BY GREG ROSENBERG
The warring gangs running the rival regimes in the
former Yugoslavia have expanded the Balkans war anew. With
the taking of Srebrenica, the misnamed United Nations "safe
haven," rightist Serb forces operating in Bosnia unleashed
a new wave of so-called ethnic cleansing, expelling tens of
thousands of residents of the enclave while carrying out
mass murder, imprisonment, and rape.
The chief imperialist powers - Washington, Paris, London, and Bonn - are being drawn willy-nilly toward greater military intervention in the Balkans war. The latest developments shattered the pretense that the imperialist troop deployments in Bosnia, under UN cover, have anything to do with protecting civilian populations. The fiasco left the "allies" blaming each other and scrambling for plans enabling each to defend rival interests. A proposal to withdraw the UN troops is now being bandied about more prominently.
The capitalist governments are at pains to avoid the political consequences of their national armies receiving large casualties on the Balkan battlefields. But each of the options they are now fractiously debating will impel them deeper into the 39-month-old conflict, which has left hundreds of thousands dead and made millions of working people into refugees.
The three main "options" for Washington and other NATO members, as summarized by the New York Times, are "exit and arm," "stay and strengthen," or "storm and conquer." The envisioned "exit" option involves introducing 60,000 new troops - 25,000 of them U.S. GIs - to bail out the UN soldiers.
Srebrenica was one of six so-called safe havens for mostly Muslim civilians within the 70 percent of Bosnia that is controlled by Bosnian Serb rightist Radovan Karadzic. Of the others, Zepa was about to fall to Karadzic's forces at press time; Gorazde, with 60,000 residents, was widely expected to be the next target.
The military and diplomatic difficulties facing the Contact Group - Washington, Bonn, London, Moscow, and Paris were underlined July 18, when Bosnian government troops defending Zepa declared they would use Ukrainian troops stationed under the UN flag there as human shields against the advancing Bosnian Serb rightists. Karadzic's forces, on the other hand, warned they would kill eight Ukrainians they are holding at the first sight of any NATO aircraft.
The Croatian regime in Zagreb is now openly preparing a major assault on Serb forces holding the Krajina region within Croatia. Milan Martic, leader of the "Republic of Serbian Krajina," threatens to launch missiles against Croatian cities in response.
Bonn deploys Tornadoes, troops
The German government took another step into the Balkan
war on July 18, transferring 14 Tornado fighter-bombers to
an Italian air base for use in Bosnia. The Tornadoes will
be accompanied by 1,500 German personnel.
German troops have not been deployed in combat in 50 years. While there is no immediate projection to send ground troops to Bosnia, the German ruling class decision to press forward on using its military capability touched off a widespread debate. Parliament approved the dispatch of the warplanes by a vote of 386 to 258 June 30. At least 50 Social Democratic deputies broke ranks with their party leadership to vote for the deployment.
Bonn is not alone in attempting to use the war to advance its military and political interests in that part of Europe, despite myriad hesitations.
In the wake of Srebrenica's fall, Paris threatened again to withdraw its troops unless reinforcements were sent to Gorazde. French president Jacques Chirac derided Washington for being unwilling to fork over ground troops, and compared the actions of the "allies" to the appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Paris demanded additional British troops to Gorazde, along with 100 U.S. military helicopters to transport the soldiers.
Chirac's "tough, bluff, stance," wrote John Ridding in the July 18 London Financial Times, enables Paris to "stake a claim for the moral high ground should the UN be forced to withdraw - an increasingly likely prospect." But, he added, "the immediate effect-was to draw the fire of the British government."
London expressed its displeasure in no uncertain terms. Some 300 UK soldiers are stationed at Gorazde. "If we judge it necessary for the safety of British troops, the response would not be to reinforce them but to withdraw them," declared Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind. Moscow, which backs the Serbian regime, warned of trouble if new troops are introduced.
Clinton calls for air strikes
The Clinton administration announced a "new" plan July
18 - large-scale air strikes under NATO auspices on Bosnian
Serb-held areas.
U.S. officials made clear that whatever steps they take in Bosnia will not be constrained by the system they had agreed to earlier, whereby Paris, London, and Moscow - under UN cover - could veto U.S. military moves. "We are not going to ask the UN's permission for Americans to do anything in Bosnia," declared Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke.
President Bill Clinton is under fire from wings of the ruling class who castigate him for failure to provide results in Bosnia. Senate majority leader Bob Dole, the most consistent of these, has introduced a Senate resolution that would ignore the arms embargo on the Bosnian government, and would provoke a sharp fight with London and Paris.
For years, capitalist politicians and media have droned on that the conflict in Yugoslavia is a result of "age-old ethnic rivalries." This self-serving lie helps prop up the imperialist support for a partition plan to divide the various republics up into "ethnically" designated fragments. It also provides political cover for the imperialist troops, currently wearing UN hats, inside the different republics. These troops are an obstacle to workers and farmers forging a movement capable of stopping the war.
The war in the former Yugoslavia, however, has nothing to do with ethnicity. It is a result of the breakup of the Stalinist regime in Belgrade. As that process accelerated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, rival gangs of privileged bureaucrats consolidated in different regions of the country. Seeking to grab land, secure positions, and get rich, these would-be capitalists began rallying support through nationalist demagogy that undercut the solidarity working people had forged through the Yugoslav revolution in the 1940s.
As weakened as that solidarity was by decades of Stalinist misrule, even under the blows of a devastating war not all working-class resistance to the course of the respective Yugoslavian regimes has been muted. In Belgrade July 5, several dozen women dressed in black held a protest carrying signs reading, "No forced mobilization," and "Desertion is an alternative to war." The regime of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic has been rounding up thousands of Serbian refugees from Bosnia and Croatia and conscripted them into rightist Serb armies.
Tens of thousands seeking to avoid that fate have gone into hiding. A 28-year-old man born in what is now the Serb held region of Croatia said, "The police want to send me into a situation where I will have to kill or be killed. They want me to go back and defend not a country, but an undemocratic regime. The way for me to defend the real interests of my people at this moment is to desert."