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The Serbian chauvinist protests against the
Feb. 17 Kosovo government declaration of independence and the subsequent
recognition of a very limited form of self-determination of the Kosovar
people by the major Western powers have had exactly the opposite
political effect from what the post-Stalinist Serbian politicians and
state authorities that organized them planned. They have been a
dramatic demonstration of why the Western powers had no alternative to
permitting the legal separation of Kosovo from Serbia.
The Serbian chauvinist forces that attempted to exterminate or expel
the Albanian 90 percent of the population of Kosovo have not been
chastened by their defeats and they obviously continue to dominate the
Serbian state and the institutions and organizations that it controls.
Moreover, they continue to be linked to the fascist-like currents that
have emerged from the breakdown of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia.
As the leader of the fight against the degeneration of the Russian
Revolution, Leon Trotsky pointed out in the 1930s, that Stalinism was
symmetrical to Nazism. That is, it resembled Nazism on the surface,
although its social base was different. But with the breakdown of the
bureaucratic system, the essential difference between the base of
Nazism and Stalinism in Russia is being erased.
The neo-Stalinists in Russia today more and more resemble Nazism, based
on lumpen, gangsters, and disgruntled career military, and on an
ideology of anti-Semitism and chauvinism. Under the leadership of
Vladimir Putin, a former officer of the Stalinist political police and
his clique of ex-KGB officers, the conflict between the section of the
bureaucracy seeking to convert itself into a new capitalist class and
the neo-Stalinist debris of the old regime has largely been overcome.
The rulers of Russia today speak with a voice that includes the rabid
tones of neo-Stalinism.
Thus, in the present furor over the Kosovo declaration of independence,
a commentator on the notoriously state-controlled Russian TV railed
that the former premier of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, deserved the bullet
he got because he dissolved the "legendary army and security
forces of Serbia" and turned over Slobodan Milosevic, "the
hero of the Serbian resistance" to the Hague court to be tried for
war crimes. The Serbian daily Danas reported this incident in its Feb.
23 issue, noting that some observers considered it a call for
assassinating the present president, Boris Tadjic, Djindjic's successor
as head of the Democratic Party (Demokratska Strana, DS).
The DS is in a coalition with the nationalist party of Vojislav
Kostunica, the Democratic Party of Serbia (Demokratska Strana Srbije,
DSS). Kostunica has been the main stage manager of the state-organized
chauvinist demonstrations. Tadjic has opposed chauvinist excesses that
would endanger the acceptance of Serbia into the European Union.
The Serbian press is reporting rumors of a split in the governing
coalition. But the second biggest political parliamentary group is the
Serbian Radical Party (SRS), a fascist-like chauvinist formation. It
organized paramilitary groups that were responsible for many atrocities
in the Serbian wars against the other former Yugoslav republics and
Kosovo. Its leader, Vojislav Seselj, is currently in prison in the
Hague facing war-crimes charges. Its organ is the monthly magazine
Velika Srbija (Greater Serbia).
The SRS candidate in the recent presidential elections, Tomislav
Nikolic, actually won a plurality in the first round of the recent
presidential elections but was defeated by Tadjic in the second round.
Nikolic was presented to the state-organized rally in Belgrade on Feb.
20 as the spokesman of all the parties in parliament, apparently as the
result of a deal with Kostunica.
There is a serious and intelligent Serbian press, such as the weekly
Vreme and the daily Danas, although the daily Politika, a rag nailed to
the government's flag post, has been cited as a source for analysis of
Serbian attitudes in major Western capitalist papers.
In its Feb. 21 issue, Danas reported on the rioting that accompanied
the Feb. 21 government-organized mass rally against Kosovo independence:
"The responsibility for the vandalism that hooligans perpetrated
on the streets of Belgrade and other cities of Serbia, under the mask
of strong feelings of injustice over Kosovo, falls exclusively on the
government. That is the opinion of the experts that Danas talked
with."
The report continued: "‘The reception of the Legion after it
surrendered, the behavior of the SRS in parliament, the toleration of
groups that shouted anti-Albanian slogans and called for a new
Srebrenica. This sent a clear enough recommendation about what this
government considered socially desirable behavior. And when you add to
this the many-months-long campaign on the theme, "We will not give
up Kosovo," then there is no reason to be surprised that some young
people drew the conclusion that they would be praised for wrecking
carried out in the name of ‘"justified anger."’ This is what
the scholar of culture Nadezda Milenkovic told Danas."
The rioters were small groups that emerged from the mass demonstration.
The defenders of the government stressed that they were not
representative and that many of them were drunk. But the regime could
not escape responsibility for their actions because the police
evidently stood by and let them wreak havoc, not only attacking the embassies
of countries that recognized Kosovo's independence but also looting
shops in the center of Belgrade.
In the aftermath of the scandal, the government has announced the
arrests of rioters and promised more arrests. But the Belgrade
merchants who suffered losses undoubtedly also demanded action.
However, the government has not accepted any responsibility for its
racist incitement.
A Reuters dispatch of Feb. 23 reported: "'The U.S. is the major
culprit for all troubles since Feb. 17,' Slobodan Samardzic [the
Serbian government’s top negotiator on Kosovo] told the state news
agency Tanjug, referring to the date when Serbia's Albanian-majority
southern province declared independence.
"'The root of violence is the violation of international law. The
Serbian government will continue to call on the U.S. to take
responsibility for violating international law and taking away a piece
of territory from Serbia,' he said."
This is novel for a legal argument, that racist outrages and
intoxication can be justified because someone else has allegedly
violated the law. In fact, some of the most inflammatory statements
have come from Samardzic, who seems in fact to have the job of official
agitator. His statements should make this argument odious in the eyes
of reasonable people.
It is true that established states have an interest in trying to make
existing international boundaries permanent. But modern history shows
that no such principle can be maintained. Changes in international
borders are determined by political factors and relationships of
forces. And there is a principle of human rights that is more
fundamental than any arrangement among established states, the right of
self-determination of oppressed nationalities.
In fact, in the Feb. 19 issue of the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza,
Dawid Warszawski wrote that the Kosovo case "exposed a
contradiction in Article One of the UN charter, which invokes the right
of self-determination and then immediately guarantees all existing
borders."
But the most glaring contradiction is the argument of the Russian
strong man Putin that the independence of Kosovo is a "dangerous
precedent." Actually, the most "dangerous precedent" is
the Russian Revolution itself, which offered the right of
self-determination to all oppressed peoples. It was on the basis of
this principle to a large extent that it triumphed over the
counterrevolutionary forces.
It was also on the basis of this principle that the Communist Party of
Tito triumphed in Yugoslavia, although it followed this principle much
less consistently than the Russian Communist Party of Lenin and
Trotsky. In particular, it offered the right of self-determination even
in principle only to the Slavic peoples of the new workers' state and
not the Albanians.
The bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the decay
and collapse of the Yugoslav Revolution was marked by the betrayal of
the principle of the right of self-determination. In Yugoslavia, this
led an unscrupulous Stalinst bureaucrat, Slobodan Milosevic, to turn to
chauvinist intoxication to replace the collapsing credibility of his
Stalinist party. This was the basic origin of the wars in the former
Yugoslavia.
Certain Stalinist and post-Stalinist politicians among other
nationalities of the former Yugoslavia did indulge in similiar
policies. But Milosevic and the Serbian chauvinists were the
originators and the most ruthless pursuers of this policy. That
qualifies them as "demons." Those commentators on the left
who object to "demonizing" Milosevic and the Serbian chauvinists
in fact seek to apologize for them, to relativize their misdeeds.
The most extreme example of neo-Stalinist apology for Serbian
chauvinism is an article by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson in the
apparently not so ex-Maoist Monthly Review in October. It offers the
appearance of serious study (like Herbert Aptecker's celebrated defense
of the Soviets’ crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in its time). And
it does have the merit of summing up the work of the new holocaust
deniers of the neo-Stalinist left on the Yugoslav question. But the
clay feet of its extensive argument are evident in one sentence:
"Kosovo’s status ought to be no different than was Kuwait’s on
August 3, 1990: It is a territory taken by military force in
contravention of the UN Charter, and its independence should mean above
all the restoration of its sovereignty to Serbia."
That is, according to these "scholars of the left," Kosovo's
independence would mean turning it over to a state and its chauvinist
base that tried to exterminate its population and has not repented of
their objective, as shown by the intoxication of the Feb. 21 rally in
Belgrade and the more recent Serb chauvinist rally in Podgorica, the
capital of Montenegro, where the demonstrators shouted, "death to
the Albanians" and "slit throats, kill, until there are no
Albanians." In fact, the Monthly Review writers offer an example
of Orwellian doublespeak that is so exaggerated that it is patently
ridiculous.
In its Feb. 23 issue, the independent Montenegrin daily Vijesti
reported the following war song of the pro-Serbian leader of the
People’s Socialist Party of Montenegro, Emilo Lubudovic: "I want
to remind those people who are celebrating in the streets of Pristina
[the capital of Kosovo] and nearby areas that they have pitched their
gipsy tents on another people's hearth, that they have built their
miserable shacks on imperial bulwarks, and that we will return."
Thus, the Western imperialist powers had no alternative but to allow
Kosovo to assert a formal independence from Serbia. They were obviously
reluctant to do it. They left Kosovo in a legal limbo for six years by
preserving the formal sovereignty of Serbia. But there was no way they
could force the Kosovars back under Serbian rule after their experience.
They are in fact continuing to try to mollify the Serbian chauvinists
by tying the Kosovar government hand and foot, but without success.
It is obvious that the Kosovar government supports U.S. imperialism and
that the Kosovar people have great illusions in the United States. But
that is hardly surprising since they think that it has saved them from
genocide at the hands of the Serbs.
They may eventually come to see that U.S. imperialism is a false
friend, as they were in fact beginning to do because it denied them
self-government for so long. In that process, it will hardly help if
voices that claim to represent socialist and internationalist
perspectives apologize for Serbian and Russian chauvinism in the name
of opposing U.S. imperialism.
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