“The region is now stable and peaceful, and the brutal killings are only a memory,” wrote former U.S. president William Clinton 10 years later. “Bosnia is one country,” he alleged in a commentary in the December 1 Wall Street Journal. Clinton, then the U.S. commander-in-chief, was the architect of that military operation, which followed 18 months of bombing by the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

“President Bill Clinton was right to invest in ‘nation-building’ after U.S. military action in Bosnia,” chimed in Dick Morris, a New York Post columnist and former Clinton administration advisor. His syndicated column appeared in the December 5 Australian, a Sydney-based daily, under the headline, “Democracy flowers in Europe’s killing fields.”

This is the claim that many politicians and pundits have made around the 10th anniversary of that imperialist assault: that Washington’s benevolent intervention brought peace and ended the fratricide in that part of the Balkans.

Nothing can be further from the truth.

The invasion of Bosnia, and the NATO air strikes and the Dayton “peace” accords that preceded it, were a continuation of the more than decade-long policy of Washington and its allies to dismember Yugoslavia. These events were followed three years later by the massive U.S. bombing of Serbia that targeted the working class in that republic, and the NATO occupation of Kosova, the autonomous region of southern Yugoslavia inhabited largely by Albanians.

The U.S. rulers’ aim was not to stop “ethnic cleansing” and establish “democracy.” It was to strengthen U.S. supremacy in Europe, overthrow the workers state established in Yugoslavia through a workers and peasants revolution in 1945, and reimpose capitalism in that country.

On the blood and bones of the people of Yugoslavia, the U.S. rulers did reinforce Washington’s position as the number one power in Europe. But the other goal of the imperialist intervention—doing away with nationalized property and reestablishing the “free market” system—remains an unresolved contradiction.

If stability and what Washington describes as democracy had been achieved, there would be no need for the indefinite deployment of imperialist troops. On Nov. 21, 2005, however, the United Nations Security Council extended for yet another year the mandate of the European Union Force in Bosnia. Those 6,500 troops, which are now commanded by an Italian general and include 200 U.S. soldiers, took over military control of that republic from NATO a year ago.

Today Bosnia is nominally governed by a three-person, rotating presidency. But it is the UN “High Representative,” bestowed with dictatorial powers that include firing elected officials he disagrees with, who calls the shots. “An imperial governorship” is how the Economist magazine recently referred to his rule, exercised until last month by Lord Jeremy Ashdown, former leader of the British Liberal Democrats.  
 
NATO fosters national divisions
Bosnia is now fractured along national lines, a status codified in the Dayton accords 10 years ago. The republic is comprised of a Bosniak-Croat Federation—further subdivided into 10 cantons largely segregated by nationality—and the so-called Serb Republic.

“Schools are strictly divided on ethnic lines,” said the November 26 Economist, describing Mostar, where Croats, Bosnians (mostly Muslims), and Serbs live. “All but one municipality have populations which are 90% from the same religious or ethnic group,” the Guardian reported November 29.

To the southeast of Bosnia, in Kosova, imperialist forces have played a similar role. More than 17,000 NATO soldiers—including 1,800 U.S. troops—are deployed there, and now plan to stay well beyond the original 2006 departure date.

NATO forces have occupied Kosova—formally an autonomous region of Serbia—since 1999, following the brutal “ethnic cleansing” campaign against Albanians in Kosova by the Stalinist government of Slobodan Milosevic. Working people in Serbia toppled that hated regime in a popular rebellion in 2000.

Washington and other imperialist powers sent troops into Kosova under the banner of protecting the national rights of Albanians, who are demanding independence from Serbia. In the last six years, however, the NATO forces have both blocked self-rule and fomented animosity between Albanians and the Serb minority, most of which lives in isolated enclaves. Last year, for example, there were “ethnic cleansing”-type attacks in which more than 30 Serbs were killed and 3,600 driven out of Kosova, while NATO “peacekeepers” stood by.

In May 2005, NATO soldiers from Norway deployed in Kosova produced a spoof music video clip, set to the Beach Boys tune “Kokomo,” that shows Norwegian troops dancing in combat gear in fields and military bases there and singing: “Down in Kosovo, we’ll kick some ass and then we’ll see how it goes, and then we really don’t know. Good luck to Kosovo…. It’s Europe and NATO, why the hell do we go?” These and other insulting lyrics, including jabs at “Serbian bad guys,” caused indignation in the region and a diplomatic spat between the governments of Serbia and Norway, reported Al Jazeera.

Macedonia is one former republic of Yugoslavia where working people did made progress in the struggle for self-determination by the Albanian minority there. Their language was officially recognized and majority-Albanian areas won limited autonomy last year. This was accomplished, however, in spite of the NATO troops, which initially aided Macedonia’s armed forces in an onslaught against Albanian rebels. It was the result of recent struggles by Albanians in Macedonia for their national rights. Their fight built on gains of the 1945 Yugoslav revolution that remain, however weakened, despite imperialist intervention and the murderous wars launched in the early 1990s by rival gangs of the Stalinist bureaucracy that ruled Yugoslavia.  
 
Difficult to create ‘market economy’
“Bosnia has yet to implement a comprehensive privatization plan to desocialize its economy,” complained a 1998 report by the CATO Institute, a U.S. think tank that promotes “free market” policies. “Many Bosnian officials are resisting privatization in order to protect a highly bureaucratic system of jobs and privileges left over from communist days.”

A UPI dispatch in 2001 said that Bosnia’s “state enterprises are patronage machines, and its banks coerced into political and unwise lending.”

The situation hasn’t changed much since then. The environment in Bosnia is not yet “conducive to a private sector, market-led economy,” noted an August 2005 U.S. State Department report. “Implementation of privatization… has been slow,” says the CIA’s World Factbook in its current entry on Bosnia.

Working people, among others, have resisted attempts to reimpose capitalist social relations. According to a December 1 Reuters dispatch, workers had protested the sale of the Zenica iron ore mines in Banja Luka, Bosnia, to the Dutch-based Mittal Steel Company. Pro-Milosevic forces had reportedly used the facilities to torture Muslim and Croat prisoners in the 1990s. Mittal now owns a 92 percent stake in the company.

According to various press reports, a number of companies in Bosnia purchased by foreign investors, mainly German capitalists, have slashed wages. Some, such as the Alloy factory in Jajce, have installed in-plant cameras to monitor workers deemed unruly. In a number of instances bosses would not pay workers for months and then pay only part of the back wages.

In many cases workers have stuck it out in such jobs because the abysmal economic conditions leave few alternatives. For the last half decade, unemployment has often exceeded 40 percent, according to Bosnian government figures. The republic’s gross domestic product remains 60 percent of what it was when forces backed by Belgrade launched a war to carve out part of Bosnia for a “Greater Serbia.”

The slaughter in Yugoslavia, launched in 1991-92 by rival bureaucratic gangs that draped themselves in nationalist garb, was also from the outset a proxy war for the competing imperialist powers—a product of the intensifying conflict between Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington.

During World War II, workers and peasants of all national origins and beliefs in Yugoslavia defeated the German imperialist occupation and in the process launched a powerful social revolution. Working people took political power out of the hands of the landlords and capitalists. By the end of the 1940s they had carried out a radical land reform, expropriated the bourgeoisie’s factories, warehouses, and banks, and established a planned economy—a workers state. An account of how this revolution unfolded can be found in the Pathfinder book The Truth About Yugoslavia: Why Working People Should Oppose Intervention (see ad).

The wars of the 1990s were a product of the degeneration of that revolution under the Stalinist misleadership headed by Josip Broz Tito. That political degeneration made Yugoslavia more vulnerable to the workings of finance capital and the pressures of imperialism, which fanned the flames of war well before the 1990s.

How U.S. imperialism and its allies fueled the war in Yugoslavia will be the subject of an article in next week’s issue.  
 
 
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