Atrocities cannot be condoned whenever and wherever they occur. I am not
convinced that the Serbs are more culpable than the Albanians in the course
of this long bloody conflict that goes back to World War 2 and then
rekindles with the break up of Yugoslavia. I *am* convinced that NATO's
bombing will lead to ever greater horrors.

My friend Louis Proyect, moderator of the Marxism International list, wrote
the following today as a reply to the position of the organization
"Solidarity," a leftist group that supports the bombing. I have excerpted
parts of Louis's message.

Proyect's text:

One of the main problems of the anti-Milosevic, pro-Kosovar left is that it
fails to provide historical context for the Serb-Albanian conflict. It has
a curious time-line, where the starting date is the suspension of Kosovar
autonomy in 1989. Solidarity doesn't even bother to go that far back in
history and seems happy to base its analysis on the hysterical press
coverage of recent months:

"The government of what was Yugoslavia (now only Serbia and Montenegro,
essentially Serbia alone) is sponsoring massive ethnic cleansing in Kosovo,
and indeed is now waging a war against the Kosovo population which is
intended to kill or remove half the Albanian population, if not more."

What's more, they charge that the Serbs' decision to ethnically cleanse
Kosovo was planned in advance and that they were encouraged to do this by
imperialism itself:

"It is clearly true that the flow of refugees, 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. Yet it is important not to overweight this
argument:The Serbian regime's campaign for the destruction of the Kosovar
Albanian population was already underway."

Internal documents from Joschka Fischer's Foreign Office in Germany
contradict these claims. They were obtained by IALANA (International
Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms) and translated into English by
Eric Canepa,an activist with the Brecht Forum in New York City. One report,
dated 1/12/99, and addressed to the Administrative Court of Trier states:

"Even in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian
ethnicity is not verifiable. The East of Kosovo is still not involved in
armed conflict. Public life in cities like Pristina, Urosevac, Gnjilan,
etc. has, in the entire conflict period, continued on a relatively normal
basis.The actions of the security forces (were) not directed against the
Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically define dgroup, but against the military
opponent and its actual or alleged supporters." (These reports are online
at the Z Magazine website http://www.lbbs.org)

While these revelations are important, the more important question ...is
what led to such a brutal conflict in the first place. There is little
disagreement about the fact that a civil war was in progress, but what were
the social and political forces at work? What were the initial causes?

Part of the problem in dealing with historical context is that nationalists
on both sides have an understanding of history that is virtually useless
...Serbs would go back to the battle of Kosovo 700 years ago, while
Albanians justify themselves on the basis of historical events during the
Ottoman Empire...[It] is most useful to examine the interplay between Serb
and Kosovar nationalities during WWII, when Tito's forces were mounting
their challenge to Nazism and capitalism alike. During the fascist
occupation of Yugoslavia during WWII, Kosovo came under Albanian control,
which was itself part of Mussolini's dominion.While the Serbs suffered
greatly under Nazi rule, the Kosovars felt relatively emancipated as they
attached themselves to local fascist militia units.

The Albanian quisling ruler, Mustafa Kruje, visited Kosovo in June 1942 and
publicly advocated the need for an ethnically pure Albania that included
Kosovo. Between 70 to 100 thousand Serbs were forced out. Those who
remained were forced to assimilate in schools where the Albanian language
was used exclusively. During the 1960s and 70s, when Kosovar nationalism
began to re-emerge, it was obvious that the goal of the movement was to
turn back the clock to this state of affairs.

There were fitful attempts to win Kosovars to the Communist guerrilla
movement, during WWII but a top Communist organizer Svetozar
Vukmanovich-Tempo explained the difficulties in a November 1943 report:

"conditions for [starting] armed resistance in Kosovo and Metohija were
worse than in any other region of the country.... the Albanian population,
which made up two-thirds of the whole population, had an unfriendly
attitude toward the partisans... The occupiers have succeeded in winning
the Kosovo Albanians to their side by annexing Metohija and a part of
Kosovo to rump Albania; the local government is in the hands of the
Albanians, the Albanian language is obligatory... The Albanian population
is suspicious of all those who struggle for Yugoslavia, whether old or new;
in their eyes it is always less than what they have got from the
occupier..." (quoted in "The Saga of Kosovo", by Alex Dragnich and Slavko
Todorovich)...

When Tito's forces triumphed, they made many of the same mistakes in Kosovo
that the Sandinistas made in Nicaragua [with the Miskito Indians]. Since
the Sandinistas were staring down the barrel of the US military, they had
to correct their course much more rapidly than the Yugoslavs did. Arrogance
remained a problem until 1966 when Tito's number two official, Aleksandr
Rankovic, was removed from office. From that point on, federal money poured
into Kosovo at a higher rate than into any other part of the country.
Pristina University grew to become one of the country's largest with 48,000
students. Most of the region's administrators, and its police, were ethnic
Albanians. They were even allowed to fly the Albanian flag,a black eagle on
a red field. Yet this rapid economic development ironically fed unrest as
expectations rose which economic development could not satisfy. Frustration
deepened when the IMF and western banks tightened their vise in ensuing
years. There were riots in 1968 and again in 1975. Demonstrators demanded
the right to secede and even demanded annexation by Enver Hoxha's
Albania.Throughout the 1970s Kosovar nationalism showed no progressive
aspects as Black nationalism in the United States had shown in the same
period... [It] is not difficult to understand why a substantial portion of
the nationalist movement openly proclaimed fascist goals...

Chris Hedges reported in the March 28, 1999 NY Times that:

"The KLA splits down a bizarre ideological divide, with hints of fascism on
one side and whiffs of communism on the other. The former faction is led by
the sons and grandsons of rightist Albanian fighters -- either the heirs of
those who fought in the World War II fascist militias and the Skanderbeg
volunteer SS division raised by the Nazis, or the descendants of the
rightist Albanian rebels who rose up against the Serbs 80 years ago.

"Although never much of a fighting force, the Skanderbeg division took part
in the shameful roundup and deportation of the province's few hundred Jews
during the Holocaust.The division's remnants fought Tito's Partisans at the
end of the war, leaving thousands of ethnic Albanians dead.

"The decision by KLA commanders to dress their police in black fatigues and
order their fighters to salute with a clenched fist to the forehead led
many to worry about these fascist antecedents. Following such criticism,
the salute has been changed to the traditional open-palm salute common in
the U.S. Army."

Such reports have appeared both in the bourgeois and left-wing press, as
well as on the Internet, for some months now. In light of the wide
availability of this information, it is simply shocking to discover that
the Solidarity comrades merely consider the KLA to be"politically
incoherent," while demanding at the same time that it be armed...
Imperialism will always find a way to support such movements without
assistance from left-wingers, just as it did throughout the years of
low-intensity conflict in the 1980s.

This leads us now to the next question. Is it correct to take a
"third-camp" position between the US and Yugoslavia? Against the Current
would have us believe that it is of little consequence to the historical
struggle for socialism which side wins:

"This is a thoroughly reactionary war, in which the rulers of the United
States and Western Europe must systematically promote ever-bigger lies to
their own populations: lies to exaggerate the 'great military success' of
the bombings and to hide the destruction of civilian life; lies to disguise
the full extent of the escalation and occupation that must be prepared to
win this war; lies to rewrite history, to make people forget that
throughout the 1990s the West facilitated Milosevic's butcheries and
internal repression by treating him as the key to Balkan 'stability.'"

The notion that Nato and the west had a pro-Serb tilt in the 1990s is
absurd. In fact, "stability" is the last adjective in the world that can be
applied to Nato intervention in the Balkans, since the result has been
nothing but war over the past decade. Since...Solidarity would have
regarded Tito's government as just another repressive regime in no way
superior to contemporaneous capitalist regimes in Greece or Portugal, we
should not be too surprised by the invective heaped on the Milosevic's
government, which--for all its distortions--does represent a historical
continuity with the first successful socialist revolution since 1917.

In the "Third Camp" schema, there is a bit of a paradox.Since there are no
qualitative class differences between societies ruled by Stalinist
dictators and our own, the obvious conflict between the two camps must be
rooted in something else than rival economic systems. What that is exactly
I've never been able to figure out. For those of us who do believe that the
cold war was about exactly such a clash, and--more importantly--that the
Soviet-type states were an advance over what preceded them, it is important
to put the war with Yugoslavia into that context.

Buried under all the war hysteria and open propaganda about Milosevic's
evil nature, there were press reports in major dailies shortly after his
election that made the underlying class issues crystal-clear. The most
forthright was Carol J. Williams' in the December 12, 1990 Los Angeles
Times:

"The choice of Milosevic and what amounts to hard-line communism isolates
Serbia, the largest republic, from four other Yugoslav states that have
elected center-right governments and set about repairing the economic
damage inflicted by half a century of Marxism. The Socialists have remained
popular in Serbia despite an anti-Communist mood in Eastern Europe..."

The demonization of Milosevic in the western press has much more to do with
the perception that he is some kind of"wild card" in the transformation of
Eastern Europe into pliant, maquiladora zones... Of course, none of this
might register on leftists who will be satisfied by nothing short of true
socialism. These dreamers of the absolute envision a society like the kind
that Marx wrote about, where the operating principle will be "to each
according to their needs, from each according to their abilities."
Repression, bureaucracy and inequality will be unknown. For some reason,
however, all attempts at revolutions in the 20th century have fallen short
of Marx's prescriptions. A dialectical understanding of such revolutions,
which proceeds from the notion put forward by Marx in the 18th Brumaire
that "Men make their own history,but they do not make it just as they
please", can lead us to only one conclusion. Any time that capitalism is
overthrown, revolutionaries in other countries have a duty to defend such
revolutions. In the battered terrain of the collapsed socialist world,
there are very few sparks of resistance today. While it takes a supreme
dialectical understanding to defend Yugoslavia in 1999, it should not take
such a gift to understand that a victory against the United States and its
Nato allies will be an enormous blow to capitalist reaction...

If there are any doubts about this, they can be assuaged by looking at the
rapid transformations taking place among Chinese youth. A profound
anti-imperialist mood has taken hold, which is directly related to Nato's
stance in the Balkans, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy, as well as
recent economic contradictions between the Chinese state and western
imperialism. Left-wing forces in China and Russia, as well as
anti-bureaucratic formations in Yugoslavia, will be inspired by a victory
over Nato. To stand "above" the conflict between US imperialism and its
allies, and a country with a mixed economy defending its sovereignty, is a
throwback.

(I invite people who read this to circulate it to friends and comrades,
left-wing newsgroups and mailing-lists,especially the Solidarity mailing
list if it still exists.)

 Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)



  


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