http://www.peg.apc.org/~greenleft/
Trond Andresen
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Kosova genocide: made in USA
By Michael Karadjis
``Kosovo is to Serbs what Jerusalem and the West Bank are to Israelis -- a
sacred ancestral homeland now inhabited largely by Muslims ... the Kosovo
issue may have to be settled one day by some sort of partition.'' -- Warren
Zimmerman, US ambassador to Yugoslavia 1989-92.
The idea partitioning Kosovo has long been pushed by the father of modern
Serb nationalism and ``Yugoslav'' President Slobodan Milosevic's mentor,
Dobrica Cosic.
For ``Greater Serbia'', Kosovo is a problem: ideologically, it is central to
the Milosevic regime's nationalist mythology; but ethnically, its inhabitant
are 90% Albanian-speaking. As long as it remains within the Serbian state,
it will be a permanent source of instability.
However, if Serbia can expel at least half the Albanian-speaking population,
it can keep the more economically valuable north (where the famous
Trepca zinc mines are located) while accepting meaningless ``autonomy''
for an enormous refugee ghetto in the south.
The NATO bombing attacks have led directly to the historic national
catastrophe of Kosovo's Albanian-speaking people. Milosevic's Serb
chauvinist thugs had driven around 200,000 Kosovars from their homes in
the past year. Since the NATO attack began, the figures have risen to
500,000 within a week.
As thousands of Kosovars pour across the borders of Albania, Macedonia
and Montenegro, the complete emptying of a wide arc of Kosovo from the
south-west to the north-east is taking place. Villages are then burned and
passports and ID cards stolen, so that people can never return.
When the bombing stops, Milosevic will have completed the job. A new
partition, based on the new ``realities'', will be the result of a new ``peace
conference''.
Political assistance
Politically, Milosevic has emerged far stronger. Two years ago, Belgrade
was the scene of months of gigantic demonstrations against his regime; the
opposition won the municipal government. This has now evaporated or been
driven underground. The mass killer ``Arkan'' praised NATO's actions:
``You have united the entire opposition in Yugoslavia. You have managed
to achieve the impossible.'' The last independent medium, Radio B-92, has
been suppressed.
The Kosovar civil leaders, as well as their journalists, teachers and any
leaders the Serb chauvinist forces can get their hands on, are either being
held captive or killed.
In Belgrade, police raided the offices of the Humanitarian Law Centre, one
of the few non-regime sources of information on Kosovo. The president of
the opposition left-oriented Civic Alliance was press-ganged into the army.
``In one night, the NATO air strikes have wiped out 10 years of hard work
of <193> the democratic opposition'', according to Vojin Dimitrijevic,
director of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights.
The Montenegrin government, which opposes Milosevic and his Kosovo
policies, appealed to the West to be left out of any NATO air attacks. Yet
Montenegro has been particularly targeted, causing a sharp shift in public
sympathies towards Milosevic, according to Serbian opposition sources.
The ``Yugoslav'' army has openly declared its opposition to the
Montenegrin government. Its fall is now a question of time.
As NATO now bombs the Kosovan capital Pristina, including entirely
Kosovar-populated regions like Vrajevac and Dragodan, it seems NATO is
giving Milosevic's thugs a hand in driving out the population.
These facts are so obvious that virtually the whole capitalist media, as well
as many ruling-class political spokespeople, have pointed them out, but
from the point of view that NATO has ``blundered''.
Clinton and company, however, are not as dumb as they look. They knew
full well that bombing Serbia would provoke the very national chauvinism
that Milosevic's regime is built on. While Serbia was tied down with its
``Vietnam'' in Kosovo, trying to fight the armed resistance of the Kosovo
Liberation Army, Serbian society was becoming increasingly restive.
Sooner or later, the Serbian regime would have had to face the
consequences of its armed forces being bogged down, especially if the KLA
had been able to get better arms supplies.
The NATO attack has now turned this around, as Serbs rally to defend their
country -- and, by extension, occupied Kosovo -- against a larger foreign
aggressor, and respond with a dramatic escalation of the anti-Kosovar
genocide, while the KLA does not have the arms to mount an effective
resistance.
Long reliance
Despite fierce rhetoric on both sides, the West has long relied on Milosevic
as the centrepiece of its strategy in the region. Before his rise to power, he
had extensive business links to the US ruling class, particularly the likes of
Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Snowcroft, two key leaders of the Bush
administration.
The old Yugoslav army had extensive contracts with the US military. Before
war broke out in 1991, General Dynamics, for example, was negotiating a
multibillion-dollar contract with the Yugoslav army to co-produce the Super
Galeb jet fighter.
When Milosevic seized power in the Serbian republic in 1987, he launched
the ``Milosevic Commission'' into economic reform, which, through a
number of measures in 1988, completely abolished the socialist planning
system in Yugoslavia. He also pushed for the recentralisation of the
Yugoslav federation, a position also strongly pushed by the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which were frustrated by the barriers
of the republican boundaries to a Yugoslav-wide market ``reform'' and to
the ability of the central government to suck out money to pay the U$20
billion foreign debt the ``Communist'' bureaucracy had amassed.
This required the scrapping of Yugoslavia's federal constitution, which was
based on the official equality of its six constituent republics and two
provinces.
Although only autonomous within the republic of Serbia, Kosovo was
equally represented with all six Yugoslav republics at the federal level, and
had its own Territorial Defence Force <197> partisan-style popular militias
which each republican government controlled.
In practice, however, formal equality between the nations of Yugoslavia
masked an increasing domination by Serbs in the bureaucracy of privileged
officials. Serbs, with 40% of Yugoslavia's population, made up 73% of the
federal bureaucracy and 70% of the military officialdom. By contrast,
Albanian-speaking Kosovars, with 8% of the population, made up only 1%
of army officers.
Economically, while Serbia's and Croatia's GNPs as a percentage of the
Yugoslav total were roughly proportional to their share of Yugoslavia's
population, Kosova's GNP percentage was only one quarter of its share of
the population. As they began to transform themselves into capitalist
classes in the late 1980s, the republican bureaucracies turned to overt
nationalism as their new ideology. Nationalism aimed to smash the class
solidarity of Yugoslav workers.
Across Yugoslavia in 1987, the multi-ethnic working class launched 1700
strikes against the IMF austerity programs. But by late 1988, Milosevic had
managed to turn sections of the Serb working class against their fellow
workers by mobilising them on the basis of national chauvinism against all
the ``enemies of the Serb nation'', who were supposedly responsible for
their economic woes.
The Serbian anti-Communist intelligentsia released its famous
``Memorandum'' claiming that Tito's Communists, by dividing Yugoslavia
into equal federal units, had set out to ``destroy the Serb nation''. The
``Chetniks'', who had fought against the partisans in World War II, were
revived and became the chief allies and shock troops of the Milosevic
movement.
For a time, this Serb nationalism coincided with the IMF push for
centralisation, because Serb forces dominated federal institutions. Control
of the army also allowed the Serbs to illegally disarm the territorial defence
forces of the republics, with the strong support of Western governments.
Autonomy abolished
In 1989, the federal constitution was ripped up when the Milosevic regime
overthrew the governments of Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro,
abolishing the autonomy of the first two. Since that time, it has instituted a
policy of apartheid in Kosovo and brutally suppressed all attempts at
peaceful Kosovar opposition.
Faced with this, the underground Kosovo provincial assembly exercised its
right to self-determination under the constitution of the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia and declared Kosovo independent of Serbia in 1990.
A subsequent referendum found virtually the entire Kosovar population in
favour of independence.
Abolition of autonomy was in line with the IMF demands to lessen
republican boundaries and with the ``Memorandum'' policy of constructing
a ``Greater Serbia''.
Three years after Milosevic's rampage began, the inevitable reaction
occurred <197> in Croatia, the Croat nationalist Franjo Tudjman was
elected president. The Croatian and Slovenian regimes called for
Yugoslavia to become a loose confederation <197> the opposite of IMF
policy.
When Tudjman went to the White House to argue for confederation in
1990, he was told ``coldly'' by Snowcroft and Henry Kissinger that the US
supported the unity of Yugoslavia ``at all cost''.
The Yugoslav army began arming Chetnik forces in Croatia and Bosnia,
which took military control of ethnically mixed regions, expelling the
non-Serb populations. In March 1991, one such Chetnik-controlled zone in
Croatia declared ``independence''. This led to the declaration of
independence by Croatia and Slovenia in June 1991.
Just as the Yugoslav army prepared to attack Croatia and Slovenia, US
Secretary of State James Baker went to Belgrade to declare US support for
Yugoslav unity and denounce the secession of the two republics.
While the Yugoslav army stepped up its attack on Croatia, with the
destruction of entire cities like historic Vukovar and the expulsion of
700,000 Croats from Chetnik-controlled areas, the US, Britain and France
pushed an arms embargo on Yugoslavia through the UN. Since the
Yugoslav army was massively armed, the effect of the embargo was to
further disarm the Croatian defenders. Nevertheless, by the end of the
year, having managed to seize some heavy weaponry by besieging Yugoslav
army barracks, Croatia was turning back the Serbian offensive.
As Croatian forces advanced, the West stepped in. Former US secretary of
state Cyrus Vance, now acting for the UN, hammered out a cease-fire. UN
forces entered the Chetnik-controlled parts of Croatia, hence freezing the
confrontation lines and leaving the Chetniks in control of one third of
Croatia.
Bosnia
Vance allowed the Yugoslav army, by now a Serb rump, to take all the
heavy weaponry, which had belonged to all Yugoslavs, as it withdrew into
Bosnia, its next target.
The US rulers knew the Serbian/Yugoslav army was already digging
trenches around Sarajevo and other Bosnian cities; the world knew that
Milosevic and Tudjman had met to plan the partition of Bosnia between
them.
In the Bosnian parliament, Chetnik leader Radovan Karadzic had declared
that unless Bosnia remained within Milosevic's ``Yugoslavia'', the Bosnian
Muslims would ``disappear from the face of the earth''. Vance knew exactly
what he was doing.
Milosevic's aim had become a Greater Serbia over as much of the old
Yugoslavia as possible, even where Serbs were only a small minority.
The European Community finally recognised Croatia and Slovenia but held
off recognising Bosnia while Brussels drew up an ethnic partition plan, as
demanded by Milosevic and Tudjman. That this was impossible due to the
total intermingling of these three ethnic groups was of no concern to the
EC; on the contrary, the destruction of the class solidarity of the workers
embodied in Bosnia's multi-ethnic society and institutions was the aim of
the Western powers.
The EC-Serb partition plan was drawn up before the ethnic cleansing began,
and hence was not a matter of accepting ``reality on the ground'', but quite
the opposite.
The West and its financial institutions expressed discomfort with too many
``small states'' which would not be ``economically viable'', i.e., would be
unable to pay back their share of the Yugoslav debt, and would be sources
of instability.
Milosevic's Serbia and Tudjman's Croatia now would be the joint enforcers
of stability. The partition of Bosnia between them would bring a new
agreement between these two powerful states, their new ruling classes and
the ethnically ``homogenised'' nation-states they were building.
While Chetnik forces, backed by the Serbian army with all the heavy
weaponry given them by Vance, launched genocide against Bosnia's
Muslims, killing a quarter of a million people and driving one and a half
million from their homes, the major Western intervention consisted of
NATO enforcing the arms embargo against Bosnia in the Adriatic Sea while
British and French UN forces did the same at Bosnia's airports.
For three and a half years, this pattern continued, the West the whole time
demanding that Bosnia accept partition as demanded by the Serb and Croat
regimes.
Ultimately, in the Dayton Accords in late 1995, a ``Serb republic'', with its
own army, was set up in half of Bosnia from which the bulk of Croats and
Muslims had been expelled. Milosevic and Tudjman were the beneficiaries
of Dayton, essentially having their partition plan fulfilled.
KLA
Kosovo remained a problem for Serbia. As long as the situation was quiet,
however, the US and other Western governments paid no attention to the
horrendous oppression there.
Why did the Western powers change their attitude toward Milosevic's
policies in Kosovo in 1998? The only thing that had changed inside Kosovo
was the rise of the KLA as an independent armed force.
The US has remained implacably opposed to Kosovan independence, which
is seen as upsetting the new balance in the region and encouraging
struggles for national self-determination elsewhere. Washington, above all,
is opposed to an armed resistance outside its control and which, if
successful, could destabilise pro-Western governments in Albania and
Macedonia.
However, Milosevic's ethnic cleansing also threatens the same instability,
as waves of Kosovars are driven into these countries.
The ``autonomy'' plan put by the US was initially rejected by the KLA
because it falls far short of even the constitutional autonomy which was
abolished in 1989. At least in that autonomy, Kosovars had their own armed
forces; under the US plan, the most they are allowed is ``municipal police''.
For Milosevic, however, even this was too much, because bringing Kosovars
back into the body politic of Serbia meant their votes would have
threatened his rule.
By attaching the condition that a NATO occupation force be sent in to
enforce the deal, the US guaranteed Milosevic's rejection. This has allowed
the US to use NATO for its first ever ``out of area'' action, without any UN
cover <197> a long-term goal of US post-Cold War foreign policy.
It has also allowed Milosevic to commit genocide in Kosovo so as to pave
the way for a Bosnia-style partition.
To achieve this, the US had to blackmail a section of the KLA to surrender
its historic demand for independence and place its faith in NATO to defend
Kosovars from genocide.
Adem Demaqi, who led the KLA politically until its leaders signed the
Rambouillet agreement, denounced this attempt to ``convince Albanians to
accept capitulation, by launching illusions and empty promises''.
The world capitalist media denounced Demaqi as a hardliner, yet in fact
Demaqi had long proposed that an independent Kosovo could, on the basis
of self-determination, join with Serbia and Montenegro in a new, equal
federation. These ideas gained wide support from Serbian opposition
elements in a wide-ranging ``Serbian-Albanian'' dialogue held in 1997
under the auspices of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia.
Such ideas were of no interest to the US or Milosevic. Demaqi resigned
from the KLA leadership as it accepted the US plan. The illusions he spoke
of have led to a national catastrophe for the Kosovars.