Socialist Action /July 1999
Lessons of the Yugoslav War
A discussion by three antiwar leaders
On June 26, a public debate was planned to take place between pro-war
supporters and antiwar activists at James Lick Middle School in San Francisco.
But when pro-war advocates either declined to appear or failed to show up
for the scheduled debate, the event was transformed into a public indictment
of the just-concluded air war against the people of Yugoslavia.
Those invited to defend their pro-war views included Rep. Nancy Pelosi
(D-Calif.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Also scheduled to appear was
Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, who reportedly supported the
use of ground troops.
Printed below are the presentations of antiwar activists Paul George,
Carole Seligman, and Alexander Cockburn. The event was sponsored by the
Ad Hoc Coalition to Stop the U.S./NATO War in the Balkans.
 Paul George
Director, Peninsula Peace &
Justice Center; Editor, PeaceWORKS Journal; Producer of "Other Voices"
on Cable TV Channel 6; Past Western Regional Coordinator, Quest for Peace;
Co-coordinator, Jan. 26, 1991, Mobilization to Bring the Troops Home Now!
At the heart of any debate over what has just occurred in Yugoslavia
is the question of "humanitarian intervention." More than any
other military intervention in recent or faded memory, this war has been
the liberals' war, a sad state of affairs enabled, no doubt, by Bill Clinton's
uncanny ability, against all logic, to parlay his participation in a couple
of antiwar marches three decades ago into a reputation as a full-blown antiwar,
pro-human-rights president.
Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic-who has a much more deserved
reputation as a supporter of human rights than Bill Clinton could ever aspire
to-said that the war on Yugoslavia was perhaps the first war waged "in
the name of principles and values."
While noting that NATO's attack on a sovereign nation was a violation
of international law, Havel excused this transgression by claiming that
NATO was acting in behalf of a higher law, "a law that ranks higher
than the law which protects the sovereignty of states: human rights."
Let us just note in passing, and without further comment, that Havel
presides over one of NATO's newest member states.
From the very beginning of this war, many analysts have examined the
U.S. record, in particular, of staunch defense of human rights. Noam Chomsky,
especially, has analyzed the U.S. record in great detail and concluded,
as might be expected, that a humanitarian intervention by the United States
"anywhere in the world would be difficult, impossible, actually"
to reconcile with the historic record.
Chomsky has detailed the U.S. response to humanitarian catastrophes in
places as diverse as Laos, Colombia, Turkey, and Indonesia and has found
the U.S. to be-and let us put this charitably -lacking in its affections
for the people of those countries and their immense human suffering."
I find the situation in Turkey to be a particularly good example of this
approach to analyzing U.S./NATO actions in Yugoslavia, because it represents
a nearly perfect analogy to the situation in Kosovo prior to the NATO attacks.
You might recall that in his speech to the nation, which purported to
explain why our tax dollars were about to be used to level a sovereign country,
Bill Clinton lamented the fact that the Kosovar Albanians weren't permitted
to use their own language in their schools-which is also true for many families
in California, by the way-that villages had been shelled, that there were
some 20,000 internal refugees, that substantial numbers of civilians had
perished as a result of the civil war between the KLA and the Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia-well, he didn't actually mention in that speech that there
was a civil war raging, but let's not sweat the details.
All of this, of course, was accurate and is lamentable. Then, he went
on to say, "Imagine if we just looked the other way while this was
happening on NATO's doorstep." Oh, the shame, the shame.
In Turkey, the Kurdish ethnic minority, brutally repressed by the central
government, has been engaged in a decades-long struggle for autonomy, let
alone independence, and has seen its aspirations blocked at every turn.
Years of frustration eventually resulted in an armed struggle for freedom.
As a consequence, the Kurds have seen 3000 villages burnt to the ground
by army forces. There are over one million internal refugees. There have
been 2000 documented cases of assassination of Kurdish political activists.
And what has been the U.S. response to this humanitarian catastrophe?
We provide them with the helicopter gunships they use to strafe and terrorize
the civilian population. Of course, Turkey isn't on NATO's doorstep. No,
Turkey is a member of NATO, it is sitting in the living room with its feet
up on the coffee table, sipping brandy with the rest of the big boys.
So, Chomsky and the others are absolutely correct: there is nothing in
the historic record that could possibly lead us to believe that what we
have just witnessed in Yugoslavia arises out of humanitarian concerns. But,
just for the sake of argument, or simply to be charitable to our liberal
friends for a moment, let us allow the possibility that there has been a
shift in U.S. foreign policy, that the "radical leftist" who now
occupies the White House has brought a new set of priorities to the national
agenda.
What would a truly humanitarian intervention, one rooted, remember, in
the highest ideals of humanity, what would this humanitarian intervention
look like? First, we might expect that all diplomatic avenues to resolve
the situation be thoroughly pursued and truly exhausted before resorting
to violence. That would be the idealistic, humanitarian course of action.
Second, if diplomacy did indeed fail, then we would expect that the military
intervention would be designed in such a manner so that the number one priority
would be to protect and shelter from harm the people on whose behalf the
intervention is taking place and, secondly, that the military action also
be designed to preserve and protect the human rights of other civilians
not engaged in the conflict.
I think these items constitute the most basic aspects of what one might
expect in a truly humanitarian intervention. Let's examine how the attack
on Yugoslavia stacks up in comparison.
First, as to exhausting all diplomatic efforts: Not only were the diplomatic
options not exhausted, they hardly raised a sweat. "Mad dog" Albright's
team-excuse me-Madeline Albright's team arrived at Rambouillet with a "settlement"
already drafted. The document was not a draft framework for a negotiated
deal, but the final document, not one word of which was to be negotiated.
Yugoslavia was given a choice: sign or be bombed. That is hardly what
one would call "negotiating."
I think it is fairly well known, by now, just what was in the Rambouillet
document, but let's review it briefly, anyway. I think there are two major
points to look at. First, there was the now famous, or infamous, Appendix
B, which would have allowed the occupying NATO troops full, unrestricted
access to all of Yugoslavia.
This passage has been mentioned by many commentators as constituting
the "poison pill" specifically designed to insure that Yugoslavia
would not, indeed, could not, sign on to the agreement. That clearly seems
to be the case.
George Kenney, a former State Department officer at the Yugoslavia desk,
has reported that he heard from what he terms unimpeachable sources that
State Department officials at Rambouillet told reporters during "deep
background" briefings, that they had intentionally "set the bar
too high" for Yugoslavia to be able to sign the Rambouillet agreement.
His source quotes the State Department official as saying, "the
Serbs need some bombing and that's what they're going to get." If this
is true, and that seems to be the case, then clearly the West arrived at
Rambouillet not with the intention of exhausting all diplomatic possibilities,
but with the intention that nothing remotely resembling diplomacy would
even be allowed to arise.
There is another aspect to Appendix B that has gone less remarked. There
is also language that would insure that all NATO personnel would be immune
from any and all Yugoslav and Serbian legal processes and would be immune
from "arrest, investigation or detention."
Furthermore, the NATO personnel would be permitted to "detain"
individuals and hand them over to unspecified "appropriate authorities."
And remember, this would be the case throughout all of Yugoslavia.
State Department and White House officials have implied that the Rambouillet
accord was based upon the Dayton agreement, which permitted the entry of
UN forces into Bosnia. This is simply untrue. The Dayton agreement allowed
only "free transit through the territory of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia" and made no mention of NATO personnel being able to detain
or arrest anyone.
Yugoslavia not only indicated a willingness to negotiate the terms of
the enforcement mechanisms, but actually made counter-offers. In his March
24 speech to the nation, Bill Clinton said, "Serbian leaders refused
even to discuss key elements of the peace agreement." This was a blatant
lie to the American public and, in any case, hypocritical in the extreme
for someone who arrived at the bargaining table with a take-it-or-leave
attitude.
One final note about Rambouillet. The document also had language in it
that would call for a referendum of some kind, apparently a vote on independence,
that would occur three years hence. This was a very troubling aspect to
Yugoslavia and was one of the points they insisted on negotiating. I think
it is interesting to note that the agreement which was finally reached after
78 days of bombing, omits this part entirely.
In any event, it is clear that the first required element of a "humanitarian"
intervention was not met. Let's take a look at the conduct of the military
attack and see how well that lived up to the lofty ideals of humanitarianism
and human rights.
First, and perhaps most astonishingly, was the total lack of preparation
to deal with the fully anticipated flow of refugees. The military planners
knew there would be massive refugee movements and yet they made no plans
to deal with them: no tents, no water supplies, no food supplies, nothing!
Apparently, Clinton's and Blair's executioners had been so busy selecting
bombing targets during the previous months that they completely forgot about
the Albanians! Never gave them a moment of thought.
If the well-being of the Albanians was uppermost in the thoughts of the
U.S. and NATO planners, you would expect that they might have done at least
a little contingency planning for the Albanians. Military and CIA analysts
had predicted that mass expulsions would take place once the bombing began.
Those predictions were totally ignored by the "caring, humanitarian"
upper echelons of the NATO governments.
While we're on the topic of refugees, it is important to note that while
the first waves of refugees were clearly victims of the reprehensible ethnic
expulsion policies of the Yugoslav forces, it is also clear that by April
and May, the massive refugee exodus continued because of the bombing. It
was repeated over and over throughout this war that no one knew what was
going on in Kosovo because foreign reporters weren't allowed in there.
But major media outlets like The Los Angeles Times, The New
York Times, and the BBC all had reporters on the ground in Kosovo. Not
many, true, but they were there. And by April they were all reporting that
the refugees were fleeing the bombs; not on the front pages, of course,
but they were reporting that fact.
While the Serbs were burning houses, NATO was leveling the rest of the
country, including the infrastructure. And it is here that we see the final
lie of this "humanitarian" intervention.
The way in which NATO conducted this war, the targets selected, the weapons
used, all lead us to one conclusion: NATO engaged in war crimes from beginning
to end of this murderous campaign. Civilian targets were attacked from literally
the first night of the bombing, when a tractor factory in a Belgrade suburb
was hit.
NATO spokesmen throughout this campaign told us time and time again that
NATO doesn't target civilians and that, even though NATO bombs are the most
accurate in history, "collateral damage" was still inevitable.
The "mistakes" that NATO made included hospitals, town centers,
churches, apartment buildings, markets, and refugee convoys. But the list
of intentionally hit targets is also a litany of civilian targets: roads,
bridges, and railways which were hundreds of miles from Kosovo; civilian
factories, including a shoe factory, a car manufacturing plant, a cigarette
factory, and food and sugar processing plants.
The list goes on and on: chemical plants, gas stations, civilian airports,
heating plants for civilian apartment buildings, oil refineries, and television
and radio stations.
It is clear that NATO's strategy was not to attack the Yugoslav army
directly, but to destroy Yugoslavia itself and thereby hope to weaken the
army. This strategy was no secret as it was reported by virtually all media
outlets that NATO had selected what it happily termed "political"
targets rather than strictly military targets.
On May 21, newspapers around the country ran comments from NATO generals
about this strategy: "Just focusing on fielded forces is not enough.
The people have to get to the point that their lights are turned off, their
bridges are blocked so they can't get to work."
The final outrage came in late May when night after night NATO targeted
water pumping stations throughout Serbia. Those few pumps that were left
operative were rendered inoperative by NATO's targeting of the electrical
grid of Serbia. At one point, nearly 1 million civilians in Belgrade alone
were without running water and Belgrade's reserves were down to their last
10 percent.
And what about casualties, civilian and military? Wartime statistics
are notoriously difficult to verify, but I think we now have a general idea
of what befell Yugoslavia. In a report entitled "Serb army unscathed
by NATO" filed after the war by Robert Fisk of the The Independent
newspaper out of London, Fisk says, "NATO officers have been astonished
that thousands of Yugoslav tanks, missile launchers, artillery batteries,
personnel carriers, and trucks have been withdrawn from the province with
barely a scratch on them."
He goes on to note that some 60,000 Yugoslav troops were withdrawn, far
above the 40,000 estimated to be there.
Sources as diverse as the Yugoslav army, the federal government, humanitarian
aid workers and Western journalists all come up with a figure of around
600 Yugoslav soldiers killed in Kosovo. Of these, about half were killed
by the KLA during the guerrilla war that continued during the NATO assault.
So, NATO killed about 300 soldiers.
Meanwhile, the civilian tally sheet is quite different. Most sources
put the civilian toll at about 1500 killed and some 6000 wounded. Of the
1500 civilian deaths, about 450 are attributed to NATO's endless series
of "mistakes." That leaves over a thousand civilians who were
killed intentionally by NATO.
When the civilian death toll outnumbers the army death toll by a factor
greater than three, it is clear that the civilian population of Yugoslavia
was the intended victim in this war, and that the Yugoslav army represented
the "collateral damage."
Humanitarian war, my ass. From start to finish, NATO's war strategy was
undeniably, unmistakably criminal in intent and execution.
Let's rewind a little bit and go back to earlier this year, as a way
of concluding this examination into the "humanitarian" nature
of this war. What was the humanitarian crisis that provoked this whole adventure
in the first place? We've heard a lot of loose talk about the genocide
that was taking place in Kosovo. Let's examine that briefly.
In February of 1998, a major KLA offensive began, opening a new chapter
in the Kosovo Albanians' long struggle for self-determination. For years,
that struggle had been a nonviolent one, perhaps the greatest example of
massive nonviolent resistance since the days of Gandhi. The Albanians received
no support from the West during that period.
Throughout 1998, what was clearly a civil war raged throughout Kosovo.
International mediation resulted in occasional cease fires, which were routinely
violated by one side or the other. During the course of that year, about
2000 civilians lost their lives. Tragic, yes. Genocide, decidedly not.
In October of last year, again as a result of international mediation
efforts, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE),
a non-military coalition of all European countries, and excluding the United
States and Canada, sent in almost 2000 civilian, unarmed human rights monitors.
The intent of the monitoring mission was to keep to a minimum the number
of civilian casualties and gross human rights violations. And it was, for
all intents and purposes, working.
The number of civilian casualties in Kosovo from the start of 1999 until
the bombing started was somewhere around 60. And this is while the civil
war continued, a guerrilla war, which means the fighting, as a rule, takes
place in and around civilian population centers.
That the Yugoslav forces were fighting a war against a guerrilla army
is recognized by even the State Department. That the broad, major offensive
by the Yugoslav army started after the bombing began is also tacitly recognized
by the State Department.
In a report issued on May 12 of this year, the State Department says,
"In late March 1999, Serbian forces dramatically increased the scope
and pace of their efforts, moving away from selective targeting of towns
and regions suspected of KLA sympathies."
Here's State Department acknowledgment that there wasn't a major offensive
aimed at civilians before the bombing began. Bill Clinton's own response
to a question about this matter, posed at a press conference, is also enlightening.
He said, "It would have happened anyway." Outside of the fact
that this statement apparently indicates that U.S. foreign policy is based
on reading tea leaves and other prognostications, it is also a tacit admission
by the president that that massive ethnic cleansing offensive was not happening
when the bombing began.
So why did NATO bomb Yugoslavia? To be brief, because they could. Read
NATO's "New Strategic Concept" paper, issued in April at its 50th
anniversary celebrations in Washington. In that paper, NATO reserves for
itself the right to intervene wherever and whenever it pleases, whenever
and wherever it detects "instability or the threat of instability."
And what leads to instability? According to NATO's Strategic Concept
paper, "Ethnic and religious rivalries, territorial disputes, the abuse
of human rights, the dissolution of states, inadequate or failed efforts
at reform."
Inadequate or failed efforts at reform. Very interesting. Refuse to get
on board the West's globalization bandwagon, refuse to surrender your national
economy to Wall Street, insist on a level of national sovereignty, and you
are running the risk of being bombed for the sin of causing "instability."
At the end of the Persian Gulf war, George Bush proclaimed a "new
world order." The truth of the matter is that a new world order was
in the works, and the slaughter in the Persian Gulf gave us a strong hint
of what it might be like. But the Cold War had just recently ended and,
after 50 years, it wasn't clear what the new world political structure would
be.
Now, the new world order is becoming clear. The NATO bombs that just
destroyed a sovereign nation constitute a draft outline of the new world
order. Military might and economic power rules the day, with no equivalent
power to stop it-except us, the people, organizing to stop it.
Welcome to the future.
 Carole Seligman
Ad Hoc Coalition to Stop the U.S./NATO War in the Balkans;
National Committee member, Socialist Action
It is important for the antiwar movement to discuss what our country
did to Yugoslavia and Kosovo because it isn't over yet. U.S. and other NATO
forces are occupying Kosovo, and it is likely to be repeated.
The movement must come to grips with the success the U.S. government
had in tricking a large number of war opponents into supporting this U.S./NATO
war, or supporting some form of imperialist intervention, say, by the United
Nations, based on the argument of humanitarian motives.
There are a number of excellent responses by Noam Chomsky, Steven R.
Shalom, Ralph Schoenman, and many others, including the newspapers being
sold here tonight, debunking the argument that the U.S. waged this war for
humanitarian reasons.
I will highlight six:
1) The results of the bombing itself are the most powerful argument against
the U.S. justification for it on so-called "humanitarian" grounds.
These results were summarized in the most cogent and fact-filled rebuttal
to the U.S./NATO arguments at the United Nations on June 10 by the ambassador
of a small, fiercely independent country (I'll name the country after the
quote-maybe you will guess who it is):
"There is no doubt now ... about the real goal of this disproportionate
aggression. For 79 days, a colossal military, economic, and technological
force attacked with impunity a small developing country, carrying out 35,778
combat and support missions.
"The aggressors' combined Gross Domestic Product is 1163 times that
of their victim: their population is 77 fold; their territory 226-fold,
and their regular troops are 43 fold. The Serbian people's resistance has
been heroic, at the cost of thousands of civilians dead or wounded, enormous
deprivation, the destruction of their country, the indelible trauma of the
bombardments in their children's minds. The aggressors deserve no laurels.
"The Security Council's silence will not erase the images of the
bombed ... passenger train; of the Djakovica-Pec convoy of Albanian refugees;
of the civilian facilities in Belgrade and Novi Sad; of the Paracin, Kralijevo,
Sremska Mitrovica villages; the Serbian television station; the Luzane bus;
the Surdulica neighborhood; the Lucani factory; the power generators; the
potable water grids; the Valjevo hospital; the Greek convoy near Vlac; ...
China's embassy; the Nis marketplace and hospital complex, the Kosovar-Albanian
Korisa village; 18 diplomatic premises; the Istok prison; tens of bridges,
railways, and roads.
"It has been a genocide. The systematic actions to deprive millions
of people of food, heat, drinking water and medical services; the deliberate
and daily strikes on non-military targets where civilians were known to
be; and the use of internationally banned weapons like the uranium-coated
shells and cluster bombs; or the indiscriminate use of seismic bombs in
urban areas and graphite bombs against power grids-so as to paralyze every
vital service-cannot be described otherwise.
"These acts are in violation of the Geneva Conventions, International
Humanitarian Law, and War Practices and Customs. Those responsible must
be exemplarily punished. This war's environmental impact on the region is
really inestimable....
"They argued that they wanted to prevent a massive exodus of refugees
and [they] created a true and readily predictable humanitarian catastrophe:
860,000 refugees left their country after the bombings began. The main attacking
countries have received only 30,703 refugees, 3.6 percent of the number
they created by their bombings. The United States and the United Kingdom,
as a whole have received 0.9 percent.
"Two-thirds of the Bosnia refugees whose return had been planned
for this year have not returned and nobody is in charge. They wanted to
defend the Kosovar-Albanian people's human rights and prevent the so-called
ethnic-cleansing: those who are bombing have too many old and current sins
for anyone to believe in their sincerity...."
"The United States contributed 74 percent of the fighter planes,
and 97 percent of the airborne refueling planes. Ninety percent of the bombs
were ... U.S.-made. It used thousands of cruise missiles, deployed for the
first time its B-2 [Stealth bombers], and spent billions of dollars financing
almost the entirety of the operation."
I have just quoted Bruno Rodriguez, Cuban ambassador to the UN, who dared
to tell the NATO countries to their faces the truth about the real results
of the so-called "humanitarian" war.
2) A second way that we know that the "humanitarian" argument
of the government is false is that the majority of the killings, the worst
of the home burnings, and the greatest number of mass forcible deportations
of the Kosovars took place after the bombing began, which, according to
NATO Commander Wesley Clark, was "entirely predictable".
In other words, the U.S./NATO leaders knew what would happen if they
were to start bombing, and they did it anyway!
Noam Chomsky has an accurate summary of the extent of the human catastrophe
prior to the U.S./NATO bombing campaign: "There has been a humanitarian
catastrophe in Kosovo in the past year, overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslav
military forces. The main victims have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some
90 percent of the population of this Yugoslav territory. The standard estimate
is 2000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees."
The threat of NATO bombing led to a sharp increase of atrocities by Serbian
military and paramilitary forces and the departure of international observers.
The actual bombing itself led to the attempt to rid Kovovo of its Albanian
inhabitants.
3) A third response to the U.S. claim of "humanitarian motives"
is:"What hypocrisy!" Disastrous human crises-in terms of deaths,
suffering, and number of refugees-are going on now in many regions: Colombia
(with political killings by government and paramilitary forces equal to
the level in Kosovo, and the flight from those killings of over 1 million
people); Turkey (with political killings and harsh repression of Kurdish
peoples struggling for their national rights and the flight of over 1 million
from the countryside); Indonesia's killing of one-third of the people and
continued bloody repression of the East Timorese; Guatemala's genocide against
its indigenous peoples (with the murder of 200,000); the genocide against
the Tutsi ethnic minority of Rwanda-and these are only a few of the recent
and current human catastrophe's plaguing the world.
None of these has brought a bombing campaign to save its victims. Nor
would such a campaign have been the humanitarian way to solve these crisis.
Neither the United States nor NATO proposes to bomb the oppressors of the
Tutsis, the Mayan Guatemalans, the Timorese, the Kurds, the Palestinians,
the Colombian peasants. No, there is no proposal or action to bomb their
oppressors, because in all these cases the United States and /or NATO nations
were supporting the oppressors.
The hypocrisy consists in the fact that the victims of these catastrophes
are victims of the same powers that bombed Yugoslavia. Britain is the chief
weapon supplier of the Indonesian government, France supported the genocidal
regime in Rwanda, Germany is Turkey's second largest arms supplier.
The U.S. supports and supplies the repressive governments of Indonesia,
Turkey, Colombia, and Guatemala that wage wars against their own peoples
and was complicit in the disaster in Rwanda. It is the financial mainstay
of the State of Israel. Its economic policies are responsible for the fact
that impoverished countries pay enormous interest on debt, which is owned
largely by rich citizens of the United States, instead of using their resources
to develop their economies and fund their basic needs for food, shelter,
and medical care.
It must also be said: The human catastrophe in Iraq, including the deaths
of 5000 children each month, the proliferation of cancers and birth deformities
caused by the wholesale use of nuclear weapons in the form of depleted-uranium-coated
bombs and bullets, is the result of the U.S. war of bombings and sanctions
started in 1991 and continuing to this day. "Humanitarianism"
spoken by the authors of these disasters is the foulest hypocrisy!
4) For a fourth answer to the "humanitarian" cover story we
must go back in time to learn how the imperialist powers, in collaboration
with the Stalinist bureaucrats of Yugoslavia, set in motion the near ruin
of the economy. This set of events forms the only rational explanation (for
me) of how a multi-ethnic society could come unraveled and enter a spiral
of inter-ethnic wars.
I'll begin with a brief quote from the Left Business Observer's
article called "This Kosovo Thing."
The name of this article comes from a statement from President Clinton
that America must have a strong economic relationship that "includes
our ability to sell around the world", and that to have this relationship,
Europe "has got to be the key. And if we want people to share our burdens
of leadership with all the problems that will inevitably crop up, Europe
needs to be our partner. Now that's what this Kosovo thing is all about
... it's about our values."
A very revealing statement don't you think? But, let's explore these
values a bit more.
To quote again from the Left Business Observer: "It's no
mere detail that Yugoslavia came under the tutelage of the International
Monetary Fund in the early 1950s, and that the country borrowed heavily
and disastrously. Over the decades, the IMF promoted decentralization, competition,
and a weakening of development policies that favored poorer regions, and
the promotion of market principles. In the 1970s, market liberalization
and nationalism went hand-in-hand..."
What happened next? In the early 1980s the economic growth of Yugoslavia
slowed down. By the late 1980s there was a decline in the Gross Domestic
Product. By the early 1990s there was a severe economic crisis and a sharp
fall in all sectors of economic activity with employment down in all the
socialized sectors such as mining, agriculture, construction, etc.
A key statistic to illustrate the profound economic crises to hit Yugoslavia
is this: in 1979 the poverty rate was high, 19 percent, but by 1988 the
poverty rate was 60 percent.
A few other statistics: The 1994 infant mortality rate in Serbia was
21.4 deaths per 1000 live births. By 1997 there was a 40 percent unemployment
rate.
Between January 1992 and January 1994, according to an April article
in The Wall Street Journal of this year, "...what was left of
Yugoslavia endured the second highest and second longest hyperinflation
in world history. It peaked in January 1994, when the official monthly inflation
rate was 313 million percent."
Quoting further from this same article, "Long before NATO struck
Yugoslavia ... monetary madness had destroyed the economy. Wreck an economy,
then start a war. It's an age-old power-preservation ploy."
During this period of hyperinflation in Serbia, the per capita income
plunged over 50 percent. And during this time more than 80 percent of Yugoslavia's
budget was earmarked for military and police forces.
The inflation that destroyed the economy flowed directly from the Structural
Adjustment agenda set by the World Bank and imposed by the IMF. This is
how the United States and other NATO rich nations bear responsibility for
setting a process in motion which led to today's catastrophe.
The attack on the economy and destruction of the Yugoslavian currency,
the dinar, was combined with an assault on the economic and social gains
of the workers of Yugoslavia in the form of unemployment, ending of funding
for social services and support for housing, education, health services,
and pensions.
The transfer of federal revenues towards payment of the interest on the
national debt to international banks and financial institutions starved
the federal government of funds while it was paying interest over four times
the amount of the principle owed. The combined impact of the destruction
of the currency and the IMF shock therapy caused industrial growth across
Yugoslavia to plunge from over 3 percent annual growth to minus 11 percent.
Despite the mobilizations of hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavian workers
against their government's collusion with the IMF starvation plan in massive
strikes by miners, teachers, metalworkers, auto and arms workers, and others,
the Stalinist leaders attacked the workers movement, and set in motion a
vicious cycle of reactionary nationalism, in order to keep themselves in
power one way or another at the expense of their own people.
What does this have to do with the U.S./NATO "humanitarian"
cover story for its war? I think that the powerful corporations and financial
institutions that run this country and whom the government serves, caused
the poverty and economic hardship in Yugoslavia, through their loans, and
their demands for economic "shock therapy" to get repayment and
interest for those loans.
I think that poverty and hardship create the conditions where ethnic
hatred grows, especially if its fires are consciously fanned. And I think
that hatred was manipulated by a conscious Stalinist leadership-Milosevic,
Tudjman, and the others-which was trying to convert itself from being administrative
bureaucrats to being owners of newly privatized property.
I think that these facts explain that the "ethnic conflicts"
were deliberately inflamed and maintained by the imperialist countries with
their Stalinist junior partners as instruments to divide the working peoples
of the Balkans.
And if you agree that this explanation makes sense, then how could you
ever think that this cruel bombing campaign and occupation of Kosovo, has
anything at all to do with humanitarian principles.
5) A fifth refutation of the humanitarianism argument is the recent spectacle
of the corporations who funded the gala 50th anniversary celebration of
NATO, held in Washington, D.C.
The Washington Post reported "A dozen companies have paid
$250,000 apiece in ... contributions for the privilege of having their chief
executives serve as directors of the NATO summit's host committee. The group
is a private sector support system raising $8 million to finance the April
...event."
"...[M]any of the firms on the host committee sell precisely the
kinds of products most in demand...."
"Corporate support for the NATO summit is an outgrowth of the active
role many U.S. companies, particularly defense contractors such as Lockheed
Martin Corp ... have played in the move to enlarge NATO beyond its traditional
U.S.-Western Europe axis."
And U.S. defense contractors such as Raytheon, which makes the Tomahawk
cruise missiles, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing have all had big jumps in their
stock since the war began.
These war contractors are pleased to see their products in use, replaced,
and re-ordered by the U.S. military and the NATO, especially the new NATO
members. This is a clearer statement of the interests behind this war than
any of the manufactured reasons.
6) We should remember also, that all wars of aggression are given the
cover of "humanitarianism" by their perpetrators. Chomsky cites
a study of the record of so-called "humanitarian interventions"
and came up with these telling examples: Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's
invasion of Ethiopia, Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia, and of course
the U.S. war against Vietnam.
"Humanitarian" rhetoric is how these wars are sold to the people
who may be asked to fight them or pay for them. And while we in this room
certainly are not paying the price that our Kosovar and Serbian brothers
and sisters have and are continuing to pay, we are paying a heavy price
in terms of our society's use of precious resources, human and material.
7) I conclude this argument hoping to have convinced anyone who may have
been swayed by the "humanitarian" arguments of the government.
The real values the United States was fighting for in the bombing of Yugoslavia,
and now the occupation of Kosovo, are not the "democratic values"
touted by President Clinton.
No, the real meaning of the destruction of Yugoslavia's infrastructure,
including the bombing of Kosovo, was first, to teach the world who the world
policeman really is; and second, to let the world know that any resistance
to the imposition of the "values" of the self-appointed policeman
will be dealt with by any and all means available.
Third, to teach the world the meaning of imperialism's real values-that
is the right of imperialism and its institutions to take over and run the
banking and financial institutions of otherwise independent countries wherever
that serves its purposes; and fourth, to put America's capitalists in the
prime place when the spoils are divided among the imperialist powers.
The only humanitarian response to this war was to oppose it.
That is what San Francisco's Ad Hoc Coalition did in mounting two demonstrations,
a teach-in, endorsing, building, and speaking at the June 5 demonstration
in this city, mass publicizing of the first important labor opposition to
the war in the form of the resolution passed by the San Francisco Labor
Council, and sponsoring this meeting tonight.
The Ad Hoc Coalition also can take great pride in its defense of the
Kosovar people in its opposition to the war. The coalition never fell into
the trap of supporting or covering for Milosevic's brutal policies against
the Kosovars and other peoples in the former Yugoslavia.
Unfortunately, some sections of the antiwar movement felt that to oppose
U.S. and NATO aggression meant they had to cover for Milosevic and Serbia's
military. This was counter-productive in building a mass anti-war movement.
The very people who are revolted by Milosevic and his brutality to the
non-Serbian Balkan peoples are potential participants in the antiwar movement
against U.S. aggression.
Most antiwar and solidarity movements in the United States-including
against U.S. aggression in Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Cuba-have
been based on support for the rights of those nations to determine their
own destinies, free from outside intervention. The Albanian Kosovars also
have the right to self-determination, including independence from Serbia.
Now, they are occupied by NATO troops and every aspect of their existence
is being dictated by outsiders. The United States has no interest in, or
history of, supporting self-determination. The demand for the withdrawal
of U.S. and NATO forces is the precondition for self-determination of the
Kosovars and all the other Balkan nations.
 Alexander Cockburn
Co-editor, Counterpunch Magazine; Columnist, The Nation,
S.F. Examiner, & L.A. Times; Co-author, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs &
the Press
I think the two previous speakers have given a pretty good account of
the diplomatic lead up to the war, the way it was forced by the U.S. leading
the other NATO powers, and I think an excellent portrait of the economic
policies that induced chaos and division inside the former Yugoslavia.
So I'll be a bit more scattered in my observations-and not too long because
I think there are a lot of questions.
I mean, as always in left gatherings, a pessimistic tinge enters the
air, so I thought we might look at the good side a little bit. What did
the war demonstrate? It proved that everything we ever said about liberals
and social democrats is true.
It's gratifying, let face it. When I was reading Lenin in my teens, when
you got to the bit where Lenin is confidently expecting all the social democratic
parties in Europe to oppose the beginning of the First World War, and of
course then, first the German social democrats all voted to fight the war,
and then all the British social democrats voted, and then all the other
social democrats-and Lenin just couldn't believe it and filled several notebooks
with curses and cries of surprise and rage.
So we're kind of, at this point in the century, 1999, a little bit hardened.
But here we did have a spectacle where Europe-every single government there,
except for my own dear motherland of Ireland, which you can scarcely describe
as social democratic in elected government-were all social democrats: Spain,
Italy-social democrats and former communists-and, there they were, hollering
for war!
And of course, the second gratifying thing was to see Democrats here
behaving exactly as one might expect. After all, when we were talking in
the years of Vietnam we'd point out, you know, that the national security
state, the intellectuals who really argued for the war in Vietnam, who devised
many of its vilest policies, who engineered killing which finished off maybe
two million people in Southeast Asia, many of them were or could be described
as liberals.
You know, whether they were the Council on Foreign Relations liberals
or New Republic liberals, I mean there are many stripes of liberals in the
zoo. But, then of course, after the debacle and horror of Vietnam, liberals
weren't quite so feisty for war for a while; they, you know-well, some of
them were.
The New Republic, I don't think a week has passed without shouting
for a war somewhere; they have long-distance war lust.
But, I think what we've found with this war is that at last a lot of
liberals who had previously been a little decorous in their blood lust,
really came out from under cover.
And you saw an amazing stretch of opinion. And, I'll tell you what, it
is a pity, I'm sad that Lerner wasn't here. I mean he signed the letter,
I think, urging Albright forward.
You had other people, like Susan Sontag, joining with people like Brezinski.
And I think what you see there is the real continuance of the old Cold War;
the Democratic Party -I wouldn't call it a wing-it's most of the body, most
of both wings.
In fact, among the Democrats, we should note that there was some quite
heroic resistance to the war by 26 Democrats in the House led by Denis Kusinich,
who is by origin-I mean talk about long distance-I met Denis when he was
the mayor of Cleveland in the late 1970s, fighting a battle against the
businessmen of Cleveland who were trying to nab the municipally owned utility,
successfully.
And here was Denis, who is an Irish Croat by origin, fighting successfully,
actually-and we should note this again-Congress never assented to the war.
Well, you could say, "so what," and you'd have a certain point.
But, it was important and had that war gone on I think you would have seen
the possibility of the suit brought by Tom Campbell in federal court, saying
that Clinton had abused the Constitution, Article I-on war-making powers
stolen from Congress-which might have gone somewhere.
You had the fact that the War Powers Act of 1973, which was brought through
after revelations of the bombing in Cambodia-they always called it the "secret"
bombing of Cambodia. Secret bombings are bombings the U.S. press doesn't
write about a lot-everybody else knows.
The Cambodians knew. They absolutely knew on day one that they were being
bombed by B52s-they're very smart people! And they went on the radio-you
can actually dig out the transcript which was made available through the
CIA. The Cambodians said, "We're being bombed, we're being bombed by
the United States, this is wrong." That was a secret war!
You'll remember that when a New York Times correspondent mentioned
this secret war in The New York Times in passing, like paragraph
nine, Kissinger was so outraged that he began the wiretapping that led,
ultimately, to the whole Watergate scandal.
So the U.S. government never liked secret wars to be discussed. But that
did produce the War Powers Act, which said that the president really had
to provide a pretty good account of himself after 60 days, otherwise Congress
could say no.
Well, he didn't, and so there was enough resistance, which brings me
to the third interesting piece of news, which is we discovered, at least
I did, a lot of good friends on the right in this war. The right wing are
mostly against it, and I wrote somewhere, and I think it's true, that the
best light on the horizon was the old Republican isolationist tradition.
They don't want the wars.
Now, most of you may feel that you just can't ever feel any relish for
anything Pat Buchanan says, but some of the most spirited, articulate, nicely
phrased, and well researched denunciations of this war came from people
who normally speak in the language of beasts.
There's a monster columnist on the Boston Herald who's an absolute
animal normally; he wrote terrific stuff against the war. Robert Novack,
the Prince of Darkness-we used to call him that-wrote magnificent denunciations
of the war.
And the fact is that I think that Clinton and the others felt a real
serious possibility that they could lose the Congress. This was a war fought
by them against time. I'll come back to that because I think until quite
near the end, in terms of organizing, in terms of possible rebuffs to this
whole mighty war machine, the prospects didn't look too bad until the Serbs
were sold out by poor, pathetic, powerless Russia.
What other things were good news? Well, all our suspicions of the War
Crimes Tribunal were soundly confirmed. Not to be confused of course with
the World Court, the Special Tribunal on War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia
was put together by the UN Security Council; the judges appointed by the
UN Security Council; the prosecutor is Louise Arbour, a Canadian judge.
And some people said, from the word go, this is a totally partial tribunal;
the game is rigged. It was interesting, on March 16 of this year The
New York Times published actually a very interesting story by, of all
people, Ray Barnard, who many of you will remember for his work in Central
America, for which he nearly got fired by The New York Times.
Barnard actually has written some pretty awful stuff in recent years,
but this was a good story. He said that the tribunal had been considering
evidence of war crimes in the single biggest ethnic cleansing of the '90s
before this war-well, of the single biggest flight-which was what? Of Serbs!
Serbs from the Krajina, where-numbers vary-you see estimates ranging from
about 250,000 to 500,000.
Serbs were driven out of the Krajina by the Croats with the active help
and participation of the U.S. ambassador, Galbraith, and a team of recently
retired high Pentagon officials forming a private company to advise the
Croats on how to do a really sound bit of ethnic cleansing. Although the
Croats are pretty good at this, I must say, if you look at the historical
record.
It said in this New York Times story that Arbour was considering
evidence and testimony that war crimes had been perpetrated by these Croat
officers, bombing civilians, driving all before them.
Now, if the Tribunal is to be seen or was to be seen as anything other
than a star chamber, they would have said okay, let's indict a few Croats
for balance, but they didn't, and the story disappeared. It was the only
time I've seen actually on the front page of the New York Times a
reference to the ethnic cleansing of Krajina.
And what happened next? Right exactly at the moment that NATO powers
wanted to give a little goose-up to public support for the war, which was
flagging, the polls were heading down, no one liked it particularly.
And, of course most people here weren't particularly involved except
on CNN-you watch a bunch of idiots saying that stuff and that's it. Your
children aren't going to go and be sent to fight in it; I mean a few are
from the height of 35,000 feet dropping high explosives on people, but it's
not exactly seriously dangerous work.
At that moment what happens? The tribunal indicts Milosevic.
Now, simultaneously, another good bit of news, there was some good work
done by lawyers in three different countries to indict Clinton. They sent
papers to the tribunal, to Louise Arbour.
Of course, she's not going to blot her copybook for a minute. She's
hoping to get a seat on the Canadian Supreme Court, and you don't get that
way by indicting the NATO leaders. It's not a sort of wise career option,
really.
But really, I think we can see that is the end, to me, totally, of any
credibility. Not that I particularly thought there was any for most people
credibility to the Tribunal, which I think is a thoroughly sinister enterprise-these
growing demands for world courts of justice are a very bad thing in my view,
a very bad thing.
If you were a right-wing audience you'd be on your feet at that one,
I'll tell you, because if there's one thing that sends right wingers and
isolationists to their feet it's talk about the world court. And I sort
of sympathize.
You know, what goes out the window? Jury trials go out the window and
it's just another piece of international arbitration by judges picked by
the NATO leaders. Is that a venue?
More good news. I think, basically, that the level of knowledge among-I'll
say our side, since I think it is pretty much now that the one guy who was
going to speak against it isn't here-unless there's someone now so intimidated
that they are hiding under their seat.
Okay, I know, we're all disappointed, but there it is. We tried for debate.
We can have an internal dialectical process in our heads. But I think that
the level of knowledge here was pretty good.
I've never been an enormous fan of the internet owing to my enormous
technical incompetence, but my trusty co-editor, Jeffrey Sinclair there,
co-editor of Counter Punch, we've pulled down an enormous amount
of stuff.
In our newsletter we were able to print all the targets hit by NATO,
we were able to evaluate all the civilian casualties caused by the bombing
inside Serbia-around 2000 as people say. People were well educated on the
war and I think in many ways the incredible campaign in some of the media,
not all.
One of the most vitriolic and long-ranging propaganda campaigns in my
memory was circumvented to a large extent. And what an incredible propaganda
campaign it's been. It's gone on for about 10 years now, displaying utter
lack of knowledge of the Balkans, absolutely no knowledge of Balkan history.
Time and again you see this mad comparison of the Serbs to-of Milosevic
to Hitler and the Serbs to Hitler's willing executioners. You would have
never have known that the Serbs were on the receiving end of terrible German
purges. You know, a million of them lost their lives in Jasenovac concentration
camp.
None of this was known, you know, but I think that most people were able
to obtain a good deal of know-ledge. I spoke a few times and was always
agreeably surprised of how up people were on the facts and how in a way
they didn't seem to be mind-sotted by hours of CNN and Wolf Blitzer.
Anyway, so those are some items of uplifting news. What's the bad news?
The bad news is, of course, NATO did win. I don't think that they won....
[inaudible]
The whole point about bombing-bombing doesn't achieve much militarily,
but it just kills a bunch of civilians. And, of course, what the bombings
have done and will do is exactly what happened in Iraq-and they've discovered
this-it's absolutely lethal.
You can destroy infrastructure, you bomb hospitals, water purification
plants, sewage facilities and, you know, the death toll will start picking
up. Life expectancy of kids will go down, infant mortality will increase,
and you'll in the end get those absolutely horrifying figures of the mortality
rate in Iraq. It will happen in Serbia.
What have we got now? We've got Kosovo, which is going to be the scene
of rivalries, and death squads, and shootings, and revenge slayings at a
horrible level for years to come.
We've got Serbia, which is now an economic basket case; we've got Bulgaria,
which is losing $2 million a month in lost trade down the Danube; we've
got ever rapacious firms in the West trying to get a bit of the reconstruction
action.
What have we got to figure out? Small countries have to figure out how
to shoot down bombers, that's for sure-they really have to. In our latest
issue of Counter Punch we have a good issue on that.
And finally, we have to go on fighting back against this tendency to
substitute NATO for the UN, undeclared wars by the executive branch from
properly discussed foreign policy. We've got to continue informing people.
I think the peace movement put on a good show.
I think, you know, the structural reality is that we do live in a uni-polar
world. Russia is a pygmy now and they could not stand up for Serb interests
against NATO powers. Those are the equations, and those are my thoughts,
so let's get on with your questions and talk. Thank you.
Socialist Action /July 1999 |