Bosnia and the New World Order
Under the pretext of safeguarding the supply of humanitarian aid to the besieged people of Sarajevo, the US government is preparing to use military force to "resolve" the conflict in Bosnia.
The outcry by US political leaders against the brutality of the war being waged by the Belgrade regime and its Serbian "irregulars" in Bosnia, however, is not motivated by humanitarian concerns.
For decades the US rulers turned a blind eye to repression of the national rights of the Croats, Albanians, Bosnians and other non-Serbs by the Serbian-dominated "Communist" bureaucracy that ruled Yugoslavia.
As long as Belgrade remained neutral in the Cold War between US imperialism and the Soviet Union, Washington opposed the aspirations of the non-Serb nationalities in Yugoslavia. The US and its allies even collaborated with the Belgrade regime's campaign of slander and assassination of exiled Croatian independence activists.
Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-90, growing rivalry between the Western powers, in particular between the US and Germany, has played an important role in the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia.
Following the overwhelming vote by the peoples of Slovenia and Croatia for independence, Germany pushed to have the European Community recognise the two republics' independence declarations. The German rulers' objectives have been two-fold: to integrate Slovenia and Croatia into the world capitalist market under the control of German big business interests; to use the crisis in the Balkans to promote German dominance over the emerging Western European "super-state."
In order to counter these moves and reassert its authority within the Western alliance, Washington pressured the EC not to recognise Slovenian and Croatian independence, and to accept a UN-imposed embargo against arms shipments to "Yugoslavia". These actions played into the hands of the Serbian bureaucracy by denying Croatia, in particular, the weapons it desperately needed to resist the "Yugoslav" army's brutal drive to force Croatians out of large parts of eastern Croatia and to annex these territories to Serbia.
Only when this had been achieved did the "Yugoslav" generals and the Belgrade regime accede to the stationing of UN "peacekeeping" troops in Croatia, thus in effect giving international recognition to Serbian conquests.
Bosnia's declaration of independence earlier this year posed a major problem for both the Serbian bureaucracy and its army: the key the former Yugoslav state are located in Bosnia. In order to maintain its control over these industries, the Serbian regime launched a brutal war to conquer major parts of Bosnia and to "ethnically cleanse" these areas of non-Serbs, as it had earlier done in eastern Croatia.
A "Greater Serbia" which not only inherited the old Yugoslav army — the fifth strongest in Europe — but also the old Yugoslav arms industry, would be a potential obstacle to the Western goal of creating a series of weak, compliant states out of the break-up of Yugoslavia.
In a June 5 article, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer explained what is on the mind of many in US ruling circles when he said that US plans for military intervention in ex-Yugoslavia are aimed at reinforcing "the cardinal rule of the new world order that nothing of importance gets done unless America does it".
Any US military intervention in the Balkans will not be aimed at relieving the plight of the 1.2 million Croat and Muslim refugees in Bosnia. It will be aimed at asserting greater control over all of the peoples of ex-Yugoslavia for US banks and transnational corporations against their West European, particularly German, rivals.
As the Gulf War demonstrated, the New World Order is about defending the interests of big business, not "humanitarianism."