BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
Imperialist occupation forces in Bosnia are expanding
their military operations there after NATO troops took over
six police stations in Banja Luka. Some 350 British and
Czech soldiers stormed the facilities August 20 unannounced,
while U.S. Apache helicopter gunships hovered overhead.
The attack came one week after Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon announced a buildup of 11,000 - 12,000 U.S. GIs in Bosnia. "It's a planned increase, and it's done for a reason," he asserted August 14. Bacon said advanced units of the U.S. Army's Second Armored Calvary, based in Fort Polk, Louisiana, would begin moving from a staging base in Hungary into Bosnia in time for the mid-September municipal elections there.
The NATO troops confiscated assault rifles, rocket launchers, and hand grenades in a drive to disarm the Bosnian Serb military forces. U.S. Gen. Eric Shinseki, commander of NATO forces in Bosnia, had announced a plan for the Serb units to disband or face arrest. U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, who helped organize the imperialist intervention, said that not having control over the paramilitary units "was a failure on our side."
Clinton administration officials said the paramilitary units would be treated as combat troops and placed under NATO control. U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's supreme commander, bellowed, "I'm not setting a time limit, I'm saying turn yourself in."
The latest NATO assault was preceded by two coordinated attacks on July 10 when British troops backed by warplanes killed one Serb and seized another man in Prijedor. The operations were organized to arrest the two men who were named in secret indictments in March by the imperialist "war crimes tribunal" in The Hague, Netherlands.
Imperialists use Biljana Plavsic
NATO forces seized the cop stations in Banja Luka, two
days after 300 British soldiers conducted a search of the
facilities under the pretext of looking for evidence of
electronic eavesdropping on Bosnia Serb president Biljana
Plavsic by her political rivals. Washington has engineered a
split between Plavsic and chauvinist leader Radovan
Karadzic, who has been indicted as an alleged war criminal.
Plavsic, described by the capitalist media as a "fervent
Serb nationalist," was expelled from the Serbian Democratic
Party (SDS) on July 20. SDS is the ruling group in the part
of Bosnia under control of pro-Belgrade Serbs.
Formerly Karadzic's vice president and one of his strongest supporters throughout the war in Bosnia, Plavsic called for new parliamentary elections, now scheduled for October 12.
Plavsic has recently rallied thousands of Bosnian Serbs and others in Banja Luka to support her side, exploiting widespread sentiments of mistrust toward Karadzic, whom many Bosnians consider one of the chief architects of 1992-95 war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. But her base among Bosnian Serbs is thin, since she is identified as a pawn of U.S. imperialism. The August 27 New York Times quoted an anonymous UN official describing Plavsic as "a creature of our creation."
Washington has thrown its weight behind Plavsic who recently met with Bosnian Serb commanding generals to win their support. Only a few hundred of the 40,000-strong Bosnian Serb police force are reportedly backing her. U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) officials said they are planning to deliver $60 million in aid to Plavsic for private enterprises in the area around Banja Luka, the largest city in Bosnian Serb territory. Gen. Pero Colic, chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb armed forces loyal to Belgrade, ignored Plavsic's summons to meet with her August 25.
"Plavsic is in the right, is the right person who is trying to implement Dayton, and is the person who believes in democracy," said Robert Gelbard, chief U.S. diplomat for Bosnia. He was referring to the so-called peace accord Washington forced the warring factions in Yugoslavia to sign in October 1995 at a U.S. military base in Dayton, Ohio. The agreement set the stage for the current partition of Bosnia and for the invasion of the republic by tens of thousands of NATO troops. It also called explicitly for the reestablishment of a "free market," that is capitalist property relations, in Bosnia.
Gelbard authorized the attack on the police station after meeting with Plavsic and Shinseki.
`We have cut the enclave'
The NATO move is part of Washington's plan to slice the
Bosnian territory held by pro-Belgrade forces into two parts
run by parallel governments. This can make it easier for
imperialist troops to extend their control over most of
Bosnia. "It's a gamble, and a very risky one," said an
unnamed United Nations official who was quoted in the August
21 New York Times. "We have cut the enclave into two
factions and we don't yet know how all this will play out."
The war moves by Washington and its imperialist allies come as the capitalist rulers state that they have not made much headway toward their goal of overturning the workers state and reestablishing capitalist social relations in Bosnia or anywhere else in Yugoslavia, after 19 months of military occupation. "The circumstances that exist now amount to a failure of Dayton," said one Clinton administration official. "We're behind schedule."
Capitalist politicians and spokespeople for big business are openly debating the risks of moving to capture Karadzic, whom they describe as an obstacle to their aims. According to the August 27 New York Times, USAID officials "argue that wresting more power from Karadzic and his supporters, at this point, would be too difficult." Democratic Sen. Carl Levin called for the U.S. military to use the broadcasting equipment the Pentagon employed for propaganda purposes in preparation for past invasions - such as "Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada" in 1983, "Operation Desert Storm" against the people of Iraq in 1991, and the 1994 "Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti."
Meanwhile, many among the Bosnian Serbs are expressing opposition to the imperialist intervention force. "This is an occupation," remarked a passerby during a television interview with Serb Radio and Television (SRT). The station broadcasted a letter by Pero Colic, the Bosnian Serb army commander, who sent NATO officials a warning that his force would "not sit back with their hands folded" and watch them split Serb-controlled territory. SRT recently aired a show mixing images of NATO soldiers guarding the police stations in Banja Luka and Nazi troops in Croatia during World War II.