BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
Leading up to and during the two-week-old brutal bombing of
Yugoslavia that began March 24, the Clinton administration has
tried to justify the NATO assault on the grounds it is
attempting to stop aggression from Belgrade and end the driving
of hundreds of thousands of Albanian people out of Kosova. A
look at the record, however, shows that the current NATO
bombing is a continuation of the more than decade-long policy
by Washington and its imperialist allies to dismember
Yugoslavia.
On the blood and bones of the Yugoslav people, the U.S. government has further entrenched its position as the major "European" power. As the rival national capitalist classes in Europe, wrapped in the United Nations flag, attempted fruitlessly to displace one another as the "winner" in the new Balkan wars, Washington unfurled its NATO banner in 1994 and decisively moved in. Despite demagogic rationalizations, the U.S. rulers' aim has been not to stop "ethnic cleansing" or to impose "democracy," but to strengthen U.S. supremacy in Europe and create the conditions that one day will facilitate the restoration of capitalism throughout the Yugoslav workers state.
The groundwork for the war in Yugoslavia was laid out more than a decade before the formal breakup of the federation in 1991-92. The Yugoslav economy was already in crisis due to the anti-working-class methods of planning and management by the Stalinist regime of Josip Broz (Tito).
Regime forged in Stalinist mold
Despite its assertion of national independence against the
Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin in 1948, the Tito leadership was
fundamentally forged in the Stalinist mold. Its policies were
those of a privileged bureaucratic caste that lived at the
expense of the working class. It sought accommodation with
imperialism, rather than pursuing an internationalist foreign
policy in the interests of the toilers. Belgrade's call for
neutrality during the imperialist invasion of Korea in the
early 1950s and its lack of solidarity with the Vietnamese
liberation fighters in the 1960s are just two examples. Tito's
regime also kept oppositionists under close surveillance,
imprisoning large numbers of them.
The Yugoslav regime had opened up its economy to international finance capital and loans from imperialist institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), much earlier than other regimes in Eastern Europe. Tito's government, as early as the 1950s, had introduced capitalist market measures into the nationalized and planned economy packaged under the slogan of "workers self-management."
Factories operated in competition with other enterprises with an emphasis on individual profitability. "The enterprises compete among themselves in the national market as if they were capitalist entities," remarked Ernesto Che Guevara, a central leader of the Cuban revolution, after his visit to Yugoslavia in 1959. "In broad strokes, with an element of caricature, you could describe Yugoslav society as managerial capitalism with socialist distribution of profits. Each enterprise is viewed not as a group of workers but as a unit functioning more or less in a capitalist manner, obeying laws of supply and demand."
These measures opened up the country to greater pressure from the world capitalist market, bringing with them all the problems associated with a "market" economy and its cycles of production: inflation and rising cost of living, unemployment, and greater differentiation in wage levels from one factory to another. These economic problems became major contributing factors aggravating existing national tensions and aiding the development of those favoring the restoration of capitalism.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a section of the ruling bureaucracy in Croatia, for example, called for income from the lucrative tourist industry in the Dalmatian coast to be allocated entirely to the Croatian, not the federal government. They resisted using such resources to even out the imbalances across Yugoslavia through "affirmative action" programs for the least developed areas. Provinces and republics closed their markets to one another, seeking to become self-sufficient. This inevitably worked to the detriment of the least developed regions, especially where oppressed nationalities lived like the Albanians in Kosova. So, when the 1974-75 worldwide recession hit, the gyrations of the capitalist market affected Yugoslav working people, too, in a differential manner, exacerbating national divisions.
Int'l finance capital fans nationalism
The first serious economic crisis hit in the late 1970s. It
was caused by the rapid rise in the prices of oil, which
Belgrade imported from abroad, and declining markets for the
country's manufactured goods, which were largely exported to
capitalist countries.
Then came the infamous "stabilization" plans of the IMF, through which imperialist financial institutions robbed a portion of the wealth Yugoslav working people produced. The imposition of IMF-dictated policies exacerbated rivalries between the rulers of different republics and accelerated social inequalities and thus social tensions.
Faced with the crisis of the 1970s, the Yugoslav regime had run up sizable foreign debts much like semicolonial countries that are under debt bondage to imperialist powers. In order to continue providing loans, the IMF demanded austerity measures that Belgrade implemented in successive waves in the 1980s. The government lifted price controls on many goods, cut employment in state enterprises, and froze investments in infrastructure and social services.
As a result, prices of food, gasoline, and transportation rose by a third in 1983, for example. Unemployment grew to 14 percent on average throughout Yugoslavia. It grew disproportionately, however, in republics with less industrial development, like Bosnia, where joblessness hit 23 percent, or Macedonia where it reached 27 percent. In the same period unemployment shot to 50 percent in Kosova.
This course codified the reversal of earlier policies that boosted growth in underdeveloped regions. By 1985, for example, the income of the average resident of Slovenia was 70 percent higher than that of the average resident of Macedonia; four years later, it was 125 percent more.
By 1990, economic growth was nearly negative 11 percent. In the first half of that year, inflation exceeded 70 percent and real wages fell 41 percent. The wholehearted submission of the League of Yugoslav Communists to IMF policy further undermined social solidarity that was one of the conquests of the Yugoslav revolution of the 1940s.
By the opening of this decade, the working class in Yugoslavia found itself in a weak state, for two reasons.
First was the decades of Stalinist misrule that weakened the workers state and alienated working people from politics.
Second - due to the misleadership of the Stalinist and social democratic parties that dominated the workers movement in France, Portugal, and other countries - working people in capitalist Europe had not succeeded in taking advantage of the revolutionary openings of the late 1960s and early 1970s to alter the balance of class forces against the imperialist powers.
The revolutionary upsurge in Europe -marked by the May 1968 revolt in France, the rebellion in Italy next year, the 1974 revolution in Portugal and the downfall of the military junta in Greece that year, and the working-class struggles that led to the fall of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain in 1975 - ebbed. Workers in capitalist western Europe did not succeed in aiding in a qualitative new way their brothers and sisters in Yugoslavia during that period.
When conflicts exploded between the rival layers of the petty-bourgeois caste that governed Yugoslavia, all used nationalist demagogy to justify maintaining under their control as much land and economic resources as they could to perpetuate their privileges and parasitic existence. They succeeded in overcoming initial working-class resistance and dragged the toilers to war. At the center of this resistance, in fact, were miners and other working people in Kosova who led massive strikes and demonstrations in the late 1980s against austerity and for national rights of the Albanian majority in Kosova. That's where the regime of Slobodan Milosevic began its nationalist tirades to justify Belgrade's clampdown on the anti- austerity protests.
But the flames of war had been fanned by international finance capital.
`Let it bleed'
At the beginning of the war - which was given an impetus to
a large degree by the drive of the government of Germany to
immediately recognize Croatia and Slovenia as independent
states and then send diplomatic personnel, military advisers,
and weapons to these regimes - Washington adopted a policy of
"let it bleed." Let the murderous bombing of civilian areas by
the rival regimes in the formerly federated Yugoslavia go on
and let the capitalist powers in Europe get into the fray
first. Washington encouraged its allies in the European Union,
which are also its competitors, to fuel a civil war through
military intervention under the cover of UN "peacekeeping"
missions.
Then Washington gave partial promises that it would support "peace initiatives" led by Paris, Bonn, and others. And every time Washington openly sabotaged each of these agreements, before anything could be signed on the initiative of any power in the EU. That's what happened with the Lisbon agreement in 1992, the Vance-Owen plan in 1993, and the Contact Group talks in 1994.
At the same time, the U.S. rulers began reconstructing NATO on the corpses of the Yugoslav peoples, acting simultaneously to tighten the U.S. military encirclement of the workers state in Russia and other former Soviet republics and to reinforce U.S. dominance over rival capitalist powers in the Atlantic alliance.
Throughout this period, Washington attempted to give the appearance of taking the moral high ground for supposed concern for the Muslims in Bosnia, blaming the "Serbs" - all Serbs - for the slaughter.
Big-business press fuels war
The big-business media in the United States conveniently
omitted reporting on atrocities committed by the Croatian
regime if the news didn't fit U.S. foreign policy objectives.
Sometimes, the U.S. press helped directly in fueling the war through false reports. During the siege of Vukovar in Eastern Slavonia, for example - a sliver of territory in Croatia that was occupied by Belgrade in 1992 -the Yugoslav army had a hell of a time overrunning that city after a three-month bombardment. That was despite Belgrade's enormous superiority in firepower against a small and lightly armed defense guard.
Numerous desertions plagued Belgrade's army at the time, as conscripts oppose being used as cannon fodder to attack fellow toilers in Yugoslavia. Many soldiers who did not desert refused to obey orders from their superiors. They refused to get out of armored personnel carries and fire their guns. This was part of the widespread resistance among working people in Yugoslavia to the break-up of the country, to "ethnic cleansing," and to the slaughters, for which the regimes in Serbia and Croatia were the principal culprits.
The command structure of the Yugoslav army units besieging Vukovar had broken down. This coincided with a series of large antiwar protests in Belgrade.
Toward the end of the siege, Reuters put on its wire service a false story that 41 children of Serbian origin had been massacred inside Vukovar by "bloodthirsty Croats." The source was supposedly an anonymous Yugoslav army officer. The story was immediately picked up by the state-run media in Belgrade and broadcast on television in Serbia, citing Reuters as the source to boost the credence of Milosevic's nationalist demagogy. His regime was able to use it to dampen antiwar sentiment, mobilize new volunteers to the front, and clamp down on insubordination in the army as it flattened and took over Vukovar.
Reuters retracted the story within a day of its publication. But the damage had already been done.
A U.S. military ring around Yugoslavia
Washington did not simply sit on the sidelines, however,
making self-serving propaganda through its media. It
simultaneously laid the groundwork for eventual military
intervention by U.S. troops.
This began in 1992, when the Clinton administration sent 300 troops in Macedonia, as part of the UN "peacekeeping" mission there. They were later increased to 500. Today U.S. troops are part of the 12,000-strong NATO force there.
After the pro-capitalist regime of Sali Berisha won the presidency in neighboring Albania in 1992, the U.S. government struck a military agreement with Tirana, in exchange for economic bribes, which allowed the U.S. air force to use an air base in northern Albania for reconnaissance over Bosnia. Later, Clinton struck another agreement with the government of Hungary, which paved the way for U.S. troops to be transported on land from Germany to Bosnia as part of the 1995 NATO invasion. NATO's sixth fleet was dispatched in the Adriatic off Yugoslavia's coast and has remained a more-or-less permanent presence there ever since.
In short, Washington built an entire military ring around Yugoslavia.
Simultaneously, the White House made sure some weapons got into Bosnia during the UN arms embargo on that republic, which Washington had voted for in the UN. But Washington made sure that not enough heavy artillery was sent to the Bosnian regime of Alija Izetbegovic to tip the balance of power and endanger an outright victory for its armed forces over Belgrade.
That's what happened when Clinton encouraged Izetbegovic to launch a military offensive in the summer of 1994. The weaponry and ammunition the Bosnian army possessed was enough to enable it to conquer some ground but not to help guarantee victory.
Washington used the regime in Zagreb, Croatia's capital, for that purpose, which sifted through arms shipments and let through to Bosnia only what the U.S. rulers approved. By that time, the U.S. government had displaced Bonn in military and diplomatic influence in Zagreb.
In the summer of 1995, the Croatian government carried out a massive offensive, with Washington's green light and aid, in the majority Serb region of Krajina in Croatia. This resulted in one of the biggest "ethnic cleansing" operations in the war, displacing 150,000 people of Serbian origin from their homes and killing many in the process. This was not presented for what it was in the U.S. media, unlike similar operations by Belgrade in Bosnia.
That offensive, and the resistance by pro-Belgrade forces in Bosnia to it, set the stage for the 1995 NATO bombing in Bosnia and the signing of the Dayton accords in November of that year.
Throughout these years, Washington humiliated its competitors in France, Germany, and Britain that had sent thousands of troops to Bosnia. The French and British troops came to be increasingly seen by many in Yugoslavia and in bourgeois public opinion in the United States as responsible for the ongoing killing to a degree, or at least as unable to bring peace and to stop the slaughter.
Why wasn't there a Madrid agreement, a Lisbon, a Paris, a Stockholm, Belgrade, or Hague agreement? Because Washington sabotaged them all. Who remembers any of these potential accords? No one. Who remembers the politicians like Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, assigned to bring them to fruition? No one. Washington humbled the authors of those plans and the powers behind them - Bonn, Stockholm, and Paris. Every time an agreement seemed close to be struck, there was another slaughter to derail it.
The bourgeois myth that the cause was "age-old ethnic hatreds," to which the Balkan people are especially and mysteriously prone to, was reinforced every time.
As failures mounted for the European occupation force in Bosnia, and as diplomatic initiatives foundered, Washington successfully pressed for U.S.-led NATO air strikes and naval and ground shelling against Serbian forces, carrying out more than 3,000 such assaults between February 1994 and September 1995.
Dayton and expansion of NATO eastward
After exacting much blood from the people of Yugoslavia and
humbling its imperialist rivals, Washington marched the
representatives of the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian forces to
the Wright-Paterson Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, and
dictated the new "peace" accords. The terms of this agreement
were not that different than those of the Vance-Owen plan or
other similar schemes. The "peace" of Dayton was nothing but
the peace of the grave.
Everyone around the world is now supposed to know of Dayton, a small city of 180,000 people in southwestern Ohio. Dayton became nothing short of a symbol of undisputed U.S. hegemony in Europe. Soon 60,000 NATO troops, led by 20,000 U.S. troops, were deployed into Bosnia and Croatia.
Dayton coincided with the announcement of the decision by the U.S. rulers to expand NATO into Eastern and Central Europe -accelerating Washington's collision course with Moscow.
During the same January 1994 NATO summit at which the U.S. administration won approval for air strikes in Yugoslavia, president Clinton initiated the proposal to expand NATO eastward closer to the borders of the Russian workers state. In March of this year, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary were admitted as new member states - barely a couple of weeks before Washington unleashed the latest military assault on Yugoslavia.