The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.24           June 22, 1998 
 
 
U.S., NATO Hands Off Kosova!  
Unionists and other working people should oppose the current U.S.-led steps toward NATO military intervention in Kosova and neighboring Albania. They need to explain to fellow workers why these war moves are not in the interests of our class - in the Balkans or anywhere else. The courageous fight by Albanians in Kosova for national self- determination and independence deserves the unconditional support of working people around the world. But the last thing Washington, London, and other imperialist powers want to do - despite their "humanitarian" hypocrisy - is help the Albanian people gain control of their lives. Instead, they seek to forcibly reestablish the system of capitalist exploitation and dog-eat-dog values that working people revolted against and overthrew half a century ago in Yugoslavia and Albania.

U.S. and other imperialist troops are already occupying territory in Bosnia and Macedonia. This reality, and the current moves to invade and occupy Kosova and northern Albania, point to the future in all the workers states in Central and Eastern Europe: a head-on confrontation between imperialist armed forces and workers and farmers throughout the region.

The overturning of capitalist social relations in these workers states was a huge blow to capitalism worldwide. For several decades after World War II, unable to launch a direct war, the imperialist powers, led by Washington, waged a "cold war" against the workers states, pressuring the ruling bureaucratic castes to police working people. But imperialism suffered a historic defeat when these privileged castes - and the Stalinist parties that represented them - shattered in 1989-91. Millions of workers and farmers who had been frozen out of politics by the Stalinist rulers began to burst onto the political arena to press for their interests. The latest example is the fight by the Albanian people in Kosova to win their independence -a road toward working people gaining confidence in their capacity to rule and uniting with fellow toilers across national boundaries.

What impels the imperialist powers to intervene in the Balkans is the crisis of their world market system, as well as the recognition that they cannot bring back capitalism in the workers states by peaceful means. It is the same crisis that in capitalist Europe is leading to record unemployment, the rise of rightist currents, and sharpening economic competition between capitalist ruling classes. Just as the wealthy rulers of the capitalist world seek to get out of this crisis by trying to roll back the historic social gains won by the labor movement, in workers states such as Yugoslavia and Albania they have no option but to intervene with naked military force and try to reimpose their rule. The same forces are fueling the U.S.-led drive to expand NATO into Eastern Europe and militarily encircle the Russian workers state.

The biggest obstacle to the goals of Washington and its fellow imperialist powers in this region is the resistance by workers and farmers to the regimes' "market reform" measures in country after country. To those who call for sanctions against Yugoslavia and for NATO military intervention to "save" the "helpless" people in Kosova -including by procapitalist figures inside Kosova - the answer is the actions by hundreds of thousands of working people themselves fighting for their rights.

No NATO intervention in Yugoslavia or Albania!

Lift the sanctions against Yugoslavia!  
 
 
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