BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND MARTÍN KOPPEL
U.S.-led forces have steadily intensified their bombing of
Yugoslavia, increasingly hitting civilian areas. The scope of
the assault is the most sweeping against a country in Europe
since World War II. Meanwhile, the regime of President Slobodan
Milosevic has driven hundreds of thousands of workers and
farmers from their towns in Kosova into neighboring republics.
Washington is seeking to apply enough military pressure on Belgrade to force it to negotiate a deal, enforced by an imperialist-led occupation force, that will lead to the partition of Kosova, following the Milosevic regime's "ethnic cleansing" campaign, or to limited autonomy under Belgrade's rule. Either outcome would be at the expense of the fight for self-determination by the Albanian people in Kosova.
The U.S. rulers' goals are - as they have been for the past decade in the Balkans conflict - to bolster Washington's hegemony in Europe against its imperialist rivals and to create conditions that will eventually allow them to reimpose the domination of capitalism throughout Yugoslavia.
To further its aims, the Clinton administration has used the March 31 capture of three U.S. soldiers on the Kosova-Macedonia border to try to whip up a nationalist, patriotic atmosphere inside the United States. The U.S. big-business press reported that the soldiers, part of a contingent of 12,000 NATO troops in Macedonia, looked "bruised and scarred," in a not-so-subtle effort to justify calls for stronger U.S. military assaults on Yugoslavia.
The media gave prominent coverage to yellow ribbons and U.S. flags displayed in the neighborhoods where the captured soldiers come from - East Los Angeles; Huntsville, Texas; and Smiths Creek, Michigan - to support "our boys."
U.S. president William Clinton promised continued bombing April 5. "The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo cannot stand as a permanent event," he said, declaring that Washington was involved in the conflict "for the long haul."
While posturing as defenders of the Kosovar Albanians, the U.S. rulers have all along opposed independence for Kosova and have tried for years to strike a deal with the Milosevic regime to undermine, corrupt, and in the end defeat the struggle for national self-determination in Kosova.
U.S. rulers: bomb and deal
In a TV address directed to the people of Serbia right after
he launched the bombing on March 24, Clinton said his
administration still wanted to preserve Kosova "as part of your
country." The current assault is the continuation of the decade-
long campaign by Washington and its imperialist allies to
dismember Yugoslavia (see article on page 2).
"We have neither a moral nor a strategic interest in the independence of Kosovo," wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a March 30 column titled "Bomb, talk, deal."
"Our strategic interest is that Kosovo not be independent," he continued. "We do not want to be formally or implicitly obligated to Kosovo independence, because it would be an endless commitment, because it would send an unrealistic message to Basques, Kurds, and other aggrieved ethnic groups that we will support their independence, and because Albania is already a failed state. It doesn't need a twin in Kosovo."
Friedman further elaborated on this prevalent bomb-and-deal position in U.S. ruling circles in another column in the April 6 Times. Clinton's strategy in the Balkans "will require much tougher sticks and much fatter carrots," he stated. "Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance."
As for the "carrots," Friedman proposed offering the Milosevic regime two options: "Either a modified Rambouillet deal that would give the Kosovars internationally protected autonomy in a Kosovo still under Serb sovereignty, or a partition of Kosovo. The Serbs would get the northwest sliver, which contains their Orthodox monasteries and holy sites."
The Albanians would "get" the rest, with an international occupation army enforcing the deal. Friedman added that "for now, this strategy is preferable to a ground war" because "once NATO invades Kosovo, it owns Kosovo," a situation that would drain Washington's political resources.
NATO widens assault
Two weeks into the military assault on Yugoslavia, the U.S.-
led NATO forces widened the scope of the bombing, dropping
missiles on major cities in Serbia and Montenegro, the two
republics that make up the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
NATO forces have repeatedly bombed Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, as well as Nis and Novi Sad, the country's second- and third-largest cities. The U.S.-led raids have destroyed many bridges on the Danube river, stranding scores of freighters from Budapest to the Black Sea. NATO officials claim they have only targeted military and government facilities, avoiding civilian areas.
On April 6, however, a U.S. warplane attacked two residential areas in Aleksinac, a coal mining town in southern Serbia. Yugoslav officials reported 12 civilians were killed and dozens wounded; the neighborhoods were demolished along with an ice cream factory and an animal feed plant.
In Brussels NATO spokesperson David Wilby mouthed regret for the deaths. The bombs hit the neighborhoods instead of a nearby military target, the British air commodore pronounced, because of "the law of statistics" and "a technical defect."
"The people responsible for this should be tried," exclaimed Stana Stojanovic, a 62-year pensioner whose neighbors were killed in Aleksinac. "I was a 16-year-old when I joined the Partisans in the fight against the Germans," said Petronje Milovanovic, cursing U.S. president William Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. "I'm ready to fight again." U.S. and other imperialist warplanes have bombed numerous industrial centers in Yugoslavia, from an aluminum plant near Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, to an oil refinery in Novi Sad.
On April 7 NATO air raids reduced much of the center of Pristina, Kosova's capital, to rubble, killing at least 10 civilians, according to authorities there.
NATO has rapidly increased its aerial armada, now at 600 warplanes and helicopters flying out of bases in Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The U.S. Navy has expanded its force in the Adriatic Sea to 11 missile- firing warships and submarines. The U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt joined the armada April 6.
Thousands driven out of Kosova
Meanwhile, Belgrade's troops and militarized police have
driven more than 500,000 of the 1.8 million Albanian residents
out of Kosova; many more have been displaced from their homes
inside Kosova. A quarter million people have poured across the
border into Albania, and tens of thousands more into Macedonia
and Montenegro. Pristina has reportedly been depopulated.
Since the beginning of its bombing offensive, the Clinton administration has asserted that its goal is to prevent the Milosevic regime's forces from carrying out its anti-Albanian "ethnic cleansing" campaign in Kosova. In the first two weeks, however, NATO's military assault was not directed primarily at the Serbian regime's forces in Kosova and its devastating terror campaign.
An April 7 editorial in the liberal Washington Post, arguing for a more aggressive U.S. policy, gave the following rationale for this situation: "In the early stages of this conflict, NATO could not protect the Kosovo civilians for whom this war is being fought. The air campaign had first to degrade Serbia's air defenses.... But even now, the officials say, the air campaign is limited in its ability to interfere in the continuing ethnic cleansing, because Serbian tanks are too dispersed, too well hidden, too close to civilians or - still - too well protected."
Continuing this pattern of applying steady military pressure and threats against Belgrade, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon announced April 4 that 24 U.S. Apache helicopter gunships would be sent to Albania with surface-to-surface missiles and 2,000 U.S. soldiers, who would be in a position to attack Serbian government forces across the border in Kosova.
U.S. government officials deny that the deployment of the Apaches is a first step toward a ground invasion of Yugoslavia. Such statements notwithstanding, the U.S. forces in Macedonia and those en route to Albania can be used as the staging detachments for such a course.
"It could take a week to 10 days to deploy the Apaches from a base in Germany," an Associated Press dispatch reported. "We could move the Apaches there extremely quickly," Bacon said, but U.S. forces will concentrate on delivering "humanitarian aid" first.
NATO officials announced April 6 the military alliance would take over coordination of all air and overland transport of "aid" to Kosovars in Albania, previously organized by UN- sponsored refugee agencies. As a New York Times reporter noted, "the relief effort and the deployment of the Apaches is deepening the American commitment on the ground in the Balkans."
The skies over Yugoslavia and the Adriatic have now become so clogged with NATO airplanes on combat missions over Serbia and "relief" flights to Albania and Macedonia that it has caused what Bacon termed a "sequencing" problem. Because of the number of these flights out of military bases in Italy, the government in Rome has shut down all its civilian airports on its eastern sea coast.
Kosovars to be held at Guantánamo
As part of the so-called humanitarian mission, NATO
officials announced a plan to ship more than 100,000 displaced
Albanians from the Kosova border area to refugee camps in other
European countries and elsewhere. Washington plans to take
20,000 of them to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
In 1994, Washington held tens of thousands of Cubans and
Haitians seeking to reach U.S. shores in concentration camps at
the Guantánamo base.
The Times cited anonymous U.S. officials who acknowledged that the base was "selected to eliminate the possibility that some of the refugees might be able to claim political asylum in the United States."
Clinton administration officials have insisted that the removal of Kosovar Albanians to scattered refugee camps is only temporary and that NATO's goal is to force the Belgrade regime to allow their return. As British prime minister Anthony Blair aggressively declared April 5, "We will drive them back to Kosova."
In contrast, Cuba's foreign ministry stated April 8 that Havana "will not put up any obstacles, and is even willing to help" any humanitarian effort for Balkans refugees. "The innocent victims, whatever their nationality, ethnicity or religion, should receive maximum aid, both within and outside of Yugoslavia." The statement also condemned the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
NATO officials rejected Milosevic's April 6 announcement of a unilateral cease-fire during the Orthodox Easter. Instead they insisted on Belgrade accepting four conditions for ending the imperialist bombing campaign. These are the withdrawal of Belgrade's troops from Kosova, the return of the refugees, the introduction of an imperialist-led occupation force under the cover of protecting the returning Kosovars, and "self- government" for Kosova.
At the same time, Washington and other imperialist powers have dropped their earlier demand that as one condition for stopping the bombing Milosevic must sign the U.S.-sponsored accords on "autonomy" for Kosova that they presented in March during negotiations at Rambouillet Castle in France. Instead, now that Belgrade has succeeded in driving tens of thousands of people out of Kosova, NATO officials said, they would send in "peacekeeping" troops under the cover of escorting the returning Kosovars before a final settlement was negotiated.
The Clinton administration has also encouraged Moscow to press its ally in Belgrade to accept U.S. demands and begin negotiations, hoping the Russian government will choose this outcome over a sharper confrontation with Washington. In a small concession to Moscow, U.S. officials described the proposed occupation troops as an "international security force" rather than a NATO force, even though it would be commanded by NATO.
Russian officials have vociferously opposed the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Moscow sent a reconnaissance frigate to the Adriatic to monitor NATO's operations, though it said it will not provide information to the Yugoslav army. At the same time Russian officials expressed a willingness to attend a meeting of the so-called Contact Group - Washington, London, Bonn, Paris, Rome, and Moscow - which will meet April 7 on the Balkans crisis, dropping an earlier condition that NATO stop the bombing before they attend.
Meanwhile, the government in the Czech Republic, which joined NATO barely two weeks before the bombing of Yugoslavia began, is riven by differences over the imperialist assault. While the government has offered hesitant support to the NATO attack, the bombing has been strongly denounced in the Czech parliament, especially by Vaclav Klaus, the former prime minister.
Greens, pacifists back NATO assault
As the imperialist powers from Washington to Bonn deepen
their intervention in the Balkans, pacifists and other middle-
class radicals have collapsed right into their respective
governments' war propaganda campaign. A notable example is the
Green Party in Germany, which is part of the coalition
government with the Social Democrats. Besides foreign minister
Joschka Fischer, an outspoken backer of the NATO assault,
pacifist Green leaders such as Antje Radcke have criticized the
bombing while insisting that the Green party will remain part
of the government in order to "influence" it.
In France, Green Party leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit called for ground forces to bring a halt to the "organized deportation" of Kosovars. British Labour Party figure Roy Hattersley wrote in the April 5 Guardian, "My own doubts about the bombing...have been completely removed by seven days of pictures. A NATO victory is the only real hope."