Socialist Action /June 1999
Clinton and NATO Wage Campaign of Terror Against People
of Yugoslavia
BY NAT WEINSTEIN
The current U.S.-led imperialist assault on Yugoslavia,
ostensibly aimed to save Kosovo and Kosovars from Milosevic's oppression,
is nothing of the sort.
The demolition of ethnic Albanian cities in Kosovo by American missiles
and bombs is in itself proof that the goals of U.S.-dominated NATO forces
serve other than humanitarian ends.
Moreover, U.S./NATO "precision bombing," allegedly intended
to "degrade Milosevic's military capacity," has been directed
against such "military targets" as Yugoslavia's bridges, refineries,
electric power plants-its entire industrial infrastructure.
Even the water supply has been shut down in Yugoslav cities, including
in Kosovo, because its flow to consumers depends on electrically powered
pumps. When bombed powerhouses are repaired and electricity restored, U.S./NATO
bombs blast it down again.
And to top off the bombing of powerhouses, frozen foods in refrigerators
are spoiling and the sewage system is blocked.
On May 25, the NATO commander, U.S. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, announced plans
to expand bombing to all industrial plants, which even he concedes contribute
nothing to Yugoslavia's military potential.
The targeted destruction alone, not counting so-called "accidents,"
will add years to the misery of the peoples in the Balkans, as well as among
Yugoslavia's trading partners in Eastern and Western Europe.
But the "accidental" and "collateral" destruction
of Kosavar refugee caravans and villages-as well as residential areas and
hospitals in densely populated cities-is no accident! It is deliberately
calculated to terrorize the peoples of both Kosovo and Serbia.
The aim of these barbarous acts of rank terrorism is two-fold:
First, to stampede Kosovars out of Kosovo so that the managed news media
can portray the terrible suffering of ethnic Albanian refugees on the electronic
and printed media as justification for their war of economic and political
conquest.
And second, to break the entire Yugoslav civilian population's will to
resist American imperialism's "New Order," in the hope it will
cause their victims to turn their fire, in anguished desperation, on the
Milosevic government.
But despite the mass media's propaganda barrage placing exclusive responsibility
for the suffering of Yugoslavia's peoples on Milosevic, mass public opinion
is decidedly shifting to the view that it is the bombing, starting two months
ago, that played the major part in forcing Kosovars to run for their lives.
Moreover, the mounting threat of getting caught between NATO and Yugoslav
troops when an invasion is launched, as seems ever-more likely, has transformed
Kosovo into a no-man's land with Serbs and ethnic Albanians alike running
for their lives.
But there is a method behind Clinton's and world imperialism's seeming
madness, reflecting their longer-term strategic goal.
The unmistakable message being sent to all the world's peoples by the
destruction of Yugoslavia is either to accept the edicts of the chief executioner
of international "law and order"-presently incarnated in the person
of President William Jefferson Clinton-or be bombed back to the Stone Age.
Media lets real views of U.S. victims leak out
The May 21 New York Times reported the reaction of a woman living
near a hospital demolished by a guided missile in Belgrade the day before.
She reportedly said that "nothing NATO did would any longer surprise
her."
Then, referring to two women wounded while giving birth in the hospital
at the moment the bombs struck, she said bitterly, "This is of course
a military target if you just take the longer view. In 20 years or so, these
babies will be soldiers."
And a report appearing in the May 24 edition of the same newspaper, in
sharp conflict with most of its other Yugoslav war news, was allowed to
leak through the heavy-handed barrage of one-sided pro-U.S./NATO war propaganda.
The article, "Belgrade's People Still Defiant, but Deeply Weary,"
by Steven Erlanger, varies from reports by Clinton and others that mass
demonstrations and troop desertions had begun and that Yugoslavia's masses
were beginning to demand an end to the war on NATO's terms.
Erlanger, who appears to be the main correspondent of The New York
Times stationed in Belgrade, provides readers with a summary of many
interviews with ordinary people in that city that contradict Clinton's claim.
Parents wait anxiously for the war to end and their sons to return from
the front; the civilian casualties and material destruction steadily mount;
strangers ask a foreigner, "When will all this end," as if anyone
really knows; Serbian jokes, if anything, are becoming darker.
But it is weariness that hangs heavily in the air, not defeatism.
The citizens of Belgrade, interviewed by the dozen this last week, feel
that they are right to be fighting for Kosovo. Some express shame at what
they have heard about the purging of ethnic Albanians; most express anger
at Western support for the secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army. They are
proud of their war, of their brave if inevitably futile defense against
all the might of NATO....
[Another person is interviewed by the reporter:] "For anyone who
has spent more than five days in Serbia, and wasn't drunk all the time-which
is hard, but spies should be sober for at least half-an-hour a day-it should
have been obvious that the bombing would set off a humanitarian catastrophe
and empower this government, maybe forever," he said....
And even if one hates the leader of the state, he said, "first
comes the war-we'll vote later." [Emphasis added]
Erlanger goes on to report that Serbs no longer believe that NATO ever
bombs in error, even if the damage is to the Chinese embassy or a hospital:
"Psychological warfare," said a doctor named Zivko, demands attacks
on hospitals, trains, and buses "to demoralize the people."
The reporter paraphrases the doctor's account: "There is, as among
lab animals, a kind of rapid adaptation to the war. Belgrade is bombed in
fits and starts, which Serbs are convinced are timed to any improvement
in the prospects for peace.
"Either NATO doesn't want peace, or it bombs from frustration. No
one thinks that attacks on electricity supplies are militarily justifiable,
rather than simply an effort to demoralize civilians."
Erlanger reports the concerns of another man about his son who is serving
in the army in Kosovo.
The father fears for his son but is very proud of him. He describes his
son's horror at seeing a column of ethnic Albanians being marched around
Kosovo under the control of the police. He reports his son describing the
cries and tears of Albanian children who were on the road. "We gave
them all we had, all our food," his son tells his father, "but
we couldn't do anything about it."
The reporter writes that the father obviously wants to believe the best
of his son, but there was no reason to doubt his account. "The regular
army has behaved well," the father said. "But they will be happy
just to come back home."
Since this report appeared, Erlanger and others in the media have provided
other reports confirming broad support by ordinary people for Yugoslavia's
resistance to imperialism's violation of its own right to self-determination.
And no less important is the clear implication in these reports that
after NATO aggression is defeated, then the peoples of Yugoslavia will deal
with Milosevic and his criminal cohorts.
The Belgrade home of Slobodan Milosevic after NATO bombed it.
A negotiated peace?
Up until May 21, Clinton had left the job of drumming up support for
sending NATO troops into Kosovo to Tony Blair, the so-called "New Labour"
prime minister of Great Britain.
It was reported on that day, however, that Clinton came significantly
closer to authorizing an invasion of Yugoslavia by troops on the ground.
He urged NATO to mobilize 50,000 troops on Yugoslav borders for the purpose
of "protecting and escorting" ethnic Albanian refugees back into
Kosovo.
But with classic Orwellian doublespeak, Clinton declared that troops
would be sent in only after Milosevic caves in and gives his "permission"
for sending NATO "peacekeepers" into Kosovo, or-get this!-when
NATO decides that Yugoslav troops "are no longer able to give organized
and effective resistance."
The terms dictated to Milosevic contained in the Rambouillet treaty amount
to demanding Yugoslavia's unconditional surrender since it provides for
absolutely no limitations on NATO troops entry into any part of Yugoslavia
they see fit!
Those terms are now widely believed to be unachievable through negotiation.
And barring the unlikely event of a capitulation by the Yugoslav government
or its peoples, such a "peace" could only be imposed after a decisive
Yugoslav military defeat on the ground-with all that that implies-or by
a vast expansion of bombing on a scale rivalling the nuclear annihilation
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
President Clinton and his bipartisan warriors appear to be aware that
they have a tiger by the tail and can't let go. This has apparently impelled
them toward embarking on one of American imperialism's most desperate gambles
since the time in 1964 when the Vietnam War was escalated into a major war
by President Lyndon B. Johnson's staging of the Tonkin Gulf incident.
That's the meaning of the U.S./NATO decision to mobilize NATO troops
on the borders of Yugoslavia. It's the kind of threat that cannot be taken
back, since it has a chance of working only if Milosevic accepts, not 28,000
troops as provided by Rambouillet, but 50,000 heavily armed troops with
bases for warplanes and helicopters inside Kosovo.
As unacceptable as that must be to the Milosevic government, Clinton
approved an action that makes it next to impossible for Milosevic to agree
to a negotiated "peace."
On May 27, it was announced that the International War Crimes Tribunal
is preparing to indict Slobodan Milosevic for atrocities and mass deportations,
and maybe, crimes against humanity and genocide. And on the next day, Milosevic
and four of his aides were indicted!
Such a decision by this tribunal could not have been made without the
tacit approval of the U.S. government. And few will believe reports "leaked"
by Clinton administration sources that while Clinton fully approved the
indictment of Milosevic he was not too happy with the decision.
The meaning of that seems to be explained by Clinton's declaration that
the war-crimes indictments would not stop him from a negotiated settlement
of the war even with a war criminal. That obviously is more of Clinton's
style of doublespeak-i.e., the methodology of covering every arrogant ultimatum
with a modicum of moderation.
The Clinton administration can, of course, still accept a "compromise"
settlement with Milosevic, but only if it constitutes a clear defeat for
Milosevic. If not, American and world imperialism would lose any remaining
possibility to use NATO as a force for imposing the rule of world imperialism.
But the alternative, going for broke with whomever and with whatever
force Clinton and his closest allies can mount, would be a desperate gamble
that-even if won in the short run-would cost imperialism as much or more
in the long run.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has already declared he will
veto sending in NATO ground troops. This shift by the head of the Social
Democratic/Green governmental alliance may well have been a temporary expedient
in the face of a major rebellion by rank-and-file Greens at the environmentalist
party's policy-making conference last month.
The action of an outraged rank-and-file Green Party pacifist in smearing
the Green foreign minister in Chancellor Schröder's "red-green"
coalition government with a bag of red paint underscores this "socialist"-led
capitalist government's genuine fear of mass antiwar sentiment festering
beneath the relative surface calm of European politics.
It also helps explain why Greece, Italy, and other NATO countries are
hedging their bets by leaving uncertain which side of the fence they will
go when push comes to shove.
All the world's imperialist powers are weighed down by the legacy of
Vietnam and fear that a military adventure in the Balkans precipitating
a mass antiwar movement could easily trigger a far wider rebellion against
the growing spread of mass unemployment and declining living standards.
But having gambled at the outset that bombing alone would be sufficient
to force Milosevic's compliance with the essential terms of the Rambouillet
treaty, now world imperialism has backed itself into a far more costly and
risky adventure than before Rambouillet was rejected by Milosevic.
 The American people can stop this war!
The American people have already slowed down Clinton and his bipartisan
warriors by making evident in many ways their opposition to this war, including
the amazingly swift outbreak of antiwar protest demonstrations. Besides,
the antiwar demonstrations, which broke out before a single young American
soldier has yet been killed, has sent a chill down the spine of the American
ruling class.
But evidence that a mass outpouring of millions of antiwar protesters
will march, if and when their sons start coming home from the Balkans in
body-bags, is being revealed by the mass media-which is controlled lock,
stock and barrel by American capitalist imperialism.
It has been forced to acknowledge the existence and the enormous power
of antiwar sentiment that has, so far at least, kept the U.S. capitalist
government from sending our GIs-who in their great majority are the sons
and daughters of the American working class-into Yugoslavia to kill and
be killed to make the world safe for capitalist profits.
The mass media allows this sentiment to surface because it knows that
concealing it would be worse since there is real sentiment among the ruling
class itself that the costs of a ground war in Yugoslavia is a game not
worth the candle.
In fact, two breakthroughs of sorts occurred in the last week of May.
The first occurred on the nationally syndicated PBS nightly news hour hosted
by Jim Lehrer on May24.
A 15-minute segment of this widely watched news program featured a report
on the "new antiwar movement." It amounted to a de facto acknowledgement
by this voice of corporate America that the Vietnam syndrome was alive and
well and was indeed a force that can stop this war.
That was followed on May 27 when there appeared on the op-ed page of
The New York Times a letter written by former U.S. President Jimmy
Carter titled, "Have We Forgotten the Path to Peace." Carter,
who has been a part of the bipartisan support granted every single imperialist
war carried out in his lifetime, is sharply critical of what he considers
to be major miscalculations and outright mistakes by his party's current
U.S. president.
Carter states in this article that "our general purposes are admirable:
to enhance peace, freedom, democracy, human rights, and economic progress."
He also says that "the international community has admirable goals
of protecting the rights of Kosovars and ending the brutal policies of Slobodan
Milosevic."
But he takes some distance from "the decision to attack the entire
nation [which] has been counterproductive, and our destruction of civilian
life has now become senseless and excessively brutal. [And that there] is
little indication of success after more than 25,000 sorties and 14,000 missiles
and bombs, 4000 of which were not precision guided."
He makes a special point of noting that U.S. "missiles and bombs
are now concentrating on the destruction of bridges railways, roads, electric
power, and fuel and fresh water supplies. Serbian citizens report that they
are living like cavemen, and their torment increases daily....
"NATO leaders now have three basic choices: to continue bombing
ever more targets until Yugoslavia (including Kosovo and Montenegro) is
almost totally destroyed, to rely on Russia to resolve our dilemma through
indirect diplomacy, or to accept American casualties by sending military
forces into Kosovo."
This shows that Carter has been reading the same reports we and millions
of others have also read. And after listing many other tactical mistakes,
the former president of the United States concludes with this "humanist"
indictment of his class:
"The United States' insistence on the use of cluster bombs, designed
to kill or maim humans, is condemned almost universally and brings discredit
on our nation (as does our refusal to support a ban on land mines). Even
for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means."
For this leader of American capitalism to publicly state his anguish
over his class's dilemma is further proof that the ruling class is in big
trouble. And that the still relatively small vocal antiwar opposition reflects
the views of what is becoming the large majority of the American people,
who are destined to march by the tens and hundreds of thousands in the streets
to stop this war and bring our boys home-alive!
All those who want to stop this calamity should come out and march and
protest in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., on June 5! And be prepared
to join in every other mass protest action, teach-in, and organizational
meeting until this war is stopped!
Socialist Action /June 1999 |