BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND MARTÍN KOPPEL
U.S.-led NATO forces unleashed a heavy bombing campaign
against Yugoslavia March 24, launching dozens of cruise
missiles that wreaked destruction in Kosova and Serbia,
including near Belgrade, Yugoslavia's capital. The opening of
the attack followed a White House ultimatum to the Serbian
government of Slobodan Milosevic to accept a NATO military
occupation force in Kosova and other conditions demanded by
Washington. The military assault is the biggest in Europe since
World War II.
Several hours into the bombing, U.S. president William Clinton made a televised statement justifying the war action as in "America's national interest." The attack is needed to maintain "stability in Europe," he declared, evoking the specter of waves of Albanian refugees, social instability, and a wider war throughout the region.
The bombing campaign will "demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's purpose," the U.S. president emphasized. Not attacking Yugoslavia now would weaken "NATO, the cornerstone on which our security has rested for 50 years now." He argued that the lesson of the first and second world wars was that if U.S. forces did not intervene now, it would lead to a wider conflict in Europe.
As with all other U.S. assaults during his administration, Clinton wrapped the bombing of the Yugoslav workers state in the mantle of humanitarian concern and peace. "We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo," he stated. Clinton portrayed the U.S. target as "a dictator in Serbia who has done nothing since the Cold War ended but start new wars and pour gasoline on the flames of ethnic and religious division."
Washington and its imperialist allies are using the assault to deepen NATO military intervention into the formerly federated Yugoslav workers state and tighten their encirclement of Russia. Posing as defenders of the national rights of Albanians in Kosova, they aim to use military might to accomplish what they've been unable to do by other means: bring closer the day of reestablishing the domination of capitalist social relations throughout Yugoslavia and deal another blow to Moscow, which has supported the regime in Serbia.
Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov abruptly canceled his visit to the United States March 24, turning his plane back to Moscow as it was approaching U.S. shores, to protest the NATO assault on Yugoslavia. Primakov had scheduled high-level talks on securing loans from the International Monetary Fund. Over the next day, the Russian government suspended its "Partnership for Peace" collaboration with NATO, recalled its envoy to the Atlantic imperialist alliance, and announced it was ready to safeguard security in the region by any means, including military steps.
The Russian government has been on a collision course with Washington over expansion of NATO into Eastern and Central Europe; the incessant campaign of U.S. assaults on Iraq; and U.S. attempts not only to dominate the oil in the former Soviet republics of the Caspian Sea region, but to establish a stronger line of influence and pressure across the southern flank of Russia -from the Caspian all along the Silk Road. The U.S.-run NATO has already taken major steps towards repositioning troops and military hardware in Europe closer to Russia's borders. Poland and Hungary, which along with the Czech Republic joined NATO March 12, have borders with former Soviet republics.
Sham of `peace plan'
The U.S. government attack received bipartisan support,
including among critics of the Clinton administration's foreign
policy. In a Senate debate the day before the bombing, "most
Democrats insisted that air strikes were necessary and
inevitable," the New York Times reported. Other senators
initially voiced reservations about U.S. stakes in the Balkan
conflict. As the bombing appeared imminent, most big-business
politicians closed ranks.
Interviewed on CNBC immediately after Clinton's speech, liberal Democratic congressman Robert Rush of Chicago compared Milosevic to Adolf Hitler and said he would "support the president. The president is doing the right thing."
The U.S. government must "take action to stop this rolling genocide," stated Republican senator Charles Hagel. "Whatever reservations about the President's actions in the Balkans," said Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, who earlier had helped lead the impeachment drive against Clinton, he would "stand united behind our men and women who are bravely heeding the call of duty."
The Senate passed a resolution March 23 backing the bombing campaign. In the 58-41 vote, 16 Republicans joined all but 3 of the Senate's 45 Democrats in backing Clinton's actions.
U.S. officials have repeatedly declared their opposition to independence for Kosova, a goal that today is supported by most Albanians as a way to end their second-class status under the chauvinist Serbian regime. About 90 percent of the two million inhabitants of Kosova are Albanian; 8 percent are Serbs; and the rest are Turks, Gypsies, and other nationalities. The Clinton administration has used Belgrade's war against the Albanians' struggle for self-determination as a pretext for its military intervention, while letting the Milosevic regime do the dirty work of attempting to crush the independence movement.
Washington is trying to establish a NATO occupation army inside Serbia and Montenegro - which now comprise the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia - using the cover of a political accord it seeks to impose on both warring parties in the Kosova conflict. The rulers of the United States hope to deal a debilitating blow to the Serbian regime and disarm the Albanian independence fighters.
"Bluntly put, they want to kill enough Serbs and destroy enough of their war machine to prevent the defeat of a much less powerful rebel force, but not so many that the rebels will be emboldened to press for victory themselves," wrote Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman March 23.
The ultimate objective of Washington, London, and other imperialist powers -sweeping away the remaining gains of the Yugoslav socialist revolution of the mid-1940s - cannot be accomplished short of using ground troops and defeating working people in huge class battles.
After two rounds of talks in France, four members of a Kosovar Albanian delegation finally signed a U.S.-dictated agreement -touted as a "peace plan" in the capitalist media - that calls for deploying a 28,000-member NATO military force in Kosova for three years. The accord demands the Kosova Liberation Army (UCK) disarm and abandon its struggle for independence in exchange for limited autonomy from Belgrade.
Balking at the proposed occupation force, the Belgrade government refused to sign the pact. Instead, Serbian army troops and paramilitary police units continued their offensive against the UCK and the Albanian population, shelling and torching villages throughout Kosova, and sparking a new wave of tens of thousands of refugees, many of whom fled to the capital city of Pristina. There are now an estimated 240,000 refugees in Kosova and the surrounding region.
Washington and its NATO allies responded by evacuating their 1,300 "monitors" from Kosova. Clinton sent his Balkans point man, Richard Holbrooke, to meet with Milosevic and issue the ultimatum of accepting the terms of the U.S.-sponsored agreement or face military assault.
Brutal assault, wave after wave
Beginning on the night of March 24, wave after wave of NATO
warplanes and missiles struck areas throughout Yugoslavia.
Explosions thundered in Pristina and around Belgrade. Missiles
reportedly hit an aircraft plant in Pancevo, six miles north of
Belgrade; Danilovgrad in the province of Montenegro; and the
Serbian towns of Kragujevac and Novi Sad, among others.
The Pentagon initially offered few details on the scope of the destruction. It portrayed the attack as one directed not at civilian centers but at the Serbian government's military defense facilities.
The U.S.-led assault relied on a large concentration of military forces in the region. Washington has six Navy ships in the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas armed with Tomahawk missiles, and London has a submarine in the region equipped with cruise missiles. NATO commanders deployed 430 warplanes in the region, 250 of them U.S. aircraft, including 12 stealth fighters based in Italy and three B-52 bombers based in Britain, as well as two B-2 stealth bombers.
NATO has a force of 12,000 in neighboring Macedonia under French command, including British, French, German, and Italian soldiers, which are supposed to be the first part of the 28,000 imperialist troops that would enforce the U.S.-dictated accord. There are about 6,200 U.S. troops in the Balkans, including 350 in Macedonia.
A year ago, Washington struck agreements with the government in Macedonia as part of Clinton's "action plan" to create a "security ring" around Yugoslavia. In addition to the expansion of NATO into neighboring Hungary, this has included the opening of a new NATO "training" base in southern Macedonia, the deployment of U.S. military advisers in Albania, and the steady presence of parts of NATO's Sixth Fleet in the Adriatic. The current military assault comes after substantial implementation of this plan.
The Serb regime had an estimated 30,000 troops inside Kosova, along with thousands more along the border. Serb forces total 114,000 troops.
As the NATO forces moved in for the assault, spokespeople for the imperialist governments voiced the ritual words of concern about "collateral damage," that is, the deaths and maiming of working people in Kosova and Serbia.
British prime minister Anthony Blair echoed Clinton in justifying the bombing of Yugoslavia. "We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women, and children," he declared, and "to save the stability of the Balkan region, where we know chaos can engulf the whole of the European Union." French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine supported the war moves arguing that every "peaceful" avenue had been exhausted. Italian foreign minister Lamberto Dini told the Italian Senate that Rome should support the military offensive, and if necessary "wipe out [Serbia's] military capability and also perhaps nonmilitary infrastructure as well." NATO warplanes are using Italian air bases. Likewise, German forces have also joined in the bombing.
At the same time, many government officials in European Union members countries, expressed nervousness that the NATO forces would, as a French official put it, "cross a threshold into a confrontation with no guarantees about the timing or nature of its outcome," including what would happen if the Serbian regime weathered the bombing campaign. They noted that one difference with the 1994-95 NATO bombing of Bosnia - which rapidly forced the Bosnian Serb forces to accept a U.S.-imposed deal - is that Belgrade's regular forces, especially those stationed in Serbia, have displayed a willingness to fight.
The Russian government, on the other hand, reacted sharply against the NATO assault on Yugoslavia.
Russian president Boris Yeltsin broke off Moscow's relations with NATO, recalling its representative to it. "What we have now is the intention of NATO to enter the 21st century wearing a uniform of a world policeman," Yeltsin stated.
Other politicians in Russia have called for military aid to Belgrade. "If we quickly supply them with S-300 [anti-aircraft] missile systems, and if they bring down a dozen American aircraft, the U.S. public will clamor against Clinton and this war will backfire on him," said retired general Alexandr Lebed, governor of the Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia.
The Chinese government also expressed its opposition to the NATO assault.
In the United States, top union officials fell into line behind the White House. Clinton gave an early version of his March 24 war speech the day before at the national convention of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and received warm applause from the gathering of officials and staffers.
Demonstrations in the United States
There were small scattered demonstrations in the United
States March 24. Albanian-American organizations in New York
and elsewhere rallied in support of the U.S.-led bombing,
arguing that it would protect the interests of the Albanian
population in Kosova and distributing flyers describing
Milosevic as the ultimate "evil." Serbian-American groups
opposed the assault while supporting the Milosevic regime's war
on the Kosovar Albanians.
A demonstration initiated by Workers World Party in New York condemned the NATO bombing but lent support to the Serbian regime and denounced the independence struggle in Kosova. In a statement announcing the protest, the International Action Center asserted that "the Yugoslav government is resisting the demands by the U.S. and NATO to dismember its country" and that the pro-independence UCK was armed and financed by the NATO powers.
A picket line of 125 people outside the White House the same day, initiated by the Washington Peace Center, was quickly dominated by a large group of Serbians opposed to the NATO bombings and supporting the Milosevic regime. Several carried buttons and T-shirts with the slogan "Proud to be Serbian." At one point, several of the Serbs circled Clive Turnbull, who was distributing a Socialist Workers Party statement demanding "Stop the bombing of Yugoslavia! Self-determination for Kosova Albanians!", and verbally assaulted him, saying he was "Albanian" and demanding, unsuccessfully, he leave the picket.
The struggle for Albanian self-determination that has erupted in Kosova over the past decade is a response to the systematic discrimination faced by the Albanian majority under the rule of Belgrade. In response to growing mass demonstrations by Albanian working people against austerity and for national rights, the Milosevic government revoked Kosova's limited autonomous status within Serbia in 1989 and imposed martial law. For several years the UCK has waged an armed struggle for independence. The savage repression unleashed by the Serbian regime has led most Kosovar Albanians to shift from supporting autonomy to favoring independence.
Most leaders of the political parties that predominate among Albanians in Kosova have voiced support for NATO intervention as the only way to protect the population in Kosova from repression by the Serb forces.
As with the earlier war in Bosnia, Washington is using the conflict in Kosova as a pretext to advance its own imperialist goals. In the early 1990s, the U.S. government sabotaged one initiative after another by the French, British, and German governments to act as power brokers in the Yugoslav workers state, where rival wings of the ruling bureaucratic caste were waging a savage war for land and power to maintain their parasitic existence. Washington successfully pushed for NATO air strikes in 1994 as the occupation force in Bosnia dominated by British and French troops, under a United Nations banner, faltered.
Following that NATO bombing, the Clinton administration pressured all the warring parties into a "peace" conference on a U.S. military base near Dayton, Ohio. Under the U.S.- orchestrated Dayton accord, Washington headed an occupation army of 60,000 NATO troops. About 6,700 U.S. troops lead the NATO occupation force in Bosnia to this day.
The current military assault, however, is already unleashing uncontrollable forces, as the reaction by Moscow shows, and can spark a wider conflict in the Balkans.