NATO hands off Serbia! Serbia out of Kosova!
The Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance condemn the United States-led NATO military aggression against Serbia, as well as the political support given to this aggression by John Howard's Coalition government and the Australian Labor Party.
NATO's air strikes against targets in Serbia and Montenegro (the rump Yugoslavia) have done nothing to help end the Serbian regime's persecution of the Kosovar people — the ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of the population of the Serbian province of Kosovo. To the contrary, they have enabled the Serbian authorities to turn this persecution into a wholesale campaign of anti-Kosovar terror and "ethnic cleansing".
The Kosovo conflict, as with the previous conflicts between Serbia and Croatia and Bosnia, has provided the US government with a means to reassert Washington's role as the dominant military power in Europe.
Contrary to the mystifications spread by academic commentators and western journalists about the "globalisation" of the "free market" causing a decline in the power of nation-states, the US rulers know that such power — above all the coercive power of a sovereign state's armed forces — is a crucial factor in determining who will be the winners and losers in the "global marketplace".
Since their defeat by the Vietnamese national liberation fighters and the international antiwar movement in the early 1970s, the US rulers have been relatively hamstrung in their political ability to use their massive military power in prolonged ground wars. The persistently strong political opposition of the US working class to involvement in any prolonged foreign ground war has forced the US rulers to limit military operations to air attacks, or guaranteed short-lived ground wars against weak adversaries, as in the 1991 Gulf War.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the US rulers have faced an addition problem <197> how to find an ideological justification for the maintenance and use of their enormous military apparatus. This apparatus is presented to the US public as intended to defend the United States from foreign military attack. In fact, it serves to protect the global operations of US corporations.
Since the end of the Cold War, the US rulers have sought to justify their military actions abroad by claiming that they are acting "on behalf" of the "international community" to enforce "international law", using the cover of United Nations' resolutions. But with each new military action, they have sought to win public acceptance of the "right" of the US government to act unilaterally, disregarding any of the conventions of "international law".
The air war that the US has waged against Iraq this year has been carried out with only the most flimsy "legal<170> cover by claiming the US and British war machines are attempting to force Saddam Hussein to comply with the UN's "disarmament" inspection regime.
Unilateral policing
The US-led NATO air war against Serbia, however, represents a qualitative escalation in Washington's drive to win public acceptance of its "right" to unilaterally "police" the world. While claiming to be acting "on behalf of the international community", the US and its NATO allies have undertaken their war against Serbia without any pretence to be enforcing UN resolutions against a threat to the national security of any sovereign state or enforcing compliance with any agreed "peace" pact.
Instead, the NATO powers claim that this war is necessary to prevent the Serbian national chauvinists from carrying out a genocidal slaughter of the Kosovars.
The NATO aggression, however, has given the Serbian chauvinists, headed by Slobodan Milosevic, a pretext for carrying out a wave of terror against the Kosovars, aimed at forcing as many of them as possible to flee Kosovo into neighbouring Albania and Macedonia.
Even before NATO began its bombing campaign against targets in Serbia, its supreme commander, US General Wesley Cark, publicly acknowledged that NATO air strikes would not protect Kosovar civilians from attacks by Serb paramilitaries. This admission demonstrates that NATO's undeclared war against Serbia is not motivated, as NATO leaders have claimed, by "humanitarian" concern to protect the Kosovar people from Serbian "ethnic cleansing".
The NATO powers have never been defenders of the democratic rights of the Kosovar people, or of any other oppressed nation. Part of their justification of their eight-year-long war against Iraq, for example, has been the claim that they have sought to defend the oppressed Kurdish people of northern Iraq from repression at the hands of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Yet throughout this whole period, NATO leaders have done nothing to prevent Turkey (a NATO member) from carrying out a terror campaign against Kurds in southern Turkey and repeated military assaults against the Kurdish population in northern Iraq.
Ever since Milosevic's regime began its attack on the national rights of the Kosovars in 1989 (with the suspension of Kosovo's provincial parliament), the NATO powers have consistently opposed any Kosovar resistance to Serbian domination. The western powers turned a blind eye to the Milosevic regime's brutal suppression of peaceful Kosovar protests in 1989. They only began to voice opposition to Milosevic's policies in Kosovo when the Kosovars took up armed resistance to Serbian persecution in 1996.
As the armed conflict in Kosovo has developed, the western powers' overriding aim has been to prevent the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA) from defeating the Serbian armed forces and liberating Kosovo from Serbian rule.
The "peace" agreement that NATO sought to impose on the Kosovars and the Serbs in Paris last month had as its major objective the introduction into Kosovo of 28,000 NATO troops. The chief purpose of this proposed occupation force was to disarm the KLA and thus to make the Kosovars completely dependent upon, and under the military and political control of, the US-led NATO alliance.
Securing western control
NATO was formed to protect the investments of the super-rich families that own the corporations and banks of the US and western Europe. NATO's military actions in the Balkans, just like the US war against Iraq, are aimed at providing a secure political environment — through imposing and maintaining governments that are "investor-friendly" — for western-controlled global finance capital.
The KLA has been fighting a just war for the Kosovars' national liberation from the Serbian regime's decade-long attempt to suppress their democratic right to control their own affairs.
If the NATO powers were really motivated by the aim of defending the Kosovars from Serbian repression, they would have enabled the KLA to acquire the material resources it needed to defeat the Serbian armed forces in Kosovo. Instead, the NATO powers have consistently opposed the KLA's resistance struggle and the Kosovar people's right to national self-determination, which includes their right to a sovereign state independent of Serbia.
The Paris "peace" agreement, however, explicitly ruled out any immediate exercise of this democratic right by the Kosovar people, and demanded that they accept autonomy within Serbia.
US President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the other leaders of the NATO powers cannot have been so stupid as to not realise that the ultra-nationalist Milosevic regime would reject their ultimatum to accept a NATO military occupation of Kosovo, even if it involved an attempt to disarm the KLA.
Nor could they be so short-sighted as to not anticipate that a NATO air war against Serbia would provide the Milosevic regime with the pretext and cover to escalate its war against the KLA into a campaign of wholesale terror of the Kosovar civilian population aimed at driving hundreds of thousands of Kosovars out of Kosovo.
To the contrary, the NATO leaders launched this air war in the full knowledge that it would lead to a massive campaign of Serbian "ethnic cleaning" against the Kosovars, and thus have the Milosevic regime achieve one of the NATO powers' key goals in "solving" the Kosovo crisis — the destruction of the KLA.
Nationalism
As the Bosnia conflict has already shown, the western powers have sought to ensure that the drive by the Milosevic regime to create a Greater Serbia out of the disintegration of the old multinational Yugoslav state results in the shattering of the cross-nationality class solidarity of the working people of the different ethnic groups that made up the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The western powers' goal has been to weaken any collective resistance by the working class to the restoration of capitalism in the former Yugoslav socialist state. This has involved policies that assist the former "Communist<170> (and now openly pro-capitalist) officials who rule each of the component national republics of the former Yugoslav federation, replace socialist ideas and values, including working-class internationalism, with capitalist ideas and values, most particularly, nationalism.
At the same time, the NATO leaders' aim has been to ensure that the capitalist states that have emerged out of the disintegration of Yugoslavia are economically and militarily dependent upon the western powers, and therefore politically subservient to western corporate interests.
Where such dependence has not been able to be achieved through the "peaceful" acquiesce of the leaders of these states (as in the case of Slovenia), it has been achieved through pitting the different ethnic groups that make up these states against each other in brutal "ethnic cleansing" campaigns, accompanied by NATO air attacks against the remnants of the former Yugoslavia's military-industrial complex.
Clinton, Blair and the other NATO leaders could not have been unaware that air strikes against Serbia/Yugoslavia would provide the Milosevic regime with a perfect political vehicle to whip up the most backward and reactionary nationalist sentiments among Serbs, including hatred of the entire Kosovar people. These leaders are thus fully complicit in the present Serbian genocidal "ethnic cleansing" campaign against the Kosovars.
Indeed, NATO's air war can only facilitate the creation of conditions for a Bosnia-style "solution" to eventually be imposed by the western powers and the Milosevic regime upon the Kosovar people. This would see Kosovo partitioned between a Kosovar regime <197> wholly subjugated to the western powers and occupied by NATO "peacekeepers" — ruling a nominally independent southern Kosovo, and a Kosovar-"cleansed", northern Kosovo territory controlled from Belgrade.
The NATO aggression against Serbia will not, and nor is it intended to, produce a just solution to the Kosovo conflict. It aims to advance the predatory interests of the western powers. This is why the DSP and Resistance unequivocally condemn NATO's air strikes against Serbia and call for their immediate cessation.
There can be no just solution to the Kosovo conflict without the establishment of the fullest and most consistent democracy in the relations between the national communities inhabiting Kosovo. In the first place, this means ending the Serbian campaign of terror, repression and "ethnic cleansing" against the Kosovar people and recognition of their right to independence from Serbia.
Short of a mass movement in Serbia itself forcing the Milosevic regime to end this campaign and to withdrew all armed forces from Kosovo (a development which the NATO aggression has made extremely improbable), the only viable force on the ground that could do this is a decisively strengthened KLA.
The KLA should be provided with all the resources, without any political strings attached, needed to defeat the Serbian armed forces in Kosovo.
[This statement was adopted by the March 29 meeting of the Democratic Socialist Party national executive and the April 3-5 meeting of the Resistance national council.]