Oppose NATO aggression against Serbia! Support independence for Kosova!

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.]

From GLW issue 355