That editorial, which focused on condemning Washington's push to expand NATO by taking into membership Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, said, "The European NATO members are junior partners, taking their orders from the Pentagon. Take the current NATO deployment in the Balkans. There NATO, like a cop on the beat, is issuing ultimatums to President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia while right- wing extremists stage provocative demonstrations to destabilize his united front/socialist government which won a clear majority in recent elections."

The CPUSA has consistently echoed the rationalizations of the Stalinist regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, which the U.S. Stalinists support 100 percent. Back in 1992, the People's Weekly World ran articles arguing that Muslims in Bosnia are for the most part privileged heirs of the landlord class that ruled the region during the days of the Ottoman empire in an attempt to justify the carnage and the "ethnic cleansing" the Milosevic regime initiated in Yugoslavia. The CPUSA also supported the division of Bosnia into cantons - that is "autonomous" regions supposedly divided along national lines - as a way to stop the war. This proposal, put forward by the rival bureaucratic regimes in Serbia and Croatia, was part of their thinly veiled attempt to grab land and economic resources in Bosnia to support the bourgeois way of life of the castes they represent. It made it easier for Washington and Bonn to deepen their imperialist intervention into the Yugoslav workers state, impose the Dayton accord that partitioned Bosnia, and send NATO troops to occupy that Yugoslav republic.

As an aside, it's interesting to note that the Weekly World has run only one small news article on developments in Yugoslavia since the protests against the Milosevic regime erupted November 18. The Stalinist school of falsification has always displayed great contempt for the facts.

Who are the leaders of the opposition coalition?
Now let's take up several of Brand's questions.

Who leads the anti-Milosevic demonstrations? The main leaders of Zajedno, the opposition coalition, are certainly no friends of the working class. Vuk Drascovic and his Serbian Renewal movement have supported the return of the monarchy and ran a paramilitary unit during Belgrade's 1991 war against Croatia that did its own "ethnic cleansing" on the side of pro-Belgrade Serbs. Drascovic, a former official of the League of Yugoslav Communists that ruled Yugoslavia until it broke up in 1990, has been an ardent advocate of "Serbian nationalism" of the Milosevic brand. He is now trying to paint a more democratic facade by pointing to his opposition to some of the atrocities in Bosnia by Belgrade backers. He is also a supporter of the Dayton accord and of the imperialist "war crimes" tribunal in the Hague handing out indictments in Bosnia.

Zoran Djinjik of the Democratic Party, often described in the bourgeois press as a "German-educated philosopher," has been a pro-capitalist intellectual since the 1970s. In 1974 he was arrested and sentenced to several months in jail by the regime of Josip Tito for trying to form a student union independent of the control of the Yugoslav CP. During the war in Bosnia, he visited and lent his support to chauvinist pro-Belgrade Serbs in that Yugoslav republic and backed "ethnic cleansing." Like Drascovic, he also supports the Dayton accord. In recent months he has been advocating openly pro-imperialist policies and the return of capitalism in Yugoslavia.

Sociologist Vesna Pesic of the Civic Alliance is one of the junior partners in Zajedno. Espousing liberal pro- capitalist views, Pesic has consistently opposed Belgrade's nationalism and took part in the antiwar actions of 1991- 92.

Washington, Bonn, and other capitalist powers are on the lookout for finding someone among opposition who could replace Milosevic and head a more openly pro-imperialist regime; just like the regimes of Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia or Lech Walesa in Poland that came to power in Eastern Europe after 1989, replacing the previous Stalinist governments. The imperialist powers may eventually succeed in this quest in Serbia, but they do face difficulties in finding another Havel, as the bourgeois press readily admits.

We shouldn't forget, however, that the Milosevic administration - following the tradition and anti-working- class policies of the Bonapartist regime of Tito - was the main culprit for the slaughter in Yugoslavia and fully responsible for continuing to unravel the lasting gains working people made through the 1945 Yugoslav revolution.

Are most demonstrators "right-wing extremists?" Clearly not.

Some among the protesters do carry U.S. and German flags and embrace the reactionary views of Drascovic and Djinjik. Thousands would also rather see the capitalist profit system return to Yugoslavia. Some workers also espouse such views. Just like when Milosevic, Tudjman, and company organized along nationalist lines to justify grabbing territory and resources for personal gain they did find some support among layers of the population in each republic. Because of decades of Stalinist misleadership, the class consciousness of workers and farmers has been eroded. Many misidentify democracy with capitalism.

Students, workers stand up for democratic rights
But thousands of students, other young people, and many workers have come out into the streets for one simple reason: Regardless of their views on Milosevic or the opposition, they cannot tolerate declaring an election invalid just because the government did not like the fact that the opposition won a larger minority of city halls in the municipal ballot. Discontent over the government's economic and social policies - which continue to exacerbate the economic catastrophe facing working people in Serbia - also fuels the protests, as well as strikes and other labor actions that took place earlier in 1996.

The Zajedno coalition cannot rally the working class in Serbia into a general strike or other mass action that would bring down the regime, as the Militant has reported. Belgrade plays on the fact that hundreds of thousands of working people in Yugoslavia are opposed to imperialist intervention - whether in the form of German tanks and military advisers first sent by Bonn to Zagreb, or the subsequent sanctions slapped on Serbia and Montenegro by the United Nations, or the U.S.-led NATO occupation of Bosnia. This anti-imperialist consciousness among wide layers of working people is one of the lasting gains of the 1945 revolution.

But it's also a fraud to refer to the Milosevic regime, as the Weekly World cynically does, as a "united front/socialist government." The so-called united front is mainly composed of Milosevic's Socialist Party and the United Left, run by his wife. A junior partner, the tiny New Democracy party, is made up mainly of small businessmen who still see their interests tied to the regime. The rightist Serbian Radical Party has also backed the Milosevic "socialist government" in parliament.

The imperialist powers are surely working hard to try to take advantage of situation. No one knows how many agents the CIA or other imperialist institutions have deployed among the demonstrators. One can assume many - just like the FBI and other police agencies have done and continue to do at most significant social protests in the United States and other countries.

Resistance to the Stalinist and anti-working-class policies of Belgrade, however, as well as against Tudjman's antidemocratic measures in Croatia, are among the best counters to imperialist intervention under current conditions. This resistance shows that the working class in Yugoslavia is alive and has not been completely demoralized and atomized, as the bourgeois media constantly claims. And the Yugoslav workers state is not about to be picked up piece by piece and brought back into the capitalist system of exploitation - despite the bureaucratic degeneration of the 1945 revolution and the recent war.

The tanks, artillery, and ground troops of NATO are aimed against workers and students in the streets in Nis, Kragujevac, Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, and other Yugoslav cities who resisted the "ethnic cleansing" and the slaughter against tremendous odds and are not ready to be governed dictatorially by any bureaucrats - of the Stalinist or other variety. Washington, Bonn, London, and Paris will try to use their military might to overthrow the workers state in Yugoslavia, possibly using force and violence against many of the very same people they are demagogically praising for protesting in the streets today.

For this reason, the best help workers in the United States and other imperialist countries can give to our brothers and sisters in Yugoslavia - the best way to counter any "right-wing extremists" or imperialist agents among the protesters - is to demand that NATO and all imperialist troops get out of Yugoslavia now.

Working people in Yugoslavia will eventually take care of their need to put in power a government that represents their interests - just like they proved they are capable of doing through their accomplishments during the 1945 Yugoslav revolution.

- ARGIRIS MALAPANIS  
 
 
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