The Wrong Weapons To Defeat Imperialism

Comment By Allen Myers

     The U.S./NATO military assault on Serbia represents a
significant escalation of the attempt by the U.S. and its allies
to establish their role as "cops of the world". The war is
intended, not only to strengthen the imperialists' control over
the Balkans, but also to establish their "right" to intervene
with military force wherever and whenever they choose, to impose
an "order" that guarantees no disruption of the flow of profits.
     The attempt to cloak the U.S./NATO aggression in supposed
concern for Kosovar refugees is the purest hypocrisy. Imperialism
cares nothing at all about the welfare of the Kosovar, or any
other, people; its only concern is what will maintain and
increase its profits.
     However, it would be foolish to deny that this cynical
propaganda campaign has had considerable effect on public
opinion; it seems even to have fooled some on the left who,
"reluctantly" or otherwise, have endorsed the bombing.
     The effectiveness of the propaganda is largely due to the
fact that it is partly based upon fact. The Kosovar people are
nationally oppressed within the Serbian state. The Serbian
government of Slobodan Milosevic is using the opportunity
provided by war to "ethnically cleanse" parts of Kosova with an
eye to gaining the best deal in a future partition.
     The sight of tens of thousands of Kosovar refugees
terrorised into fleeing, often with little more than the clothes
on their backs, also revives memories of the Milosevic
government's role in Bosnia, where it deliberately inflamed Serb
nationalism and aggression in an effort to create a Greater
Serbia out of the break-up of Yugoslavia. It is easy for
imperialism to demonise Milosevic for the same reason it was easy
to demonise Saddam Hussein. (In both cases, previous imperialist
backing for the "demon" was only a minor embarrassment.)
     Opposition to the U.S./NATO aggression, if it is to be
effective, needs to take account of these realities. It is
particularly important that imperialism not be able to portray
opposition to its schemes as indifference or even hostility to
the needs and well-being of the Kosovar people. Respect for the
national rights of the Kosovars is both a demand of simple
justice and an indispensable condition for building public
opposition to the war.
     Unfortunately, some on the left have taken a different
approach. The Communist Party of Australia, and its newspaper
Guardian, are trying to campaign against the imperialist war in a
way that evades or denies the crimes of the Milosevic regime.
Worse, they justify Serbian national chauvinism and its hostility
towards the Albanian-speaking majority of Kosova.

One-Sided History

     The April 7 Guardian carried a two-page feature entitled
"The criminal dismemberment of Yugoslavia". The unsigned article,
which made extensive use of a paper by Canadian academic Michel
Chossudovsky, purports to provide the "background to the NATO
aggression". In fact, it presents a one-sided account that
sanitises the role of Milosevic and the Serbian Communist
bureaucracy in Yugoslavia's dismemberment.
     Chossudovsky's paper, and the Guardian's quotation from it,
give an overview of Western interference in Yugoslavia. This
interference, as elsewhere in eastern Europe, was intended to
overthrow the Yugoslav socialist state and bring about a
restoration of capitalism. It succeeded. But it didn't do it all
by itself.
     Chossudovsky documents the role of international financial
agencies like the International Monetary Fund, which imposed
austerity plans that savaged the Yugoslav economy and the living
standards of workers. As in Russia, workers sometimes went for
months without wages while their enterprises were converted into
private property.
     But what is missing from the Guardian's account is any
indication of the role of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and
its constituent republics.
     It is not only a matter of how Yugoslavia became deeply
indebted in the first place, thus giving the IMF the leverage to
impose its "solutions". (Again as in most of eastern Europe, as
bureaucratic mismanagement caused economic growth to slow, the
bureaucrats borrowed partly to maintain consumption and partly in
the hope that the borrowings could be invested in industries that
would find markets in the West.)
     Large parts of the bureaucracy did more than mismanage. Many
of them actively collaborated in privatising the economy, for
their personal benefit:

"The restructuring programme demanded by Belgrade's creditors was
intended to abrogate the system of socially owned enterprises ...
The 1989 Enterprise Law required the transformation of [those
enterprises] into private capitalist enterprises with the
Workers' Council replaced by a so-called 'Social Board' under the
control of the enterprise's owners including its creditors. 'The
objective was to subject the Yugoslav economy to massive
privatisation and the dismantling of the public sector. Who was
to carry it out? The Communist Party bureaucracy, most notably
its military and intelligence sector, was canvassed specifically
and offered political and economic backing on the condition that
wholesale scuttling of social protections for Yugoslavia's
workforce was imposed ...'"

     The Guardian's writers ought to be familiar with this
information: the passage is taken from the same article by
Chossudovsky that they make use of. (Within the passage,
Chossudovsky quotes from Ralph Schoenman.)
     Here is another passage from the same article:

"Moreover, the leaders of the newly sovereign states have fully
collaborated with the creditors: 'All the current leaders of the
former Yugoslav republics were Communist Party functionaries and
each in turn vied to meet the demands of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, the better to qualify for investment
loans and substantial perks for the leadership ... State industry
and machinery were looted by functionaries. Equipment showed up
in "private companies" run by family members of the nomenklatura'
[quoting Schoenman]."

     Of course, the Guardian is not obligated to agree with
Chossudovsky's analysis. But it reveals bad faith to say nothing
about these comments, and thus to leave the impression that
Chossudovsky shares the Guardian's view of the Yugoslav
bureaucracy's innocence.

Nationalist Poison

     The Guardian also omits Chossudovsky's quotation from
Dimitrije Boarov on the bureaucracy's culpability in fostering
national hatreds:

"When [Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante] Markovic finally started his
'programmed privatisation', the republican oligarchies, who all
had visions of a 'national renaissance' of their own, instead of
choosing between a genuine Yugoslav market and hyperinflation,
opted for war which would disguise the real causes of the
economic catastrophe."

     In the Guardian's retelling of history, "ethnic tensions"
(the term it uses in place of the more accurate "national
conflicts") in former Yugoslavia are mostly the product of
Western "financing" of the Kosova Liberation Army. There is not
so much as a hint of any of the national grievances of the
Kosovars within Yugoslavia, going back to 1946.
     Instead, the Guardian provides abuse of the Kosovars. In its
April 14 issue, another unsigned article attempts to discredit
the KLA. It begins:

"The Albanians of Kosovo are not new arrivals on the
international scene. As long ago as 1985, the Wall Street Journal
was reporting on the activities of the 'Kosovo-Albania Drug
Mafia' in New York City..."

     Let us silently pass over the "Communist" Guardian's
touching faith in the reliability of the Wall Street Journal's
reporting. The Journal, as the Guardian writer quotes without
understanding, does not report on "Albanians of Kosovo", but
about people of Albanian Kosovar birth or ancestry in the United
States.
     Moreover, the KLA, according to most reports, has been in
existence for only about two years. It can therefore hardly be
responsible for anyone's drug-running in 1985. But this doesn't
stop the Guardian from continuing:

"Today, according to some estimates [whose?], 25-40 per cent of
all heroin in the U.S. is being supplied by the Kosovo Cartel.
Kosovo-Albanian dealers are in jails in Switzerland, Italy and
Germany as well as the U.S."

     Readers can search the rest of the article in vain for any
evidence connecting the "Kosovo Cartel" or jailed drug runners
with the KLA. The fact that "Kosovo-Albanians" are involved is
all that the Guardian writers consider necessary.
     Branding people in one place or time with the crimes of
people in another place or time, because they share a common
nationality, is racism and nothing more. Presumably this is not
what the Guardian intended, but that is where its search for any
mud to throw at the KLA has led it.
     On the facing page to this article is its mirror image. This
is written by Josef Haubelt, "Chairperson of the Czech
Humanists". It begins: "The Serbs, a generous people, are among
the bravest of the Slav nations. For centuries they fought
tirelessly against the Ottoman threat to European civilisation."
     Such words have no connection even with humanism, let alone
with Marxism. They are purely an appeal to nationalist, and even
religious, chauvinism. They are the weapons of imperialism, not
weapons to defeat it.

(Source: Green Left Weekly, Issue #357 April 21, 1999
<http://www.peg.apc.org/~greenleft/>)