Bosnia, Kosova and the West — The Yugoslav tragedy: a Marxist view
By Mike Karadjis
Resistance Books, 2000
251pp, $24.97 (pb)
BY JUSTIN RANDELL
Many articles and books have been written, from all points of the political spectrum, that attempt to analyse and explain the last 10 years of what was once known as Yugoslavia. Given the tumult and tragedy there, this is hardly surprising — after all, understanding these events is a big part of avoiding their reoccurrence.
What may be surprising is how little of this material, particularly from those on the left, accurately describes the dynamics of the break-up of Yugoslavia. This makes the release of Mike Karadjis' new book, Bosnia, Kosova and the West — the Yugoslav tragedy: A Marxist view a particularly valuable contribution to the subject.
After providing an introductory chapter that summarises pre-1990s Yugoslav history, Karadjis, who has been Green Left Weekly's principal correspondent on Balkan affairs for a decade, outlines the common ground between the Western powers and Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic on the need to increase the strength of the federal structures within Yugoslavia.
The unambiguous desire for independence by majorities in the northern republics of Slovenia and Croatia, followed by formal declarations of independence in the middle of 1991, were ignored by the Western powers and the Serbian elite.
The central government of Yugoslavia was dominated by the Serbian elite, Karadjis details: "By the 1970s, Serbs, around 40% of the population, made up 78.9% of personnel in the federal administration and about 70% of the military officialdom of the [Yugoslav Peoples Army]".
For Milosevic, an increase in the powers of the central government would mean an increase in the control the Serbian elite had over the affairs of the country as a whole. But at the same time, the Serbian elite was pushing for "Greater Serbia", the unification of all Serbs into a single state.
Greater centralisation of Yugoslavia and "Greater Serbia" are seemingly in contradiction but, argues Karadjis, Milosevic and his backers saw centralisation as a useful, intermediate step towards their long-term goal, as it would disproportionately strengthen the position of the Serb elite.
For the West, Karadjis states, support for greater centralisation was "due to the demands of the [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank (organisations ultimately controlled by Washington) for greater central authority to force repayment of the $20 billion foreign debt, to carry out a 'free market' transformation and privatisation of the economy, to overcome republican barriers to an unrestricted Yugoslav-wide market for Western investments and goods, and to remove the republican veto on federal economic decisions dictated by the IMF."
Western pressure, however, had an ironic result: "This stubborn insistence on centralisation eventually led to the Yugoslav break-up for the opposite reason — the non-Serb republics could no longer bear the increasing weight of the central regime."
Complicity
Karadjis' book shines the spotlight on the cynical complicity of the Western powers in the destruction of Bosnia.
"The most effective aspect of Western intervention in the Bosnian war was the enforcement of the arms embargo" against the new Bosnian state, he states. "Serbia had the massive arsenal of the [Yugoslav Peoples Army], while Bosnia had no arms.
"Nothing in the [UN] resolution states that [the embargo] should apply to any state that became independent of Yugoslavia. Hence when Bosnia's independence was recognised by the EC and the US in April 1992 and it was accepted into the UN as a sovereign state, no UN resolution imposed any arms embargo on it. The continuation of the embargo was hence a decision by the major Western powers."
Serbian nationalist forces quickly took control of some 70% of Bosnia, with much of the rest taken by Croatian nationalist forces. The genocidal ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims that followed was ignored by the Western powers at the time, who preferred cynical posturing to any humanitarian intervention.
Both the West and Milosevic were thus well served by the resulting carve-up of Bosnia contained in the Dayton agreement in November 1995, which created a territorially integrated Serb region and a Bosnian-Croatian "federation" effectively controlled by a colonial UN administration and Croatia.
For the Milosevic regime, the Dayton plan represented an important step towards bringing Greater Serbia into existence. For the West, Dayton established a colonial regime that facilitated sucking debt repayments out of Bosnia and set up a (fragile) regional balance between a dominant Serbia and Croatia, deemed a necessity for the revival of imperialist profit-making in the region.
The fear of "instability" due to the struggle of the Kosovan people for national self-determination worried both Milosevic and the West. Both were adamant that Kosova should remain part of Serbia, and ruled out independence despite a 1991 referendum that indicated that this was the wish of 90% of the population, including near all ethnic Albanians.
Following an uprising in early 1997 that toppled Sali Berisha's dictatorship in Albania, many of the 750,000 weapons seized by the population made their way to the Kosova Liberation Army. In March 1998, one month after US Balkan envoy Robert Gelbard declared that the KLA were a "terrorist organisation", the Milosevic regime launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the KLA.
This assault did not have the required effect, however, driving many displaced Kosovar Albanians into the ranks of the KLA, who were then able to take over large parts of Kosova. A larger Serbian offensive in May 1999, shortly after the visit of US special envoy Richard Holbrooke, took back much of central Kosova, but no "stabilisation" was possible, as the stepped-up campaign of ethnic cleansing only broadened the KLA's recruitment base.
Rapidly losing confidence in Milosevic's ability to stabilise the situation, Western powers began to realise that they would need their own troops to stop the KLA from enforcing its own solution. Early in 1999, the US attempted to force Serbia and Kosova to accept the Rambouillet plan, which would give Kosova limited autonomy as part of Serbia and see NATO troops enter to "ensure stability".
The plan was at first rejected by both Kosovan and Serbian delegations. After heavy pressure from the US, the Kosovan delegation accepted the plan but Milosevic wouldn't budge. Under this pretext, NATO launched a three-month air war on Yugoslavia in March 1999.
Ethnic cleansing
In the first week of bombing, 750,000 Kosovan Albanians were ethnically cleansed, forced to leave their homes and straggle across the border into neighbouring countries — three times the number ethnically cleansed in the year before the air war broke out.
Serb forces within Kosova, the ones carrying out this genocide, were left largely untouched by NATO's bombing, while raids within Serbia destroyed much of the civilian infrastructure of that country, causing massive hardship for the population.
Following the cessation of bombing in June, NATO troops moved into Kosova, which was to remain part of Yugoslavia, disarmed the KLA and installed a colonial administration.
Karadjis directs much attention to refuting two common but mistaken positions taken by sections of the left with regard to this conflict: on the one hand, support for NATO's bombing of Serbia and Kosova, on the basis that this was a "humanitarian intervention" aimed at ending the oppression of the Kosovan people; and, on the other, support for Milosevic and opposition to Kosovar independence, on the grounds that the Serb regime was "defending Yugoslavia" from imperialist attack.
The particular strength of Karadjis' work is that he amply demonstrates that, even during the air war, NATO's goals were closely aligned with those of Milosevic and that, throughout the different stages of Yugoslavia's disintegration, the Western powers were complicit in the crimes of the Serbian regime.
In a pithy summary of his thesis, Karadjis states, "In the first phase, that of the collapse of Yugoslavia, all Western powers insisted on the maintenance of the 'unity of Yugoslavia' at all cost. The centralising tactics of the Milosevic regime were the key weapon to maintain this forced unity against the wishes of various peoples for self-determination."
"In the second phase, the war in Bosnia, the Western powers insisted on Bosnia's ethnic partition, again in agreement with Milosevic and his new Croatian ally, Franjo Tudjman, but against the wishes of the bulk of the Bosnian population. In the third phase, the Kosova conflict, the Western powers insisted, like Milosevic, that Kosova remain within Serbia, against the express desires of the population there."
Bosnia, Kosova and the West provides information and analysis essential for an understanding of the continuing struggle of the people of the former Yugoslavia for justice today.
[Copies of the book can be ordered at Resistance Books' web site: <http://www.dsp.org.au/rb/rb.htm>.]