticut, 1993.

In the imperialist Carrington-Cultheiro partition plan, Muslims would form a majority of 56 percent in “their” canton, Serbs 61 percent in “theirs” and Croats 65 percent in “theirs,” leaving around two-fifths of the population in all three cantons minorities. The “Muslim” canton would contain only 64 percent of all Muslims in Bosnia, the “Serb” canton 48 percent of all Serbs and the “Croat” canton only 41 percent of all Croats. Yet we are assured that this recipe for disaster offered ‘self-determination” to all three nations and would have ensured peace! It is obvious that the massive ethnic cleansing that ensued was aimed precisely at carrying out this partition by the massively armed Serb nationalists and their by now relatively well-armed Croat nationalist allies.

What of the assertion that Serbs “formed clear majorities over large and contiguous areas of Croatian and Bosnian territory.” This all depends what you mean by “large” and “contiguous”. The main three regions of Serb-majority in Bosnia were Eastern Herzogovina in the south-east, the Banja Luka region in the north-west and the Bosnia Krajina region in the far west on the Croatian border. The only large region of clear Croat majority was Western Herzogovina, in the south west, situated between Serb-majority Eastern Herzogovina and Serb-majority Bosnia Krajina. These two Serb regions and one Croat region were situated along the west, on the Croatian border, on the backward and infertile Dinaric range.

Croat-majority Western Herzogovina was contiguous with Croatia, but the only Serb-majority region contiguous with Serbia-Montenegro was Eastern Herzogovina (plus a small tip of north-east Bosnia around Bijelina, with one third Muslims). It was in no way contiguous with the other two Serb-majority regions, and these two regions were nowhere near Serbia. In fact, the western Bosnia Krajina was the part of Bosnia furthest from Serbia, separated from it by the whole Bosnian republic; it was contiguous with the Krajina region in Croatia, with which it could have united; and while western Bosnia Krajina and the Banja Luka region to its north were joined, it was only by a very tenuous neck, almost cut by Muslim-majority and mixed regions (the neck is much narrower than in the map sent to the list when mixed regions are mapped separately). Moreover, Banja Luka itself, the “capital” of the “Serb” region, was in reality more mixed than “Serb” – its Serb majority was only 54 percent, and it seems to me that socialists in such an area would emphasise multi-ethnic solidarity rather than ‘self-determination’ for 54 percent of an urban population via expelling the 46 percent, a highly reactionary solution.

Given these realities, it should not be difficult for Marxists to see that maintaining maximum proletarian, multi-ethnic unity would have been the optimum outcome in Bosnia, and even if some clearly mono-ethnic parts broke away, maintaining a multi-ethnic Bosnia should have been possible over most of the republic. The opposite road was the bourgeois-nationalist road, the road of catastrophe as in Asia Minor, Cyprus, the Indian subcontinent, Croatia etc. Bosnia was squeezed between the two bourgeois-nationalist regimes in Serbia and Croatia aiming to eat it up, similar to Greece and Turkey in Cyprus, or Serbia and Croatia in Krajina and Slavonia. However, there were two differences. Firstly, there was also the third major ethnicity, the Muslims, who fitted into neither camp and had no ‘fatherland’; secondly, while average Greek and Turkish Cypriots lived together OK, they did not intermarry – Cyprus was still a more traditional society where different religions excluded this, whereas Communist Yugoslavia and Bosnia created a high level of secularisation in the working class heartlands and hence intermarriage was a significant factor. This meant there were greater chances of avoiding the catastrophist road advocated for Bosnia by Milosevic, Tudjman, imperialism, and a wing of the western left.

While we (meaning the internationalist left) specifically defended the Muslim population who were subsequently subject to genocide by both Serb and Croat chauvinist forces, our orientation was never to support any kind of ‘Muslim’ republic, but to defend multi-ethnic Bosnia. Bosnia was run by a multi-ethnic government, with a Presidency consisting of 2 Muslims, 2 Serbs, 2 Croats and a Yugoslav; the military high command consisted of one Muslim, one Serb and one Croat – the general leading the defence of Sarajevo for three and a half years against Serb chauvinist assault was himself an ethnic Serb. In major cities like Sarajevo and Tuzla, large numbers of Serbs and Croats remained and took part in the defence of multi-ethnic Bosnia against Serbo-Croatian chauvinists throughout the war; the multi-ethnic Trade Union council in Tuzla was prominent in the defence of the city and of Bosnia. Prior to the full outbreak of war, the government consisted of all the major ethnic and non-ethnic parties; when the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) pulled out of the government in April 1992 in order to commence destroying the country it had till then been a partner in governing, their ministers were replaced by other Serbs from non-ethnic based parties.

It is thus important to emphasise that the three sides fighting were not “Serbs, Croats and Muslims” as the western media endlessly parroted and as “leftist” apologists for Serbian reaction parrot as well; the three sides were the Serb and Croat chauvinist militias with the expressed aim of creating ethnically pure Serb and Croat states attached to the fatherlands, and the internationally recognised, multi-ethnic Bosnian government with an expressed aim of maintaining a multi-ethnic republic.

It may be objected that, while weaker, the Bosnian bureaucracy was also on the capitalist path and the leading Muslim-based party, Izetbegovic’s Party of Democratic Action (SDA), was as bourgeois as the Serb Democratic Party and Croat Democratic Union. This is true, but without a ‘fatherland’, with a scattered population, and not being a majority (being only 44 percent of the population), the aspiring Muslim bourgeoisie simply could not have a viable ethnic-chauvinist plan. Simple bourgeois self-determination for Muslims coincided with the need to preserve a multi-ethnic Bosnia, coinciding with the proletarian need. There was simply no possibility of creating a ‘Greater Bosnia’ project. On the contrary, to the extent that a wing of the SDA did eventually accommodate a more ‘Muslim nationalist’ wing, it could only mean a ‘smaller Bosnia’, which played into the hands of the more powerful Serb and Croat chauvinists, because it meant accepting a degree of ethnic cleansing of Muslims, and being shoved into a little Muslim mini-state between Greater Serbia and Croatia. This is precisely the ‘solution’ the Bosnian government, the SDA most of the time, the non-ethnic based opposition, the trade unions and supporters of multi-ethnic Bosnia fought against.

However, to the extent the proletarian, multi-ethnic road may not have been possible everywhere, or that left and progressive Bosnian forces may not have been strong enough to convince all Serbs and Croats of this course, was there a case for self-determination for those unconvinced in regions of clear ethnic majority? Was there a case for supporting the right of Bosnia’s Croats and Serbs to either form fully autonomous statelets, independent states or to unite with Serbia or Croatia?

As with the Croatian case, it depends – we need to specifically look at the regions. In general, I support the right in principle where ethnic groups were in a very clear majority, although I am rather concerned about “majorities” of just over 50 percent, as in Banja Luka. Where Serbs had the clearest majorities, in Eastern Herzogovina, they could feasibly have joined Serbia (or more likely Montenegro), and next door, the Croat majority in Western Herzogovina could have joined Croatia. On the other side of Bosnia, however, in western Bosnia Krajina, the Serbs could only have joined Croatian Krajina, in a new Serb state consisting of a mere 200,000 people along a rugged infertile mountain range separated from Serbia by the entire republic of Bosnia; they could not have joined Serbia in any practical sense, so probably some form of autonomy would have been preferable. Still, if they could in no way be convinced, yes I still support their right to independence in principle, because not supporting it would mean supporting the right of someone else to overrun it by force.

The problem is, none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the actual war that took place in Bosnia. There was no fighting at any stage of the war within Eastern Herzogovina, or Western Herzogovina, or the western Bosnia Krajina region. There was never any attempt by the Bosnian government’s forces to seize any of these regions from the Serb and Croat chauvinist militias that ran them with the aid of their two powerful fatherlands. The question in fact is a complete furphy.

The war consisted of the massively armed Serb chauvinist forces – with the entire weaponry of the former Yugoslav army at their disposal – and their Croatian chauvinist allies striking out well beyond these regions to seize much of Bosnia – Muslim-dominated or ethnically mixed – for their ethnic chauvinist states, by carrying out massive ethnic cleansing/genocide against the Muslim population, as well as against Serb and Croat populations in the ‘wrong’ zones. THIS was the war.

The Serb chauvinist state, called ‘Republika Srpska’ (RS), seized 70 percent of Bosnia, and the Croat chauvinist state, Herzeg-Bosna, seized some 10-15 percent, leaving the Muslim and mixed majority of the population squeezed into 10-15 of the country, or fleeing overseas. The refugee population reached nearly 3 million people.

Let’s look at what the actual war entailed. In the Banja Luka region, where Serb ‘majority’ status was most tenuous but which had already been seized by the Serboslav army the previous year (1991), long before the ‘official’ beginning of the war, the fighting consisted of subjugating Muslim and mixed regions around its outskirts, doubling the size of the ‘canton’, and carrying out massive ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats, putting them into death camps like the famous Omarska etc. Thus this region was forcibly united along a wide area with the western Krajina region to its south-west, though still disconnected from Serbia. Muslim populations were pushed into the town of Bihac in the far north west where they experienced a three year brutal siege.

Secondly, almost the whole of eastern Bosnia, north of eastern Herzogovina, was overwhelmingly populated by Muslims with clear majorities. This was the region along the Serbian border, the west bank of the Drina. So since to create a greater Serbia, they would want it connected to the fatherland, and since most of the region was inconveniently populated by the “wrong” people, a major part of the war was the conquest and massive ethnic cleansing of eastern Bosnia. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims were driven from their homes in the east, to the central region or to one of three small towns within the east that managed to hold out under three years of relentless siege and bombardment by surrounding Serbian chauvinist forces – Srebrenica, Zepa and Goazde.

Even with conquering and cleansing the whole of eastern Bosnia and hence the land adjoining Serbia, this was still not connected to the Banja Luka region. So the third major part of the war was the offensive to create a “northern corridor” through the Brcko and Posavina regions, north of proudly multi-ethnic, government-held Tuzla. The problem was that this region was inconveniently populated overwhelmingly by Muslims and Croats, who therefore had to be ethnically cleansed and put in horrendous death camps like that in Brcko.
The fourth part of the war was the offensive by the Croat chauvinist state in Western Herzogovina into ethnically mixed central Bosnia, rapidly doubling its size and ruthlessly ethnically cleansing the Muslim half of the population. Here the Serb chauvinists came to the aid of their Croat allies, as they both spent many months jointly besieging Muslim-dominated Zenica, Travnik, Vitez etc.

The fifth part of the war was, even after having conquered most of Bosnia, the Serb chauvinist forces continually laid siege for three and a half years to Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica, Srebrenica, Zepa, Gorazde, Bihac and a host of other government-controlled urban centres with Muslim or mixed populations, firing massive doses of artillery into them on a daily basis, killing civilians on an enormous scale, to force a surrender.

None of this had anything whatsoever to do with defending the main Serb or Croat majority regions which they had conquered and cleansed at the outset of the war, or in fact over the six months before the official start of the war.

This should caution those who, due to understandable confusion or ignorance of the complexities of the region, prefer the intellectually dishonest cop-out of “three ethnic groups fighting each other”, the “Balkans are like that” and other essentially racist views, which dominated the bourgeois media and much “left” discussion through the war.

However, some may still not feel satisfied with this, feeling that it does not clearly prove there was oppressed and oppressor in this war. In that case, what needs to be asked is why the Serbian chauvinist forces were able to take over so much of the country, where they were not the majority. The answer shows that this was not a war between three equal ethnic militias. If that had been the case, there still may have been war, but it would have taken more the form of skirmishes over borders, and we would have been correct to be neutral.

6. Imperialist Intervention Against Bosnia

The absolute superiority of the Serb nationalist forces was due to the fact that the Serbian republic (still called ‘Yugoslavia’) inherited the entire military arsenal of the former Yugoslav army, and this, as well as Serbian troops, were put at the disposal of the Bosnian Serb chauvinists, who therefore were not merely another militia. More interesting is why Serbia got control of the entire Yugoslav army arsenal, which had, after all, been the property of all Yugoslav workers, all of who had paid taxes for it.

The key here goes back to the famous Vance Plan, which ended the Serbo-Croatian war in late 1991. Cyrus Vance, former US Secretary of State, was closely connected to the pro-Yugoslav ‘mafia’ that ran George Bush I’s administration, including Eaglebuger, Scowcroft and Kissinger. Vance was on the Board of General Dynamics, which at the time had a multi-billion dollar contract with the Yugoslav Army to develop the Super Galeb fighter aircraft.

The Vance Plan demanded that all the heavy weaponry of the Yugoslav army that Milosevic had deployed in Croatia was to be returned to ‘Yugoslavia’ under the control of the ‘Yugoslav army’, even though at that time, Croatia and Slovenia were no longer part of that state, and the Yugoslav army had lost all its non-Serb soldiery and officers, ie, it had become the army of the Serb republic. Croatia protested that the weaponry should be put temporarily under international control to be divided between the republics, but in reply claimed to have received “threats and ultimatums from Vance and others” insisting that the ‘Yugoslav’ army now be able to take all its massive heavy weaponry into Bosnia, which was still considered part of ‘Yugoslavia’. Croatia correctly suggested that the Serboslav army would use this weaponry on Sarajevo and other Bosnian cities in the same way they had used it on Vukovar and Dubrovnik. Yet this transfer of hundreds of tanks and fighter planes and thousands of artillery pieces and hundreds of thousands of pieces of weaponry into Bosnia went ahead, even though prominent SDS leaders like Karadzic had made it abundantly clear they intended to make the Muslims “disappear from the face of the Earth.”

Vance and the US government, like Carrington and the UK government at the same time, knew perfectly well what they were doing. But even worse was the fact that throughout the next three and a half years of war in Bosnia, this overwhelming military superiority of the Serbian nationalist forces – who were supplied, armed, financed and whose officers were paid by the Serbian (“Yugoslav”) government in Belgrade – was cemented by the criminal arms embargo imperialism imposed on the region, which in practice meant imposed on the Bosnia defenders.

The result, of course, was the ethnic cleansing, massive killing and cultural genocide of Bosnia’s Muslims by allied Serb and Croat chauvinist forces. Aside from the arms embargo, the other major western policy throughout these years was to try to impose one ethnic partition plan after another down the throat of Bosnia – the Carrington-Cultheiro plan, the Vance-Owen Plan, the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan, the Contact Group Plan and finally the US-imposed Dayton Plan.

It is true of course that US leaders, in a sudden 180 degree turnaround in March 1992, encouraged Izetbegovic to reject the imperialist Carrington partition plan. In my opinion, this was one of the opening shots of the post-Cold War EU-US conflict, particularly given the emergence of a Franco-German alliance which in early 1992 announced the setting up of a new security force to rival NATO, the ‘EuroCorps’. France being a traditional sponsor of Serbia and Germany of Croatia could further express their unity via supporting the joint Serbo-Croatian plans to partition Bosnia. By the same token, however, as the leaders of Europe, they were also concerned about the possible rise of Muslim radicalism if the Muslims were squeezed into too much of a corner, if the plans led to Gaza in Europe; hence Germany also put pressure on Croatia to ease its war on Bosnia, while France wavered between pro-Serb initiatives and strongly supporting the arms embargo, and at other times rather strong assertions of French military power to pressure Serbia.

Britain’s Tories were so fanatically pro-Serbian and anti-Muslim that it appears UK imperialism, as head of the UN committee negotiating the Yugoslav conflict at the time, attempted to grab the initiative to create a more powerful UK-Russia-Greece alliance via a dominant Serbia in the Balkans as a means of undermining the Franco-German bloc; in particular, the UK was concerned to prevent the Franco-German bloc from forming an economic and military alliance with Russia to dominate the continent. Britain was the most ardent defender of the arms embargo, of the most vile partition plans, and the most ardent opponent of any military intervention, including by its US ally, even though in the same years the UK took active part in ongoing US aggression in Iraq. Britain’s Lord Carrington, Lord Owen, Foreign Secretaries Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind, Prime Minister John Major and General Rose were all among the most energetic collaborators with Serbian chauvinism and its actions throughout the war.

The US began adopting the complete opposite position from the UK in undermining the Franco-German balance in Europe, suddenly from around May 1992 beginning to engage in a lot of aggressive sounding anti-Serb rhetoric, to reassert the importance of the US as head of NATO to the ‘security’ of Europe, though the contrast between the aggressiveness of the rhetoric and the outright US opposition to any action was as stark as could possibly be.

Izetbegovic of course hardly needed much encouragement to reject the Carrington plan to dismember his country. The US, while encouraging this rejection for its own imperial reasons, had no intention of coming to Bosnia’s aid in the ensuing Serbian blitzkrieg, but to merely use ‘principled’ opposition to scuttle EU partition plans to grab the initiative from the EU. When it did, it imposed its own worse partition plan after three and a half years of slaughter. Since Jim Yarker applauds the EU partition plan of 1992 which gave the ‘Serb republic’ 44 percent of Bosnia, he should be even more grateful to the US for later granting the ‘Serb republic’ 49 percent of Bosnia in a much more contiguous region.

Meanwhile, throughout the war, Bosnia was occupied by the UN, meaning British and French imperialist troops, setting aside six towns and cities as “safe” areas, where hundreds of thousands of dispossessed Muslims flooded into, creating giant ghettoes. They were supposedly “safe” because the Serb-Croatian chauvinists were not supposed to attack the civilian populations inside them, but nevertheless they did, on a daily basis, for years, so they were not “safe” at all. However, the imperialist occupiers tried to make them safe for the besieging chauvinist forces by further disarming the Muslim or mixed populations in these cities, while making sure no further arms got in, as they were part, alongside their Adriatic fleets, of policing the criminal arms embargo. Izetbegovic several times demanded the imperialist UN occupation get out, lift the arms embargo, and if some difficult to defend Muslim pockets still needed protection, the Islamic Conference Organisation offered to send their own forces, but of course such a threat of greater Islamist influence in Europe was exactly what the imperialists most feared.

In other words, imperialist forces occupied Bosnia and the Adriatic, enforcing an arms embargo that put Bosnia at massive disadvantage with respect to the chauvinist forces, in order to try to force the Bosnians to accept the partition of their country as demanded by Milosevic and Tudjman! One would think that anti-imperialists should be opposed to such blatant imperialist occupation, colonialism and classic UK-style partition politics, but instead we had a section of the left go completely off the rails in support of Serbian chauvinism and Islamophobia.

At the height of this imperialist offensive against Bosnia, Lord Owen, representing the UK Foreign Office, and his EU colleague Stoltenberg, invited Milosevic, Tudjman, and their two quisling chauvinist paramilitary leaders in Bosnia, Karadzic and Boban, to jointly draw up the Owen-Stoltenberg partition plan in mid-1993, awarding 52 percent of Bosnia to a “Serb Republic” and 18 percent to a Croat one. Yet IZETBEGOVIC – head of the legally recognised Bosnian government – WAS NOT INVITED TO ANY OF THESE MEETINGS. Was this not the most arrogant imperialist intervention? Meanwhile, Owen also paid off the Muslim puppet Abdic in western Bihac to collaborate with the partition of Bosnia and attack fellow Muslim forces in the region (the following year he was routed by Bosnia’s historic 5th Corps).

This UK policy was so aggressively anti-Bosnian that some 50 percent of delegates at an EU conference in Autumn 1993 voted to condemn British policy. Meanwhile, France and Germany, though sponsors of the Serbo-Croatian partitionists, recognised that regional stability within “their” Europe would be threatened by the UK’s extreme anti-Bosnian policy, so they modified the plan by releasing their own version of it, expanding the ‘Muslim state’ to 33 percent within same the partition plan, while offering to release sanctions on Serbia if it could pressure its SDS Bosnian tools to agree to cede a little of the conquests to the Muslims.

Fortunately, Bosnian forces gradually built up a supply of light arms from capturing them and from Iranian circumvention of the imperialist arms embargo, and by the end of 1993 had smashed the Croatian chauvinist forces in the south. To prevent the Bosnians, in the glory of victory, from bringing in greater numbers of Muslim forces or arms from the Middle East to turn on the Serb republic next, Washington drew up a new partition strategy. Against the opposite inclinations of both the multi-ethnic Bosnian forces and the Croat chauvinists, Washington in April 1994 hammered them together in a ‘Muslim-Croat federation’ in the regions controlled by these forces. The aim of setting up this was to abolish multi-ethnic Bosnia – by definition a ‘Muslim-Croat federation’, despite the 200,000 loyal Serbs still living in government-controlled regions, must recognise the Serb Republic carved out by the far-right SDS forces of Karadzic. This new US plan also avoided the problem of a potential small, landlocked, unstable ‘Muslim state’ which the UK-sponsored partition plans, in their aim of giving maximum away to Serbia and Croatia, unwittingly led to, squashed between the ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’ states.

From April 1994 onward, the conflict became one of drawing exact border lines for these two states partitioning Bosnia. Washington arrived at the figure of a 51:49 percent split between the M-C federation and Republika Srpska (RS), which was a deal dramatically in favour of the latter, half the country being offered to less than one third of the population (in fact less than a quarter were living there at the time). Milosevic and Tudjman both immediately supported this deal, but Izetbegovic needed much greater pressure to reluctantly comply. However, Karadzic and the Serbian fascistic Right under Seselj’s Serbian Radical Party broke with Milosevic on this and rejected any compromise, even though it was in their favour. They figured why should they withdraw from the 70 percent of Bosnia they had conquered, due to overwhelming military superiority, and go down to 49 percent, when on the ground the lightly armed Bosnian army still gave them no challenge.

Therefore, the US began to turn a blind eye to a stream of Iranian weapons passing through Croatia to the Croat and Bosnian forces in Bosnia, with the aim of exerting pressure on RS to pull back to stable partition lines. This was the famous US circumvention of the imperialist arms embargo. The problem is, who gave the US the right in the first place to control whether, and how much, any weaponry gets through to besieged Bosnia? It was imperialist forces imposing the arms embargo; without their armed forces occupying the region, there would be no embargo. Without the embargo, masses of weaponry would have flooded in from Iran and other Muslim countries to the Bosnian government, and of course there was nothing the imperialist powers, whatever their differing tactical approaches, wanted less than this. Before 1994 there were plentiful examples of not only British and French, but also US forces actively preventing shiploads of Iranian arms from reaching the Bosnians. THIS is intervention.

The fact that in the later part of the war the US partly circumvented the imperialist embargo is not so much intervention, but rather partially stopping its own intervention – unless anyone thinks the US had the right to be there checking what arms get in. Intervention in fact continued, consisting of the fact that the US did not allow these Iranian arms and fighters to freely reach the Bosnians in the quantities chosen by the Bosnians or Iranians. The reason was that, without an embargo, the Bosnians may have chosen their own solution, rejecting partition outright, or at least regaining a larger part of former Muslim and mixed regions from RS. But the US solution was the 51:49 percent partition, which they saw as a guarantee of regional stability. Therefore, by attempting to control the quantity of Iranian arms going through Croatia – which had the same partitionist aims as the US and Milosevic – it allowed Croatia to take the best arms and only leave the Bosnians with enough to pressure RS but not enough to impose a Bosnian solution.

Incidentally, this went hand in hand with continuous arms supplies to Serbia from US allies Israel and Greece, the latter the main NATO imperialist power in the region. “Mossad was especially active and concluded a deal with the Bosnian Serbs at Pale involving a substantial supply of artillery shells and mortar bombs”, the Sarajevo population being “perplexed to find that unexploded mortar bombs landing in Sarajevo sometimes had Hebrew markings,” according to the Dutch report into Srebrenica. Neither Israel nor Greece was warned about this by the US, presumably seeing them as an indirect conduit to the Serbian ruling elite. Meanwhile, even while skimming off these Iranian arms directed to their alleged Bosnian allies, the Bosnian Croat chauvinists continued to sell oil and arms to the Serbian chauvinist forces.

The main problem with the partition maps was that they were still not very “neat” – there were too many Muslims or Croats too close to Serbia and too many Serbs close to or inside Croatia, in regions distant from both the fatherlands and the regions of Bosnia planned for partition. To solve this problem, extra ethnic cleansing on both sides was needed. Tudjman’s famous map he drew for Paddy Ashdown in March 1995, with an ‘S’ through Bosnia divided into Serb and Croat halves, was to be the basis of a future stable partition of the region between Croatia and Serbia. Such an equal partition between the two dominant powers was in imperialism’s interests of stabilising the region. Both the Bosnian aim of a multi-ethnic whole Bosnia, or at least regaining larger non-Serb majority regions for a ‘fairer’ partition, and the extreme Serbian Right’s aim of keeping 70 percent of Bosnia and one-third of Croatia, were considered threatening to a stable partition.

In eastern Bosnia, the ‘neatness’ strategy meant allowing Serbian chauvinist forces to eliminate Srebrenica and Zepa, islands of Muslim refugees within an otherwise ‘cleansed’ region. So Serbian forces eliminated these enclaves in June 1995, ethnically cleansing another 70,000 Muslims for eastern Bosnia, and in the process cold-bloodedly murdering 7-8000 Muslim men and boys who had been captured, the most horrific massacre in Europe since 1945. These were both UN “safe” areas where the UN had disarmed local fighters and was supposed to “protect” the Muslims.

At the other end of the region, Serbo-Croatian regional partition meant allowing Tudjman to eliminate the Krajina region controlled by Serbian nationalists, ethnically cleansing the 150,000 strong Serb population (he had 3 months earlier taken back Western Slavonia, driving out its 15,000 Serbs). Tudjman continued the advance into western Bosnia, taking the western-most Bosnian Krajina region from the Serbian chauvinists, handing to the Croat chauvinists, even through this region was overwhelmingly Serb. Some 50,000 Serbs were driven out of this region, so that Croatia and the Bosnian Croat state could have a solid block of contiguous territory, like that Serbia and RS had established over north and east Bosnia.

All this extra ethnic cleansing allowed the US-Milosevic-Tudjman Dayton partition plan to be signed in October 1995, ending the war. However, before that, the Bosnian government nearly threw a spanner into the works.

As Croatian forces advanced, the Bosnian Muslim forces of the Bosnian 5th Corps were able to break out of Bihac where they had been permanently besieged for over 3 years by both the Bosnian and Croatian Serb ‘Krajina’ forces (including with napalm and cluster bombs). Now they began advancing and regaining formerly Muslim majority and mixed regions in north-western Bosnia.

At this point, the US intervened to smash up the massive RS military machine which had been besieging Sarajevo and other cities for years. It is important to note that this decisive US intervention occurred after Serb chauvinist forces were already being pushed back.

Izetbegovic released his own plan for a united multi-ethnic Bosnia with autonomous regions, rather than full republics, where ethnic majorities existed, such as for Serbs in the Banja Luka region. His plan did not allow Serbian chauvinists to keep ethnically cleansed eastern Bosnia or the northern corridor, hence violating the Dayton partition understanding. More seriously, the Bosnian 3rd Corps also advanced from Tuzla into the northern corridor, aiming to retake this formerly overwhelmingly Muslim and Croat region from RS. For RS, this cleansed region was all that territorially united its eastern and northern conquests. If Bosnian forces could retake this region, as they were justified in ethnic terms doing, it would have meant there could be no real Serb ‘republic’, but more likely autonomy for regions like Banja Luka cut off from Serbia.

At this point, Croatia, which had now seized Muslim majority Jacje in central Bosnia, cutting Bosnian forces in Sarajevo off from those in Bihac, quit the offensive in order to not give any more aid to the advancing Bosnian forces, as this would upset the soup Tudjman had made with Milosevic and Holbrooke. The US intervention at this point – an intervention that could easily have occurred any time within the last three and a half years – was designed precisely to show who was boss. The US and UN continually demanded the Bosnian army halt its advance, which threatened to go beyond the magic 51 percent allowable to the M-C federation, but Bosnia refused, over and over. The US finally announced that whoever was threatening the ceasefire would be subject to attack, meaning now the Bosnian army. The Bosnians thus saw decisive western intervention for the first time in the war only as they were for the first time advancing – and it cut off their advance.

Republika Srpska was legalised by the US-imposed Dayton partition plan. US intervention legalised this ethnic-based state which was built on the expulsion of a million non-Serbs from the region it covers. By recognising RS, the US Dayton plan legitimised genocide.
Jim Yarker claims that “these entities (ie the Serb ‘republics) born of an obvious Serb expression of self-determination were targeted for destruction by Western imperialism” in “the spectacularly successful Nato-backed offensives which drove Serbs by the 100’s of 1000’s out of the Krajina and other parts of Bosnia and Croatia, helping make Serbs displaced from these regions. What a tribute to the Serbs’ “massive military superiority”.

This is completely disingenuous. Firstly, there is no disagreement that the Croatian army’s reconquest of the Krajina and the western Bosnian Krajina in late 1995 were acts of ethnic cleansing by a chauvinist regime in regions of Serb-majority, and they drove 200,000 Serbs from their homes (plus another 15,000 driven from former Croat-majority Western Slavonia a few months earlier).

However, what much of the left refuse to recognise, or simply hide from, is the fact that these reconquests also allowed some 150,000 Croats to return to their homes from which they had been driven in these regions – and in fact even with these reconquests, around another 100,000 Croats were still not able to return to their homes in Eastern Slavonia. Unfortunately, for some of the left, this need not matter because they view Croats to be mere human filth, but to other internationalist-minded leftists, the fate of previously displaced would have some relevance. That does not of course justify the actions of the Croatian regime, but it points to the fact that previous ethnic cleansing may well beget reverse ethnic cleansing as others return when they find the strength. Marxists justify neither but point to the original destruction of class solidarity as the key problem leading to later similar acts.

Secondly, this ethnic cleansing of 215,000 Croatian and Bosnian Serbs was an exact swap for the 200,000 Croats ethnically cleansed from Republika Srpska, principally from the Banja Luka region and the northern ‘corridor’. In fact many of these Bosnian Croats are now in the houses of the Krajina Serbs. They cannot return to an ethnic Serb state run by the same army that carried out the genocide, and this then hilds up the return of Serbs to Krajina.

Moreover, this swap was clearly the plan of both Milosevic and Tudjman, and was “imperialist-backed” precisely to the extent it fitted into the overall regional partition scenario dictated by the US at Dayton. However, while the training of the Croatian army by private US military contractors is a well-established fact, I do not see the rapidity of the Croatian advance as having a lot to do with it. Even very lightly armed Croats and Muslims in Bosnia and Croatia had held out longer when they fought to keep their land. The fact that the Krajina Serb Chetnik leadership, which had only very recently fired napalm and cluster bombs on Bosnian Muslims in Bihac and also cluster bombs at Zagreb and a number of Croatian cities, did not manage to fire a shot at the Croatian forces to defend a piece of territory where they were the majority, was the result of the Milosevic-Tudjman deal. Krajina and the western part of Bosnian Krajina were distant from Serbia and thus strategically and economically worthless to it, but were strategic to Croatia; the northern ‘corridor’ from where large numbers of Bosnian Croats were cleansed from was unimportant to Croatia but vitally strategic to Republika Srpska. All this should be obvious to anyone that looks at a map.

The Dayton partition plan ending the war not only allowed the Croatian chauvinist militia, as part of the ‘Muslim-Croat federation’, to keep the western part of Bosnia Krajina, which had been overwhelmingly Serb, it also allowed Republika Srpska to keep the just-cleansed and slaughtered Muslim Srebrenica and Zepa regions, along with the rest of already ethnically cleansed Muslim eastern Bosnia, and allowed RS to expand the northern ‘corridor’, previously Croat and Muslim. Moreover, by allowing a fully fledged Serb republic in half of Bosnia, it marked the Serb nationalists as clear victors, as this had been their strategic aim; by contrast, the Croat nationalists, who had also wanted a ‘Croat republic’ were denied one, while the Bosnian government forces, who wanted a multi-ethnic Bosnia, had it smashed, and if some Muslim nationalists had wanted a Muslim republic, they were also denied one. While Serbia got a fully fledged satellite in half of Bosnia, Croatia had to be satisfied with an unofficial hegemony over the other half, and Croat nationalists with unofficially keeping control of the regions within the federation they wanted for their ‘state’.

Dayton allowed not only Croatia to consolidate control over most of “its” own territory, but also allowed Serbia to maintain control over Kosova. The attempts by the Kosovar political leadership, which had waged a peaceful struggle for a decade, to be represented at Dayton were rebuffed by the US; for a new generation of Kosovar Albanians growing up in the despair of Serbian occupation, they could see that using enormous violence and committing genocide were very successful for Bosnian Serbs, gaining them a republic with virtually independent powers within Bosnia, whereas their peaceful struggle had gained them nothing. The rise of the KLA was inevitable. Of course we don’t even have to mention the continuing refusal to acknowledge the repression and ignoring of referendums of the Presevo Albanians, the Sanjak Muslims and the Vojvodina Croats and Hungarians – that was all “Serbian” territory to imperialism and Milosevic.

7. The Right of Return

Jim Yarker suggests it makes no difference that the exercise of ‘Serb self-determination’ was carried out via massive ethnic cleansing, “It shouldn’t matter an iota in this whether there were forced population transfers by Serb militias or gangsters. After all, any serious reckoning shows that that was true of the other nationalities and of their leaderships (including the KLA)” and continuing with this same thread, “There is no *logic* and no *principle* for calling for the “right of return” for non-Serbs to the territory Republika Srpska *unless* one is also calling for the right of return for Serbs expelled from the territory of the other 51% of Bosnia, in the Bosniac-Croat federation, and *also* for the right of return for non-Albanians to Kosovo and the right of return for Croatian (and particularly Krajina) Serbs. There’s no logic or principle to delegitimizing a political entity because there’s been ethnic cleansing on its territory unless you’re prepared to do so for all the others in the Yugoslav space, like independent Croatia, achieved over its current territory by substantial ethnic cleansing, like the Bosniac-Croat federation – same deal, like Kosovo, same deal.”

Of course I am in favour of the right to return of not only non-Serbs to Republika Srpska but also Serbs to the other half of Bosnia, to Krajina and to Kosova. The point is, however, if some 900,000 non-Serbs returned to Republika Srpska, their population would come close to equalling the total current Serb population of RS, and so it would not be a “Serb republic”, just as the return of Palestinians to ‘Israel’ would eliminate the basis of a “Jewish state” or for that matter the return of Greek Cypriots to the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” would mean there was no longer a “Turkish republic.” This is the problem of explicitly ethnic-based states formed via ethnic cleansing.

The return of Serbs to the other half of Bosnia, the ‘Muslim-Croat federation’ may not automatically have this same result, simply because RS had from the start taken over all Serb majority regions, all Serb ‘plurality’ regions, not to mention large numbers of Serb-minority regions, so there are not a really high percentage of Serbs to return. Moreover, a large body of Serbs always remained in the M-C federation, especially in the big cities, and have formed parties like the Serb Civic Council which represent their interests and support multi-ethnic Bosnia. There has also been a far greater percentage of Serbs returning to the M-C federation than non-Serbs returning to RS – several years ago, the difference was ten to one, and according to recent reports, the only big movements have been of Serbs, to western Bosnia Krajina districts like Glamoc and Grahavo.

Moreover, I am opposed to the ‘Muslim-Croat federation’ in principle, as were most within the multi-ethnic Bosnian camp – this was imposed by the US precisely in order to recognise RS as representing “Serbs”. That of course is why the proposal by the Serb Civic Council and other non-Serb allies that it be represented in international negotiations, rather than only Karadzic’s Serb fascists, and that the Serbs become the third recognised nation within the federation (ie that it become a Serb-Croat-Muslim federation), was rejected by the US and its allied Bosnian leaders, as these proposals would undermine RS and partition.

In other words, if all Serbs, Croats and Muslims returned to their homes in both RS and the M-C federation, and the racist structures of Dayton were eliminated in favour of democracy, then there would be no RS and no M-C federation, but merely two halves of multi-ethnic Bosnia, which may therefore soon find being in two halves rather pointless. In similar fashion, if Palestinians set up a democratic, secular mini-state in the West Bank and Gaza, and Israel (via some miracle) allowed the right of return of several million Palestinians, and racist structures were abolished in favour of democratic ones, we would have two democratic, secular states next to each other, which would soon find being in two states pointless.

Of course, if Krajina Serbs returned, it could threaten Croatia’s borders, which I have no attachment to, but you would need to remember that it would be 150,000 people in a wasteland distant from Serbia, so I reckon they may prefer some sort of autonomy, having had enough of a couple of decades of Serbian chauvinist cynicism which led them to their apocalypse. BTW, of 300,000 Serbs who were expelled or left Croatia over the years (over two-thirds expelled and the rest left due to chauvinistic pressures in the war atmosphere etc), some 100,000 have returned according to latest estimates. Also, it ought to be borne in mind that the return of the Croatian Serbs and of their properties is the number one demand placed on Croatia by the EU before accession to the EU can be considered. Finally, it is notable that the returned HDZ party (ie Tudjman’s party), which defeated the Social Democrats in 2003, has formed a government coalition with the Serb minority party on the basis of fully reintegrating Croatian Serbs – hence junking Tudjman’s program and carrying out the Social Democrat program that the latter never had the guts to do. This is not to laud them, it is simple bourgeois pragmatism – that is what the EU demands. Which should caution us from a lot of left nonsense about imperialism ‘supporting’ the Tudjman program.

8. Kosova – Right of Return and of Self-Determination

And of course I am also in favour of Serbs returning to Kosova, but again this is a red herring. By definition, Republika Srpska would not exist if non-Serbs returned, but if Serbs – one tenth of Kosova’s pre-war population – all returned, it would not abolish the right of the overwhelming majority of Kosovars (Albanians) to self-determination, including either independence or union with Albania. Some regions with Serb majority may want autonomy or union with Serbia, that is their right. What most ‘anti-imperialist’ apologists for Serbian nationalism fail to note is that it is the ongoing imperialist occupation that denies Kosova, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, self-determination, and the main excuse used by NATO for staying forever, is the need to protect the Serb minority from Albanian revenge and chauvinism.

Indeed, the main reason for the imperialist war in 1999 was to prevent the emergence of an independent Kosova. The actions of the Serbian regime were not only failing miserably to do this, but were having the opposite effect, boosting the KLA from a tiny group to a massive army of desperate people with nothing to lose of some 40,000 fighters by mid-1998. This large-scale instability around NATO’s southern flank, threatening the ‘nightmare scenario’ in the southern Balkans and even war between NATO allies Greece and Turkey, meant NATO could no longer ignore Serbian repression there as it had done for the last decade. Only imperialist troops entering Kosova would succeed in disarming rather than boosting the KLA and prevent the emergence of an independent Kosova, but as the idea of western troops within “its” Kosova came into conflict with Serbian nationalist ideology, Serbia had to be ‘taught a lesson’ by imperialism about who was boss. Teaching such a lesson via some “shock and awe” terror against Serb civilians also helped the US lay the groundwork for a new interventionist role for NATO, which was having its very symbolic 50th birthday in April 1999. Of course NATO did nothing to help the Albanians who then came under massive Serbian attack – NATO only hit 13 Serbian tanks in Kosova during the whole war, but plenty of civilian trains and bridges in Serbia.

Of course I oppose Albanian revenge and chauvinism, but as with the Krajina, it was more or less inevitable with no revolutionary parties to lead the struggle – following a century of oppression, a decade of intense repression and apartheid, and finally the ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Albanians and destruction of 100,000 homes by the Serboslav army in 1999, which used NATO’s air terror as a cover to terrorise someone else, it was to be expected that many returning Albanians would attack the Serb minority. Foolishly claiming that NATO’s actions led to the reverse ethnic cleansing of Serbs is the same as saying that ethnically cleansed Albanians had no right to return. The actions of many returnees were of course is reprehensible, though it must be pointed out that these actions are carried out by individuals or groups rather than by an organised state apparatus, as the Albanians are not allowed by imperialism to set up such a thing and the KLA was forcibly dissolved and disarmed; and as with Krajina, while both cleansings must be condemned, it is the original massive violation of proletarian ethnic solidarity by the Serbian oppressor regime that led to the later actions in response.

It is also not often noted that it was the NATO occupation forces that drew a line across northern Kosova, through Mitrovica, north of which Albanians could not return, in order to allow a region where Serbs could safely congregate. Under the circumstances, this is understandable, and Albanian chauvinists have themselves to blame; however, the rapidity of the NATO cordon-line, the choice of region to protect – the most economically valuable region – and the fact that NATO couldn’t care less about human rights, suggests this was the already understood partition strategy. This allows the Serb minority, effectively Serbia, to keep control of the Trepca complex, the most valuable mining and metallurgy complex in the Balkans.

If Kosova chooses independence, this northern region may choose to join Serbia, though the Serbian regime is also angling for another four regions, which it is currently discussing with the EU, though none would have Serb majorities without ethnic cleansing. The regions claimed by the Serbian regime cover some 30 percent of Kosova. However, then Kosova may put the question of Albanian majority regions in the Presevo valley in south-east Serbia.
“But this goes back to an old discussion and your comic book rendition of the Yugoslav conflicts in which only one side is doing the cleansing, firing the guns, etc.” I of course have no such comic book rendition of this war any more than any other war. “Both” or “all” sides fire guns in the Balkans, as they do in Palestine, in Iraq, in all theatres of Kurdistan, in Kashmir, in Mindanao, in Sri Lanka, in East Timor and elsewhere. The difference is the ability to distinguish the massive and systematic violence of the oppressor from the violence of the oppressed, even when aspects of the latter takes the form of “terrorism”, of attacking civilians etc. I condemn all such “terrorist” attacks when used by the oppressed, in all theatres, but I never put it in the same category as the systematic crimes of the oppressor.

Putting the crimes committed by Srebrenica Muslim leader Naser Oric against surrounding Serb villages, or of the Muslim 7th Brigade in central Bosnia against Croat villagers, on the same level as the massive crimes and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbian and Croatian war machines, that in the first place drove tens of thousands of vengeful Muslim refugees into holes like Srebrenica and Zenica, from where they later struck out, is the same as putting terrorist acts by Palestinians coming out of various holes they’ve been driven into or trapped in like Jenin or Gaza or Shatilla on the same level as the massive crimes of the Zionist state which drove them into these holes.

Nevertheless, reverse ethnic cleansing and reverse chauvinism from among the oppressed and terrorised when they get the upper hand here and there is also reprehensible and it goes without saying that it is anti-proletarian politics. All of this represents the limitations of the bourgeois nationalism that arose on the corpse of ex-socialist Yugoslavia. Only a new socialist working class unity can eliminate these chauvinist inheritances throughout the region. Such unity however can only be a unity among equals, meaning an unambiguous right of self-determination for the Kosovars, and the right of return of all peoples, meaning the abolition of the chauvinist Dayton partition of Bosnia, and the withdrawal of imperialist occupation troops from both countries. It is true that there is little hope of any of this for the time being, but the time to defend proletarian multi-ethnic unity was precisely when the major multi-ethnic working class concentrations were under attack in Bosnia in 1992-95, something some of the left did with honour and others lost their bearings and ended up peculiarly waving the flag for reaction.

By Michael Karadjis

December 18, 2014

This is a brief article – these days, I am flat out following, and writing on, the Syrian revolution and apocalypse at http://mkaradjis.wordpress.com.

Nevertheless, given the previous prominence of the morbid “body counts” debates about how many Kosovar Albanians were slaughtered by Milosevic’s racist and fascist ethnic cleansers in 1999 – with the favourite recycled article by the “anti-imperialist” left and the Islamophobic ultra-right being the one that answered either “very few” or “not enough” – I thought it was significant to note the final publication of the Kosovo Memory Book. I have copied an article about this below, with a link to the Memory Book.

This is the full list of the roughly 13,000 victims who were killed between 1998 and the end of 2000, including the 11 weeks of the NATO-Milosevic-KLA war in March-June 1999, the KLA uprising and brutal Serbian counterinsurgency of the year leading up this (1998-99), and the often brutal revenge against remaining Serb communities in the year or more afterwards.

As we always insisted at the time, the figure of approximately 10,000 Albanians killed, the most common figure cited at the time, was approximately correct – according to the article linked below, “the list includes 10,415 Albanians, 2,197 Serbs, 528 Roma, Bosniaks and other non-Albanians.”

Of course, the 2197 Serbs killed is also a significant proportion, given that Serbs accounted for some 10% of the Kosovo population. Such figures have often been cited to suggest that the killings between Serb and Albanian forces was roughly proportional. This idea sits uncomfortably with known facts – eg, the fact that the “Serbian” massacre of Albanians was carried out by the Serbian state apparatus, the 4th largest military force in Europe, with overwhelming military superiority in advanced weaponry, whereas the Albanians were a guerrilla force lightly armed with AK-47’s; and the fact that the mass killings of Albanians by this fascistic state corresponded the to the Nakbah-like expulsion of 850,000 Albanians – some half their entire population – from their homeland.

This contradiction is resolved when we understand that the 2197 Serb victims do not merely mean those Serbs killed in Kosovo by Albanian guerrillas during the war. Importantly, the figure also includes Serbs killed by NATO bombing within Serbia itself (as well as Kosovo); includes both military and civilian casualties; and includes Serbs killed in attacks by Albanians after the war ended until the end of 2000, in attacks motivated either by blood-lust revenge, opportunistic crime or a race-hate reflecting that of the oppressor they had just been freed from.

Saying this is in no way intended to diminish the importance of Serb civilians killed by NATO (really, how did bombing Serb civilians in Belgrade and Ljubijana, hundreds of kilometres north of Kosovo, help protect Kosovar Albanians from the Serbian armed forces in Kosovo – NATO only hit 13 Serbian tanks in the whole war, most in the last 10 days), still less of those killed in the period of post-war revenge and anarchy, innocent Serbs forced to pay for the crimes of the Serbian military and Chetnik bands who were safely back in Serbia following their rape and pillage of Kosovo.

However, what it does is underline that the war itself (on the ground, as opposed to NATO’s air war), was absolutely a war of disproportionate slaughter and ethnic cleansing carried out by a massive military machine against a civilian population defended by lightly armed guerrillas, and the relative numbers do indeed represent this fact, because between the NATO bombing and the post-war revenge, virtually the entirety of the 2000 killed Serbs can be accounted for.

Michael Karadjis

List of Kosovo War Victims Published
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/kosovo-war-victims-list-published

Balkan Insight
10 December 2014

A wide-ranging list of more than 13,000 people of all nationalities who died or disappeared during the Kosovo conflict was published online to mark Human Rights Day.

Milka Domanovic | BIRN | Belgrade

[PHOTO}: The Kosovo Memory Book website.

The list of 13,517 people who were killed or went missing between January 1998 and December 31, 2000, including civilians and members of armed forces, was published on Wednesday on a website called the Kosovo Memory Book <http://www.kosovomemorybook.org>.

The list includes 10,415 Albanians, 2,197 Serbs, 528 Roma, Bosniaks and other non-Albanians. It was created by the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre and the Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo and was last updated on November 7.

The database says that 8,661 Kosovo Albanian civilians were killed or disappeared, as well as 1,797 Serbs and 447 Roma, Bosniaks and other non-Albanians. The rest of those registered were fighters.

“It is a result of years of research, which is based on the statements of witnesses and family members given to researchers from the Humanitarian Law Centre and Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo, as well as on data from court documents, forensic reports, armed forces records, NGOs and media reports, war diaries and other documents,” the Humanitarian Law Centre said in a statement.

[PHOTO]: Women in Black human rights protest in Belgrade.

Meanwhile at a press conference to mark Human Rights Day, several Serbian NGOs warned that the Serbian government was failing to tackle rights issues.

Sonja Biserko from the Heksinki Committee for Human Rights said that the situation in Serbia was worse than 10 years ago, arguing that “Serbia is a divided society, primarily on ethnic grounds”.

“The unwillingness of Serbia to overcome the legacy of the recent past and distancing itself creates tensions in regional affairs, as it was recently the case with the return of [war crimes defendant] Vojislav Seselj,” Biserko said.

Marijana Toma from the Humanitarian Law Centre also spoke at the press conference, saying that Serbia was not issuing enough indictments for war crimes and that only low-ranking perpetrators were being prosecuted, while “the responsibility of middle- and high-ranking police and army officials is almost completely neglected”.

Serbian peace group Women in Black also gathered in Belgrade on Wednesday to mark Human Rights Day with a protest action entitled ‘Enough Terror’.

Activists held up placards listing human-rights problems and banners that read “I will always be an activist” and “I will not live in fear”.

Stasa Zajovic from Women in Black said that it was impossible to speak about progress in the field of human rights.

“What’s done [by the authorities] is done on a declarative level, and we want this action to point out to the difference between the real situation and promises,” she said.

Human Rights Day is marked annually on December 10 to honour the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United Nations General Assembly adopted on December 10, 1948.

April 07, 2010

By Michael Karadjis

Introduction to 2008 article in 2010:

The following article was written in early 2008, shortly after Kosova declared independence. Over two years later, the deadlock the article describes remains almost unchanged. The article explains that Kosova consists of parts of two nations – the Serb and Albanian nations – inextricably linked due to geography, but deeply divided due to a history of oppression and the rise of national chauvinism and its reflection among the oppressed. This makes Kosova similar to Cyprus, where parts of two nations – the Greek and Turkish nations – are also linked but deeply divided. In both cases, full ethnic partition along an international border is impossible. The article therefore proposes a plan for Kosova similar to the UN Annan Plan which was proposed for Cyprus (but as yet rejected) – that plan calls for a bi-zonal, bi-communal Cyprus federation consisting of a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot entity, rather than mere “autonomy” for the Turks. Such a plan is much better suited to Kosova’s realities than the current Ahtisaari Plan, despite the vast autonomy it offers the Kosovar Serbs. I am putting it up now because I consider it to be just as timely as it was then.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….

Since Kosova declared independence on February 17, it has been recognised by around 30 countries, though every country in the 57-member Islamic Conference Organisation also signed a statement welcoming the event. Another 20-30 have declared they will not recognise, while most are “waiting and watching” the situation, wanting more information, waiting for more concrete steps by Kosova regarding implementation of the minority rights’ provisions of the Ahtisaari Plan, or otherwise in no hurry.

With Russia and China and most non-permanent members of the UN Security Council opposed, there is no UN recognition, meaning that officially the UNSC Resolution 1244, adopted in June 1999 at the end of NATO’s devastating war on Serbia, which calls Kosova part of Serbia, remains the officially “legal” situation.

Meanwhile, both imperialist blocs with a presence in Kosova, NATO and the incoming EU supervisory bodies, consist of countries which are deeply divided on the issue, and thus have no consensus on how to act. Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Rumania and Slovakia, members of both organisations, are leaders of the anti-recognition camp, even if the most powerful countries in the two blocs have recognised the new state.

As such, NATO has announced that its mandate remains the same, that is, under Resolution 1244, which recognises Serbian sovereignty, with a role to maintain “a safe and secure environment” for “all peoples,” but that it “is not a police force or a lead political body in Kosovo.”

The EU police and justice mission (EULEX), however, and the proposed EU-appointed International Civilian Representative (ICR, to replace the high representative of the outgoing UN authority UNMIK), are on shakier ground. The original mission of EULEX was to supervise the implementation of the Ahtisaari Plan, particularly the aspects concerned with the high degree of minority rights.

The aim was to reassure Kosovar Serbs and other minorities that such legislation would be implemented and institutions built as the Albanian-led Kosova government declared independence, as it had long announced that it would do unilaterally if no UN resolution could be agreed on.

While there was sharp disagreement within the EU over recognition, there was unanimity in supporting the mission. This is because although the Ahtisaari Plan calls for recognition of an imperialist “supervised independence” for Kosova, those EU countries rejecting any independence nevertheless support the plan’s provisions for minorities, support the “supervision.” Therefore, there is consensus in the EU for EULEX only to implement the internal provisions of the plan, not to aid “independence.”

However, as EULEX, unlike NATO, has no mandate under 1244, as Serbia demanded a new UN resolution if it was to be accepted. Serbia’s aim was for such a resolution to reaffirm Serbian sovereignty. Otherwise it would oppose EULEX’s entry. However, if such a resolution had been passed by the UNSC, the Kosova government would have blocked EULEX entry, as they see it as a concession they are making to minorities and not something they need so much themselves. Thus, if no independence, no EULEX – which also worked vice versa, hence the late decision by a number of major EU countries, particularly Germany, to accept recognition as the price to be in a position to control it.

This means the EULEX mission has arrived “illegally” according to international law, and has no mandate. And this is even more the case given that many of the EU states represented in EULEX have now recognised Kosovar independence, in violation of 1244.

But what should socialists and supporters of the oppressed say about these “legal” issues which make it “illegal” for an oppressed people such as the Kosovars, long trapped by force within borders they did not consent to, to declare their independence? Even more, how does this play out when major imperialist powers, which have their troops and missions in Kosova, are not only recognising this “illegal” independence but also “supervising” it and rendering it, in fact, much less than independence?

One side of this is that socialists certainly do support the right of oppressed nations, such as the Kosovar Albanians, to self-determination, including independence. There can be little substance to a “legality” that prevents independence for a people who have struggled for it for many decades just because one or two members of the elite 5-member Security Council club – in this case Russia – blocks it in the same way that the US blocks recognition of Palestine’s 1988 unilateral declaration of independence.

After Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1974, and the intervention of the Indian army to promote its independence, China also vetoed Security Council recognition for 3 years, making Bangladesh “illegal.”

We certainly object to the imperialist troops and “supervision” that are greatly limiting Kosovar independence, but our attitude is to call for these imperialist forces to withdraw, which would allow Kosovars to achieve full self-determination.

At the same time, we need to understand that nearly all the “conditions” set by the EU and Ahtisaari for “independence,” which are to be “supervised,” are concerned with the rights of the minorities, especially Serbs, and more generally with nullifying any “Albanian” content to an officially multi-ethnic state, even though Albanians constitute 90 percent of the population.

This includes autonomy and links to Belgrade for Serb-majority regions, protective areas around Serb Orthodox monasteries, dual citizenship for Serbs, a large degree of representation for Serbs and minorities at all levels of government and state, including significant veto powers, the enforcing of a new flag with no Albanian colours or symbols, an independence declaration vetted by the imperialists to make sure there was no mention of the Albanian people, and banning of union with Albania, while the major role of imperialist troops and police is protection of Serb and minority communities and cultural monuments.

While opposing the restrictions on independence, it is difficult to argue that these actual policies are not good in a country where the massive crimes against the Albanian people by the previous Serbian occupation led to pogroms against Serbs by vengeful or chauvinist Albanians once the Serbian army had been driven out. The smashing of basic working class solidarity between the two peoples is a factor that cannot be ignored.

Nevertheless, despite the very high level of minority rights and protection under supervised independence, most Kosovar Serbs remain opposed and fearful of any independence, precisely because of these realities on the ground. Since the Serb oppressor regime was expelled, Albanians have run the state, Serbs effectively turned into an oppressed minority, whatever the legal standing. But then their opposition to the democratic right of the majority of Kosovars to exercise self-determination further deepens the inter-ethnic hostility. This plays into the hands of Belgrade, which aims to maintain Kosova as its “sovereign” land in some form, but their interests are not necessarily identical.

What is happening on the ground therefore is the consolidation of a partition of Kosova. This partition – mostly across the north – was first established when NATO troops arrived in June 1999 and aided Serb militia dividing the northern city of Mitrovica across the Ibar river, maintaining the entire north of this natural border up to the Serbia border as a Serb zone – some15 percent of Kosova – a zone that just happens to have the richest resources of Kosova.

Moreover, while we reject the argument that “international law” has any moral authority over oppressed peoples changing oppressive “legal” borders, the reality in this case is that recognition of Kosova by some but not by others, or by the Security Council, has entrenched and given a legal character to this partition.

That is because the Serbian state is still effectively in control of north Kosova – indeed has been since 1999 – so while its “legal” arguments have no practical effect in the south, they form the reality in the north. Serbian legal control over the north is consistent with UN resolution 1244. And at present, the UN authority (UNMIK) which has ruled Kosova since 1999 on the basis of alleged Serbian sovereignty remains in place.

Thus, forced to comment on Serbia’s opposition to EULEX, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon had to publicly deny EULEX mission chief Peter Feith’s claim that the transfer of jurisdiction from UNMIK to EULEX has begun, and stressed that UNMIK will continue in Kosovo until UN Security Council decides otherwise.

Recognising this reality, and the mass Serb boycott of the incoming EU “supervisory” institutions, EULEX on February 24 packed up and left northern Kosova. In contrast, Serbs in the north said they welcomed the continuing presence of UNMIK and NATO.

As such, the new international border is the Ibar River. Moreover, this has extended, more tenuously, to the smaller Serb minority enclaves in the Albanian-dominated south. Throughout the whole country, almost all Serb police officers have either quit, or refused to turn up for work for the Kosova Police Service (KPS), where they form 10 percent of officers – one of the more successful multi-ethnic institutions. The Serbian Orthodox church announced it had severed all contact with Kosova authorities and EULEX. Meanwhile, Kosovo Albanians employed by UNMIK’s civilian institutions are also leaving the northern Kosova, Albanian police have withdrawn from the north and even Albanian inmates from a northern jail have been withdrawn.

Of course quitting the KPS in the south could be shooting themselves in the foot, as Serb communities in the south are more vulnerable to Albanian hostility and having their own police is to their advantage. However, Serb police leaders say that while they will no longer work for the KPS now that it is part of an independent state, they will continue working if they can report directly to UNMIK. Negotiations are now underway, but this signals a further legal basis for partition extending beyond the north.

EU officials acknowledge the risk of a split between a Serb “UNMIK-land” north of the Ibar from which the EU is barred and a “EULEX-land” Albanian Kosovo elsewhere. This is the substance of the latest proposal put by Serbia’s Kosovo Minister, Slobodan Samardzic, to the UN, for the “functional separation” of Serb and Albanian communities, with the Serb community still under the Serbian government. UNMIK deputy head, US diplomat Larry Rossin, stated this “could be the basis for talks between Belgrade and UNMIK.”

NATO officials say Serbia’s attempt to force a partition presents a difficult challenge. “Our mandate is to ensure a safe and secure environment and to assure the freedom of movement throughout all of Kosovo,” said James Appathurai, a NATO spokesman. “But NATO is not a police force or the lead political body in Kosovo, so let’s not ask of NATO what it cannot do.” Many senior European Union officials also admit privately that there is little the European Union could do to prevent partition. Thus the provocation by UNMIK police on March 17 – when they raided the courthouse in northern Mitrovica to end its occupation by Serbian legal workers demanding a separate court system, provoking a Serb backlash – appears a test of the waters that badly backfired.

To partition or not to partition has been a long term debate among imperialist powers. One of the first US ideologists to advocate Kosovar independence, Charles Kupchan in a Foreign Affairs article in 2005, in fact advocated it in combination with partition – a position he has now restated. Britain’s former Balkan envoy Lord Owen, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, British general Mike Jackson – the first head of NATO in occupied Kosova – Britain’s Daily Telegraph, the Dutch government and many others have advocated partition as the answer. The French Le Figaro recently called for a new international conference to “finally determine” borders throughout the Balkans based on ethnic criteria. From one point of view, partition is the ideal solution: only by officially dividing peoples whose cohabitation can only lead to conflict, they reason, can a new stability be founded in the region. One theory even claims the rapid imperialist recognition of “illegal” independence was meant to lead to deadlock, in order to make partition the only solution.

But of course this internal partition already exists. What the current majority in the imperialist camp believe is that if this translates into open partition along an international border, this will be more destabilizing than Kosova independence in itself – which they always opposed because they believe there may be a “precedent effect” of encouraging other oppressed peoples to declare independence – as it would even more clearly pose the ethnic principle as a basis for border changes. At least if it can be declared “multi-ethnic,” this precedent effect could be dampened

More concretely, if the north remains part of Serbia, this may encourage the Albanian-dominated south to join Albania, which would then have a destructive flow-on effect in Macedonia, where a quarter of the population are Albanian. This could lead to a blow-out of the ‘Macedonian question’ and threaten the cohesion of NATO’s “southern flank.” Blocking a ‘greater Albania’ has long been considered a central priority in imperialist strategy. Therefore the western powers want an officially united, multi-ethnic Kosova, as enshrined in the Ahtisaari Plan, which they believe will be the least destabilizing alternative.

Both the secession of the north to Serbia proper and the right of the rest to join Albania and create an ethnic Albanian state can be viewed as the right of both communities to self-determination, blocked by imperialist ‘stability’ concerns. And both should have the right to do this, and not be blocked by imperialism, if they so desire.

However, it is arguably the worst outcome for the Kosovar Serbs: the simple fact is that only 40 percent of Kosovar Serbs live in their already very secure northern stronghold, so its secession would abandon the majority of Serbs who live in smaller and more vulnerable enclaves surrounded by the Albanian majority throughout the south. All the famous Serbian Orthodox monasteries are also in the south. An international border at the Ibar will effectively leave these Serbs a much smaller minority in a fully Albanian Kosova, with what is now their major centre cut out. At least some kind of Serb-Albanian partnership to run an independent state still therefore appears the best overall outcome, if it were possible.

Thus the partitionist push by a section of the northern Serbs and elements of the Belgrade regime may be in Serbian interests – getting rid of the hostile, fast-breeding Albanian majority while keeping hold of the vast resources of the north – but represents the opposite of the interests of most Kosovar Serbs.

Thus many Serb leaders from outside the north are highly critical of partition at the Ibar precisely because it would leave them out. This view is continually expressed for example by Rada Trajkovic, the president of the executive council of the Serbian National Council in Kosovo. Likewise, head of the Serbian List for Kosovo, Oliver Ivanovic, denounced on March 25 “jingoism” in the north, where it is easy to be jingoistic and “score cheap points, but the price will be high for the Serbs in the central part of Kosovo, because, in the event of a partition, they don’t see themselves staying in Kosovo at all.” He accused Samardžić of trying to gain cheap points in Kosovo for his election campaign.
Trajkovic also stresses that it is in the interests of Serb communities to accept EULEX. She therefore proposes the legal problem be fudged by UNMIK remaining and for Serbs to have contact with EULEX via UNMIK. Thus while she opposes full partition, this proposal still fits into a growing internal legal partition. In fact, Trajkovic called for a “soft” partition of Kosova “according to the Cyprus model,” that is the Annan Plan for Cyprus reunification based on a Greek Cypriot entity and a Turkish Cypriot entity forming a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation. In similar vein, Ivanovic, while rejecting partition and calling on Serb police not to quit the KPS, claimed the Serb regions of Kosovo will in the coming period have a status “similar to that of the Republic of Srpska in Bosnia,” and this “will last not for months, but for years.”
In pointing to something beyond the autonomy and very significant rights guaranteed to Serbs in the Ahtisaari package in an otherwise united Kosova, but something less than outright international partition at the Ibar, these Kosovar Serbs are not only offering a way out of the current constitutional deadlock, but are also offering a solution that accords with the reality of this society very deeply divided between two nations, that was never multi-ethnic even in better times.

While many Serb leaders have stated that they prefer supervised independence – with the vast rights and autonomy within Kosova in the Ahtisaari Plan, guaranteed by the imperialist “supervisory” bodies and troops – to full partition, nevertheless this vast autonomy cannot satisfy them. The reality of Kosova – unlike Bosnia before it was violently ripped apart by Serbian and Croatian chauvinism and EU ethnic partition plans – is that it was never in any sense a multi-ethnic society, but a straight out Serbian colony.

This means the divisions between the two peoples – who also unlike in Bosnia do not speak the same language – are long term and deep. There has never been intermarriage for example. What this also means is that once the Serbian colonial regime was driven out, Albanians now run the state and Serbs are effectively an oppressed minority. This is not in a legal sense, where Serbs – even before the Ahtisaari Plan – have vast official rights and representation. However, the reality on the ground, with proletarian solidarity having long been smashed to pieces, is that whatever the formalities, the overwhelming majority will rule, and minorities will tend to pick up the crumbs.

What we have therefore in Kosova – like in Cyprus – is parts of two nations that have no common consciousness as “Kosovars.” A Cyprus-style plan thus represents this reality better than the Ahtisaari Plan, but also better than open partition. The advantage for the scattered Serbs in the south compared to full partition is that northern Mitrovica, by remaining in Kosova, would continue to form their educational, health, cultural and partly political centre, a centre with a Serb university and major hospital. It is much easier to incorporate scattered enclaves into the same Serb entity if it is part of a Kosova federation than if it was in a separate country.

However, there are also advantages for Kosovar Albanians. Now, in order to attempt to incorporate the Serbs and prevent Kosova becoming part of an Albanian state, the new EU-run state is enforcing an official multi-ethnicity that denies Albanians genuine self-determination. This is not only because of the international presence and supervision of this plan. It is also because this goes well beyond the rights, representation and autonomy for Serbs, to denying the Albanian majority any official recognition as the key people in the state, after a century of struggle and thousands of martyrs. After tens of thousands waved the Albanian red and black eagle flag, representing their actual ethnic consciousness and the rights they had under Tito, it is difficult to not see the new blue and white flag as a gross imperialist imposition, along with the fact that the Albanian people are mentioned nowhere in the independence declaration, and most likely will not be mentioned in the constitution.

By contrast, a bi-national federation will not only allow both Albanians and Serbs to run their own affairs, but also to represent themselves with whatever symbols from their history and culture that they choose. It has the further advantage to the Albanians that the rationale for denying them full independence – that their treatment of the Serb minority requires the imperialist “supervisory” bodies to ensure protection of minority rights and official multi-ethnicity – would have much less credence if Serbs run their own entity.

In fact they could argue against having any “supervision” of their independence – Kosova has only accepted “supervision” on the basis that otherwise the imperialist states would not support their independence. But if such a set-up brought the Serb community on board, there would be less need to accede to these demands, as it would be more difficult to accuse it of “unilateralism.” At this stage, the declaration of independence, even with all the provisions for minorities, is essentially a statement by the Albanian majority community rather than the whole society.

This is why a solution based more on the Cyprus Annan Plan than either the Ahtisaari Plan or open partition appears the most realistic alternative.

There is also the possibility that Serbia itself may see this as enough of a “compromise” to accept Kosovar independence as such a federated state, enabling a UN Security Council resolution to pass. There is of course no guarantee of this, but certainly the pressure within Serbian society from both Kosovar Serbs and anti-chauvinist Serbs in Serbia proper would gain momentum at the expense of the far right which now dominates and stirs up chauvinist poison as a matter of political survival on the backs of real lives in Kosova.

It is also just possible that imperialist states have such a solution as a ‘Plan B’ tucked away somewhere. The current logjam has led to a section of the imperialist leadership now essentially espousing this solution, probably a card long there which no-one wanted to play too early. Swedish Foreign minister, Carl Bildt, while “ruling out Kosovo’s partition along ethnic lines,” said “the division was a fact and would require a large degree of self-government for the Serbs.” His meetings with the local Serbs “testified that the partition was present in their lives: “these are two societies, two communities. We have tried for many years of the UN presence to overcome this, but with no significant success.”

At one point Belgrade and Priština will have to return to the negotiation table, “but it will not change the status of Kosovo,” meaning the internal arrangement will need to change to better accommodate the Serbs, whose situation “is worrying, but little is said about it. It should be reiterated that they are also Serbian citizens, since they have the right to dual citizenship.” Italian foreign minister Massimo D’Alema has now joined in, declaring “I hope that they (Belgrade and Pristina) will soon pick up the dialogue that was interrupted. Kosovo has not achieved full independence, lives under an international protectorate and it doesn’t seem probable to me that it will become a UN member state before an agreement with Serbia has been reached.”

He also said UNMIK will have to stay in Kosovo indefinitely to act as a buffer between nations that recognize Kosova and those that do not – the vast majority. Many states not (or not yet) recognising, have good reason. For our socialist friends in power in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, the fear that the formal “violation of international law” by imperialist powers might act as a precedent for them to use dissatisfaction in their borders to intervene and set up a bogus state is something they are right to consider.

While we should give an unofficial, and cautious, socialist ‘welcome’ to the only partial fruition of the Kosovar people’s legitimate aspirations for self-determination – our message of solidarity with these aspirations – the question of recognition by states is more complex. The Australian government recognised Kosova; we did not campaign for them to do so, though obviously neither do we campaign against. This stance derives especially from the continuing imperialist presence and control limiting these aspirations, but also given that the real partition on the ground is likely to lead to further changes that may unlock the deadlock.

As a statement by Greek socialists maintains, “a real just solution for Kosovo comes through the restoration of multinational co-existence.” This should not be seen as a condition for independence; on the contrary, independence is a necessary step towards this goal, but an insufficient one. But there can be no real independence without the restoration of shattered working class solidarity between the two communities. Whatever the maneuvers of imperialist powers and nationalists on both sides, if a pragmatic end result accords with what is best in the circumstances for approaching this goal, then it should be welcomed

Kosova Independence Series Part III:

March 18, 2010

By Michael Karadjis

The second part of this series (http://mihalisk.blogspot.com/2008_03_30_archive.html) showed that the basis for Kosova’s right to self-determination is real, and that there has been a genuine, mass-based striving for it all century. Yet some on the left have argued that its recent declaration of independence is merely an initiative of the imperialist powers, who allegedly had a long term aim to create an “independent” Kosova state under their control.

This third part will show that the imperialist powers have long opposed Kosova’s right to independence, and explain the reasons for this. As such, their belated recognition of it is an acceptance of the inevitable – unless they wanted to fight a counterinsurgency war inside Europe against 2 million Albanians – and given this, an attempt to control, “supervise” and limit Kosova’s independence. A key focus will be the war in 1999, showing how even as NATO bombed Serbia, it acted not to promote independence, but to derail it.

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

Post-war Yugoslavia had a “special relationship” with the west, due to Tito’s break with Stalin. Even within the Non-Aligned Movement, it was part of its pro-western wing – the western countries strongly backed Yugoslavia to head the movement in 1979 against the rival Cuban candidacy.

Yugoslavia was a “de facto member of NATO,” with military obligations in the event of war.[1] The US supplied Yugoslavia with $1 billion in weapons from 1950 to 1991, according to the Pentagon’s Security Cooperation Agency, including 15 F-84G Lockheed Thunderstreak fighters, 60 M-47 tanks, hundreds of artillery pieces and anti-aircraft guns, a mine countermeasure ship and millions of dollars worth of sophisticated electronic equipment.[2]

Western support increased after Tito’s death in 1980, as de-Titoisation removed many of the genuinely progressive aspects of Titoism. In the 1980s, Yugoslavia had more political prisoners than any country in eastern Europe, and the bulk were Albanians. In the 1980s, the US sold Yugoslavia $193 million worth of air-to-surface missiles and air defense radar systems. After Milosevic seized power in 1987, the US supplied $96 million in arms and training to 1991, including fighter aircraft, tanks and artillery.[3] Officers of the Yugoslav Peoples Army (JNA) were trained by the US until 1991.[4]

The US ignored the massive human rights violations in Kosova due to Yugoslavia’s role in the Cold War as a bulwark against the Warsaw Pact: “(while) human rights in Kosovo has been the subject of US concern, its relative importance was reduced by many other factors; the USA saw Yugoslavia as a symbol of differences within the communist world. Its human rights policy seemed liberal in comparison with the countries of the Warsaw Pact, while its foreign policy was one of non-alignment.”[5]

Yugoslavia’s “market socialism” also allowed deeper economic relations with imperialist countries than elsewhere in east Europe. The “Belgrade mafia” – George Bush’s assistant secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger, his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and “permanent adviser” Henry Kissinger – who had significant economic interests in Yugoslavia – was in charge of the Bush government during Yugoslavia’s collapse. Eagleburger and Scowcroft were instrumental in the “Friends of Yugoslavia” which continually lobbied for further loans and debt rescheduling to Belgrade,[6] the former flying from his Belgrade embassy to Washington in 1981 to campaign in Congress against condemnations of human rights abuses in Kosova, during the murderous crackdown that year.

Not surprisingly, the US media in the 1980s parroted the Deep South style racist horror stories about a lawless Albanian mob running Kosova, the story spread by their Serbian nationalist friends. A good example is an oft-quoted NYT article, which parroted the Serbian nationalist charges about an Albanian plot to rape Serb women and the like, and also asserted the rise of Milosevic was a “rare opportunity for Yugoslavia to take radical political and economic steps. Efforts are underway to strengthen central authority through amendments to the constitution. The hope is that something will be done then to exert the rule of law in Kosovo.”[7]

The federal president during the rise of Milosevic, Ante Markovic, was described by the BBC correspondent as “Washington’s best ally in Yugoslavia.”[8] Markovic sent the federal Yugoslav army into Kosova in early 1989, at Serbia’s behest, to crush the Kosovars’ struggle to defend their constitutional autonomy. When Milosevic completed the task, via killing 24 miners and surrounding Kosova assembly with tanks and helicopters, Markovic congratulated him on this destruction of the federal order and of the Yugoslav constitution that he and the army were supposed to represent.

It became hard to avoid the worst human rights situation in Europe, but the US tried. A letter supposedly signed by Bush during his election campaign in 1988, expressing personal concern about human rights in Kosovo, was denied by the State Department, which reported it was a forgery, a somewhat different response to the loud US policy on “human rights” in eastern Europe.[9]

The only concern was about the effects that resistance by Kosovars might have. The alienation of the Albanians might cause damage to the “territorial integrity and stability of Yugoslavia” (which the US “has a strong interest in”), if the Albanians “increase the pressure for a change in the political and territorial status quo in Yugoslavia, either by forceful or peaceful means.”[10]

Serbia’s smashing of the Yugoslav constitution in Kosova, its imposition of economic sanctions on Slovenia in October 1990, its new 1990 bourgeois constitution declaring its “right” to intervene in other republics, and finally its refusal to accept the Croat Stipe Mesic’s legal turn as Yugoslav president, led to overwhelming majorities of Croats and Slovenes voting for independence in mid 1991. While remaining unrecognised by any country, the Yugoslav army then smashed Croatia to pieces in 6 months of massive bombing, smashing anything that remained of the concept of Yugoslavia in the eyes of the masses. At the end of this, in late 1991 the European Union launched the Badinter Commission to assess the claims of Yugoslavia’s republics for independence. Because Kosova was not officially a republic, its independence declaration was ignored, leaving Kosova in limbo under apartheid throughout the 1990s. Arguably, its legal pre-1989 status as constituent unit of Yugoslavia entitled it to self-determination like the republics the West belatedly recognised.

The abolition of Kosova’s autonomy and years of repression and apartheid in the 1990s drew little reaction from western circles, and never calls to reinstitute autonomy. The EC Declaration on Bosnia and Herzegovina in May 1992[11] outlined policy towards the successor states of Yugoslavia. Regarding Serbia, it called for “respect for the rights of minorities and national or ethnic groups, including Kosovo,” making no mention of autonomy or special status, not to mention restoration of is legal status as constituent unit of Yugoslavia. By contrast, in Croatia it called for “special status for Krajina,” the Serb region torn out of Croatia by the Yugoslav army. For Bosnia, a “political solution can only be based on” partition into “three (territorial) constituent units,” as outlined by the EC in February 1992, despite no internal borders existing and the complete intermingling of the three populations.

When Milosevic finally abolished the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992, setting up the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between Serbia and Montenegro, Kosova had no say in the matter, thus its inclusion was constitutionally invalid.

While western powers accepted Serbian rule, no UN resolution recognised the new state’s borders, as its insistence on occupying the seat of former Yugoslavia was rejected by other successor states. Therefore, the talk about international “legality” being violated by Kosova’s recent independence declaration has an ironic underpinning: the first time the Security Council recognised Kosova as part of new Yugoslavia was in June 1999 in Resolution 1244, the result of the NATO intervention!

In the US-imposed Dayton Plan ending the Bosnian war in 1995, Bosnia was partitioned into two ethnic-based republics. Even if this had become necessary due to the destruction of the mixed Bosnian population and proletarian solidarity by the war itself, the Serb 30 percent of the population would have been entitled to only this share of the territory, yet the US plan gave the Serb Republic 49 percent of Bosnia, recognising ethnic cleansing.

Yet when Kosovar leader Ibrahim Rugova, leading a peaceful “Gandhian” resistance, appealed to be invited to Dayton to put the plight of the Kosovars on the table, he was ignored. Kosova, despite its Albanian majority, was left on a lower footing than ‘Republika Srpska’, though the latter had not had a Serb majority before its expulsion of non-Serbs. Kosova in Serbia was part of Dayton’s Serbo-Croatian regional balance.

A KLA commander explained, “we feel a deep, deep sense of betrayal. We mounted a peaceful, civilised protest. We did not go down the road of nationalist hatred, always respecting Serbian churches and monasteries. The result is that we were ignored.” Dayton “taught us a painful truth: those who want freedom must fight for it.”[12] This is crucial for understanding the decision of this radical group to give up the peaceful road.

The west greatly feared this threat of an armed uprising. Western leaders believed independence for Kosova may be a precedent for other peoples, such as Turkey’s Kurds or Spain’s Basques, to also fight for independence. Further, while the Bosnia disaster was contained within former Yugoslavia, and was dealt with via Serbo-Croatian partition, an outbreak in Kosova, either large numbers of Albanian refugees being driven across borders, or Albanian armed resistance, would pose a threat to the stability of fragile bourgeois regimes in Albania, Macedonia and the southern Balkans. A large influx of Albanians into Macedonia would alter the precarious ethnic balance, radicalising the large Albanian minority there, which may join a struggle for a united Albania.

Kosova’s union with Albania was considered even more dangerous. As Foreign Affairs wrote during the 1999 war: “With most ethnic Albanians concentrated in homogenous areas bordering Albania, the drive to extend Albania’s borders remains feasible. That drive is not only a wider threat to European stability to also to Albanian moderation. Many KLA commanders tout themselves as a ‘liberation army for all Albanians’ – precisely what frightens the NATO alliance most.”[13] These homogenous regions include Kosova, a large part of Macedonia, and parts of Montenegro and south Serbia.

This could in turn lead Macedonia, truncated to its ethnic core, looking to closer ties with its oppressed ethnic kin in Greece and Bulgaria, resulting in a wider conflict involving Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, the latter two NATO allies on opposite sides, threatening NATO’s “southern flank.”[14] This was called the “nightmare scenario.”

For these reasons, Washington long feared instability in Kosova more than elsewhere. During the darkest days of the Bosnian genocide, in November 1992, Eagleburger warned that ethnic cleansing in Kosova would be “qualitatively different” from Bosnia and would require US intervention, which Bosnia did not.[15]

The West advocated improving human rights to dampen Albanian resistance while insisting Kosova remain in Yugoslavia. France and Germany, pushing Milosevic and Rugova towards some educational reforms for Albanians in late 1997, offered to reward such mild concessions by fully normalising EU-Yugoslav relations.[16]

However, for the Serbian ruling class, the aim was less clear. Kosova’s population were completely alienated from Serbian rule and set up their “parallel” institutions; many forms of protest intensified. Though victorious at Dayton, how could Greater Serbia, effectively controlling half of Bosnia on an ethnic basis, continue to rule an area 90 percent Albanian? This was a source of permanent instability. Stabilising an ethnic state may require shedding this troublesome population. In 1998, Serbian voices were raised for partition of Kosova, in particular by Dobrica Cosic, the “father” of Serb nationalism.

Voices in the imperialist camp also pushed this solution. “Kosovo is to Serbs what Jerusalem and the West Bank are to Israelis – a sacred ancestral homeland now inhabited largely by Muslims. The Kosovo issue may have to be settled by some sort of partition,” according to Warren Zimmerman, former US ambassador to Yugoslavia.[17] David Owen, Britain’s negotiator in the Bosnian war, proposed partition, with every square mile “lost” to Serbia and “given” to its Albanian population compensated by the same amount of territory in Republika Srpska joining Serbia. This was taken up by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times[18] and other western policy makers.[19] Given permanent conflict, they believed formalising the separation of peoples was essential to stabilise the region.

However, this could also pose great risks for western policy. The independence or union with Albania of even part of Kosova could have even worse destabilising effects than independence for the whole, as it would even more clearly pose the ethnic principle as a basis for border changes; if an autonomous Kosova could be called multi-ethnic, the precedent effect could be dampened. Therefore, any internal partition would have to avoid the Albanian part formally breaking away. Further, Serbs were a far smaller section of the population in Kosova than in Bosnia, so a much greater proportion of Albanians would need to be cleansed for a partition that would satisfy Serbia, which would overwhelm the southern Balkans.

Thus both actions by Serbia (driving out hundreds of thousands) and by the Kosovars (armed struggle for independence) were threats. The latter case was more of a threat if carried out by an armed liberation movement outside of imperialist control. The only thing that began to change the rhetorical attitude of western leaders in 1998 was the sudden rise of the KLA as an independent armed force.

The KLA’s sudden rise in late 1997 was due to the liberation of hundreds of thousands of weapons in Albania during the revolutionary uprising that year, which found their way across the border and were eagerly snatched up by Kosovar villagers living under brutal repression. This coalesced with increasing Kosovar frustration with the failure of the peaceful resistance road of Rugova. Volunteers, arms and money came from the 600,000 Albanians working in Europe, while Albanian former officers of the JNA and Kosovar Territorial Defence Forces provided military experience.

At this time the US began supplying its first arms shipments to Serbia since 1991, “in the name of the War on Drugs.”[20] Given the widespread demonising propaganda from the US and western imperialist media, that the Kosovar Albanians are leaders in heroin trading, this arming of Serbia may have aimed at helping its crackdown on the Kosovars.

The US reacted with hostility to the KLA’s appearance, giving the green light for Milosevic to crack down following attacks on Serbian police in early 1998. US envoy Robert Gelbard, speaking in Pristina, congratulated Milosevic for a “constructive” policy in Bosnia, then stated “the KLA is, without any question, a terrorist organisation.”[21]

“Moslem aid for Albanians” was “a threat to peace” according to US advisers, and could turn the KLA into “a more dangerous military force.” US envoy Richard Holbrooke briefed Milosevic in May “on US intelligence assessments which demonstrate the growing strength of the KLA and how it poses the threat of a large-scale regional conflict.”[22]

Some who believe the US later bombed because Milosevic was a “socialist” holdout in east Europe assert the west may have wanted to undermine Milosevic by “encouraging” the KLA. In fact, Milosevic had launched a sweeping privatisation program in 1997, giving vast opportunities to western firms. Half of Serbian Telecom was sold to Greek and Italian investors, a French firm was buying the Beocin cement industry, Kosova was all up for sale and French and Greek firms already had interests in the giant Trepca mining and metallurgy complex. It was the underground Kosova parliament which in January 1998 denounced such “flagrant violations of the rights of Kosovar workers and citizens” and warned foreign capitalists investing in Kosova that “the Albanian people will treat them as neo-colonialists and demand reparations,”[23] given the decade-long lock-out of the entire Albanian working class from the state industries being flogged off.

The uprising in Kosova drove the Serbian elite to the right; in March 1998 Seselj and his fascistic Serbian Radical Party (SRS) was brought back into the ruling coalition for the first time since 1993. The SRS advocated solving the Kosova problem by expelling the Albanian population.

Within weeks of Gelbard’s speech, villages in Kosova were in flames, dozens of civilians killed and thousands driven from their homes, their villages attacked by helicopter gunships, providing thousands of recruits to the KLA, uprooted people with nothing to lose. As the pattern continued, the KLA blossomed into an organisation of 20,000 guerrillas, based in villages throughout the country.[24]

In this new reality, regional branches of Rugova’s Democratic League, of Demaqi’s Parliamentary Party and Qosja’s Democratic Union – the major political groups of the peaceful struggle – became local KLA village guards. Under massive military attack, the movement responded by taking up arms, rather than setting up a new “parallel school.” “There is no doubt that these groups have the full support of the local population.”[25]

The KLA thus became the armed force of the Kosovar population, containing vastly different political currents, from its Maoist core to left, right and liberal currents, to those more or less in favour of accommodation with imperialism, from former human rights fighters in the peaceful struggle to traditional clan leaders, advocates of independence and of union with Albania, from Albanian anti-Serb chauvinists to strong defenders of the rights of the Serb minority. While demonisers of the KLA often focus on more negative traits among some elements and attempt to roll them together and depict the KLA as a uniformly Serb-hating, mafia-led tool of the CIA, in reality its political breadth reflected its emergence as a real national movement.

Thus the strategy of the new Serbian government had the opposite effect to that intended. Gelbard’s speech indicated US support for a counterinsurgency war against the KLA, but the US also noticed Rugova after a decade of ignoring him. In May, US envoy Richard Holbrooke visited Belgrade, and pressured Milosevic and Rugova to negotiate the return of some limited autonomy in order to head off the growth of the KLA.

The first western intervention was an arms embargo on massively armed Yugoslavia. NATO pushed for its forces to be employed along Albania’s and Macedonia’s borders with Kosova, to prevent arms getting to the KLA.[26] Albania agreed to a hundred international police to train Albanian forces to block arms crossing the border.

With far superior weaponry, the Serbian forces drove the KLA back from much of the central region. Western rhetoric went up and down, but the Economist reported that “the operations by the Serb security forces that began in central Kosovo in late July were quietly condoned by western governments.”[27]

Holbrooke negotiated a ceasefire with Milosevic in October. Serbia withdrew its special units, while keeping 20,000 troops there. The US presented a plan for limited autonomy, falling short of the level Kosova had enjoyed under Tito: Kosova would have only municipal police but no armed forces, there would be no central bank, and it would not have the federal representation it once had. Minorities would be able to block legislation deemed against Kosova’s “vital interests”[28] – outlawing any independence push.

The KLA rejected the plan as “not even worth dealing with”[29] appalled at being asked “to negotiate about rights and institutions which the citizens of Kosova once enjoyed and which were then abolished unlawfully.[30] The “autonomy” offered not only less than what Milosevic took away in 1989, but even “less than what he was ready to give us back.”[31]

But none of this stabilised the situation. As people were not fleeing across borders, the scenario of mass refugee exodus was avoided; but the 250,000 uprooted Kosovars inside Kosova provided a huge base of recruits to the KLA. “Western diplomats in Yugoslavia thought the KLA had been destroyed in last summer’s fierce Serbian offensive,” wrote Chris Bird in the Guardian. They “then tried to ignore the KLA in political talks.” But while Serbian forces had captured the main towns, in the villages “as soon as you head off the main roads, held by sullen Serbian police, you encounter officious KLA guerrillas manning sandbagged checkpoints.”[32]

A situation of permanent instability developed, which did not only affect Kosova, but Yugoslavia, Albania and Macedonia. Milosevic’s ambitious privatisation plans dried up, as few wanted to invest in a war zone; the same occurred in Albania.[33]

The main problem with Milosevic’s brutal tactics were not their success, but lack of success. The Guardian, a key pro-war Blairite mouthpiece, pointed to the dilemmas. Doing nothing, or even a “limited bombing campaign,” could lead to a drastic attempt by Milosevic to “wipe out the KLA,” which might include “large scale evacuation of villages,” but “all this might be done quite quickly and the casualties might not be huge.” The Guardian implied this would be an enviable outcome, but “even if that were the case, the situation would be absolutely unstable. Kosovars would never be reconciled to it, nor would their kin in Albania. Sooner or later the war would resume.”[34]

A further fear was that the KLA “will swiftly become utterly disenchanted with the west and turn to Islamic radicals. There are already signs contacts have been established,” according to Chris Hedges in Foreign Affairs,[35] claiming to have seen “mujahideen, who do not look Albanian,” wandering around Albania.”

The growing chorus for intervention by early 1999 did not result from dramatic new Serbian offensives. Milosevic’s new operations in January were well below the scale of mid-1998. In January, Serbian forces massacred 45 civilians in Racak. Yet while blown up in the media, it was not the catalyst for the NATO war, as is often claimed by both propagandists for the war, and left opponents of the war, who call Racak a “hoax.”

Western politicians more and more gave the actions of the KLA as a major concern. UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook claimed the KLA had been responsible for more deaths since the ceasefire than the Serbian forces,[36] not mentioning that most of these were of military forces. The KLA’s alleged sin was to re-occupy the regions Serbian special forces had withdrawn from under the ceasefire.[37] The head of the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), the international monitors of the ceasefire, claimed “the irresponsible actions of the KLA are the main reason for the significant increase of tension,”[38] yet the KLA insisted that not only did it stick to the ceasefire, but did so despite increased Albanian suffering,[39] as the KVM prevented it from aiding its people under attack.[40]

Almost every outburst in January-February stressed both sides were at fault and faced air strikes. Following Racak, NATO’s General Klaus Naumann, warning of air strikes, said that “both sides must be made to understand that they’ve reached the limit.”[41] NATO head Solana declared “We rule out no option to ensure full respect by both sides in Kosovo for the requirements of the international community.”[42]

However, as the US News and World Report (‘Bomb ‘em Both’) explained, it would be easy to destroy “the heavy weapons, command centres, and air defence batteries belonging to the Serb forces in Kosovo. The Albanian rebels, however, are a guerrilla force with few assets visible from above.” Thus strikes on Serbian weaponry would benefit the KLA, meaning “renting our air force out to the Albanians.”[43] US analyst Jim Hoagland explained that air power requires the aid of ground forces, but the KLA is a “ground force” US leaders “distrust and disparage,” hence “there is neither appetite nor convincing logic for bombing raids,” because, “whatever Washington’s intentions, bombing will have the effect of bringing Kosovar independence closer.”[44] The Guardian warned that “Bombing, especially attacks directed specifically against Serbian units operating in Kosovo, would encourage the KLA to take advantage of the altered odds.”[45] Solana insisted NATO “cannot be the KLA’s air force.” If air strikes reduced Serbia’s military capacity it “might hand the Albanians independence – which the West fears would see the Kosovo crisis spreading into neighbouring countries.”[46] NATO leaders in Brussels oposed action which aided the KLA, as “KLA fanaticism is as frightening as Milosevic’s ruthlessness.”[47]

Thus air strikes would need to be supplemented by western troops to prevent the KLA taking advantage. Hoagland continues, “Britain, France and now Germany have formally told the United States that they will commit ground troops to a NATO force in Kosovo if a small number of US troops join that force. They are opposed to air raids alone.”[48] The Guardian claimed that even with air strikes the two sides “will fight unless a substantial third force, armed and determined, stands between them.”[49] Imperialism decided it needed its own troops in Kosova to disarm the KLA, having lost confidence in Serbia’s brutality to be anything but counterproductive.

In early 1999, the US put its autonomy plan in negotiations in Rambouillet. Till now, NATO had ignored the KLA, but now the it was invited along with the two other Kosovar political blocs. NATO had to include the KLA because by then the bulk of Kosovars were supporting the KLA, so any deal without its consent would be unenforceable – the same process that led Israel ultimately to negotiate with the PLO.

In this autonomy, the KLA would be disarmed, and a purely local police force would be set up, with less powers than most police in the world.[50] Most Serbian forces would withdraw, but 2500 Yugoslav troops would patrol a 5-kilometre border zone inside Kosova, and 2500 dreaded Serbian Interior Ministry police would remain the first year.

Given the Albanians’ disbelief they could feel secure within Serbia, the US offered a NATO “peace-keeping force” to police the deal. As Austrian diplomat Wolfgang Petritsch explained, the mediators believed an international force was essential to disarm the KLA, as the Yugoslav army had “already tried to disarm the KLA and had failed.”[51]

In the first Rambouillet round in February, the KLA refused to capitulate to autonomy and Serbia refused to allow a NATO security force. Petritsch however claimed the Serbian delegation “significantly contributed to achievement of the compromise on the future political and legal system in Kosovo” (ie, autonomy), and even expressed a willingness to discuss the “scope and character of an international presence,” meaning it was open to further discussion on this aspect.[52]

Of the three Kosovar Albanian delegations, only the KLA held out. To get the KLA to sign on, the US pressured a section of its leadership under Hashim Thaci to surrender its independence demand, capitulating on March 15. Veteran Kosovar independence fighter Adem Demaqi, who had led the KLA politically over the 6 months until Rambouillet, denounced this attempt to “convince Albanians to accept capitulation, by launching illusions and empty promises,”[53] quitting the leadership.

By this time, the aim of getting in to control the Albanian movement had coalesced with a broader US aim of establishing a new strategic doctrine for NATO’s post-Cold War existence and for imperialist intervention: executing “out of area” actions with “humanitarian” aims. This tendency wanted a victory for NATO force to crown the alliance’s upcoming 50th birthday in April.

Between the first and second Rambouillet meetings, an annex was inserted into the agreement allowing NATO troops in Kosova to roam all over Serbia and not be bound by Serbian law. It is widely believed that this was inserted to guarantee a Serbian rejection, as NATO was now determined to bomb. Milosevic’s ‘No’ to NATO troops allowed imperialism to turn his government into a convenient “rogue regime” target as a trophy for NATO’s birthday, made easier by the real crimes it had committed.

Serbia’s rejection led on March 24 to NATO’s air war. Did the actual war, whatever the previous motivations, now constitute an imperialist intervention on behalf of the KLA, for Kosova independence?

The bombing imposed a terrible toll on Serbian working people and infrastructure. Use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium was indicative of how anti-humanitarian this “humanitarian” war was; destroying the bridges across the Danube, hundreds of miles north of Kosova, also indicated aims beyond “defending Kosovar Albanians.” The Serbian government claimed a death toll of some 2000 civilians and 600 troops, though some estimates of both are higher.

Neither did this anti-humanitarian war have any humanitarian effects for the Albanians. Belgrade had been tied down with its “Vietnam” in Kosova. Parents all over the country demonstrated with the message: “Bring our sons back from Kosovo.”[54] When nationalist parties attempted in February 1999 to organise rallies outside parliament to demand rejection of Rambouillet, a few dozen turned up. Passers by took no notice;[55] few in Belgrade had any interest in volunteering to go and fight in Kosova. With 2 million Serbs out of work and pensioners owed 7 months pension, Serbia was close to social rebellion.

Then the bombing gave the regime the political cover it hadn’t had previously to carry out its most radical plan: emptying Kosova of its Albanians. Within a couple of weeks of the bombing beginning, the Serbian armed forces had driven some 850,000 Albanians – half their population – from their country into gigantic camps in Albania and Macedonia. Some 10,000 Albanians were killed, and 100,000 houses and 215 mosques destroyed.

What then was NATO’s aim? Many claim NATO had aimed to get Milosevic’s rapid capitulation, which they believed required “a few days bombing” to give him the political cover to do so, but “blundered.”[56] In the first two weeks, bombing was fairly light, initially concentrating on scattered air defence targets and command and control facilities far from major cities. The US aircraft carrier in the region was moved out of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf just 8 days before the bombing began![57]

However, a “few days” is unrealistic. When NATO bombed the Bosnian Serb armoury in late 1995, even though the Dayton partition was what Karadzic had been fighting for, and Milosevic was already signed on and pressuring Karadzic, it still took two weeks of bombing for Karadzic to feel politically able to sign Dayton. It was scarcely likely to take less time over Kosova. While NATO had not expected an 11-week war, its anticipated “few day” campaign should be translated as “a few weeks.”

Did NATO expect Milosevic to play dead during those few weeks? Western leaders were surprised by the attempt to empty Kosova, but did expect an all out attempt to smash the KLA. “All the alliance’s secret services had the same hypothesis: (Milosevic) was about to clear away the two or three main centres of the KLA as soon as the bombardments began. Nobody imagined the deportations.”[58] Wesley Clarke said “we thought the Serbs were preparing for a spring offensive that would target KLA strongholds, but we never expected them to push ahead with the wholesale deportation of the entire Albanian population.”[59] Was getting Belgrade to soften up the KLA actually western strategy?

The desire for to bomb as a NATO trophy dovetailed with an understanding that a peaceful entry of NATO into Kosova, even if approved by the KLA leadership, would not make it easy to disarm the KLA. Michael Mandelbaum of the US Council on Foreign Relations claimed that if both sides accepted Rambouillet, “NATO forces would enter Kosovo” but “are not guaranteed a peaceful stay. NATO’s plan envisages keeping Kosovo as part of Yugoslavia indefinitely. The Kosovars are unlikely to accept this, nor is the KLA likely to surrender its arms. (NATO’s) forces might well become KLA targets.”[60] Hedges claimed it was “wildly unlikely” the KLA would disarm. “Villages have formed ad hoc militias that, while they identify as KLA, act independently.”[61]

Guerrilla armies are based on such a village structure. It was in NATO’s interests for Serbian forces to destroy the KLA’s real village social base, rendering it less able to resist NATO’s disarmament later.

As Turkish journalist Isa Blumi suggests, while the bombing “was initially intended only to be a face-saving gesture, to allow Milosevic to return to the table, the paucity of the first few weeks of night bombing was also meant to allow Serb forces to eliminate the KLA … Serb daytime operations inside Kosova were not immediately threatened by NATO’s night-time bombing.”[62]

Where NATO did miscalculate was that Milosevic would use this crackdown to further the more radical aim of emptying Kosova of its Albanians. These massive refugee camps in neighbouring countries were the kind of regional destabilisation NATO wanted to avoid; even worse for NATO credibility, it had occurred as a result of its actions.

It was then, in later phases of the war, the bombing escalated into a horrific attack on civilian infrastructure, as NATO sought to force Serbia to quit and allow the refugees to return. This sequence also discredits the theory that NATO aimed to destroy Serbia’s economy, which was hit later in the war as a by-product of this unintended escalation.

What of the claim that NATO aimed to destroy the Serbian military? This is related to the claim that NATO aided the KLA. In fact, Solana’s statement that NATO cannot be the KLA’s airforce was stuck to during the war; the Serb military was largely untouched.

In the first two weeks – when nearly all the Kosovars were driven out – not a single Serbian tank was hit in Kosova. Even when NATO later stepped up its bombing, hitting bridges, factories and civilian infrastructure in Serbia, it did little to attack the Serb military in Kosova. Forty percent of total damage to the Serb military occurred in the last week of the 11-week war, and 80 percent in the last two-and-a-half weeks.[63]

By the end of the war, NATO had destroyed only 13 of the 300 tanks Serbia had in Kosova. As Serbian troops marched out, “at least 250 tanks were counted out, as well as 450 armoured personnel carriers and 600 artillery and mortar pieces.”[64] “All NATO’s powers have anti-tank helicopters, but no country offered to send them into Kosovo.”[65]

This meant zero NATO action to support the KLA. “It is all very well to blast bridges and oil refineries in Novi Sad, but our struggle to shield Albanian villages would be more effective if NATO focused on hitting Serb forces in Kosova,”[66] KLA fighters were quoted. KLA officer Shrem Dragobia claimed “when we signed Rambouillet, we were led to believe NATO will help the Albanians. So we stopped arming and mobilising ourselves. The KLA was not to take advantage of any NATO action to embark on an offensive.” The KLA kept its word, but “NATO has failed to keep its part of the besa.”[67]

During a visit to a rugged corridor which the KLA was desperately holding against a Serb offensive, Jonathon Landay claimed “there was no sign of any NATO support, even though American and British military officials visited the area last week. Yugoslav tanks, troops and artillery opposing the rebels are untouched by NATO’s bombs, as are watchtowers along the border from which Serbian artillery spotters direct fire.” KLA fighter ‘Guri’ told him “NATO has basically done nothing against the Serbian ground troops. At least we have not seen anything in the vicinity of the fighting.”[68]

The KLA “has not persuaded western governments to lift an arms embargo that has blocked its access to the Swedish-made BILL-2 anti-tank missile, the Carl Gustav M2 missile, Western-made heavy artillery and other sophisticated weaponry.”[69] The Albanian government appealed to the West to arm the KLA, but State Department spokesman James Rubin stated the US continued to oppose arming or training them.[70]

Despite all this, much ink has been spilt on claims the west backed the KLA. Chossudovsky compares the demonisation of Milosevic to his straw dummy of the KLA being “upheld as a self-respecting nationalist movement struggling for the rights of ethnic Albanians.”[71] The Washington Post claimed “NATO is seeking to maintain its distance from the KLA, declining to supply it with weapons, or endorse the goal of independent Kosovo. It remains an object of suspicion. There is concern about their role in a post-conflict Kosovo.”[72] The London Times claimed “there is a concern within NATO that once its troops are inside Kosovo, the KLA could be part of the problem. Thus they have not been supplied with ammunition.”[73] The KLA remained on Germany’s list of terrorist organisations, and the government banned their fund-raising and confiscated funds.[74]

Chossudovsky alleged the CIA funded the KLA, providing two sources: Belgrade, and “intelligence analyst” John Whitley. Whitley, a “right wing conspiracy nut,” also claims the war was planned by the Bilderbergers, and that Clinton was conspiring to facilitate a “planned Russian and Chinese imposition of a Marxist New World Order on America.”[75]

However, there is ample evidence that the US had made contact with the KLA several months before the war, providing small-scale assistance. Given the refusal to arm the KLA or give it air cover, it is worth looking at what US aims may have been.

All the pro-Milosevic left and right has come up with are a couple of articles in the mainstream media, notably one Times article where US agents admit they had infiltrated the OSCE ceasefire monitors’ mission in the months before the war, developing links with the KLA, giving them “American military training manuals and field advice.”[76]

US agents had also made early contact with less-known KLA figure Hashim Thaci, who emerged at Rambouillet as new number one. Given US hostility to the KLA’s goals, the aim of this small-scale “training” and “advice” was to win influence and mould a pro-imperialist current around Thaci, in order to moderate its aims, to drop the independence demand, allowing Thaci to sign Rambouillet which only allowed for “autonomy.” This also allowed the CIA to “gather intelligence on the KLA’s arms and leadership.”[77]

Meanwhile, when the OSCE mission left before the bombing, “many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA” by these agents, “ensuring guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with NATO.”[78] These KLA spotters relayed intelligence on Serbian positions, to help NATO targeting. Yet as shown above, NATO rarely used it to give cover to the KLA; aiding a struggle for independence remained distant from NATO’s objectives even when “coordinating” with it.

NATO even reminded the KLA who was boss. On May 21, US planes bombed a key KLA base, held for six weeks, though “for more than a month, regular reports on who controlled which small parts of this mountain were fed back to NATO on a satellite fax link from rebels.” A reporter visiting two days earlier “was told by KLA officers that they frequently sent NATO targeting information on Serb units opposing them.”[79]

Certain facts are unassailable. Firstly, if the US was sending all the aid to the KLA that many imagined, it was strange that they were hardly able to defend any villages once the war began. A million were driven from their country because the KLA had so few arms.

Secondly, the only arms ever seen in possession of the KLA were the AK-47’s looted from Albanian armouries. If they got a few more as an influence-buying gesture, they were clearly not aimed at helping their struggle.

Thirdly, even if imperialist states had supplied some small arms to the KLA, engaged in its life and death struggle to defend Kosovars, this itself cannot transform the entire KLA from a liberation movement to a tool of NATO. While both fighting Serbia, they had opposite aims. The KLA was fighting for independence; any influence buying by NATO was aimed at derailing this struggle.

For example, Clinton made a widely touted tough speech in mid-April, warning Serbs to expect more civilian casualties. Yet he sounded less “tough” when warning Serbia that Albanians, given all they were suffering, now have a right to … autonomy within Serbia.

NATO’s goals were spelt out in the US ruling class journal Foreign Affairs, which claimed NATO “is working feverishly – even as it bombs the Serbs – to blunt the momentum toward a war of independence. The allies want NATO troops to separate the warring factions. The underlying idea behind creating a theoretically temporary, NATO-enforced military protectorate is to buy time for a three-year transition period in which Albanians will be allowed to elect a parliament and other governing bodies – meeting enough of their aspirations, it is hoped, to keep Kosovo from seceding.”[80]

If NATO had armed sections of the KLA, the aim would have been to use them as an auxiliary, and then be in a position to cut them off before the KLA could use the arms to achieve its goals. This would have required only minimal arms going to the KLA. If the Kosovars had sufficient arms to defend themselves they would not have needed NATO.

It must be remembered that, aside from NATO’s criminal bombing of Serbia, there was concurrently a just war being waged by the Kosovar people to defend their lives and villages. According to the Independent, the KLA was “defending 250,000 civilians in the Lapski and Shalja region in the north” from a fierce Serbian offensive.[81] In such a struggle, did the KLA not have the right to defend those villages, which would otherwise be ethnically cleansed? Was expelling the population necessary for “anti-imperialist resistance”? Of course, the KLA leadership is also to be condemned for supporting NATO bombing of Serb working people. But the KLA as a whole was simply the only armed force the Kosovars had to defend themselves. Socialists cannot call on an entire people to commit “revolutionary” suicide because they have a bad leadership, yet that is what much of the left did by opposing the Kosovars’ just struggle.

Much of the “NATO supported the KLA” claims rely on events near the end of the war, when the Serbian military was hit, due to NATO’s increasing desperation to force a surrender. The risky strategy of finally giving air cover to some controlled KLA attacks from Albania into the border region, to flush out Yugoslav troops and hit them, was employed only in the last ten days of the war. By hitting the military, NATO brought the war to an end within days, quickly enough to bring the KLA back to heel.

In early June, just before the peace agreement, Operation Arrow, “involving up to 4,000 KLA guerrillas, was launched to drive into Kosovo from across its south western border with Albania,” where they “received their first known NATO air support.”[82]

However, there remained “uncertainty” in the west “about the extent to which the KLA, designated a terrorist organisation by the US, should be supported.”[83] Despite the KLA’s earlier capture of territory near the Albanian border, “armed only with light weapons, it has been unable to break through Serbian armour since NATO started bombing,” revealing how little support the it had received till then. “NATO commanders are reluctant to enter into a formal relationship with the KLA. They have not, for example, provided secure communications channels.”

A NATO source explained: “We are acutely conscious that at some point, in enforcing a peace agreement, we may have to disarm the KLA and even fight them.”[84]

The peace agreement, signed in early June, mandated Kosova remain under Serbian “sovereignty,” while putting it under a UN authority (UNMIK) and an occupation by thousands of mostly NATO troops (KFOR). Given NATO’s smashing victory; if it had desired a move towards independence, it could have set the ball rolling; it clearly did not.

To trick the KLA into signing Rambouillet, a clause had said the future of Kosova would be determined by a conference in three years, taking into account “the will of the people.” However, it would also be based on “opinions of relevant authorities, each party’s efforts regarding the implementation of this Agreement, and the Helsinki Final Act,”[85]- the latter ruling out border changes. Petritsch maintained the mediators “expressly included this provision to ensure Kosovo would remain in Yugoslavia.”[86]

Nevertheless, with the overwhelming NATO victory in June, even this vague suggestion about the “will of the people” was removed. One NATO promise that was kept, however, was the disarmament and dissolution of the KLA, achieving what Milosevic could not.

From the outset, everyone from Bernard Kouchner (the first UNMIK proconsul to rule Kosova) to US, UN and EU leaders insisted there would be no independence.[87] On September 23, NATO chief Solana insisted that “one outcome will not be independence for Kosovo.”[88] UN interim governor, Sergio Vieira de Mello, declared “we will determine on a case to case basis” whether the KLA mayors who had sprung up were performing according to western dictates. If they are not, “You sack them, absolutely.”[89]

In December 1999, Kouchner forced the Kosova provisional government, which UNMIK had refused to recognise, to dissolve into his new ‘Interim Administrative Agency’ of Kosova, consisting of 4 members of UNMIK, 3 Albanians and 1 Serb, and giving Kouchner final say – the 90 percent majority got 37.5 percent of the power, in a structure dominated by anti-independence forces. Despite Thaci taking part, other factions of the KLA condemned this body which made Kouchner “the King of Kosova.”[90]

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

As Kosova set in for nine years of limbo under a colonial authority, the threat of being returned in any form to the state which had tried to annihilate them weighed heavily over the heads of its people. Total opposition to independence, whatever the “behaviour” of Kosovars, remained official imperialist policy through the first half of the next decade. This imperialist view contrasts sharply with the century-long struggle by Kosovar Albanians for independence, and the overwhelming nature of this aspiration among Kosovar Albanians, as demonstrated in the previous part of this series. These facts illustrate how incorrect is the view that Kosova’s recent declaration of independence is an imperialist, not Kosovar, initiative. However, given the imperialist states have now accepted a form of so-called “supervised” (by them) independence, the next part of this series will discuss how and why imperialist states finally changed their view, and their broader geo-political objectives.

[1] Anton Bebler, “US Strategy and Yugoslavia’s Security,” Yugoslav and American Views on the 1990s, Simic, Richey and Stojcevic Eds, Institute of International Politics and Economics, Belgrade, 1990.

[2] Abel, D, “US Arms, Training Aided Milosevic,” The Boston Globe, July 4, 1999.

[3] ibid.

[4] Janes Defence Weekly, July 20, 1991.

[5] Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, Washington, November 2, 1989, p19.

[6] Lampe, op cit, pp319-320.

[7] Binder, D, “In Yugoslavia, Rising Ethnic Strife Brings Fears of Worse, NYT, November 1, 1987.

[8] Glenny, M, “The Massacre of Yugoslavia,” New York Review of Books, January 30, 1992, p34.

[9] The New York Times, December 28, 1988, pB7.

[10] Woehrel, S, “Yugoslavia’s Kosovo Crisis: Ethnic Conflict Between Albanians and Serbs,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, November 2, 1989, p19..”

[11] EC Declaration on Bosnia and Herzegovina on May 11, 1992.

[12] Hedges, C, “Kosovo’s Next Masters,” Foreign Affairs, May-June 1999.

10 ibid.

[14] This scenario was widely discussed. See for example articles “Catastrophic Kosovo,” “The Fire is Being Rekindled,” “The Next Domino?” The Economist, March 7, 1998.

[15] Broder, J, “US Warns of Broad War Over Kosovo,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 30, 1992.

[16] Minxhozi, S, “Why Did Kinkel Visit Tirana,” Alternative Information Mreza, February 12, 1998.

[17] Zimmerman, op cit, p13, 130.

[18] Friedman, T, “Redo Dayton on Bosnia, and Do a Deal on Kosovo,” International Herald Tribune, February 8, 1999; ‘Op-Ed – Foreign Affairs,” New York Times, September 15, 1999.

[19] Mearsheimer,J, and Van Evera, S, “Redraw the Map, Stop the Killing,” NYT, April 19, 1999.

[20] Wayne Madsen, ‘Mercenaries in Kosovo: The US connection to the KLA’, The Progressive, August 1999, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_8_6/ai_55309049/pg_1. “In the aftermath of the Dayton Accords, the Clinton Administration viewed Milosevic as an ally against America’s other great enemy: international drug dealing.” Testifying before Congress on May 1, 1997, Clinton’s drug czar General Barry McCaffrey requested national interest waivers “to ship weapons to various nations, including some with questionable human rights records,” including Serbia, “which the president granted.” The panel was headed by Republican Dennis Hastert, who was “very supportive” of weapons to Serbia.

[21] ‘Washington ready to reward Belgrade for “good will”: envoy’, AFP, February 23, 1998.

[22] Kitney, G, “Muslim Aid For Albanians a Threat to Peace,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 16, 1998.

[23] Commission for Economy and Finances/Commission for Industry, Power Industry and natural Resources, Parliament of the Republic of Kosova, Pronouncement, January 7, 1998.

[24] After the war the International Organization for Migration (IOM) registered 25,723 ex-combatants, but this may include “non-combatants looking for assistance,” Human Rights Watch, ‘Structure and Strategy of the KLA’, Under Orders – War Crimes in Kosovo, October 2001, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/kosovo

[25] Rexhepi, F, “Unproclaimed Curfew,” Alternative Information Mreza, Pristina, February 24, 1999.

[26] Newman, R, “One Possibility: Bomb ‘em Both,” US News and World Report, July 20, 1998.

[27] “Kosovo in Peril,” The Economist, August 8, 1998.

[28] Perlez, J, “Kosovo Talks Offering Limited Autonomy,” New York Times, February 8, 1999.

[29] Kosova Liberation Army, General Headquarters, “20th Political declaration,” December 9, 1998.

[30] Krasniqui, A, “Negotiations, Despite Everything?” September 21, 1998; and Inic, S, “Kosovo: Municipality or State Within a State,” both from Alternative Information Mreza.

[31] Interview with Pleurat Sejdiiu by Christopher Ford and David Black, Hobgoblin, London, May 6, 1999.

[32] Bird, C, “People Will Come and Force Us Apart,” Guardian Weekly, January 24, 1999.

[33] Stefani, A, “Shooting in Kosovo Prevents Investments in Albania,” Alternative Information Network, Tirana, June 20, 1998.

[34] Editorial, “Kosovo Requires a Forceful Response,” The Guardian Weekly, March 28, 1999, p14.

[35] Hedges, Foreign Affairs, op cit.

[36] Cornwell, R, “Serbs Goad Impotent West,” The Independent International, January 20-26, 1999.

[37] Bird, op cit; Guardian Weekly editorial January 24, 1999.

[38] Schwarm, P, “Drama of Eight Soldiers,” Alternative Information Mreza (AIM), January 13, 1999.

[39] Rexhepi, F, “With massacre Against Dialogue,” AIM, January 17, 1999.

[40] Smakaj, L, “Kosovo on the Verge of Controlled Chaos,” AIM, Podgorica, January 11, 1999.

[41] Kitney, G, “New Atrocity Throws Talks Bid Into Doubt,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 27, 1999.

[42] Kempster, N, “Fire at Will, NATO Orders,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 1, 1999.

[43] Newman, op cit.

[44] Hoagland, J, “Time to Call Up GI Joe,” Washington Post, in Guardian Weekly, February 7, 1999, p16.

[45] Editorial, “Kosovo Requires a Forceful Response,” The Guardian Weekly, March 28, 1999, p14.

[46] Cornwell, R, “Serbs Goad Impotent West,” The Independent International, January 20-26, 1999.

[47] Kitney, G, ‘View to a Kill’, SMH, January 23, 1999.

[48] Hoagland, op cit.

[49] Editorial, “Stopping War in Kosovo,” Guardian Weekly, January 24, 1999; Mary Kaldor, “We Must Send in Troops to Stop the Killing in Kosovo,” Independent International, January 20-26, 1999.

[50] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo, “Chapter 2: Police and Civil Public Security,” February 23, 1999.

[51] Mirko Klarin, ‘Petritsch sheds light on Rambouillet’, IWPR – Tribunal Report, No. 273, 1-6 July, 2002, http://iwpr.net/index.php?apc_state=hen&s=o&o=p=tri&s=f&o=164862

[52] Ibid.

[53] Adem Demaqi in Pristina daily Sot, February 27, 1999.

[54] Putnik, M, ‘Vojvodina Against the War’, Alternative Information Mreza, Belgrade, June 21, 1998.

[55] Hofnung, T, ‘Make or Break for Serb Regime’, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1999.

[56] Macintyre, B, ‘Kosovo Blows Up n Albright’s Face’, The Australian, April 9, 1999; Luttwak, E, ‘NATO Started Bombing to Help Milosevic,’ Sunday Telegraph, London, April 25, 1999. Luttwak is a member of the National Security Study group of the US Defence Department.

[57] ‘Admiral: Could have Slowed Slaughter’, UPI, October 14, 1999.

[58] Jauvert, V, “Nothing Went According to Plan,” Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, July 1, 1999.

[59] Smith, R, and Drozdiak, W, “The Anatomy of a Purge,” Washington Post, April 11, 1999.

[60] Mandelbaum, M, “Washington in a Bind as Talks Resume,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 13, 1998.

[61] Hedges, Foreign Affairs, op cit.

[62] Isa Blumi, ‘A Story of Mitigated Ambitions: Kosova’s Torturous Path to its Postwar Future’, Alternatives, Turkish Journal of International Relations, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 2002, http://www.alternativesjournal.net/volume1/number4/blumipdf.pdf

[63] Daalder, I, and O’Hanlon, M, “Unlearning the Lessons of Kosovo,” Foreign policy, Fall 1999, p131.

[64] Evans, M, The Times, London, June 24, 1999

[65] Luttwak, E, “Give War a Chance,” Foreign Affairs, July-August 1999, p41.

[66] Heinrich, M, “NATO Urged to Focus on Serb Forces,” Sydney Morning Herald, April 20, 1999.

[67] Meaning “sworn vow,” Nazi, F, “KLA Commander’s Talk of NATO Betrayal,” IWPR, April 2, 1999.

[68] Landay, J, “Despite Shortfalls, KLA Shows Muscle,” Christian Science Monitor, April 27, 1999.

[69] Smith, J, “Training, Arms, Allies Bolster KLA Prospects,” Washington Post, May 26, 1999.

[70] Finn, P and Smith, J, “Rebels With a Crippled Cause,” Washington Post Foreign service, April 23, 1999.

[71] Chossudovsky, M, “Freedom Fighters Financed by Organised Crime,” International Viewpoint, London, April 1999. I responded in Green Left Weekly, May 12, 1999, http://www.greenleft.org.au/1999/360/18863

[72] Finn, P and Smith, J, “Rebels With a Crippled Cause,” Washington Post Foreign service, April 23, 1999.

[73] Lloyd, A, “Balkans War,” Times, London, April 20, 1999. The Washington Times alleged members of the KLA, “which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by Osama bin Laden,” Jerry Seper, ‘KLA rebels train in terrorist camps’, 5/4/99.

[74] Liebknecht, R, “Inside the KLA,” International Viewpoint,” London, May 1999.

[75] Beyer-Arnesen, H, “The Balkan War and the Leftist Apologetics for the Milosevic Regime,” A-Info News Service, http://www.ainfos.ca, Oslo, May 11, 1999. Another example of nonsense was ‘Germany’s role in the secession of Kosovo’ (M. Kreickenbaum, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/feb2008/koso-f26.shtml). It claimed the German Information Service gave “logistical assistance” to the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo (FARK), which in 1998 “was integrated into the KLA.” Even if this unreferenced tale were true, in fact FARK entered as an enemy of the KLA, which violently wiped it out!

[76] Tom Walker, Aidan Laverty, ‘CIA aided Kosovo guerrilla army’, The Sunday Times, March 12, 2000.

[77] Ibid.

[78] Ibid.

[79] The Scotsman 24 May 1999.

[80] Hedges, Foreign Affairs, op cit.

[81] Boggan, S and Nazi, F, “War in the Balkans – ‘Arm Us or Invade’, KLA Tells NATO,” Independent, London, April 21, 1999.

[82] Dana Priest, Peter Finn, ‘NATO Gives Air Support To Kosovo Guerrillas’, Washington Post, 2 June 1999.

[83] ‘America in secret moves to aid KLA’ The Sunday Times, 16 May 1999.

[84] Ibid..

[85] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo, “Chapter 8: Amendment, Comprehensive Assessment, and Final Clauses,” op cit.

[86] Mirko Klarin, ‘Petritsch sheds light on Rambouillet’, IWPR – Tribunal Report, No. 273, 1-6 July, 2002, http://iwpr.net/index.php?apc_state=hen&s=o&o=p=tri&s=f&o=164862

[87] Kouchner Says He is to Prepare Kosmet Autonomy Within Yugoslavia,” Serb Info News, July 11, 1999; Gray, A, “UN Not Preparing Kosovo For Independence – Annan,” Reuters, October 14, 1999; “US Reaffirms Opposition to Kosovo Independence,” AFP, September 30, 1999.

[88] “Solana: Kosovo Must Not Be Independent,” UPI, September 23, 1999.

[89] “UN Threatens KLA Mayors With Removal,” Associated Press, July 30, 1999.

[90] Kosovapress, December 20, December 21, 1999

Kosova Independence Series Part II:

By Michael Karadjis

This is the second part of a series of articles looking at different aspects of the issue of the recently announced semi-independence of Kosova, which has produced markedly different reactions among left-wing and socialist movements around the world.

The first part was a general background to the events leading up to this independence declaration. It can be read at

http://mihalisk.blogspot.com/2008_02_24_archive.html

This part will tackle the general question of the right to self-determination, and why Kosova’s situation fully accords with this right long supported by the left. While much more will be said of the role of imperialism and other factors in the following parts – including imperialism’s role precisely in limiting Kosovar self-determination – understanding this aspect is primary to developing an overall position.

………………………………………………………………………………………………

Support of the right of nations to self-determination is a long-term principle for Marxists. Lenin in particular elaborated a great deal on this issue, and his writings remain of great relevance today.

Lenin stresses that even abolishing national oppression can only become reality “with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres, including the delineation of state frontiers in accordance with the “sympathies” of the population, including complete freedom to secede.” This is not in order to create small states, but on the contrary, only this can, dialectically, “serve as a basis for developing the practical elimination of even the slightest national friction and the least national mistrust, for an accelerated drawing together and fusion of nations …”[1]

Thus this is all the more important when talking about capitalist states, the relationships between which are commonly characterised by national oppression. Lenin considered it self-evident that peoples will only revolt for independence if the conditions of national oppression are intolerable:

“From their daily experience the masses know perfectly well the value of geographical and economic ties and the advantages of a big market and a big state. They will, therefore, resort to secession only when national oppression and national friction make joint life absolutely intolerable and hinder any and all economic intercourse.”[2]

Moreover, for all practical purposes, to oppose the right of self-determination means to support the right of the stronger nation to forcibly suppress their struggles:

“… in the capitalist state, repudiation of the right to self-determination, i.e., the right of nations to secede, means nothing more than defence of the privileges of the dominant nation and police methods of administration, to the detriment of democratic methods…”[3]

Far from being a concession to the narrow bourgeois aspect of the nationalism of the oppressed, it is only the right to full secession that is capable of undermining such nationalism:

“The right to self-determination and secession seems to ‘concede’ the maximum to nationalism” but “in reality, the recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination implies the maximum of democracy and the minimum of nationalism” because it helps promote the internationalist “class solidarity” of the workers of oppressor and oppressed nations.”[4]

But while many leftists accept this right in theory, some claim it is limited to struggles by oppressed peoples against imperialism, or at least that it depends on whether a particular struggle for national self-determination strengthens or weakens imperialist interests.

But this wasn’t how Lenin viewed it at all. When he supported Norway’s independence from Sweden it had no connection to either alleged condition. Even more starkly, recognising that the balance of class forces was against the working class in the Baltic states in 1918, Lenin chose not to send the Red Army of the young Soviet republic in to help the Communist forces in these republics, where right wing regimes came to power. The Bolsheviks did not believe socialism could be imposed on the barrel of a gun; only the working classes in those states could carry out this task.In the 1930s, following the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the revival of Great Russian oppression by the Stalinist regime, the issue again arose of the position revolutionaries would take towards movements for self-determination in the oppressed non-Russian republics. Trotsky’s view was clear. Calling for a “united, free, and independent workers’ and peasants’ Ukraine,” Trotsky pointed out that it was precisely the denial of the right to self-determination of the Ukraine by a “Communist” regime that has shifted the Ukrainian national movement to “the most reactionary Ukrainian cliques,” who had won over a section of the Ukrainian working class. On the other hand, an independent Ukraine would become “if only by virtue of its own interests, a mighty southwestern bulwark of the USSR.”[5]

When one sees Kosovar Albanians wildly waving American flags next to their own Albanian flag – which, ironically enough, imperialism has forced them to abandon – one is reminded of this quote from Trotsky: it was not the exercise of Kosovar self-determination, but precisely the denial of it to the Kosovars, that allowed US imperialism – very belatedly – to pose as their champion when it found it opportune, leading to this marked pro-imperialist shift in the consciousness of Kosovar Albanians.

There is a basic “common sense” aspect to this right: given that people will only risk a struggle for independence when they find conditions unbearable, any opposition to their struggle from leftists will not only change nothing about their struggle, but alienate the left from this entire oppressed nation. Every claim that a particular national struggle may happen to coincide with some reactionary or imperialist interest can be countered by the simple fact that it was the oppression in the first place that produced this result. The masses of this oppressed nation will not move on to a more progressive, let alone socialist, consciousness, until they have achieved their right to run their own state and learn in practice that their “own” bourgeoisie is also their enemy.

The roots of Albanian oppression and resistance

In the 19th century, the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian people had waged successful liberation struggles against the Ottoman empire and set up their own independent capitalist states – as today’s critics of Kosova might say, they carried out “illegal secession” that “violated Ottoman sovereignty.” However, a strip of the Balkans, covering the Albanian, Macedonian and Thracian regions, with a wide ethnic mixture, remained under Ottoman rule.

In 1912, the Albanian peoples rose in revolt against Ottoman rule. Aiming to grab as much territory from the retreating empire as possible, before the Albanians or other local peoples could set up their own states, the three independent Balkan states launched the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 to carve up remaining Ottoman territory. Approximately half of the Albanian ethnic territory fell to the Serbian monarchy, including Kosova, a large section of Serbian-conquered part of Macedonia (itself divided into three), the Presevo Valley in southeast Serbia and parts of Montenegro. The other half was rescued for a rump Albanian state by Austrian diplomacy.

This partition of the Albanian and Macedonian nations and the other borders drawn in blood were officially recognised by the imperialist powers at the London Conference of 1913. Serbia was a key ally of the British-French-Russian imperialist bloc in its impending clash with its German-Austrian rivals. This imperialist consecration of the division of the Albanian nation is at the heart of the conflict which has raged throughout the century.

The Kosovar Albanians furiously resisted the occupation. The Serbian monarchy was pitiless in its suppression – according to the investigators of the Carnegie Commission, referring to the period immediately after the Balkan wars:“Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind – such were the means which were employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldiery, with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians.”[6] Another account was given by Lazer Mjeda, the Catholic Archbishop of Skopje, who noted that in Ferizaj only 3 Muslim Albanians over the age of 15 had been left alive, and that the population of Gjakova had been massacred despite surrendering. He described the scene in Prizren, which had also surrendered peacefully in the hope of being spared what was happening elsewhere in Kosova:“The city seems like the Kingdom of Death. They knock on the doors of the Albanian houses, take away the men and shoot them immediately. In a few days the number of men killed reached 400. As for plunder, looting and rape, all that goes without saying; henceforth, the order of the day is: everything is permitted against Albanians, not only permitted, but willed and commanded.”[7]

Serbian Marxist Dimitrije Tucovic witnessed “barbaric crematoria in which hundreds of women and children are burnt alive” and claimed the clergy were urging the troops on to take revenge for the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, when the then Serbian empire was defeated by the Ottoman empire in Kosova. “The historic task of Serbia,” he wrote “is a big lie.”[8] “For as long as the Serbs will not understand and realize that they are on foreign lands and territory, they will never be in peace or have good neighbor relations with Albanians,” Tucovic wrote. “Unlimited enmity of the Albanian people against Serbia is the foremost real result of the Albanian policies of the Serbian government. The second and more dangerous result is the strengthening of two big powers in Albania, which have the greatest interests in the Balkans.”[9]

Tucovic was leader of the left faction of the Serbian Social-democratic Party which, together with Lenin’s Russian Bolsheviks, were among the only social-democratic parties to remain internationalist during WWI and to deny war credits to their “own” bourgeoisie. What he writes above about 1912-13 may just as well have been written about the 1980s and 1990s.

Meanwhile, living under the Austro-Hungarian yoke were other south Slavs, the Slovenes, Croats and now Bosnians. In their own freedom struggle, the idea had emerged of the unity of all South Slavs, in a “Yugoslav” state. In practice this meant that these Hapsburg-ruled Slavic nations would unite with the expanded Serbian monarchy. This “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” was proclaimed in 1918 under Anglo-French auspices, but from the start was a classic prison-house of nations, completely dominated by the Serbian bourgeoisie.

The worst excesses occurred in Kosova, where the largely Muslim Albanian majority were not Slavic at all, and lived in a land that Serb nationalists declared the cradle of their nation due to the presence of a large number of medieval Orthodox churches, and the famous battle against the Ottomans back in 1389.

Modern Serb nationalists claim that “Kosova has always been Serbia,” but according to one reading of Turkish statistics of 1911, of the 912,902 residents of the Vilayet of Kosova, 743,040 (80.5 percent) were Albanians and 106,209 (11.5 percent) were Serbs.[10] According to a more generous reading, Ottoman statistics put Orthodox Serbs at 21 percent of the population, still an absolute minority, and Austrian statistics in 1903 put it as high as 25 percent, the maximum claimed by any source.[11] The discrepancy in claimed Ottoman figures is almost certainly due to the fact that the Ottomans did not do censuses of ethnic groups, but only of religious affiliation – ‘Orthodox’ was assumed to be ‘Serb’ by the more generous researchers, but this would be an incorrect reading. But even according to the most generous reading, Albanians were the absolute majority.

Between the two World Wars, Albanians were ruthlessly uprooted: in one example, the entire Albanian population of upper Drenica (6,064 people) were dispossessed of their land in 1938. They were pressured into leaving for Albania or Turkey – estimates are of some 70,000 Albanians leaving during this period. However, that was not considered adequate, so in 1938, Yugoslavia made a deal with Turkey to expel another 40,000 Albanians, as Turkey wanted to use the Muslim Albanians to colonise eastern Anatolia as an outpost against its own oppressed Kurds and Armenians. A leading member of the Serbian Academy, Vaso Cubrilovic, put out a memorandum entitled “The expulsion of the Albanians” in which he claimed that if Hitler and Stalin could get away with all kinds of slaughter without anyone reacting, then what would the world care about the expulsion of a few hundred thousand Albanians?

Some 15,000 Serb families – representing some 70,000 people, or about 10 percent of the total Kosova population – were moved in from Serbia proper as colonists and given large properties. Of 400,000 hectares of arable land in Kosova, these colonists were awarded 100,000 hectares. In 1928, Serbian official Djorje Krstic boasted that colonisation had boosted the percentage of Serbs in Kosova from 24 percent, which he claimed for 1919, to 38 percent.[12] Given that in 1999, the then Serb population of only 10 percent of Kosova consisted of only 200,000 people, this gives an idea of how significant this colonization was.

Following these 25 years of this prison-hell, when Mussolini invaded, the Albanians initially welcomed the Italian fascist troops, like Ukrainians and many other initially welcomed Nazi troops, or like future Indonesian national hero Sukarno collaborated with the Japanese occupiers. Of course, there were also Serb collaborators, as there were among all Yugoslav nations.[13]

The Italian occupiers allowed Kosova to be reunited with Albania as their puppet state. It is estimated that some 40,000 Serbs were expelled by the Albanian collaborationist regime. Though these were overwhelmingly the Serb colonists that were driven out, as the war progressed, Albanian fascists got less discriminating and acted with ruthless brutality towards the Serb population.

However, a Kosovar Albanian Partisan movement also appeared, fighting for the right to self-determination, including unity with Communist Albania. This was inspired by the program of Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Partisans, who opposed the unitary Serb-dominated Yugoslavia of the inter-war years, and advocated instead an equal federation of Yugoslavia’s nations, based on proletarian internationalist ideals. Yugoslav and Albanian Communist leaders Tito and Enver Hoxha had aimed for Albania to become part of this, and for a new socialist federation of all Balkan nations, beyond a mere Yugoslav federation. As such, there could be no Kosovar republic, because it would eventually be part of the Albanian republic in the new federation, alongside the six Yugoslav republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro), and perhaps Bulgaria as well.

However, this never came to pass. In the first major violation of the new impending federal order, Tito had gathered Serb Partisans together with large numbers of former royalist, Serbian-chauvinist Cetniks (who came over following two amnesties declared by Tito in late 1944) and crushed the Kosovar Partisans.

According to Miranda Vickers:

“Perhaps the worst atrocity occurred in Tivar in Montenegro, where 1,670 Albanians were herded into a tunnel which was then sealed off so that all were asphyxiated.”[14]

As relations between Yugoslavia and Albania later deteriorated, Kosova was stuck in the highly unsatisfactory situation of autonomy inside Serbia.

Kosova’s “autonomy” status signified it the Albanians as a “national minority” rather than a “nation” as their nation state was Albania. However, Albanians were the vast majority of the population of Kosova in 1945, and in sheer numbers, they were bigger than most of the “nations” of Yugoslavia, and growing. This lack of republican status, combined with Kosova’s drastically poorer position than all Yugoslav republics, made the Albanians an unambiguously oppressed nation in the new Yugoslavia.

In the first twenty years, under hard-line Serb leader Rankovic, this ‘autonomy” meant little more than living under permanent terror. Even the expulsions continued: in 1953, the pact with Turkey was reactivated, and some 100,000 Albanians were forced out in the program in the 1950s.

With the fall of the Rankovic regime in 1966, the Kosovar Albanian national movement began to blossom, partly under the influence of the 60’s rebellion. Responding to this, Tito visited Kosova in 1967, and declared a complete reversal of policy. According to Tito:

“One cannot talk about equal rights when Serbs are given preference in factories … and Albanians are rejected even tough they have the same and better qualifications.”[15]

A new, more internationalist, policy was introduced, which for the first time brought Kosovar Albanians close to the same level of equality enjoyed by the six other nations under the Titoist ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ policy of the socialist federation of equal nations. Till then, Albanians had been left out of this policy largely as a concession to Serbian nationalists, who had always regarded Titoism and federation as “the destruction of the Serb nation,” because that nation did not have the absolute power it had had in capitalist Yugoslavia. By denying equality at least to the “Serb holy land” of Kosova, and giving them many positions in the repressive apparatus there, Tito had hoped to pacify these reactionary forces.

According to Clark:

“The provincial government now gained more autonomy, introduced secondary schooling in Albanian, accepted Albanian and Turkish alongside Serbo-Croatian as official languages, and began to administer the ‘ethnic keys’ that were a feature of Yugoslavia at that time. For the first time, the majority of members of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in Kosovo were Albanians.”[16]

Prisoners were released, the secret police purged, and the media allowed a field day to expose the crimes of the Rankovic era. In 1970, the University of Pristina, with courses in both Albanian and Serbo-Croatian, was opened, as was the Rilindja publishing house, for the first time bringing out many books on Albanian history and culture. Above all, Kosovar Albanians could now fly the flag of neighbouring Albania as their own flag, reflecting their actual national consciousness, and the degree to which ‘high Titoism’ was moving towards internationalism on this issue.

The new 1974 constitution upgraded Kosova’s status to what is known famously as ‘high level autonomy’, under which, while still officially an autonomous province of Serbia, it was also declared a ‘constituent element’ of the Yugoslav federation itself. Kosova had direct representation in the Yugoslav federal presidency as an equal to other republics, not via the Serbian republic. Albanians from Kosova had their turns as president and vice-president, like representatives from other republics, positions annually rotated among the eight equal constituent units of the federation. Kosova even had the same right to veto on the collective presidency as did republics. It had its own supreme court, its own central bank, its own territorial defence force, all features of a republic.

Despite these highly positive changes, Albanians still continually called for full formal republic status, as recognition of full equality. Leading Albanian Communist Mehmet Hoxha had asked in 1968 “Why do 370,000 Montenegrins have their own republic, but 1.2 million Albanians do not even have total autonomy.”[17] However, now that they did have “total autonomy-plus” after 1974, this near-republic status, while far from perfect, was the “legal” situation, and therefore the claim that Kosova was a mere “province” of Serbia, and thus that is all it can aspire to now, is false. Indeed it is important to understand that even the element of still being formally a “highly autonomous” province of Serbia was entirely connected to and conditional upon it also being a direct part of the Yugoslav federation, so when that federation later collapsed, so did this entire constitutional set-up that included “autonomy”, because mere autonomy within Serbia can only be a downgraded status compared to being a constituent unit of a greater federation, which no longer exists.

The fact that Albanians nevertheless remained dissatisfied was accentuated by Kosova’s dramatic economic situation, where unemployment hovered around 50 percent, two and a half times the Yugoslav average. Kosova’s proportion of Yugoslav GDP was only one quarter its share of the population, and its GDP per capita was one quarter that of Serbia, again revealing its absolutely oppressed state.[18] Albanians likewise were grossly under-represented in unelected state bodies: with 8 percent of the Yugoslav population, they accounted for only one percent of the officers of the Yugoslav People’s Army, while 67 per cent of officers were Serb or Montenegrin (compared to their 39 per cent of the population).[19]

Tito died in 1980, and with him, one of the key figures dedicated to preserving the delicate ethnic balance that held the federation together. In 1981, demonstrations at Pristina University were brutally crushed by the Yugoslav military, with considerable killing. Thousands were arrested. This was followed by years of repression. Albanians, while only 8 per cent of Yugoslavia’s population, made up 75 per cent of political prisoners in the 1980s.[20] Between 1981 and 1988, 1000 Albanian teachers were sacked for allegedly not being committed to the fight against Albanian “nationalism.”[21]

This crackdown demonstrated to the Kosovars how frail their “high level” autonomy really was. Even though this remained their official status, this new wave of heavy repression effectively put to an end the 1968-81 ‘honeymoon period’ of Albanians in Yugoslavia. This intensified their push for republic status, and, amongst a minority, for full independence or unity with Albania. An array of far left underground groups sprung up in the 1980s, supported by Enver Hoxha’s Stalino-Maoist regime in Albania. It is from these groups that the core of the Kosova Liberation Army arose in the 1990s.[22]

On the other extreme, the Serbian nationalist intelligentsia in the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986 released the famous “Memorandum,” attacking the entire post-war Titoist order. It claimed the “Communist-Croat alliance” represented by Tito had set out to destroy the Serb nation by imposing an “alien” (federal) Yugoslavia upon them, and that the division into federal republics divided up the Serb nation. The Memorandum demanded that the Serbian nation must now re-establish its full “national and cultural integrity … irrespective of the republic or province in which it finds itself.” In particular, Kosova must be crushed, to prevent the ongoing “genocide” against the local Serbs. This represented the first naked expression of the new nationalist ideology of the rising Serbian bourgeoisie, which had grown up under decades of “market socialism,” breaking through the Titoist/Communist ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ ideology that had encrusted it to date.

The wing of the Serbian bureaucracy around new leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1987 forged an alliance with this reactionary national chauvinism, and together spearheaded a countermobilisation of Kosovar Serbs with the exact opposite aim to the Albanians – to abolish Kosova’s autonomy, or reduce it to a meaningless pre-1974 variety. They believed, correctly, that there was a contradiction between Kosova being autonomous within Serbia yet having many features of a republic. In 1986, Vojislav Seselj (today leader of the extreme Chetnik Serbian Radical Party) demanded this contradiction be fixed, through reduction of autonomy, because, as he saw it, the contradiction could be interpreted as Kosova, as a federal unit, having the same right to secession as the republics.

Kosovar Serbs were mobilised on the pretext that it was their rights under attack from an “Albanian” administration in Kosova, which would seem odd considering the massive police repression of everything Albanian from 1981 onwards. The Kosovar Serbs had a very high constitutional position for the small minority they were. According to Kullashi Muhaludin from Pristina University, “Throughout the institutions, from the lowest communal level to the highest instances of state and party, the leading functions were always shared between the two nationalities. If a school director, for example, was of one nationality, his deputy would have to be from the other. Furthermore, there existed a system of rotation which, each time a mandate changed, assured that the replacement would be from the other nationality … Indeed, the rotation principle favoured the Serbs, who were always in the minority in the province.”[23]

The reason a considerable percentage of the Kosovar Serb population was able to be mobilised was that it did indeed have “grievances” – like those of white South Africans after the end of apartheid. High level autonomy, and particularly the Pristina University, had resulted in a growing percentage of jobs in government and administration being taken by Albanians. While still not equal to the Albanians’ percentage of the population, nevertheless, this was a big change given that these jobs had previously been the preserve of Serbs. This in the context of Kosova having such high unemployment was a perfect environment for nationalists. The economic flight of Serbs to greener pastures in northern Serbia and Vojvodina was interpreted as flight from an alleged campaign of violence by the Albanians.

Like in the US Deep South, the centrepiece of this propaganda was an alleged campaign by “backward, Muslim” Albanians to rape Serb women. Official statistics, however, showed that rape was at a lower level in Albania than in more advanced Serbia and Slovenia, and the overwhelming majority of victims were Albanian women. Statistics also showed only one murder of a Serb by an Albanian in the period 1982 to 1987, over a land dispute, following which the culprit was executed. More significant was the change of law by Serbian authorities which made the ethnic origins of the accused in rape cases a legally relevant factor.[24]

This campaign was supplemented by the racist conspiracy theory that the larger families which poorer Albanians had was a deliberate strategy to outbreed Serbs. The Albanian proportion of the population in Kosova continued to increase, from 70-75 percent, to over 80 percent in 1980 and some 90 percent by 1999. This occurred for the same reasons as Lebanese Muslims, Irish Catholics and Palestinians continued to increase in population all century, much to the chagrin of colonial powers and chauvinists among Lebanese Christians, Irish Protestants and Israelis, who wanted to maintain sectarian states: poor people have lots more babies, while better-off people have less. In addition, the Kosovar Serbs, like the Bosnian Serbs and Croats, had a place to go to get out of the miserable poverty of Kosova, the 3rd world of Yugoslavia, (and out of slightly less miserable Bosnia): to north Serbia, Vojvodina (or Croatia), whereas the Kosovar Albanians (and Bosnian Muslims) did not, further entrenching their majority in the province.

In 1988, Milosevic, who had purged the Serbian League of Communists of its internationalist wing and launched an IMF-backed neo-liberalisation of the economy, proposed constitutional changes abolishing Kosova’s high level autonomy. As the Kosova assembly opposed this, Milosevic forced the resignation of veteran Kosovar leader and Tito-protégé Adem Vllasi. The heroic Kosovar miners led the last major working class resistance to the Milosevic counterrevolution. The irony of many western leftists seeing the Milosevic regime as the continuation of “socialist” Yugoslavia opposed to “pro-western secessionists” is exposed most clearly in these events. As Milosevic sought to destroy the Yugoslav constitution, with its fine balance between the various nations, mobilising under reactionary Chetnik and Serbian Orthodox slogans, the Kosovar miners led a movement to defend the Yugoslav constitution in late 1988 and early 1989. In their gigantic march from the ‘Trepca’ mines near Mitrovica in the north to Pristina in November 1988, the miners chanted “Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia,” bearing portraits of Tito and red flags. They were not calling for Kosovar independence, but warned that the violent crushing of the Kosovar people would lead to the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia.

Three hated officials, who had no popular mandate, were put into the Kosova assembly by Milosevic. In February, a general strike erupted throughout Kosova. A thousand miners went on hunger strike underground for 8 days, but were tricked into coming up with the pretence that there demands would be met. The strongly western-backed federal prime minister, Ante Markovic, sent federal troops into Kosova, not to support the constitutional demands of the Kosovar working class, but to suppress them on behalf of Milosevic, in outright violation of the constitution, effectively putting an end to Yugoslavia. A state of emergency was declared, and 24 Albanians shot dead by the occupation forces. Some 2000 Albanian workers were hauled before the courts, including former leaders of the assembly. The assembly was surrounded by tanks and helicopters and under this somewhat direct threat, agreed to pass the constitutional changes and vote itself out of existence. The next day, Markovic congratulated Milosevic on this destruction of the federal order.[25]

Kosovar working class resistance continued throughout 1989 and 1990. In January and February 1990 a further 32 Kosovar demonstrators were killed. In July, Serbia abolished what was left of Kososva’s autonomy as it adopted a new constitution, reducing Kosova (and Vojvodina) to just any other administrative district of Serbia. Locked out of the Kosova assembly, the majority of legally elected Albanian delegates voted on an act of self-determination for Kosova. Serbia formerly dissolved the assembly. On September 7, Kosovar delgates met and declared the Republic of Kosova as a “democratic state of the Albanian people and of members of other nations and national minorities who are its citizens: Serbs, Muslims, Montenegrins, Croats, Turks, Romanies and others living in Kosova.”[26] In 1991, Kosovars held a referendum, in which 99 percent voted for independence.

As the constitutional changes were forced through against the will of the Kosova assembly, it was an open attack on the federal constitution. Milosevic stooges were put in charge of the fictional “assembly” that was maintained as window dressing – the first major step in transforming federal Yugoslavia into a unitary Serb-dominated state. Despite abolition of the provinces’ autonomy, the new hand-picked “representatives” of Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro maintained federal representation, meaning four federal units had essentially become one. Milosevic now had four of the eight votes on the Federal Presidency, meaning an effective control of Yugoslavia. Hence beginning the IMF-demanded constitutional changes to limit the powers of the republics over federal decisions went in tandem with laying the groundwork for Greater Serbia and the destruction of the real Yugoslav federation. Not surprisingly, therefore, restoration of Kosovar autonomy was never one of the West’s demands over the next decade.

Following the scrapping of Kosovar autonomy and its complete occupation by the federal army, a state of apartheid existed in Kosova throughout the 1990s. Albanians were expelled from all jobs in public administration, all Albanian police were sacked and all municipal and communal councils were suspended, making Kosova essentially a colony, with a powerless population ruled by an administration made up entirely of people from the small Serbian minority. Only Cyrillic script was allowed in official dealings, thousands of teachers, who continued teaching in Albanian, were sacked and school syllabuses were Serbianised. Half a million school age children were thus effectively denied an education. The same happened with Prisitna University, and all names there were changed to Cyrillic script. Hundreds of Albanian doctors were driven out of hospitals. All Albanians in the public sector – which in the still largely state-controlled economy of the time meant nearly everyone in formal employment – were sacked. In the historic Trepca mines, Albanians, who had formed 70 percent of the 23,000 strong workforce, all lost their jobs. Names of streets and other locations throughout Kosova were changed to names from Serbian nationalist mythology. For example, Pristina’s Marshall Tito Boulevarde was changed to Vidovdan Boulevarde, after a Serbian Orthodox festival. Thousands of Albanians were hauled before the courts on the most trivial of charges; a state of complete lawlessness characterised the relations between the Serbian occupation authorities and the mass of the population.

This led on to a deeper anti-Muslim ideological crusade by the Serb nationalist movement. The cream of Serbia’s writers and intellectuals, such as future prime minister Dobrica Cosic, and Vuk Draskovic, now head of the moderate Chetnik Serbian Renewal Party (SPO), pushed obscurantist and medievalist Serbian chauvinist and Muslim-hating views in their writings. It was alleged that Tito merely “created” the Muslims as yet another part of his devious project of “destroying the Serb nation” by setting up a federation. The Muslims and Albanians were called “Turks” and presented as continuers of the Ottoman Empire. The repression in Kosova and the later genocide of Bosnia’s Muslims were presented to the world as Serbia crusading in the frontline of western Christian civilisation against the “Islamic threat.”

From 1992 onwards, the independence struggle was led by Ibrahim Rugova and his Kosova Democratic League, which consisted essentially of the former Kosovar branches of the Yugoslav League of Communists. This entirely peaceful “Ghandian” struggle contrasted strongly with the bloodshed engulfing the region. The centrepiece of the struggle was a system of parallel schools, hospitals and other social and political institutions, allowing Albanians to continue take part in normal life in some form after being driven out of the system of the occupied province.

However, while gaining mass participation by Albanians, this imposed the onerous burden of double taxation – by the occupation regime, which gave them nothing in return, and by the parallel authorities. From around 1996, Rugova’s strategy was more and more challenged by more radical elements, particularly those led by Adem Demaci, known as Kosova’s Nelson Mandela for spending a total of 28 years in Serbian prisons. Demaci and others, including the growing student movement, demanded these institutions be supplemented by a more active mass protest action approach.

This entire struggle of the 1990s is a hugely inspirational story in itself, which this essay cannot detail.[27] The ultimate failure of this decade of peaceful resistance to achieve any gains, however, alongside the complete ignoring of this struggle by western powers, led to the rise of armed guerrilla movement, the Kosova Liberation Army at the end of the 1990s. This will be dealt with in the next part, but the important point here is to understand that this was not simply some “CIA-backed creation of the Albanian mafia and drug-runners” as the right-wing (and some left-wing) anti-Albanian demonisation asserts, but on the contrary was an organic outgrowth of this already existing mass independence struggle. It is hardly the first time in history that a non-violent liberation struggle turns to armed resistance when all else fails and repression prevails.

The other point to understand is that the demand for complete independence was not an innovation of the KLA. Some like to imagine that the ‘peaceful’ movement led by Rugova had a similarly “moderate” aim, in the view of those who consider independence sinful. As explained, Kosova’s declaration of independence by the Rugova-led movement took place in 1990 and there has never been any movement for autonomy or anything less than complete independence from any section of Kosovar Albanian society at any point.

In 1996, the Serbian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, carrying out research on the views of various minorities within Serbia regarding solutions to their oppression, was struck by the fact that the choice of “independence” as the only solution was supported by 100 percent of Albanians.[28] This is the simple reality that today’s critics of the right of the Kosovar people to self-determination have to deal with.

Conclusion to Part II

This second part of the series has aimed to demonstrate two things.

Firstly, the Kosovar Albanians were an oppressed people in the former Yugoslavia, and much more so under the Serbian iron heel when Yugoslavia collapsed. As an oppressed people living in a well-defined region, they have the right to self-determination, including complete independence. Moreover, considering the historic imperialist partitioning of the Albanian nation in 1913, and the fact that Albanians – the poorest nation in Europe – still live in a compact, contiguous region covering five countries, the Albanian people as a whole have the right to self-determination, meaning, if they wish, the Kosovars and other Albanian minorities should be allowed to unite with Albania.

This is their right – though whether a united Albanian nation or an independent Kosova is the better outcome will be discussed below.

Secondly, the Kosovar Albanians have resisted Serbian occupation for a century and have never recognised its legitimacy. This has to be an important aspect of the alleged ‘sovereignty” of established international borders. They have never claimed anything less than complete independence in all their struggles.

Therefore those claiming the current declaration of independence is merely an imperialist maneuver are wrong – the independence demand is and always has been overwhelming in Kosova, long before the very belated imperialist acceptance of it. The role of imperialism in the current crisis is very major, but cannot be understood in isolation from this very fundamental underpinning.

The next section will deal with the long term imperialist interest in and attitude to the Kosova question, including the war of 1999, while the third will deal with how we reached the current situation and the broader imperialist geo-strategic interests involved. A particular aspect will be the position of the Kosovar Serb minority in the newly independent state, and the question of independent multi-ethnic Kosova versus that of partition and/or united Albanian nation.

[1] Lenin, V.I., ‘The Discussion of Self-determination Summed Up’, Collected Works, Vol 22, p. 325

[2] Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, Vol 20, p. 423

[3] Ibid, p. 423.

[4] Ibid, p. 434-35

[5] Trotsky, L, “Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads,” July 22, 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-39).

[6] Quoted from Malcolm, N, Kosovo: A short history, New York University Press, 1998, p. 254, from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, Washington 1914, pp. 148-186.

[7] Ibid, p. 254

[8] Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo, Pluto Press, 2000, p. 9.

[9] Holberg, A., Book review: Dimitrije Tucovic: Serbia and Albania, Published by Arbeitsgruppe Marxismus, Vienna, 1999, http://www.labournet.net/balkans/0003/serbrvw.html

[10] Turkish statistics of 1911, quoted by The Institute of History, Pristina, “Expulsions of Albanians and Colonisation of Kosova,” Pristina, http://www.kosova.com/expuls/. Indeed, the Supreme Command of the Serbian III Army did a census with similar results on March 3, 1913, ibid.

[11] Malcolm, N, Kosovo: A short history, New York University Press, 1998.

[12] Ibid, p. 282.

[13] The main collaborationist forces were the Nazi-installed genocidal Croatian Ustase, who killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and others, the Serbian puppet regime of Nedic, ruling over Belgrade as the first city to be declared ‘Judenfrei’ (free of Jews), and the Italian-backed and later German backed Serbian Cetniks who killed most of the 100,000 Bosnian Muslims who died in the war.

[14] Vickers, M, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, p. 143.

[15] Clark, p. 12.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Clark, p. 38.

[18] Vovou, S (ed), Bosnia-Herzegovina – The Battle for a Multi-Ethnic Society, Deltio Thiellis, Athens, 1996, table on p. 19.

[19] Vreme, July 15, 1991.

[20]. Amnesty International, Yugoslavia’s Ethnic Albanians, New York, 1992

[21] Interview with Kullashi Muhaludin, “Where the Crisis Began,” International Viewpoint, April 27, 1992, p20.

[22]. These groups included the Movement for the National Liberation of Kosova, the Group of Marxist-Leninists of Kosova, the Red Front, the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) of Yugoslavia, and the Movement for an Albanian Republic in Yugoslavia.

[23] Interview with Kullashi Muhaludin, op cit.

[24] Magas, B, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, Verso, New York/London, 1993, p. 62.

[25] Magas, op cit, p161.

[26] Poulton, H, The Balkans, op cit, p70.

[27] An excellent overall account of this struggle is Civil Resistance in Kosovo, by Howard Clark, then coordinator of War Resisters’ International, Pluto Press, 2000.

[28] Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, Report on Human Rights in Serbia for 1996, Belgrade, 1997. In the opinion of the Serbian Helsinki Committee, such unanimity was impossible, hence declaring the result “invalid.” It also regarded to be invalid the fact that 100 percent of Albanians gave a figure of ‘one’ out of ‘one to ten’ as to how unequal they feel. The Helsinki Committee decided that such unanimity was impossible “unless we want to conclude that … all Albanians in Serbia feel totally unequal and oppressed and that all of them consider that the only solution to their problem is an independent Kosovo.” In reality, the fact that the Helsinki Committee even doubted that this was exactly the case only indicates how far from the Kosovar reality even well-meaning Belgraders were at the time.

February 24, 2008

Kosova declares (semi-) independence: Yes to full self-determination for Kosova. No to continuation of colonial-ruled state

By Michael Karadjis

This article is the first in a series that will look at different aspects of the issue of Kosova’s declaration of independence, which has produced markedly different reactions among left-wing and socialist movements around the world.

This first is a broad overview of developments and the attitude we believe the left should take. The second article will tackle the general question of the right to national self-determination, and why Kosova’s situation fully accords with this right, long supported by the left. While much more will be said of the role of imperialism and other factors in coming articles – including imperialism’s role precisely in limiting Kosovar self-determination – understanding this aspect is primary to developing an overall position. The role and interests of imperialism and other issues will form another part of the series.

***

Kosova (Kosovo)* made its long-postponed declaration of independence on February 17, greeted by massive celebrations involving tens of thousands of people, euphoric that their hundred-year struggle had finally bore fruit. This very real groundswell was revealing of the very deeply grounded nature of the desire for independence among Kosovar Albanians.

Meanwhile, in the Serb-dominated north of Kosova, reactions ranged from protest demonstrations, to attacks on the Serbia-Kosova border posts, indicating their view that where they live remains part of Serbia. Independence may well turn into partition, as Kosova’s secession from Serbia faces its own mirror secession.

So far, only the United States and a handful of west European powers have recognised the new state, though the 56-nation Islamic Conference Organisation also welcomed the move; Serbia, Russia and another group of European countries have condemned it, while most nations are sitting on the fence.

This followed the breakdown of the final round of talks between Serbia and Kosovar Albanian leaders. On December 10, the “Troika’’ – consisting of the US, the European Union (EU) and Russia, which has presided over the talks – handed their report to the UN Security Council, claiming all possibilities of “compromise” had been exhausted. The red lines of the two sides – Serbia allowing a large degree of autonomy but ruling out independence; Kosova accepting nothing less than some form of independence, however limited – were mutually irreconcilable.

However, while the Kosovar Albanians’ jubilation at the word “independence” is understandable, Kosova is not to be allowed to fully determine its own affairs. Rather, the major imperialist powers will recognise something called “supervised independence”. The colonial-style UN authority ruling Kosova since 1999 will go – and be replaced by an International Civilian Representative appointed by the European Union, with the right to veto any legislation passed by Kosova’s “independent” parliament, and even remove elected officials. A new EU-appointed police and justice mission (EULEX) will hold sway over the local police and legal institutions, and the 16,000 NATO troops that have occupied Kosova since 1999 will remain.

Thus the colonial state will essentially remain, mitigated by considerably stronger powers of the Kosovar parliament vis a vis the occupation forces. The struggle for self-determination will continue, in a new form and probably after a period as the initial euphoria dies down. For Kosovar Albanians, the gamble is whether or not the new set-up, of a relatively greater degree of independence, will facilitate or make more difficult their further struggle for full self-determination.

Right to national self-determination

The Kosovar Albanians were an oppressed people in the old Yugoslavia, and much more so in Serbia following the collapse of the Yugoslav federation in 1989-90. Kosova had a per capita income one quarter that of Serbia; Albanians constituted only one per cent of military officers of the Yugoslav army, while Serbs constituted 70 per cent; Albanians made up 70-80 per cent of political prisoners. They are a national group in a long well-defined territory that deserve the right to national self-determination.

Much mystification surrounds Kosovar independence. It is claimed Kosova is a “mere province” of Serbia that happens to have an Albanian majority, and thus its “secession” is a violation of Serbian “sovereignty”. The alleged difference between Kosova and the other parts of the former Yugoslavia is that the latter were constitutionally fully fledged federal republics, which had the right to independence, whereas Kosova merely had autonomy within the Serbian republic.

It is therefore claimed that independence for a “mere province” could encourage other minority populations to split away from sovereign states. This danger of precedent — of encouraging other oppressed peoples to fight for their freedom — is a major reason the imperialist powers have always opposed Kosovar independence, until a few years ago. This is an odd argument, however, coming from some on the left, which has long supported oppressed peoples such as the Kurds in Turkey and the Basques in Spain fighting for the right to self-determination, though such peoples have never constituted formal republics within those countries. As socialists, we reject the idea that oppressed peoples must be forced to live in an allegedly “sovereign” state that has conquered and subjugated them.

The resistance of the Kosovar Albanian majority to Serbian rule began when they were first brutally subjected to that rule in 1913, and has continued to now. There has never been a moment when Kosovar Albanians have accepted the legitimacy of Serbian rule, either under direct Serbian oppression in capitalist Yugoslavia, or the bogus “autonomy” in the first 20 years of the socialist Yugoslav federation after 1945.

However, their struggle achieved a major change in the constitution in 1968-1974, when Kosova, with the full support of Yugoslav leader Broz Tito, achieved the near-republic status of “high-level autonomy”, including direct representation in the Yugoslav presidency as an equal to other republics, not via the Serbian republic. It had its own high court, its own central bank, its own territorial defence force, all features of a republic. While Albanians still continually called for full formal republic status, as a recognition of full equality, this high status of near-republic was the “legal’’ situation, and therefore the claim that it is a mere “province” of Serbia is false. Indeed it is important to understand that even the element of still being formally a “highly autonomous” province of Serbia was entirely connected to and conditional upon it also being a direct part of the Yugoslav federation, so when the Yugoslav federation later collapsed, so did this entire constitutional set-up.

When the rising Serbian bourgeoisie under Slobodan Milosevic took control of the Yugoslav state apparatus in 1988-91 and crushed Kosovar self-rule with tanks, making it a mere “province’’ of Serbia, this was an illegal move, that destroyed the Yugoslav constitution. When 99 per cent of Kosovars voted for self-determination in a referendum in 1991, this was a legal move given the destruction of Yugoslav federalism. When Serbia and Montenegro created a new state, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992 (i.e., leaving out the word “Socialist’’ which was in the name of the now deceased state), Kosova was not asked its opinion (by contrast, Montenegrins had a referendum in which they voted to join). Therefore its incorporation into this new “Yugoslavia’’ was illegal. What’s more, this state itself dissolved in 2003, leaving simply no legal basis for Serbian sovereignty.

When a decade of entirely peaceful (“Gandhian”) resistance in the 1990’s failed to achieve any breakthrough, it gave way to an armed insurrection led by the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998-99 and a brutal Serbian counterinsurgency, leading to murderous air war against Serbia by NATO, afraid the situation would spin out of control and lead to regional instability. Some 10,000 Albanians were killed and 850,000 – half their entire population – were forced out of the country by the Serbian armed forces, while some 2000 Serbs were killed by NATO bombing.

Following the end of this apocalypse, since June 1999 Kosova has been ruled by a United Nations authority (UNMIK) and a NATO-led security force (K-FOR), effectively denying both the independence aspirations of the 90 per cent Albanian majority and Serbia’s goal of maintaining its authority there. UN Resolution 1244, while demanding Serbian troops exit Kosova, decreed that the region remain under the “sovereignty” of Serbia.

The Western aim had been to take control of the process to prevent the Albanian struggle leading to regional instability. The rise of the KLA had been firstly due to the implosion of Albania in 1997, when hundreds of thousands of weapons were looted from armouries, many finding their way across the border into Kosova; and secondly, due to the response of the Serbian state to its appearance. When it appeared, US envoy to the region, Robert Gelbard, declared in Kosova’s capital Pristina in March 1998 that the KLA “is beyond any question a terrorist organisation”. However, by burning and destroying entire villages and driving out their inhabitants as part of a typical US-style counterinsurgency, the Milosevic regime had managed to boost the KLA from a few hundred fighters to a 20,000-strong guerilla army with a presence throughout most of the villages of Kosova.

NATO aimed to get its own forces in to do a better job than Belgrade of controlling the situation and disarming the KLA (which it did in September 1999), and when Belgrade said no, it was made the convenient target of a new NATO doctrine on “humanitarian intervention’’.

The underlying Western aim was explained by Chris Hedges in the US foreign policy elite’s top journal Foreign Affairs in April-May 1999:

“With most ethnic Albanians concentrated in homogenous areas bordering Albania, the drive to extend Albania’s borders remains feasible. That drive is not only a wider threat to European stability to also to Albanian moderation. Many KLA commanders tout themselves as a ‘liberation army for all Albanians’ — precisely what frightens the NATO alliance most … The underlying idea behind creating a theoretically temporary, NATO-enforced military protectorate in Kosovo is to buy time – even as it bombs the Serbs – for a three-year transition period in which ethnic Albanians will be allowed to elect a parliament and other governing bodies — meeting enough of their aspirations, it is hoped, to keep Kosovo from seceding.’’

However, opposition to any form of Serbian rule hardened after the cataclysmic events of 1999. It is impossible to find any Kosovar Albanian against independence.

Meanwhile, the nine following years of legal limbo under UN colonial rule, denying Kosova development credits and investment, has left half the population unemployed, a black hole in Europe that was ripe for social explosion.

Despite claims that independence is a creation of the imperialist powers, it was not until 2006 that, recognising the unsustainability of the situation, the first voices among Western leaders began to accept the inevitability of what had been demanded by the Albanians for a century. Following a year of fruitless negotiations, in early 2007, UN negotiator Marti Ahtisaari released the plan for “supervised independence”, as a “compromise” between the mutually irreconcilable demands for autonomy or independence.

If some kind of independence was now inevitable – unless imperialist powers wanted themselves to wage a counterinsurgency war inside Europe against 2 million Albanians who would surely rise up if independence were denied – then Western powers aimed to “supervise” it in order to limit it as much as possible.

Aside from the EU “supervision”, the other main aspect of the plan – the more progressive aspect – is the wide autonomy for regions where Kosovar Serbs form a majority of the population, with control over their education, health and police systems and the majority of income made in these areas, and will be able to be directly linked to and financed by the Serbian government.

The former municipality of Mitrovica in the north will be divided into two. Serb northern Mitrovica connects the entire region to its north to the Serbian border as the largest Serb bloc, covering some 15 per cent of Kosova. Mitrovica already has its own Serbian university, hospital, school system, currency and police. This northern region contains the massive Trepca mining and metallurgy complex, allegedly worth some US$5 billion . It has been effectively partitioned from the rest of Kosova by NATO troops since they entered in June 1999.

The Kosova Protection Corps – the unarmed civil emergency and reconstruction corps which gathered many former members of the KLA, which fought for the country’s independence in 1997-99 — will be abolished, and Kosova will be barred from joining any other state (meaning Albania). Strong minority representation has already been enshrined under UNMIK, and a new flag has been designed under EU supervision, with the map of Kosova surrounded by six stars representing six ethnic groups, absent any symbolism or even colours from the Albanian or Serb flags.

While thousands of Kosovar Albanians waved the red and black two-headed eagle flag of neighbouring Albania in their celebrations – the only flag that represents their national consciousness, and the flag that was legally theirs under Tito – now the EU decrees from above that their flag will be blue and white in order to enshrine Kosova as an officially multi-ethnic state.

The US and EU supported the plan, as did the Kosovar Albanian leadership with some reluctance. Serbia rejected it, and was backed by a Russian veto on the UN Security Council, leading to a further year of negotiations which ended in December.

While Russia’s backing of Serbia was matched by an equally strong backing of independence by US authorities, the EU was in a quandary over this situation. The EU has the most to lose from any outcome that leads to Balkan instability; it was easier for Moscow and Washington to play “hard’’ positions as part of a greater geopolitical game. EU states also have vast strategic and economic reasons to strive for overall agreement with Russia – precisely a scenario the US finds threatening.

The EU was also divided, unwilling to come to a decision that did not have consensus of all its members. Britain tended to play along with Washington, and following the election of Sarkozy, France also moved to this camp. In contrast, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia, Rumania and Bulgaria have remained opposed to Kosovar independence.

The EU preferred a resolution through the UN, requiring enough compromise to get Belgrade’s agreement, as their EU force needs a clear mandate, so in contrast to the US, continually and strongly warned Kosova against unilateral moves. Germany in particular, with strong economic concerns in the Balkans, vast economic relations with Russia, and the centre of the EU which it does not want split, played the moderator role through the process.

With negotiations failing, however, the EU was confronted by a dilemma. The Albanian leadership made clear it would not tolerate the situation forever, and would declare independence unilaterally if no compromise was reached and independence remained blocked in the UNSC. In such a scenario, a continued EU refusal to recognise it would increase the resulting instability, with tensions between Serb and Albanian populations sharpened by such an outcome, but the EU less able to control it.

Therefore, the EU majority moved towards agreeing to recognise independence, but called on Kosovar authorities to delay their declaration for a period so that the process can be “coordinated” with the EU, allowing the new political and security forces time to establish themselves. It is hoped that this way minority Serbs will be more assured of protection and less likely to flee.

Multi-ethnic republic?

Kosova premier-elect, former KLA leader Hashim Thaci, has offered the vice-presidency to a Kosovar Serb. Four Serb parties formed a coalition and defied Belgrade by negotiating to enter into a governing coalition with Thaci’s Democratic Party of Kosova (PDK). Popular Serb leader Oliver Ivanovic condemned Belgrade’s blocking of Kosovar Serbs voting at recent elections as a “catastrophe” for the Serbs, and publicly welcomed Thaci’s moves. Serbs already account for 10 per cent of the Kosovar Police Service (KPS), and the Minister of Returns is a Kosovar Serb.

Kosova’s declaration of independence declares Kosova “to be a democratic, secular and multi-ethnic republic, guided by the principles of non-discrimination and equal protection under the law. We shall protect and promote the rights of all communities in Kosovo and create the conditions necessary for their effective participation in political and decision-making processes.” There is no specific mention of the Albanian people.

However, most Kosovar Serbs remain opposed or fearful, given their real experiences of sporadic violence from Albanians since 1999. Following the mass return of the dispossessed Albanians in June 1999, a reverse wave of some 100,000 Serbs – about half their original numbers – fled Kosova. A wave of Albanian revenge killings precipitated this flight, most of whom fled in fear, given the conditions of insecurity in the legal limbo in which Kosova was left. A brief second wave of anti-Serb pogroms erupted in March 2004, when eight Serbs were killed, while 11 Albanian rioters were shot dead by NATO troops.

The current Kosovar Serb population of 130,000 now forms more like 5 per cent rather than the original 10 per cent of Kosova’s population. Their situation varies greatly: from full Serb control in north Kosova (to where Albanians have been unable to return) to the wretched barbed-wire enclosed ghetto in Orahovac and Gorazdevac, with a number of medium-sized concentrations in between, particularly Gracanica, Novo Brdo and Strpce.

There is valid criticism that international forces have been ineffective in enforcing security. NATO provides armed convoys for Serbs traveling through Albanian territory, yet the fact they are needed reveals the situation remains bad. However, it is futile to merely blame this on NATO not policing a foreign occupation more harshly. The real issue is the frustration of the Albanian desire for independence combined with the fact that most Kosovar Serb leaders speak on Belgrade’s behalf in opposing the right of self-determination of their neighbours who outnumber them ten to one, making their people a target for Albanian chauvinists. The nationalism of these Serb leaders is mirrored by that of Kosovar Albanian leaders, who, while strongly condemning attacks on Serbs, have never fully prioritised forging a partnership with Serbs to construct a multi-ethnic Kosova.

However, there have been no major outbreaks of anti-Serb violence since March 2004, and the belief among Albanians that their goal of independence is approaching is perhaps one reason for this decline of ethnic Albanian radicalisation.

The Western powers are officially recognising a united, multi-ethnic Kosova, as enshrined in the Ahtisaari Plan, which they believe will be the least destabilising alternative. Any too-strong “Albanian’’ colouration will lead to the internal partition along the Ibar river in the north assuming an international character. But a fusion of northern Kosova with Serbia poses the question of the remainder of Kosova having the right to unite with Albania, further posing the question of the Albanian minorities living in a compact region in neighbouring Macedonia, southeast Serbia and Montenegro. Imperialism has long believed this could lead to a “nightmare scenario” of attempted border changes throughout the region, far more destabilising than if Kosovar independence – itself opposed for precisely this reason – assumes an officially multi-ethnic character.

The problem is that the poisoning of ethnic relations and solidarity between Serb and Albanian communities goes back a long way, especially since the destruction of Kosovar autonomy in 1989-90, and the brutal imperialist attack in 1999 greatly accentuated this, opening the political conditions for the Serbian government to commit an “Al Nakba’’ on the Kosovar Albanians, while in turn the Kosovar Albanian leadership supported NATO bombing of Serbia’s working people. As such, the effort to hold together a “multi-ethnic’’ state may be frustrated by the results of imperialism’s very actions.

Geostrategic interests?

Much emphasis has been given to the imperialist “supervision” aiming to enforce neo-liberal prescriptions and allow imperialist firms to privatise Kosova’s wealth, but given that every country in eastern Europe, including Serbia, already follows this path, it explains little. Much is also made of geostrategic interests: the US has built an enormous base at Bondsteel in Kosova, situated perfectly to overlook a pipeline for Caspian oil being built by a US-led consortium, running through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania.

However, there is no reason to believe the pro-imperialist government in Serbia would not allow such a base, if in return the US had opposed Kosovar independence. The US has bases all over the world without needing to set up a state directly under its control. The point is, however, this would have involved either an imperialist or a Serbian long-term counterinsurgency war against the armed independence struggle which would immediately break out again, threatening precisely the stability desired for pipelines and other imperialist concerns. Enforcing an officially multi-ethnic state thus remains the main aim of the occupation.

However, the fact that most Kosovar Serbs are not on board means that Kosova’s unilateral declaration, even while accepting the Ahtisaari Plan, is essentially a statement by the Albanian majority. In the north, Serbs are already refusing to cooperate with the independent Kosova authorities, declaring themselves still part of Serbia, making partition along the Ibar River the most likely outcome.

A partition may appear the ideal “compromise” between autonomy and independence, yet was ruled out by both Serbia and Kosova. Serbia’s advantages would be getting rid of two million Albanians with a high birth rate, while keeping the economic assets of the north, and gaining a small face-saver in the process.

Both the secession of the north to Serbia proper and the right of the rest of Kosova to join Albania and create an ethnic Albanian state can be viewed as the right of both communities to self-determination, blocked by imperialist “stability’’ concerns. And both should have the right to do this, and not be blocked by imperialism, if they so desire.

However, it is arguably the worst outcome for the Kosovar Serbs: the simple fact is that only 40 per cent of Kosovar Serbs live in their already very secure northern stronghold, so its secession would abandon the majority of Serbs who live in smaller and more vulnerable enclaves surrounded by the Albanian majority throughout the south. All the famous Serbian Orthodox monasteries are also in the south. At least some kind of Serb-Albanian partnership to run an independent state still therefore appears the best overall outcome, if it were possible.

With no consensus in either the UN, the EU or NATO, none of the foreign bodies have a clear mandate to act one way or the other, apart from generally protecting security. One possible way out of the crisis is for the Ahtisaari Plan to be extended into a Bosnia-style set-up, making the Serb- and Albanian-dominated regions two confederal states within an independent Kosova.

Whatever the outcome, socialists should welcome the partial fruition of the century-long struggle of Kosovar Albanians for national self-determination, while also condemning any oppression of the Serb and other minorities by the new state. However, the actual state being formed is not an independent one, and remains a modified colonial-ruled set-up. Kosova has the right to full self-determination — meaning all UN, EU and NATO occupation forces and governing bodies should exit Kosova and allow the Kosovar peoples, both Albanian and Serb, to determine their own futures.

However, it is possible that minority populations, fearful of the threat of violence by Albanian chauvinists, may call for some UN forces to remain in the unstable conditions of the transition for their protection, given the absolute poisoning of proletarian solidarity that has occurred over the last 20 years. This would be quite understandable as long as such forces were disconnected from running the Kosovars’ state for them. Therefore we must oppose the use of this as a justification by imperialist powers to limit Kosova’s real independence via its colonial “supervisory” bodies, and strongly distinguish between the two

by Michael Karadjis

2002

Edward Herman (Z-Magazine, February 2002, Body Counts in Imperial Service) sets out to reveal the ways in which mass killings are highlighted when such figures are in the service of western propaganda, but ignored when carried out by the same western leaders, or their clients such as Israel, Turkey and Indonesia. There is no question that such exposure is essential work for anti-imperialists to campaign against US and other western aggression as in the cases of the Gulf, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, Herman seems completely unable to remain on that fine line between justifying imperialist propaganda and war – where Hitchens etc have fallen – and scabbing on the oppressed and terrorised in places where western propaganda does sometimes suddenly find a need to exploit their suffering. Above all, this means the Kosovars and Bosniaks, whose terrorisation at the hands of the massive Serbian-Yugoslav military machine is surely equivalent to the terrorisation of the Kurds, Palestinians, Timorese and Iraqis by the massive Turkish, Israeli, Indonesian and US military machines.

Herman and others may argue that there is little point pointing out the suffering of these peoples as this is already done in the mass media. That, however, is not the problem. The problem is that Herman simply employs the same selective methods as the mass media in reverse, aiming to delegitimise the suffering and the struggles of the Kosovars and Bosniaks.

In so doing, he does a great disservice to the anti-imperialist cause. Our struggle against imperialist war and slaughter should centre on the fact that such aggression does not help the oppressed – even the cases where the oppressed are sometimes used for propaganda purposes – and that our solidarity is with all oppressed and terrorised peoples, wheter they are currently in or out of favour. Putting a minus everywhere that the US government propagandistically puts a plus does not create principled politics.

Regarding the conflicts in the Balkans, it would require us to write entire polemical books to thrash out all details of our differences. However, what appears indisputable is that previous to March 1999, in all the Balkan conflicts (Croatia, Bosnia and Kosova), one side, the Belgrade regime, possessed an absolutely overwhelming monopoly on means of state terror, with one of Europe’s largest military and police machines inherited from the former united Yugoslavia. On the other side, the West imposed an arms embargo on “all of Yugoslavia”, which meant that those republics which broke away were unable to arm themselves to resist Belgrade’s terror. The Yugoslav army had been the fourth most powerful military machine in Europe, its suppliers including the US up until the outbreak of war in 1991. The Serb republic managed to get hold of the entire arsenal, which belonged to all Yugoslavs and hence should have been divided between them, due to the Vance Plan in early 1992. As the Serbo-Croatian war was coming to an end, and Croatia was now on the offensive, the US via Cyrus Vance stepped in to force Croatia to allow the UN to occupy the zones which had been seized by the Yugoslav army, about one third of Croatia. Most of this had not been Serb-majority territory and the Croat majorities had been expelled. The UN was now to police the new border, with one third of Croatia now run by Serb nationalists.

Most crucially, Vance insisted that the Yugoslav army be allowed to take its entire arsenal, which was now scattered around Croatia and could have been divided among the republics, back to Serbia, and above all into Bosnia, which was still officially part of ‘Yugoslavia’. The JNA took from Croatia 300 tanks, 280 artillery pieces, 210 aircraft, tens of thousands of tons of equipment and supplies, and took it all into Bosnia, despite the fact that Serbian plans for Bosnia were very well known, Bosnian Serb rightist leader Karadzic had even threatened to make the Bosnian Muslims “disappear from the face of the Earth”. Croatia demanded that the JNA’s arsenals be placed under international supervision, warning that what had been done to Vukovar and Dubrovnik would be repeated on Bosnian cities, as was to occur; this was ignored by Vance and others who made “ultimatums and demands” on Croatia that JNA be allowed to withdraw its heavy weaponry to Bosnia.

The callousness with which Herman and so many apologists for Milosevic have for years made an issue of Kosovar death counts borders on the morbid. Certainly, if people like US defense secretary Cohen had suggested there were 100,000 dead, as Herman quotes, such a gigantic difference with the reality should well have been exposed as absurd propaganda. Cohen’s story of “100,000 missing” was indeed “a meaningless propaganda ploy” in the circumstances of war, when it was difficult to know who was missing and who was not, as Herman correctly states. Perhaps it was aimed at suggesting that such a number had already been killed, but that is drawing a long bow given that the realistic figure of 4600 dead was given by Cohen in the very next sentence.

However, the discussion rarely revolves around the obscure ‘100,000’ quote but over the somewhat less significant difference between around 4-5000 dead (the figure beloved by Belgrade apologists and the bulk of others who thought opposition to NATO’s terror meant we had to downplay that of Belgrade), and 10,000 dead, the figure given by the UN, which was the figure most quoted *by far* in the western media. Before looking at this in detail, let us for argument’s sake assume the lower figure to be correct.

Why, in that case, did nearly all imperialist propaganda only inflate the figures by a few thousand, surely not a very useful exaggeration? And indeed, if I am correct and the 10,000 is indeed closer to the mark, why do I believe NATO barely exaggerated the numbers at all? Could it be that with 850,000 Kosovars, half their entire population, brutally expelled from their country and languishing in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, for all the world to see (especially since they were in Europe rather than some ‘far off land’ easily ignored), that NATO simply had no need for any further propaganda other than this superb propaganda which Milosevic was handing it?

After all, if there were only 4-5000 deaths rather than 10,000, does that mean the expulsion of half the Kosovar population from their homes was any less of a crime against humanity?

No, NATO did not need any further propaganda. But surely Herman and company would have noticed that these 850,000 people were only expelled from Kosova after NATO began its terror bombing, a terror which had produced the political conditions under which it was now possible for Milosevic to do what his regime was previously incapable of. Therefore, rather than denying the extent of the attempted genocide, wouldn’t it be better for our propaganda to point out that this was a direct consequence of NATO’s actions? Why underestimate the consequences of NATO’s actions? If the real figures were 10,000 dead, then they were killed by the Yugoslav army, police and semi-fascist Serbian paramilitaries after and as a direct result of NATO’s aggression. They were part of the same region-wide catastrophe created by NATO which simultaneously was leading to the massacre of defenceless Serb civilians and the destruction of factories, power plants, bridges, trains, buses and so on in Serbia itself.

And here let me ask Herman a further question: as we are in agreement in opposing NATO’s terror against Serbian civilians and Serbian civilian infrastructure, if indeed there had been 10,000 rather than 4000 killed (after NATO’s attack) would this in any way give any retrospective justification for NATO’s attack? I fail to see how it could so what’s the point? Imperialist terror has to be opposed due to its own demerits; deliberately downplaying the crimes of the opponent, when such crimes are real, ends up being reverse liberalism: if the greater numbers were true, would imperialist intervention then be OK?

Perhaps the point is that even a small difference should be exposed to show that western leaders lie. However, if this is then done by deciding that the minimum possible figures must be the correct ones, in contrast to citing maximum death figures in other cases (Afghanistan, Timor), it serves far more to reveal how much Herman wants to underestimate the suffering of a people he considers ‘unworthy’ of sympathy, since their horrendous oppression drove them into the arms of NATO – in a mirror image of imperialist media concepts of ‘unworthy’ victims.

So how many did die? According to Hague boss Carla Del Ponte, “approximately 4000” bodies had been dug up from the search of 529 “mass graves” by the end of 2000 (http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/p550-e.htm). This figure combines the 2108 bodies dug up by the end of 1999 with the further 1835 by the end of 2000. As victims of NATO bombing were unlikely to have been buried in “mass graves”, and as Yugoslav army troops killed would have been retrieved by the army, and also unlikely to be in “mass graves”, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of these 4000 were murdered Albanians. Herman does not waste time disputing this, as some others do, as he uses the fact that the number of bodies found in Kosova is “under 4000” to show this cannot “demonstrate that 4600 people had been executed,” as suggested by Cohen, or for that matter, the later figure of 10,000.

This is a strange argument, because Herman’s own polemics create problems for it. He quotes an earlier figure of 2,108 bodies by late 1999, showing that further search almost doubled the body count in one year. Does this not suggest there may be more?

In fact, Herman himself suggests this, apparently without realizing the logic of what he is saying. He writes “according to the ICRC, there were some 3500 Kosovo residents still missing in May 2001, a figure which included some 900 Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanians.” Therefore, according to his figures, there could be another 2600 Albanians dead, taking the figure to some 6600. According to ICRC figures I came across at the time of Herman’s article, there were still 2915 missing Albanians, alongside 1,035 non-Albanians (646 Serbs, 67 Montenegrins, 219 Roma and 103 Bosniaks, plus a number of Goranci). As such, the total figure for killed or missing Albanians would be some 6900. Herman adds “whether these were all genuinely missing or had died is unclear.” But if they were not “genuinely missing” but “had died” then we must obviously add them to the 4000 dead. If they are still “genuinely missing” after so long the likelihood would seem to be that they are also dead.

But then there are those whose bodies have turned up in Serbia. Herman dismisses as a “story” the discovery of a refrigerator truck with dozens of Albanian bodies which had been dumped into the Danube. He confidently proclaims that no further such trucks have come to light. In fact, many further such trucks and mass graves inside Serbia did indeed come to light, with a total of some 1100 Albanian bodies. This figure is a public figure which can be found on Serbian government official sites and in Serbian media. Far from being a “story,” the Serbian government, UN and Kosova authorities have been involved for several years in a process of identifying and returning the bodies to Kosova.

This may not be the final figure – the Serbian government of Zoran Djindjic called off the search at that point. The reason is very obvious. The current western-backed Serbian government is full of former politicians, generals, police officers and mega-capitalists attached to the Milosevic regime. They were up to their eyeballs in the same crimes for which a select few have been chosen as scapegoats. In particular, Djindjic had powerful links with the Serbian Interior Ministry Police, who are credited with far more crimes in Kosova than the Yugoslav Army, linked more to Kostunica. And the embarrassing thing was that many of these trucks or graves of Kosovar Albanians were turning up on or near police grounds in Serbia.

If we add this minimum of 1100 bodies, we now have at least 7700 Albanian dead or missing, somewhere in between the lowest possible figures beloved by Herman and others, and the UN figures. But if we consider the fact that the Tribunal search teams were looking for “mass graves”, their figures would exclude the fact that returning Kosovar refugees no doubt immediately buried any dead relatives in proper individual graves. There is simply no reason to believe that most dead were buried in ‘mass graves’, let alone these designated 529 ‘mass’ graves.

Therefore, what is required is a thorough survey of the numbers killed, not merely a grotesque ‘body count’ methodology, with the well-known historical parallels of the use of such methodology. Has one been done? Fortunately, the one that has been done was carried out by the highly respected British medical journal the ‘Lancet’. Now, since the ‘Lancet’ did a similar survey in Iraq in 2006 which showed that at the time some 660,000 Iraqis had been killed since the US invasion, and this report has been widely quoted – and rightly – by Herman and his co-thinkers, then presumably Herman will be happy with the Lancet study of deaths in Kosova during the 1999 war?

So let me try. According to the study carried out by the Lancet, some 12,000 Albanians were killed in 1998-99, and another 4000 were still missing in September 1999 (4 months after the end of the war) when the study was carried out. Given that of these 4000, some 2000 turned out to be in Serbian prisons and have since returned, it suggests some 2000 missing, presumed dead, on top of 12,000 killed. This means the death toll may have been well over 10,000 Albanians. The Lancet study is at http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673600024041/fulltext. Note that its sample is much greater than that in the Iraq study.

What does any of this have to do with ‘genocide’? Is ‘genocide’ the difference between 5000 and 10,000 killed over a couple of months? A horrendous massacre, but not genocide. However, the reason many of us used the term genocide had little to do with numbers of deaths, but rather the attempt to destroy a whole people by driving them out of their country. The forced expulsion of 850,000 Albanians, nearly half their population, was what constituted attempted genocide, and there is no knowing whether or not more would have been expelled. This was combined with the destruction of 100,000 homes, and 215 mosques, a full one third of the mosques in Kosova, many going back to medieval times. An expulsion this size is similar to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians by the new Zionist state in 1948. I’m not sure how many thousands were killed during the ‘Nakbah’, or ‘Catastrophe’, but it is called such because such a mass expulsion destroyed their entire society, destroyed the Palestinians as a people living in Palestine, not specifically based on the numbers killed. Chomsky in his ‘New Military Humanism’ makes this comparison explicit. On the left, we have never had any qualms about calling the Palestinian Nakbah a form of genocide, and so we shouldn’t. For the sake of consistency, the same goes for the Kosova Nakbah of 1999.

And it is here, on the attempted Kosova genocide, the Kosova Nakbah, that I have yet to see any coherent genocide revisionism, that seriously questions the organized mass expulsion of the Kosovar population by the Serboslav army and rightist paramilitaries. In ‘Fool’s Crusade’, Diana Johnstone devotes a mere one page to this, and suggests the Albanians may have gone on holidays at relatives’ houses in Albania and Macedonia to sit out the war; Parenti in ‘To Kill a Nation’ reports on a journalist who allegedly spoke to one (1) unnamed Albanian on a boat to Italy who allegedly said she had fled bombs rather than being expelled by the Serbian army. Not real heavy stuff from the two leading revisionist books.

However, it is in the case of Bosnia that Herman’s number-crunching, logic and politics is most skewed. At least in the case of Kosova, the fact that many lost sympathy for the terrorised Kosovars may be explained by their sympathy with the Serbian people being simultaneously terrorised by countries whose superiority over Yugoslavia in possession and use of means of terror was equivalent to the superiority which Yugoslavia had over the Kosovars.

In the case of Bosnia, however, there was no such US or NATO aggression; throughout the entire war it was clearly the Belgrade regime and its Bosnian Serb proxies it paid and armed that possessed and used absolute military superiority over the almost defenceless Bosnians.

Before going into the political questions, let’s look at Herman’s number-crunching. He disputes the widely quoted figures of 200,000 dead (or the unusually large figure of 250,000 given by David Rieff who he quotes), claiming “he gives no source, and is clearly regurgitating claims of Bosnian Muslim officials.” Yet later, referring to East Timor, he tells us that the Indonesian army and paramilitary forces killed over 5000 defenceless civilians even before the August 30, 1999 vote, according to Church estimates.”

So (Christian) “Church estimates” are worth quoting, especially when the killers are Muslims, but “Muslim officials” are not, especially when the killers are Christians. And we might add, alongside the “Muslim officials”, also the Christian Serb and Croat and atheist and Bosnian (of no declared nationality) officials, military leaders, clergy and so on who stood firmly alongside their Muslim allies in the Bosnian government or in defence of multi-ethnic Bosnia against the allied Serbian and Croatian right-wing chauvinists – the figures they mostly gave were also around the 200,000 mark.

Herman quotes George Kenney to the effect that the ICRC estimates 20-30,000 dead in Bosnia. Kenney in fact estimates between 25,000 and 65,000 dead, and it is clearly Herman who chooses to provide only Kenney’s minimum figure to the Z-Net readership. As for the ICRC, I have not found any figure for estimated dead in an admittedly quick search of their records on Bosnia, but I did find the figure of 20,000 for the numbers still missing, as Herman quotes. Amnesty International gives two figures for numbers missing, one of around 20,000 and one of around 27,000. Assuming the lower figure to be correct, Herman then jumps in with the following piece of “meaningless propaganda”: “which again doesn’t get us near 250,000 or genocide.”

Presumably, then, Herman believes the total number still missing equals the total number killed in the entire war. So for three and a half years, there was presumably not a single body found. Forget the thousands that the Red Cross had already reported from the concentration camps in 1992. Forget the 13,000 graves in Sarajevo, a city where all the cemeteries were full so early that parks and sports grounds and numerous other places had to be used to bury the dead. Forget the non-stop sieges by massively armed Serbian chauvinist forces who daily and endlessly poured enormous firepower into the defenceless citizenry not only of Sarajevo but also of Tuzla, Zenica, Bihac, Srebrenica, Zepa, Gorazde, Zepce, Mostar (first by the Serbian chauvinists and then by their Croat chauvinist allies) and a host of other towns. Forget the ongoing battles for three and a half years as Serbian and allied Croatian forces attempted to conquer even more non-Serb and non-Croat majority territory (most of which they had already conquered) while the Muslims and multi-ethnic populations attempted to hold them back. Is it entirely unreasonable that in three and a half years the death toll would have mounted to 150-200,000?

In Vietnam, there are 300,000 Vietnamese still missing after nearly 30 years. There are usually estimated to have been 3 million killed. That’s a rate of one in ten missing. There are also some 3-4000 Americans missing – again about the same ratio to the 50,000 Americans killed. I’d hazard a guess that these figures are about average to many conflicts. In that case, 20,000 missing and 200,000 killed seem most likely round figures. However, if we take out the particular case of the 7000 missing from Srebrenica following the June 1995 massacre, and multiply the remaining 13,000 by 10 we get a possible figure of 130,000.

Incidentally, doesn’t the figure of 300,000 Vietnamese still missing after 30 years make Herman and those who engage in this nonsense stop to think how silly it looks to decide that the latest body count in Kosova after only a few years must without doubt be the final one? Do Herman and company perhaps believe that the Vietnamese government has merely invented this figure for propaganda purposes? Has he researched the evidence? Or does he believe that Vietnamese tell the truth but Balkan Muslims lie?

In fact, a study comparing the pre-war and post-war population of Bosnia, and adding all the known Bosnians living elsewhere in the world, the total number of dead or missing comes to 229,000, of whom 75 percent were Muslims, if it is assumed that there would have been no population increase over that period. If the rate of growth that existed previous to the war is assumed, the numbers of dead or missing rise to 343,000, of whom 64 percent were Muslims (‘Demographic Consequences of the Bosnia War’, by Murat Praso, http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/dem.html ). Muslims were 43 percent of the population. Take your pick – my guess is somewhere in between.

(Since writing this, the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre has done a very thorough study of Bosnian deaths and as of 2007 the still-rising total is nearly 100,000, of who 66 percent are Muslims, and 83 percent of civilian deaths are Muslims. For elaboration on this, see my post on this site ‘How many, and who, died in Bosnia? at http://mihalisk.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-many-and-who-died-in-bosnia.html)

The most appalling point is reached when Herman talks about the Srebrenica massacre of 8000 defenceless Muslim men and boys in July 1995, surely the crowning atrocity of the entire Balkan wars. “In Srebrenica, there have been only 473 bodies recovered, and there is absolutely no credible evidence that 7500 men and boys who allegedly disappeared in this area in July 1995 were murdered.” No credible evidence. The Muslim women survivors of Srebrenica are all a bunch of liars.

It would be one thing if this statement were simply the kind of gratuitous ignorance that much of the left has prided itself on regarding this issue, basically, “the less I know, the better” attitude, so they can parade around sounding very sophisticated by voicing inanities like “all sides committed atrocities”, without the trouble of having to distinguish oppressor and oppressed, a bit like the received liberal wisdom on “both sides” committing atrocities and not compromising on Palestine. Yet Herman is in fact worse than this.

As he has just quoted the ICRC on the numbers missing in Bosnia, he would have had in his face the ICRC figure (13/7/2000) of 7439 missing from Srebrenica alone, among 20,000 missing in Bosnia. Added to the 473 bodies recovered, this gives a total figure of 7912. “No credible evidence” that these “alleged missing” have been killed. Presumably Herman thinks they are all hiding out with Karadzic and being fed by their generous Chetnik captors. Just to compare, the Amnesty International website at the same time gave a figure of 6-8000 missing in Srebrenica, and claimed “every one of the scores of Moslems we have met who left Srebrenica in 1995 has a relative or friend now among the missing” (the site also claimed 1000 Croatian Serbs were missing following Croatia’s ‘Operation Storm’ in the Krajina). Since Herman wrote this, in fact 5000 bodies have now been uncovered, and in mid-2004, the Bosnian Serb government of the ethnically-cleansed ‘Republika Srpska’ formally confessed to the crime and claimed 7800 were killed by their henchmen.

Interestingly, Herman notes: ‘In 1999, when the people of Australia’s closest northern neighbour, East Timor, which had been invaded and annexed by the Indonesia dictatorship of General Suharto, finally had an opportunity to vote for independence and freedom, it was the Howard government that betrayed them. Although warned by Australia’s intelligence agencies that the Indonesian army was setting up militias to terrorise the population, Howard and his foreign minister, Alexander Downer, claimed they knew nothing; and the massacres went ahead. As leaked documents have since revealed, they did know.’

He claims UN troops finally went in to end the carnage, but not till after so many Timorese had already been killed. Quite so. Funny how he can make no analogy with Bosnia. Just as the UN refused for months to defend the Timorese after a UN-called referendum, so likewise, after an EU-called referendum in Bosnia in early 1992, neither the EU nor UN did anything to protect the Bosnians for three and a half years when they immediately came under massive attack by the most massive military force in the region. The UN even set up “safe havens” in a few cities a year or so later, where they disarmed the Bosnians, promising to “protect” them themselves. They never did. The “safe havens” continued to get bombed for years. Srebrenica was one of those “safe havens”, overrun by the Chetniks in July 1995. The UN politely made way for them.

Pity Herman cannot see any analogy.

By Michael Karadjis

October 2000

The elections and popular uprising which ousted former ‘Yugoslav’ president Slobodan Milosevic have provoked varied reactions on the left. Central to the debate is the nature of the transfer of power.

Two overlapping events occurred. The first was a rearrangement of power within the ruling elite, replacing the highly tainted Milosevic with Vojislav Kostunica – a long time advocate of Milosevic’s “Greater Serbia” project who had, however, stood aloof from the barbarous actions needed to create it.

The second was the dramatic entry of the masses – above all the powerful Serbian working class – onto the political scene, something not planned by the ruling elite and its western backers who wanted a smooth transition in order to maintain capitalist “law and order” and preserve much of the regime and its state apparatus intact.

Oddly, the nature of these two events has been totally confused by many on the left. Diana Johnstone, a long time apologist for Serbian nationalism, saw it this way:

“The “October surprise” was actually two events. One was a democratic election, made in Serbia. The other was a totally undemocratic putsch, made in the “international community” … The democratic election would have been sufficient to oblige Milosevic to retire … But the NATO-backed putschists wanted … a dramatic media spectacle.”

Calling the actions of hundreds of thousands of Serbian workers a “putsch” is the only way for the pro-Milosevic left to deal with seeing the working class oust a regime they, for reasons best known to themselves, consider to be “socialist.” It also helps justify their odd theory that western imperialism is in favour of a working class uprising.

Scabbing on the Serbian working-class

For others thrown into deeper disarray by the downfall of their idol, the anti-working class language is more hysterical. According to George Szamuely, “throughout the country drunken mobs have been storming the offices of factories, coalmines, banks and universities and forcing people to resign … The managers of Yugoslavia’s [sic] largest gold mine and smelter were kicked out, as were the managers at Zastava, the country’s giant carmaker. The Director of the Kolubara coalmining complex was thrown out, as was the Director of Yugoslav Coal Production.”

He doesn’t dare tell the reader that these “drunken mobs” driving out their corrupt, plutocratic “managers” all over the country are the long-suffering workers and their new strike committees in these enterprises. Johnstone likewise claimed the “unguarded building was systematically vandalized and set on fire, causing considerable damage to public property. The liberators then went on to smash shop windows and steal property in nearby shopping streets.”

This bourgeois “law and order” talk sounds remarkably like right-wing Australian prime minister John Howard’s description of the occupation of parliament house by Australian workers in 1996.

By “unguarded” she means that, after the police had fired tear gas at the masses, they became even angrier, so they simply overwhelmed the police, who gave up. No doubt these good “socialists” would have preferred the cops to have massacred the workers.

In view of what actually occurred, the best description of all this drivel is ‘scabbing on the Serbian working class.’

The industrial working class was the key force in the uprising, the occupation of parliament and the continuing “instability.” From September 29, the strikes and occupations and ousters of managers by thousands of miners at the Kolubara coal mines were the spearhead of the uprising. Tens of thousands of people from surrounding areas came to the defence of the workers when police attempted to attack their picket lines. No doubt Johnstone, Proyect, Szamuely et al would have again preferred the police to have done a better job and not left the Milosevic-era management “unguarded”.

The working class uprising went far beyond Kolubara. According to Aleksandar Ciric in Podgorica “Every day a growing number of factories and enterprises were proclaiming that they were on strike demanding the true election results. On Thursday October 5, more than one hundred large companies were on strike, including the former giant industries such as chemical industries Nevena from Leskovac and Zorka from Sabac, parts of Bor mining and melting combine, hydro electric power plant in Bajina Basta, Trajal tire factory and chemical factory Merima from Krusevac, parts of Kragujevac Zastava, Pancevo fertiliser factory and petroleum industries, Electric Company of Serbia… Railway transportation between Belgrade and Bar was interrupted, and blockades of roads interrupted transportation in the country for a few hours every day.”

Notably, many of these plants were bombed by NATO last year, particularly Zastava and Pancevo. It is the height of arrogance for the Milosevic bandwagon to write that workers bombed by NATO are now rallying to NATO’s cause because their leaders are allegedly being offered a fistful of dollars. These same industrial plants and industrial towns were already the backbone of the upsurge against Milosevic last year following the end of NATO’s war, an upsurge betrayed by the very leaders now pretending to have led the current revolt.

It is similarly offensive to claim, as some have, that coal miners, suffering under western sanctions, “closed down the mine in order to get rid of the enemy of Washington” to get sanctions lifted. Leaving aside his belief that only sanctions, not the multi-millionaire plutocracy that did fantastically well from sanctions, caused their wages to fall, it avoids the issue of why sanctions don’t work like this in other cases. Washington’s 40-year total embargo on Cuba, far more stringent than the selective sanctions on Yugoslavia, have not encouraged Cuban workers to “get rid of the enemy of Washington.” Likewise, the genocidal total embargo on Iraq has not encouraged Iraqi workers to rise up against “the enemy of Washington.” And in this case, the Hussein regime is a capitalist regime as brutal as that of Milosevic. The difference is that the Iraqi masses understand they are being punished for daring to threaten imperialist control of the oil-fields, and as part of keeping down the Arab nation so as to protect Washington’s colonial client Israel. In the Balkan’s this is reversed, with Serbia playing the Israeli role of ethnic cleanser of the region. Serbian workers have rightly decided there was nothing to be defended about a regime which had continually sent them to slaughter their fellow non-Serb workers throughout the region.

Working Class and Kostunica Regime: Clash of Interests

Far from the upsurge having been organised by a conspiracy involving Kostunica and the US government, it is precisely the working class that is trying to more fully destroy the vestiges of Milosevic’s crony capitalist tyranny, while Kostunica’s US-backed regime desperately tries to salvage as much of it as possible and keep the movement under control. Workers strike committees have become “crisis committees” pushing more than just industrial demands, many stating their only interest is the “well-being of the collective.”

The description by Jonathan Steele in the Friday October 13 Guardian reveals much about this conflict of interests. According to Steele, at the large Trudbenik construction company, the workers posted their own guards in the accountant’s office. “We need to prevent documents being removed,” explained Predrag Jelic, a member of the crisis committee. Workers with arms checking the books? Terrible to Kostunica, US imperialism and pro-Milosevic “left”, but otherwise a page straight out of Lenin’s “State and Revolution.”

A similar account is made by Argyris Malapanis in the US Militant: “Engineers and production workers (in the largest state-owned oil company) have now formed a commission of inquiry to look into the practices of the old management … If they find any evidence of embezzlement or other pilfering of company resources, the commission will bring charges against those directors.”

Kostunica and Milosevic are in complete agreement on all this: both vigorously condemn the “chaos” and “anarchy” of the factory occupations. Kostunica has attacked this process of restructuring “from the bottom up,” insisting that change come through state institutions after the new “transitional government” is created. “Some of these actions are from people who are in connection with or appear on behalf of DOS or even myself, which is not true. But all together, it’s something that worries me,” said Kostunica.”

According to Steele, Kostunica sent Nebojsa Covic, who leads one of the parties in DOS (Democratic Opposition of Serbia, the Kostunica-led coalition), to visit factories, “urging workers to get back to work and trust DOS to bring change,” but the strike committee at Trudbenik is having none of it. “We don’t need political support, and we won’t accept any demands for restraint from Covic or anyone else from DOS,” stressed Jelic.

According to Steele, “the strike committee wants to be sure that the new rulers from DOS do not just reproduce the old system by imposing so-called democrats on factories … (it) wants a proper system of accountability in the company, credible financial public accounts and no further role for party politics in factory appointments.”

The strike committee has taken over the enterprise – when managing director Dusan Djuraskovic attempted to take back control with a mixture of threats and promises, workers asked “Excuse me, who invited you here?”

A key working class force both in ensuring the electoral ouster of Milosevic and in now keeping the mobilisations on guard against the new regime is the 200,000 member independent trade union federation Nezavisnost, which last year vigorously condemned the barbarism of both NATO and the Belgrade regime. Its May Day 2000 message revealed its working class politics went beyond “factory politics” but extended to strong internationalist opposition to the Serbian nationalism which the rule of both Milosevic and Kostunica is based on:

“All of us who support ourselves from honest work must jointly and decisively stand up to terror applied against the world of labor for over a decade … Milosevic’s hand of nationalistic evil has seized us and removed us from the factory machines, from our fields, our classrooms, university amphitheaters, and our offices. Wrecked and stripped of our identity, which is created through work, with only our national omen he sent us off to destroy all those who do not belong to our nation and our religion.”

In an October 6 uprising message, Nezavisnost president Branislav Canak called on “all members of Nezavisnost and all employees in Serbia, particularly those on involuntary leaves of absence, to return to their factories, to organize workers’ watches, to prevent SPS and JUL managers from entering the firms and to protect the property from any attempt of destruction.”

“We demand from all employees, members of other trade unions … to begin today to support their own interests … the interests of free and autonomous workers’ movement, the world of labor which makes the decisions about its fate autonomously.”

Kostunica regime: Clone of Milosevic regime

It is notable that, in Steele’s account above, the person Kostunica sent to rescue the Milosevic-era management was Nebojsa Covic. In looking at who Covic and others in the Kostunica camp are, much is revealed about the new regime:

Covic is the former long-time Milosevic-party mayor of Belgrade, the third most senior person in the party, becoming an “oppositionist” from 1996. While in “opposition” he has remained managing director of a profitable tin can company.

Close to the regime is former army chief of staff Momcilo Perisic, who played the key role in Milosevic’s Bosnian war, being the general in charge of the 1995 massacre of 8000 Moslem captives in Srebrenica. He became an “oppositionist” in late 1998 due to his view that the Kosova policies of Milosevic and Seselj were suicidal. He still maintains considerable influence in the military.

In an identical position is Milosevic’s former head of internal security, Jovica Stanisic, who also went into “opposition” in 1998 while maintaining powerful influence.

Kostunica has strongly defended maintaining the position of Milosevic’s current army chief of staff, Nebojsa Pavkovic, who headed the Yugoslav army’s depredations in Kosova last year, against attempts by others in DOS to oust him. Significantly, the western controlled war-crimes tribunal left him off the list of those to be prosecuted.

Kostunica has appointed Predrag Bulatovic from the pro-Milosevic forces in Montenegro, as federal prime minister, despite the 80 per cent success of the election boycott called by the anti-Milosevic Montenegrin government.

The Serbian republican government (where their were no elections) is being reorganised, with DOS coming to an arrangement for a transitional government with Milosevic’s party, while excluding the fascistic Serbian Radical Party (Milosevic’s former coalition allies) and ousting the Interior Minister, Vlajko Stojilkovic, who had advocated force be used against the masses and who has been indicted by the Hague – a “clean-up” act.

The Serbian Orthodox Church, a bastion of Serbian nationalism, has welcomed Kostunica, as has Milosevic’s state news agency, Tanjug.

For Kostunica to restabilise the capitalist regime, he is going to need Milosevic’s armed forces to control the working class movement – even though the ranks may not be as keen as the officers. “This lawlessness has not escaped the attention of the Yugoslav military,” according to Szamuely. Kostunica met the Yugoslav Army General Staff, where “concern was expressed over certain events in the country that are not in accordance with the Constitution and the laws, and the position and role of the Yugoslav Army in resolving problems had also been considered.” To anyone familiar with the role of armed forces in suppressing workers’ struggles, this is hardly surprising. Yet Szamuely, good socialist as he is, concludes “Sounds like a clear warning to Kostunica not to engage in mob rule.”

With Kostunica’s circle consisting of former chips off the Milosevic regime, and with Kostunica trying to maintain intact as much of the former regime, state apparatus and economic “management” bodies as possible, the essentially similar nature of the two regimes is obvious. In a word, both are regimes of the Serbian capitalist class.

Those contrasting a rabidly pro-capitalist Kostunica with an allegedly socialist Milosevic fail to explain how this could be possible when the entire political-economic apparatus is the same.

Certainly, western imperialism has shown only too clearly that it was such minimalist change – the ousting merely of the tainted name Milosevic and a few close cronies – that was all they wanted. The fact that the sanctions imposed during and after the Kosova war – the air flight ban, the oil embargo and the refusal to grant reconstruction aid following the bombing – have all been lifted in a hurry is evidence enough of this. Meanwhile, the “outer ring” of sanctions – the ban on Yugoslav membership of the IMF and World Bank – are about to be lifted.

These sanctions punished the masses for the crimes of the regime, and so their ending should be welcomed. However, from the point of view of western rhetoric, it is notable that no political concessions were demanded. According to the US-based intelligence group Stratfor, “The European Union also showed little interest in linking a potential $2 billion aid package to the extradition of Milosevic to face war-crimes charges.” Neither was the release of the thousands of Kosovar Albanian political prisoners still incarcerated in Serbian jails an issue.

Milosevic: Architect of Capitalist Restoration

In reality, Milosevic’s capitalist regime enjoyed many years of collaboration with western imperialism. Far from being a socialist, it was precisely the economic liberal Milosevic who destroyed the old socialist system of workers self management, as demanded by the IMF, during his reactionary “anti-bureaucratic revolution” of 1988-89.

He called on the Yugoslav people to overcome their “unfounded, irrational and primitive fear of exploitation” by foreign capital and called on new profit oriented bodies which replaced the workers committees to “function on economic principles…strive to create profits and constantly struggle for their share and place in the market.” While the process was slow, as in all of eastern Europe, a Serbian capitalist class came into being, closely connected to the regime.

For example, among Serbia’s and the entire Balkan’s biggest capitalists are the Karic brothers, who started their fortune with Milosevic’s political and economic “reforms” in Kosova, and now own a private telecommunications, banking, mineral and oil empire. Not surprisingly, Boguljub Karic was a minister without profile in the Yugoslav government until late last year.

Or take the case of Vladimir Bokan, who shared a house in Athens with Milosevic’s son Marko. He owned assets in Greece worth tens of millions of dollars, the entire chain of kiosks in Belgrade and Vojvodina, a chain of retail clothing stores and a real estate company in Belgrade, a shipyard in Novi Sad, a sizable share in a chemicals and fertiliser factory and much more, while running Panama and Cyprus registered shipping companies. With so many mega-capitalists like these, how is it possible for some to still parrot on about Yugolsavia being more “socialist” than elsewhere in the region?

Following the Dayton Accord to partition Bosnia into Serbian and Croatian dominated halves – drawn up by Milosevic, Croatian leader Tudjman and the US State Department – Milosevic was seen as the “guarantor of stability” in the region. Foreign capital rushed in. The British firm Nat-West Industries, headed by former British Foreign Secretary during the Bosnian war, Douglas Hurd, signed a million dollar deal to aid the privatisation of Serbian enterprises. Following the new privatisation law of October 1997, which aimed to sell to 75 most strategic Yugoslav industries, Nat-West organised the sale of half of Serbian Telecom to Greek and Italian investors. The Trepca lead, zinc, silver, gold, cadmium complex in northern Kosova was also put on the market, with French and Greek firms buying in.

None of this leaves much room for “socialism”, and there were clearly ample opportunities for western capital. Those seeing Milosevic’s Yugoslavia as an outpost of resistance to the IMF or think western sanctions were imposed due to a “socialist” orientation of the regime turn reality on its head. Milosevic wanted IMF/World Bank money to complete the privatisation process; this was held up by Washington – making political rather than economic demands – after 1995 the only “sanctions” were precisely denial of IMF/WB membership by the US.

The political demands centred on cooperation with the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague – to hold together the fragile Bosnian Dayton Accord – and negotiations on Kosova – while not demanding a return to pre-1989 autonomy – to prevent the situation there exploding and destabilising the southern Balkans. Once Milosevic’s barbarous tactics in Kosova led to a mighty upsurge led by the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), NATO decided to get its own forces in to control the situation – including to ensure the defeat of the KLA’s project for independent Kosova. Combined with other US concerns, above all to ensure its domination of NATO leading up to the 50th NATO Summit, a savage war was launched, in which Milosevic needed to demonised. As such, his removal and replacement by less tainted elements from the same capitalist elite became the main imperialist demand before sanctions were lifted.

In reality, “it is not just economics, stupid.” Imperialist control of the world relies on a system of political and military control where sometimes short-term profits might have to wait if a political situation threatens to unleash instability and hence threaten profits further down the line. If imperialism only launched wars and imposed sanctions because regimes were following a socialist economic course, then the last twenty years would tell us that the right-wing Haitian junta, Somalia’s heirs to Siad Barre, Noriega of Panama, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Sudanese junta and the Argentine junta were all socialist regimes.

As for the talk of the need for economic “reform” in Yugoslavia, this kind of talk has been heard by imperialist leaders with reference to all kinds third world capitalist regimes, from Suharto’s Indonesia to Turkey, where some 80 per cent of industry remains in state hands. This is where Yugoslavia fits: as Steele points out well, “Indonesia’s crony capitalism under Suharto is a more accurate parallel than the state socialism of Ceausescu.” Even South Korea has been chided for not going far enough with “reforms” in the post Asia crisis period, this allegedly being the reason for “slow recovery.” This imperialist “reform” drive is about pressure on capitalist regimes to open their economies even wider to foreign imperialist, rather than local capitalist, control.

Having said all this, however, is there a case to be made that Yugoslavia had maintained a little more “socialism” than elsewhere in eastern Europe? Measuring the amount in state and private hands is not very reliable. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development claims some 40 percent of Yugoslav GDP is produced by the private sector; several years ago the World Bank complained that 60-70 percent of Croatian industry remained in State hands and the privatisation process “had virtually stalled.” Does this mean Tudjman’s Croatia was also “socialist”?

Slovenia was the last country in eastern Europe to adopt a privatistion law, yet is heralded as the key success story. However, according to Svetlana Vasojevic and Igor Mekina in Bijelina, following the mass handout of privatisation vouchers to former employees, “the sale of unprofitable stock became practically impossible … The larger, unprofitable firms, wanted by no one, were mostly left to the state … in larger companies, the percentage of stock given to workers was minimized, the larger part being turned over to citizens, various funds and the state. Government … appointed its own people to head the funds (capital, compensation, and so on) … the economy has only been “half-privatized” … Notorious losses were revealed on the accounts of major companies such as TAM, Elan, Iskra, etc. Some were liquidated while the government still owns the others.” According to Mladjan Dinkic of the G-17 Plus organization and a DOS leader, Yugoslavia’s economy should be structured according to the Slovenian model.

Hence, the existence of a large state sector in countries like Serbia where large numbers of mega-capitalists abound is hardly unusual. Firstly, someone has to want to buy the stuff Milosevic is trying to sell; apart from investors not liking to buy industries in war zones, the question of how much investment in modern equipment old unprofitable industries need is obviously a concern. Capitalists go where profits can be made fast, especially capitalist classes rising from the dust as in eastern Europe. In Serbia’s case this has meant giant import-export companies, construction, banking, oil and various booming black market industries in preference to renovating old industries.

Workers Confront Mafia Rule

But moreover, the co-existence of private and state firms under a highly corrupt and autocratic regime is the very model for the rule of the mafia – not just Serbia and Croatia, but Yeltsin’s Russia and any number of crony capitalist regimes the world over are based on this model.

If you can “manage” a state firm via political connections, earn a giant salary regardless of whether the firm does well or not, and your brother owns a private firm, then you can strip the “state” firm of its assets and give them to your brother whose company makes mega-bucks selling it on the black market. If your brother owns a private bank, you can organise loans with ridiculously high interest to benefit the private bank at the expense of the “state” company. Because its all illegal, its hard to prove; but anyone familiar with Yugoslavia would know that stories of workers turning up for work at the car plant and finding no parts abound. The key ingredient missing, to prevent this happening, is democratic control by the workers themselves.

Malapanis reports on the role of the insurgent workers in stopping this mafia-capitalist accumulation: “While workers at these (vegetable oil) factories received very low pay, managers organized in the last decade for most production to be diverted to the black market, where company officials and middlemen made a bundle from exorbitant prices.


As part of the rebellion, workers guards formed in these factories to stop this “diversion” of products … From Monday, October 2, although the production was not stopped, our workers guards did not allow a single bottle to go out of the factory,” Canak said.

Steele gives another example: “Political connections were vital … for the company to get privileged access to capital, licences and subsidies … In the early 1990s, as a crude market economy and phoney privatisation spread through eastern Europe, Mr Milosevic joined the bandwagon. He allowed large companies to break into smaller units and fix their own commercial contracts. Union leaders were as eager as managers to exploit the new chance of riches … “The trade union secretary practically ran this company,” said Mr Jelic (about Trudbenik). Under privatisation the trade union secretary formed a company called Sind which built upper-income flats in Belgrade.” Sind paid workers DM5 an hour, while workers in the “state” enterprise got DM100 for a whole month.

When workers at the “state-owned” Genex trading giant ousted general manager Radoman Buzovic, they revealed he had been paying himself a princely salary of DM180,000 a month. The workers earn DM10.

By scabbing on the insurgent working class, the pro-Milosevic “socialists” oppose the very force that is capable of stopping legal and illegal privatisation of state assets, whether by the Milosevic or the Kostunica regime. According to George Skoric, “The (crisis) committees have been formed largely under this banner: ‘To protect the state-owned property from robbery by the ousted criminal bureaucrats.'”

Of course, this applies not only to the ousted regime but also to the new one: Nezavisnost president Canak made clear that “[Kostunica’s] economic program is seriously neo-liberal and I think, if nothing else, that would put workers and Nezavisnost in a confrontational position against him sooner or later … We will warn him first and then we will start behaving as unions are supposed to behave when their basic interests are in danger.”

While even under Tito’s bureaucratic regime, the socialist revolution was thoroughly undermined, and was then assassinated by Milosevic’s counterrevolution, the high points of the recent events has been this working class movement to resurrect – however briefly – the best traditions of that revolution and the system of workers’ self-management.

Kostunica and Greater Serbia

Meanwhile, pro-western Kostunica is trying to put back together the pieces of Milosevic’s Greater Serbia. His accommodation with the pro-Milosevic unitarist bloc in Montenegro has already been mentioned. The even more pro-western DOS leader Zoran Djindjic recently stated that 1200 Yugoslav troops would be back in Kosova by the end of the year. Kostunica, who was photographed with a Kalashnykov machine-gun in his hands in Kosova during the war in 1998 in the company of the para-military ‘Tigers’ of Captain Dragan, clearly agrees this is a good idea.

And while he was expected to pay a state visit to Sarajevo to offer recognition of Bosnia and apologise for Serbia’s role in the genocide, Kostunica’s first trip to that country was to the Republika Srpska para-state, to a reburial of a famous Serb nationalist poet who had died 60 years ago – a visit he had promised to the hard-line anti-Bosnian Serb Democratic Party.

Far from any of this annoying Kostunica’s western backers, the removal of Milosevic will mean the return of more “normal” economic and political patterns in the region, where a Serb-dominated state has been the lynchpin of western policy since 1918. This is because, as Stratfor points out, “The trade corridor from Germany and Italy to Greece will gradually reopen, physically linking Greece to the rest of the EU … the Danube – the region’s economic artery – will be cleared. Debris from bridges destroyed during the Kosovo war has blocked the river for well over a year. Once cleared, the 10 states that sit on the river’s banks will again be able to engage in large-scale trade. That very act will all but lock Yugoslavia into western Europe’s orbit. Both of these routes – the region’s two busiest – pass through downtown Belgrade.”

By Michael Karadjis

The Trepca zinc, lead, cadmium, gold and silver mining and metallurgy complex in the north of Kosova has been described as the “most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans” by Chris Hedges, the Balkan writer for the New York Times. It is valued at about US$5 billion. The Trepca complex goes way beyond raw materials. According to Hedges, “The Stari Tng mine, with its warehouses, is ringed with smelting plants, 17 metal treatment sites, freight yards, railroad lines, a power plant and the country’s largest battery plant”.

Trepca explains why the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, which has been trying to construct an “ethnically pure” Serb state over the last decade, wants to hang onto a region where 2 million Albanians form 90% of the population. The wealth of northern Kosova means far more than medieval monasteries abandoned by the Serbs many centuries ago.

The northern city of Mitrovica, Kosova’s second largest, is now firmly partitioned between a Serb-ruled north and an Albanian-ruled, completely destroyed, south. A river and a bridge solidify the border.

When Albanians, who previously formed the majority in the north, try to cross the bridge and return to their homes, they are confronted with two obstacles: Serb paramilitaries who physically abuse them, and their allies: French NATO troops, using armoured vehicles and checkpoints with barbed wire and cement blocks.

In the northern section of Mitrovica is the Trepca complex. The Serb paramilitaries have declared the whole of Kosova from their side of the river to the Serbian border, some 50 kilometres away, to be a “Serb zone”. The towns to the north, such as Leposovac, are overwhelmingly Serb in population, but northern Mitrovica and the Trepca region, before the war, were not.On August 7, 1000 Albanians tried to cross the bridge to return to their homes. They were driven back by French troops with armoured vehicles. Over the following days, hundreds of Albanians repeatedly confronted the French blockade.

Division long debated

Just before the latest war, David Owen, Britain’s chief negotiator during the Bosnian war, proposed the partition of Kosova, with every square mile “lost” by Serbia to its Albanian population to be “compensated” by the same amount of territory in “Republika Srpska” — the ethnically cleansed Serb area of Bosnia — becoming formally part of Serbia. Leading Serbian nationalist intellectuals, such as Dobrica Cosic, had been pushing this view for years.

The idea of physically separating the two peoples was put up as a solution to the seemingly endless instability of the region, caused by the clash between an independence-seeking Albanian majority, and a Serbian regime determined to deny them even autonomy. The NATO air war and the corresponding Serbian attempt to empty much of Kosova of its Albanians has cemented ethnic hatreds to a level making separation inevitable.

For Milosevic, the aim of the war was to put “facts on the ground”, so that many of the region’s ethnically cleansed villages could become the Serbian part of Kosova in such a partition.

However, NATO could not agree so blatantly, because the scale of the Albanian refugee problem threatened to further destabilise the southern Balkans. They clearly had to be taken back to Kosova. This was also necessary to NATO’s credibility.

Despite US rhetoric that a Russian zone would partition Kosova, as Serbs would gather there and Albanians would not return, it is the French NATO troops who are carrying out partition. In reality, the US concern was with overall NATO control, not partition, and the deal that brings Russian troops into parts of the French, German and US zones will have the same effect anyway.

French imperialism has long had a special relationship with Serbia. Most Bosnian Serb leaders wanted by the Hague for war crimes, including Radovan Karadzic, live in the French sector in Bosnia. A joint French-Serbian international trade bank was established in Mitrovica on July 14.

Attacks on Serb minority

Since the retreat of the Yugoslav army and the entry of NATO troops, there have been nearly 200 murders in Kosova. A large proportion of these have been of members of the Serb and Rom (Gypsy) minorities. It is estimated that up to half the province’s 200,000 Serbs have fled, fearing revenge attacks.

The Kosova Liberation Army, which is being disarmed by NATO forces, has vigorously condemned these attacks. Following the brutal murder of 14 Serb farmers in the village of Gracko, south of Pristina, Hashim Thaci, head of the KLA and its unrecognised provisional government, declared, “We strongly condemn this act …it has nothing to do with the progressive democratic forces in Kosova …So we must cooperate closely with the international community to assist in the investigation that will lead to the capture of those who are guilty.”Thaci went on to call again for “a harmonious coexistence, tolerance and understanding between ethnic groups”.

The attacks on Serbs have a number of sources. In the main, they appear to be revenge by returning Albanian refugees, who have come back to mass graves of relatives, burned-down houses, their possessions stolen, their farm animals killed.

For example, Pec in western Kosova is a blackened hole — Albanians, who formed 80% of the pre-war population, returned to find all their houses destroyed and only Serb houses standing. An element of revenge is hardly surprising.

Some Albanians are expelling Serbs from their homes because they themselves have none — it is estimated by the UN refugee agency that up to 400,000 people do not have habitable homes, and they will not be repaired by winter. After spending billions on war, the Western powers have sent only a trickle of aid to help house rebuilding.

A UN Human Rights report has implicated units of the KLA in many attacks — but did not find evidence of any support from the KLA leadership. On the contrary, to the extent that there is any political drive behind attacks, they may be directed by elements of the KLA trying to destabilise the Thaci leadership’s moderate course, or even enemies of the KLA.

Another element is purely criminal. Such a shattered society creates a criminal element, and there is considerable evidence of organised crime crossing over from Albania, which remains in major instability since the 1997 uprising which looted the armouries and smashed the state apparatus. Increasingly, Albanian as well as Serb homes are being looted by criminal gangs with no particular ethnic bias.

According to Masar Shala, KLA-appointed mayor of Prizren, referring to the criminal gangs from Albania, “Girls are kidnapped, taken to work as prostitutes in Italy, cars are stolen or hijacked, houses are looted, and there are shootings at night”.

Serb paramilitaries

The revenge attacks and the poisoned ethnic atmosphere are creating the conditions for solidifying certain “Serb” areas, which would join Serbia proper in a future partition.

The key region is that to the north of Mitrovica containing the Trepca complex. Russian forces would patrol the southern part of the French sector in the north-west, which will de facto extend this “Serb” region.

Just south of that, in the northern part of the Italian sector, there are increasing reports of Serb paramilitary activity. The whole of Kosova’s border with Serbia and Montenegro is wide open.

On July 27, Albanian television reported that Serb paramilitary units had laid siege to the village of Moistir. Just south of there is the patriarchate of Pec, a collection of medieval churches outside the town, which Yugoslav troops, according to the UN resolution ending the war, will return to protect.

This region then borders on the Russian zone in the northern tip of the German sector. On July 17, Serb paramilitary forces murdered four Albanian farmers in this region, outside of Klina. There could thus be a solid stretch of “Serb” zones along the north and north-west.

The other major region of Serb paramilitary activity is the north-east section of the US zone, along Kosova’s eastern border with Serbia. While returning Albanians expelled many Serbs from the town of Kamenica, Serb paramilitaries have expelled many Albanians from villages to the east of Kamenica and Gninalje.

Moreover, thousands of Albanians who formed the majority in several districts in Serbia proper, bordering this region, are also being expelled, according to a UNHCR spokesperson on August 2.

Now the Russian forces are being based in the Kamenica region. This in turn would border on the region of the Gracanica Monastery just south of Pristina, to which Yugoslav forces will return, while, just to the north, Russian forces have a major base of operations in Kosovo Polje, a western region of Pristina heavily populated by Serbs. There is thus potential for another “Serb” zone in the east.On August 4, 2000 Albanians marched against the Russian troops in Kamenica, following many incidents of Russian roadblocks, including by masked men who reportedly spoke Serbian. In one case, Russian troops detained KLA commander Agim Ceku. US forces allowed the demonstration to proceed, but hovered threateningly above it in Apache helicopters.

Who is ruling Kosova?

The United Nations has set up a temporary authority in Kosova, UNMIK, which rules the province as an international protectorate. While it is supposed to prepare conditions for eventual Kosovan autonomy within Yugoslavia, in reality it is refusing to devolve any power to the Kosovan Albanian and Serb populations.The KLA and other Kosovan parties have already set up their “provisional government”, separate from the UN authority, but the UN refuses to recognise this authority — though at the municipal level it provides the only basic services.


A UN police force of 3000 is being set up from troops from many countries, supposedly to ensure security for both Albanians and Serbs, which in reality could be done only by a Kosovan police force based on both populations.Outgoing UN “interim” governor Sergio Vieira de Mello declared that if the KLA mayors are not performing according to Western dictates, “You sack them, absolutely”, with the use of force. This attitude has led to clashes between KFOR and Albanian forces.

The fundamental question is “Who owns Kosova’s resources and industries?”. Since Kosova is promised “autonomy” rather than “republic” status within Yugoslavia (like Serbia and Montenegro), Kosova’s economic assets are still owned by the Serbian republic, as UN governor Bernard Kouchner recently made clear.

Therefore, partition may not even be necessary for Serbia to maintain ownership of Trepca — but Milosevic is taking no chances with something so valuable.Furthermore, the Serbian regime has been trying to sell many of Kosova’s assets. The Greek company Mytilinios has already bought a major share in Trepca, while Greek and Italian investors were sold the right to exploit Kosova’s telephone system.

According to Yugoslavia’s official privatisation law, the workers are entitled to shares when industries are privatised — but all Albanian workers were driven out in 1989, 13,000 of them from Trepca. Giving workers their rightful shares would leave fewer for foreign partners and make it more difficult to sell the industries.In January 1998, the underground Kosova parliament denounced the “flagrant violations of the rights of Kosovar employees and citizens” and warned foreign governments and businessmen that these deals were “invalid” and that “the Albanian people will treat them as neo-colonialists and demand reparations”. It is thus in the interests of Western investors for Albanian workers to be deprived of their rights.

However, even a Kosova truncated by partition would be unlikely to be allowed independence by its imperialist masters, as everyone from NATO chief Javier Solana to Bernard Kouchner has insisted. For imperialism, independence or union with Albania of even a part of Kosova would hold the same dangers as if it were all of Kosova. Changes to international borders would encourage demands by other oppressed national minorities throughout the Balkans, above all the Albanians in Macedonia and Montenegro.

For the Kosovans, the loss of Trepca would doom economic independence. For imperialism, internal partition would be the best of both worlds: an internal separation of hostile forces, making the situation easier to control, while avoiding the destabilising effects of a change in international borders.

By Michael Karadjis

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/19539

A declaration condemning the NATO attack on Serbia was released in April by 17 organisations which have long opposed the Serb national chauvinist regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Their stance reveals how little NATO’s attack has to do with winning the “hearts and minds” of the anti-nationalist opposition in Serbia.

For the opposition groups, the war has been an unmitigated disaster. Serb national chauvinist “homogenisation” has reached a fever pitch in the war conditions and the opposition has not been able to operate freely in this oppressive atmosphere.

Women in Black, a peace group which has carried out weekly anti-chauvinist vigils for eight years, is suddenly unable to operate. Milosevic “overnight acquired a most potent ally — fear. It is all-pervasive and has silenced every dissenting voice”, according to a dissident Serb journalist.

On April 11, Slavko Curuvija, a journalist who wrote an open letter to Milosevic last year calling on him to break his coalition with the fascist Serbian Radical Party, was gunned down outside his home.

Before the NATO attack, Milosevic did not have things going his way. Around the country, parents from many cities gathered outside the office of the army’s general staff with the simple message: “Bring our sons back from Kosovo”.When nationalist parties in February attempted to organise demonstrations at the national parliament to insist on rejection of the Rambouillet accord, only a few dozen turned up. Passers-by took no notice. With 2 million Serbs out of work and pensioners owed seven months’ pension, Serbia was close to rebellion.

One of the declaration’s signatories is the independent trade union federation Nezavisnost, which has about 300,000 members. Nezavisnost has long held a staunch anti-nationalist position. During the Bosnian war, it joined Women in Black and other anti-nationalist organisations in the coalition “Living in Sarajevo”, which openly condemned Belgrade’s aggression against Bosnia and declared support for the Serb Civic Council, the mass organisation of Bosnia’s Serbs who supported Bosnia’s multi-ethnic government against the Milosevic-backed rightist forces. Only Milosevic and his allies were recognised by the West as legitimate “representatives” of Bosnian Serbs.

Targeting working-class resistance

Many of the industries where Nezavisnost is strong have been destroyed by NATO’s bombs, including the massive Zastava car plant in Kragugevic. Last year, workers there went on hunger strike against the refusal of the regime to pay them, and two years ago they launched a strike wave under the banner “the factories to the workers”.

Speaking to reporters from the US Militant, Nezavisnost leader Branislav Canak said, “Many workers joke that NATO’s special target is the independent trade union”. This is unlikely to be a joke. It is precisely working-class opposition to Milosevic that imperialism most fears.

Of course, NATO’s bombs have hit far and wide, killing and devastating indiscriminately. But if Western powers really had wanted to overthrow of Milosevic, they would have spared places known to be strongholds of the opposition. The opposite has happened.

In addition to working-class centres such as Kragugevic, NATO bombs have continually hit Novi Sad, the capital of once autonomous multi-ethnic Vojvodina province. Milosevic, who suppressed the province’s autonomy, has remarkably little support here. It was a centre of last year’s “bring our sons home” movement. Even the members of the municipal government led such protests, yet the municipal government building was hit weeks before Milosevic’s headquarters.There are reports of a rise in Serb chauvinism directed against the Vojvodina’s large Hungarian minority, who are being branded “traitors” following Hungary’s recent joining of NATO.

NATO has even bombed the Vojvodinan city Subotica, the proud multi-ethnic town that resisted for years attempts to draft it into the Bosnia slaughter, identifying instead with multi-ethnic Bosnia.

Likewise, the NATO bombing of Montenegro has played into the hands of the pro-Milosevic forces, who have been pushing to overthrow the anti-Milosevic government of the republic for more than a year. The Montenegrin government has opposed Milosevic’s brutal counterinsurgency operation in Kosova.

Declaration

Early this year, the ruling Montenegrin Democratic Party of Socialists formed an alliance with a number of Serbian opposition parties to form the Coalition for Changes. The coalition included the Civic Alliance, long opposed to Milosevic’s Kosova policy.

The opposition declaration appeared in the Greek leftist paper Epohi. It stated:

“Deeply shocked by the catastrophic NATO attacks on our country and the terrible situation of the Albanians of Kosovo, we, the representatives of non-government organisations and the trade union confederation Nezavisnost, demand that all those who created this tragedy take all necessary steps to create the conditions for the renewal of the peace process.

“For two weeks now, the strongest military, political and economic countries of the world kill people and destroy military and civilian installations, bridges, railway lines, factories, warehouses and power stations. This has resulted in a cost of first-rate dimensions. Hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs, above all ethnic Albanians, have been forced to abandon their ruined houses and flee from the bombings and from the military actions of the Milosevic regime and the KLA, in the hope of finding salvation in the tragic situation of exile.

“It is obvious that all this leads to catastrophe and that a peaceful solution to the problem of Kosovo through negotiations, for which we struggled for years, is now further away than ever. Our struggle to develop democracy and civil society in Yugoslavia and to help restore its place in all international organisations, occurred despite the endless pressure on us by the Serbian regime.

“We, the representatives of groups and civilian organisations, have struggled courageously and systematically against warmongering and nationalistic politics, for respect for human rights and, in particular, against the suppression of the Kosovar Albanians.

“We have always insisted on respect for human rights and the restoration of autonomy for Kosovo. Throughout this time, the Serbian and Albanian civil society groups were the only ones who maintained contact and cooperation.“The intervention of NATO has not only destroyed everything we accomplished until now but also the very possibility of the existence of civil society in Serbia. Confronted by the current situation, we put forward the following demands in the name of humanity and in the name of the values and ideas which guide our actions:

· We demand the immediate end to all bombing and all military operations;
· We demand the renewal of the peace process with international mediation, at both the regional and the European level, as well as the United Nations;
· We demand the European Union and Russia undertake the weight of responsibility in finding a peaceful resolution to the crisis;
· We demand an end to the practice of ethnic cleansing and the repatriation of all the refugees;
· We demand support for the peace, stability and democratisation of Montenegro and every possible action that helps relieve that republic of the catastrophic results of the refugee crisis;
· We demand that the Serbian and international mass media describe with professionalism and without bias the current developments, refrain from participation in the media war and the encouragement of inter-ethnic hatred, hysteria and glorification of violence, considering this to be the only logical road out of the crisis.

“We cannot achieve the above by ourselves. We expect you to support our demands and to help us realise them through your actions and initiatives.”

Signed: Civic Alliance for Democracy, Social Justice and Support to Trade Unions; Belgrade Circle; Centre for Cultural De-pollution; Centre for Democracy and Free Elections; Centre for the Passage to Democracy; Political Initiatives; Centre EKO; European Movement of Serbia; Forum for Ethnic Relations and Foundation for the Management of Peace and Crises; Group 484; Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia; Student Union of Serbia; Union for Truth and Anti-Fascist Resistance; Weekly Video News; Women in Black; Committee of Yugoslav Lawyers for Human Rights; Trade Union Confederation Nezavisnost.