Dissolve NATO!
Discove NATAI
This editorial was published in the May-June issue of Against the Currents magazine The carnage in Kosovo and the United States/NATO air campaign pose one of the greatest challenges in a generation to the left's principles, political courage and moral backbone. During most of our lifetimes, it's been unprecedented to confront such a situation of apparent total conflict between competing imperatives: between the need for immediate action to stop genocide, and the need to oppose and halt imperialist interventions..
The crime against humanity perpetrated in Kosovo would have been prevented, years in advance, by the defeat of the Milosevic regime and allied gangsters during their previous war, in Bosnia. What was required then, from 1991 on, was not NATO bombings or invasions, but simply allowing the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina to arm itself against the ethnic cleansing that aimed at destroying a small multicommunal state.
The West imposed an arms embargo in the name of "avoiding a wider war," which left the unarmed Bosnian civilian population subject to destruction by Milosevic's "Yugoslav National Army" and by Serb and Croat paramilitaries, finally forcing Bosnia into a military alliance with Croatia for physical survival... Throughout the 1990s the West facilitated Milosevic's butcheries and internal repression by treating him as the key to Balkan "stability." The Catastrophe in the Making
The flow of refugees from Kosovo, the reports of mass depopulations and burning of villages, and the all-too-credible reports of separation of male refugees for summary mass executions, all accelerated when the bombings began. But he Serbian regime's campaign for the destruction of the Kosovar Albanian population was already underway... The planning and implementation of this operation was enabled and precipitated not by the bombing of Yugoslavia, but by the West's policies of the previous decade of constant attempts at cynical deal-making with Milosevic...
The admirable anti-war struggles of the Yugoslav democratic opposition, at its height in the early 1990s, organized anti-war mobilizations of larger size, relative to the population of Serbia, than the biggest U.S. anti- war demonstrations of the Vietnam era. And this brave legacy of civic opposition to Milosevic is the first "collateral damage" of the bombing.
But no one could imagine that this opposition today, in its defeated and corrupted state (with some of its leadership now in the Milosevic cabinet), could mount any effective challenge to slaughter and depopulation in Kosovo.
Again, the main international factor that derailed the once-promising democratic challenge to Milosevic was not NATO bombing. It was, rather, the incessant western policy of copying up to Milosevic, legitimizing his regime, rewarding his adventures in Kosovo (abrogating its regional autonomy in 1989), the war with Croatia, then the ethnic-cleansing rape of Bosnia-Herzegovina, each one more murderous than the previous, culminating in the 1998-99 Kosovo catastrophe.
Throughout this decade, everything the West has done could only make this regime appear permanent and irremovable, even irreplaceable. That, in fact, was the real lesson of the Dayton accords, which consolidated the dismemberment of Bosnia (after its army had begun to win the war!), and the intent of the ramshackle agreement at Rambouillet, which specifically excluded the Kosovar Albanians' right of self-determination.
The facts of the immediate impact of NATO bombing on the fate of the Yugoslav democratic forces, and on the acceleration of killing and depopulation in Kosovo, are relevant but not ultimately decisive. After all, by all accounts the refugees fleeing Kosovo welcome the bombing and would prefer to see it intensified. As socialists and as revolutionary opponents of imperialism, we have to face the question uppermost in most ordinary people's minds: Shouldn't the world stop the genocide? The Politics of This War
Our response must begin by noting numerous genocides and crimes against humanity in which U.S. imperialism itself was the perpetrator or sponsor: Guatemala, Indonesia and East Timor, Guatemala. Indonesia and Fast Timor Indochina, the starvation of the people of Iraq today.
Nor should it be forgotten that the United States-organized sadistic torture of the Iragi population began with the stated goal of liberating Kuwait from the murderous occupation by Saddam Hussein. This case illustrates one fundamental reason for opposing the current war: Any gateway for imperialist "humanitarian intervention" opens onto the most horrific consequences, unanticipated and uncontrollable by wellmeanıng tolks who may have ınıtıally supported the intervention.
What flows from the United States and NATO giving temselves license to be the saviors and the garantors of stability? Our view is that even worse horrors are the likeliest result.
The current war is a confrontation between two malignant relics, former Cold War partners now become enemies: NATO, the U.S.-organized alliance organized 50 years ago to ensure Washington's hegemony in the anti-Communist Cold War crusade; and the rump Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milsevic, a Stalinist who turned to nationalism, and allied himself to the most vicious elements within Serbia, to advance his own opportunist ambitions.
NATO is not at war with Yugoslovia for humanitarian reasons to save Kosovars. Nor is this a war over some direct economic interest. NATO is at war to save itself and its political leadersbecause their threats and bluffs failed, and they must now follow through, regardless. As in Vietnam, "we have to destroy Kosovo in order to save it." An Inevitable Wider War • We oppose NATO's war in the former Yugoslavia first, because we are opponents of NATO itself-because by its very nature it is not and cannot be any-
International Viewpoint #312 June 1999 11
* USA thing other than a machine for imperialist dominion.
NATO was created in 1949, at a time when the economic hegemony of the United States was absolutely unchallenged, when it was the political decisionmaker for Europe, when its military muscle and nuclear umbrella made Washington the guarantor for the reconstruction of capitalism in Europe and the supervisor of the transformation of the old European colonial empires. The New NATO
Much has changed in half a century. The former foe, the Soviet Union, has vanished, and United States capitalism faces serious economic rivals. Still, through its unique ability to organize a large-scale military intervention, the United States seeks in this war with rump-Yugoslavia to reaffirm its power to call the shots.
The same desire to maintain U.S. hegemony lies behind Washington's aggressive sponsorship of NATO's newest members, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, at a time when a nearly-shattered post-Soviet Russia cannot be considered any military threat to them.
Ostensibly, U.S. "leadership" is an indispensable ingredient for preserving "stability." Instead, the expansion of Lawyers for p NATO leadel
Lawyers from several countries have laid a formal complaint with the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia against the individual leaders of all NATO countries and the Organisation itself.
The complaint alleges "open violation" of the United Nations
Charter, the NATO treaty itself, the
Geneva Conventions and the Principles of International Law Recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
The complaint points to the bombing of civilian targets and alleges that NATO leaders "have admitted publicly to having agreed upon and ordered these actions, being fully aware of their nature and effects" and that "there is ample evidence in the public statements of NATO leaders that these attacks on civilian targets are part of a deliberate attempt to terrorize the population to turn it against its leadership."
The complaint also cites a statement of United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights 12 International Viewpoint #312 June 1999
NATO humiliates Russia and strengthens right-wing nationalism there, while the bitter example of the Balkans shows U.S. "leadership" morally and politically bankrupt, unable even to foresee let alone prevent systematically-organized ethnic cleansings, dithering and dathering and blithering and blathering while civilian populations were left defenseless and consumed.
Secondly, this war, once having begun, almost inevitably must become nothing less than an all-out occupation and re-drawing of the map of the Balkans. In this process, the rights of self-determination of all the peoples involved, Kosovars included, will be brutally subordinated to the goals of conquest.
We recognize that the Kosovars themselves overwhelmingly support NATO intervention and undoubtedly want it to be expanded. Our fundamental quarrel is not with the victims who are understandably seeking help from any possible source, but rather with those supporters of this war who fail to face up to the consequences of where it is most likely to lead.
Unlike some apologists for the Belgrade regime, we don't subscribe to the notion that this war was all plotted in advance by U.S. imperialism as part of a plot to "break up" Yugoslavia. If anyeace 's accused Mary Robinson in which she says that "large numbers of civilians have incontestably been killed, civilian installations targeted on the grounds that they are or could be of military application and NATO remains sole judge of what is or is not acceptable to bomb... "
The group, lead by professors from Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto has the support of the pan-American American Association of Jurists.
Professor Michael Mandel, spokesman for the group of complainants, explains that "the bombing of civilians is not only immoral, it is criminal and punishable under the laws governing the Tribunal. You cannot kill a woman and child in Belgrade on the theoretical possibility that it might save a woman and child in Pristina. Even in a legal war you cannot kill civilians and destroy an entire country as a military strategy." * Contact: (Toronto) Professor Michael Mandel (Tel. +1 416-736-5039 e-mail <[email protected]>, (Geneva) Alejandro Teitelbaum, <[email protected]> thing, the United States was less eager than (for example) Germany to enin courage Croatian and Slovenian seces-
1n sion from Yugoslavia-and certainly, to
Washington showed little objection to
G
Milosevic's ambitions for a Greater
Serbia so long as it seemed attainable without too much "wider instability."
NATO's error
Far from expecting this war, it in appears that NATO and the United were th surprised by the failures of their diplomatic schemes and military bluff, and have
SE gone to war without the necessary
= military or political preparation.
Evidently, the State Department's
Balkan experts failed to recognize what was most obvious: If the Serb regime
T was determined to hold onto Kosovo, m against the wishes of its 90% Albanian population, it would have to kill or expel be half or more of the two million Kosovars.
01
Only the kind of "experts" whose
B professional assignment was to work out a deal with Milosevic could fail to see
W the pre-planned escalation from repression to depopulation in Kosovo.
Saving face
Having failed to secure Milosevic's agreement at Rambouillet or to deter him with the threat of air strikes, NATO
W suddenly found itself with a choice between two options, both potentially catasm trophic.
m
It could in essence abandon its stated
OD commitment to the Kosovars—a choice m that Clinton and his European social la democratic partners Blair, Jospin and m
Schroeder refused to contemplate, since it would constitute an incredible defeat
SU that would discredit their respective in governments and leave in doubt NATO's unity and possibly its very survival.
Or, NATO could begin the air war— but once the first strikes failed to produce a Serb surrender, as again could be predicted by anyone other than a military
W expert self-hypnotized by Cruise missile technology, there is no option but to
CC escalate toward an inexorable larger war-or admit defeat.
Day by day, as the scope of the
W horrors imposed on the Kosovars and the unmanageable extent of the refugee to emergency unfolded, the war imposed its own logic on the planners, more than the
N other way around. To save NATO-an even greater imperative than saving the
Kosovars, obviously—it is necessary now to fight the war and win it.
In the words of the 1980s Reaganaut
Lawrence Eagleburger, "We can't let this pipsqueak nation, Serbia, inflict a defeat on NATO."
If the refugees are to be returned, as
K
NATO has promised, the Yugoslav military must be absolutely defeated in
Kosovo and prevented from returning.
That objective requires the destruction of Serb military power and Serbia's capacity for rebuilding that power. Hence
not only must Serbia's existing military infrastructure be wiped out, but its industrial capacity must be bombed back to pre-World War II levels. Ground war
This means that a large-scale ground force must be sent into Kosovo, since air power alone cannot drive out the Serb forces, and to create a NATO protectorate in most of Kosovo (a part may be left for the Serb population in Kosovo to flee to). True, Clinton promises every day not to send ground troops, with the same credibility with which he vowed never having had sexual relations with that woman— but by the time the lie is revealed it will be "too late." British Prime Minister Tony Blair is already calling for a massive ground force.
At war's end, new boundaries must be forcibly imposed on Serbia. Whether or not to join "Republika Serpska" in Bosnia to Serbia; whether or not Montenegro secedes from rump-Yugoslavia; whether to coercively "adjust" the borders of Macedonia to satisfy Albanian ambitions on the one hand or Greek claims on the other-all these are decisions that will be taken by the occupying powers.
It hardly seems likely (though in the world of diplomacy, perhaps a role can be arranged for Russia to play intermediary) that these arrangements can be made with the Milosevic regime and his gangster partners. Hence, although a military occupation of the Serbian heartland is out of the question, the government of rump-Yugoslavia must probably be somehow removed, or else its people subjected to the protracted horrors now imposed on the people of Iraq for their unforgivable crime of being ruled by Saddam Hussein.
Such objectives entail war, and a postwar level of intervention, with casualties and expenses on a scale for which the population of the United States and other NATO powers have been completely unprepared. No wonder that neither Clinton nor any of his European partners have the political courage to do what democratic principle demands-to state openly where their course leads and to ask their Congress or Parliament to debate a declaration of war.
Anyone on the left who favors NATO's actions, regardless of the most honorable and sincerest of desires to stop genocide, must face up to these consequences. The result can only be a more virulent post-Cold War NATO, intervening at will (mainly, U.S. will) wherever its power can reach, ie. practically anywhere. Kosovo Yes-NATO No!
Given these realities, it is impossible for socialists to want NATO's operation to succeed. Supporting this war, now, can only mean supporting imperialism. In the real world, we cannot pick-and-choose
THE INHUMAN 1 TERRORIST SCUM IN 10 00014 TROUSERS! between ostensibly benevolent military interventions, carried out in the name of humanitarian rescue, and those conducted for naked military-political aggrandizement or profit-because inevitably, inexorably, the former becomes the pretext for the latter.
That is the case even in Kosovo, a war the United States and NATO didn't "provoke" but actually tried to avoid through a criminal policy of appeasement. Once having begun, this is inevitably a war for NATO to occupy and re-configure the map of the Balkans— even though the war itself, should it end in yet another "political settlement" with Milosevic or should it produce military debacles and serious casualties for the invaders, may prove to be NATO's own road to ruin.
For us, the ruin of NATO is the only possible good that can come from this horrific human holocaust. Our small contribution to NATO's defeat must be to do all we can to politically expose and discredit it inside our own country. We have no "constructive alternative" to propose for NATO except its dissolution.
Whatever happens next, the Kosovar and Serb peoples have lost. The Kosovars, if NATO accepts defeat and deals yet again with Milosevic, will be left a landless and homeless people-the Palestinians and the Kurds of the Balkans. If NATO ultimately overwhelms Serbia and establishes a military protectorate in Kosovo, the refugees may return, but their survival would then depend upon an indefinite occupation with all the consequences that entails for future generations.
For the Serbs, ten years of Milosevic's Greater Serbia campaign have produced a national catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs who lived for centuries inside Croatia, whose welfare was Milosevic's pretext for invading Croatia in 1991, were brutally expelled from their homes in the Krajina region when Croatia regained the territory. Serbs in "Republika Serpska" are ghettoized, Serbs in Kosovo will have no future in a NATO-occupied zone and Serbs in the heartland of Serbia have suffered economic ruin and the destruction of the hope for democracy. What Can We Do?
We support the Kosovar Albanians' right of self-determination. No-one with democratic values can deny the legitimacy of their struggle, which is a fight for physical and cultural survival as well as political rights. Even further, under circumstances of threatened annihilation or mass dispersal of the population, an independent Kosovo is the only real-life solution.
But the Kosovars' absolutely legitimate struggle is only one element in what has become a much larger and reactionary imperialist war. The United States always regarded the Kosovars as bargaining pawns, never supported Kosovo independence-and even welcomed the defeat of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998, when the Yugoslav military launched its first assaults.
Yet even aside from that, we do not support "liberating" Kosovo through NATO destruction of Serbia's cities and people.
In this tragic situation, we believe there are several "wars within the war" where socialists with consistent democratic loyalties can take sides and, in some cases, small practical steps.
Obviously, we cannot influence in any way the struggle between the Kosovo Albanians and the Yugoslav Army. But as a matter of principle we uphold the right of the Kosovars to struggle for their survival by any means available to them, whether through the pre-war movement of civic resistance or the struggle of the KLA.
The KLA itself is no left-wing force: It appears to be politically incoherent at
International Viewpoint #312 June 1999 13