BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
As Washington and other capitalist powers continue to deploy their armies in Bosnia and surrounding republics, military officials are beginning to state openly that the imperialist operation will last well beyond the end of 1996. Lt. Gen. Michael Walker, British army commander of NATO land forces in Bosnia, told his aides he thinks two years is the right time frame. "Only if NATO is willing to stay longer in Bosnia will there be solid ground," wrote the editors of the Economist, joining the chorus for longer imperialist .
"To finish this operation well, we will need the United States throughout, not just in the first act," a French senior officer told the Washington Post. "You must excuse me if I seem to value a real solution in Bosnia over the re- election of President Clinton," he said. When the Dayton agreement was forced on the warring parties in Yugoslavia, Clinton vowed to pull U.S. troops out of the 60,000-strong NATO military operation by November 1996.
But the imperialists' goal of overthrowing the workers state in Yugoslavia and reestablishing capitalism there will most likely not be accomplished by the end of 1996. The invading capitalist powers in Washington, Bonn, London, and Paris will meet resistance as they attempt to wipe out the gains of the massive popular revolution that swept the country in the 1940s.
During that time, the Partisan movement united workers and peasants from all nationalities in Yugoslavia to defeat the occupying forces of Hitler's Germany as well as local landlords and capitalists. The revolutionary mobilization of the toilers enabled the new government led by Josip Tito to confiscate the property of the great landowners and take other anticapitalist measures, including instituting a state monopoly of foreign trade and expropriating the basic means of production.
Despite the degeneration of the revolution as a result of Tito's Stalinist policies, many of the gains of the workers and peasants remain in place, including the non- capitalist property forms and especially the class consciousness of millions of working people who view themselves as Yugoslavs.
Today, many people throughout Yugoslavia are opposed to the divisions wrought by the chauvinist factions in their grab for territory and resources that began in 1991. This has been most graphically demonstrated in the city of Sarajevo, where tens of thousands of citizens of Serbian origin, as well as Croatians, fought for three and a half years to defend their city side by side with their Muslim brothers and sisters against the cutthroat gangs of Belgrade- backed Serbs.
The big-business press, of course, never refers to these facts when it reports on thousands of Serbs leaving the Sarajevo suburb of Ilizda before the area comes under the control of the Bosnian government.
But even in the pages of the bourgeois dailies one can occasionally distill examples of this resistance to the "ethnic cleansing" drives led mainly by the Serbian and Croatian regimes.
"The good people here never supported what happened to our neighbors," Marko Salvarica, a farmer of Serbian origin in the rural town of Ljubinje in southern Bosnia, told the New York Times. He was explaining his opposition to the expulsion from the town of his Muslim neighbors by Serbs loyal to chauvinist leader Radovan Karadzic. According to the January 18 Times article Salvarica said "some in the town had been misled by extremists" and that Muslims and Croats "could begin to return."
Clamor for manhunt of war criminals
The Clinton administration, meanwhile, is trying to use
the widespread disgust with those responsible for the
slaughter in Bosnia to justify its drive toward war in the
Balkans. The latest imperialist propaganda blitz has come
under the cover of organizing a manhunt for alleged war
criminals. According to Newsweek, U.S. national security
adviser Anthony Lake and UN representative Madeline Albright
have "pushed hard" for such investigations. "The dead cry
out; U.S. troops are headed into a broader mission," read
the headline of that February 5 Newsweek article, which also
stated that some in the military shudder "over the prospect
of Somalia-style `mission creep.' "
John Shattuck, U.S. assistant secretary of state for human rights, argued that capturing war criminals is "an essential part of the peace process." Shattuck and two officials from the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague toured areas in late January where thousands of Bosnians were reportedly killed and buried by Belgrade- backed Serbs. The tribunal was created by imperialist forces in the United Nations in 1993, when atrocities committed by the warring gangs in Yugoslavia sparked world outrage.
Using chief prosecutor Richard Goldstone - a prominent South African jurist - as cover for its so-called war crimes investigations, Washington is debating how to pursue individuals who are considered obstacles to its imperialist aims. The tribunal has indicted 7 Croats and 45 Serbs, including Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic. The New York Times reported that only Dusko Tadic, a Serb, has been arrested and is in custody so far.
While Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic sent Serb guards to accompany Shattuck during his investigation, Belgrade has ignored requests to arrest Mladic and Karadzic. The two have been indicted by the imperialist tribunal on charges of genocide for the massacre of thousands of Bosnians at Srebrenica.
U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili is reportedly adamantly opposed to U.S. troops arresting the two indicted Serb leaders at the moment. According to the Times, Pentagon officials say Shalikashvili is "spooked" by Washington's military experience in Somalia, since the arrests of Serb leaders or "even rank and file officers could bring retaliation against NATO forces." Eighteen GIs were killed in an attempt to capture one Somalian during the imperialist military occupation of that country.
Meanwhile, during the last two weeks in January, more than 500 prisoners have been released from all sides in the conflict. The Dayton accord required all prisoners to be freed by January 19, but the Bosnian government said 24,000 people are still unaccounted for. A protest was organized January 29 in Tuzla, where several hundred women broke into the Red Cross office demanding the return of missing relatives.
There are about 2.5 million people who fled their homes during the three-and- a-half-year war. So far, only a few hundred have returned. On January 26, Bonn decided to begin deportations in July of the 320,000 Bosnian refugees in Germany.
Seven NATO soldiers killed so far
In other developments, three British troops were killed
January 28 when a mine detonated ammunition inside their
armored vehicle while traveling in northwestern Bosnia.There
are an estimated 3 million mines in Yugoslavia.
A soldier from Sweden was also killed January 28 when his personnel carrier crashed in a river elsewhere in northwestern Bosnia. Seven NATO soldiers have been killed in accidents since the NATO military mission in Bosnia began in December.
The imperialist military intervention in the Balkans took another twist when the Turkish government announced January 22 that Gen. Ersim Yaltsin of the Turkish army and Bosnian army commander Gen. Rasim Delic signed an agreement under which Turkish forces will train Bosnian soldiers.
White House officials say the Clinton administration will offer Ankara about $220,000 in military exchanges to the United States this year, to supplement the Turkish government. The estimated cost of the training program is more than $300 million.
At the same time, Washington is demanding that the Iranian government, which supplied arms to Bosnia during the war, have no military role there. Brig. Gen. Dzemal Merdan, the head of the training and development of the Bosnian army, was instrumental in establishing the 7th Muslim Brigade of Bosnian soldiers, who were trained by fighters from Iran's Revolutionary Guards.