BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
"We just came back from the demonstration. It was one of the largest in Pristina. Some people said it was up to 200,000. We marched at the center of the city. We demonstrated against the terror by the Serbian regime, for peace, and for independence of Kosovo." That's how Miljat Cakaj, a member of the Independent Students Union (UPS) at the University of Pristina, described the April 9 mass mobilization in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, in a telephone interview from that city the same day.

"We'll give up our lives, but we won't give up Kosovo," was among the main slogans, as in previous marches.

This was the largest protest for self-determination of the Albanian majority in Kosovo since early March, when tens of thousands poured into the streets of Pristina and other cities and towns of Kosovo in daily protests against assaults by special police forces Belgrade sent to the Drenica region. Eighty-five Albanians were killed then, a third of them children. Another dozen Albanians have been killed since that time in smaller-scale police sweeps throughout Kosovo.

Demonstrations for national rights of Albanians had subsided for a couple of weeks leading up to April 9. The police did not interfere with the latest action, Cakaj said, which was larger than the March 13 mobilization when 100,000 people rallied in the Dragodan neighborhood of Pristina.

At the same time, however, Belgrade has been boosting its special police forces in Kosovo according to Cakaj and reports from the Kosovo Information Center. The Serbian army has also reportedly deployed hundreds of additional troops at Kosovo's border with Albania and has held military exercises in the region.

The April 9 mobilization was sponsored by the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), the main political party among Albanians there. It took place two days after the parliament in Belgrade approved a proposal by Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to hold a referendum on how to conduct negotiations with Albanians in Kosovo. The LDK and other political parties that predominate among Albanians in Kosovo have turned down talks with Belgrade and are demanding participation by "international mediators" in any negotiations. Holding such talks is one of the preconditions for lifting the arms embargo the United Nations Security Council imposed on Yugoslavia March 31, on Washington's initiative.

The U.S. government and other imperialist powers are working hard to exploit the turmoil in Kosovo to deepen their intervention in the Balkans under the guise of supporting the struggle for national rights of Albanians. For Washington this is tied to expanding NATO into Eastern and Central Europe, tightening the encirclement of Russia, and maintaining U.S. hegemony in Europe.

Polarization inside Serbia
"The United States has always... supported our enemies, and now it wants to destroy the Serbs," said Stevo Dragisic, a member of the Yugoslav parliament from the ultrarightist Serbian Radical Party. He spoke at the April 7 session of the assembly that approved the referendum on talks about Kosovo's status. "If we accept U.S. mediation we would be signing our capitulation."

The general secretary of Milosevic's Socialist Party, Gorica Gajevic, called on people in Serbia and Montenegro - the two republics that now comprise Yugoslavia -to reject international mediation in any talks on Kosovo at the April 23 referendum. Foreign powers are supporting Albanian "terrorists" who want to split the country, Gajevic said.

On March 24 the Milosevic regime had invited Vojislav Seselj's Radical Party to form a coalition cabinet with the governing Socialist Party, showing a convergence between the SP and the rightists over Serbian nationalism. Seselj's group accepted the offer and was given 15 posts, including the ministries of information and privatization. The Radical Party had organized paramilitary squads that carried out "ethnic cleansing" during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and is one of the loudest advocates of a "Greater Serbia."

These moves have been combined with a massive propaganda offensive through the state media in Belgrade painting Albanians as "terrorists" and pawns of foreign powers. Demonstrations by pro-government Serbian students supporting Belgrade's stance on the referendum have also been held across Serbia. These actions have also condemned an education agreement Belgrade signed with LDK leaders in March. If implemented, the accord will end the ban on instruction in the Albanian language at state high schools and the university system. These reactionary marches, though, have been small - in the thousands - despite great effort and resources by the government to show it has massive support.

"The calling of this referendum is another indication that the regime in Belgrade still intends to wage war on us," Cakaj stated. "But we will continue to resist." Cakaj said the Independents Students Union in Kosovo has kept in touch with a number of student leaders from the University of Belgrade who over the last two months have organized small delegations of Serbian students to join actions in Pristina supporting self-determination for Albanians. "These students, however, don't have enough support yet to organize demonstrations in Belgrade supporting our struggle," Cakaj said. "They are worried about provocations from the ultranationalists. We will continue our work with them to broaden that support inside Serbia."

UCK gains strength
At the same time, press reports indicate that the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) has been gaining strength and recruits throughout Kosovo. The UCK was formed out of frustration with the ineffectiveness of the strategy of the LDK leadership, headed by Ibrahim Rugova, over the last few years. The LDK's course has consisted of dialogue and "passive resistance" to the authorities in Belgrade and accommodation with U.S. imperialism. The Independent Students Union, one of the main organizations that has sponsored mass actions over the last year, launched street protests last fall over the objections of Rugova. Many students have expressed skepticism or outright disagreement with Rugova's reliance on "help" from the "international community" to win self-determination.

The Independent Students Union, though, has joined forces with the LDK, other political parties, the Independent Trade Union of Kosovo, and other organizations to denounce the ongoing brutality by Belgrade and demand independence.

The demand for independence gained overwhelming support following the brutal repression by Serbian police in the Drenica region in early March. Until then, many Albanians supported return to the status of autonomy Kosovo had.

Kosovo is a region that is formally part of the Republic of Serbia. Its population is 90 percent Albanians. Under the formerly federated Yugoslavia, Kosovo had autonomy and its own self-government that had been granted in 1974. The Milosevic regime revoked Kosovo's autonomous status in 1989 and imposed a state of emergency that has been in place ever since. Instruction in Albanian was banned at high schools and colleges and most Albanians were fired from state administration, health-care facilities, and factories for refusing to sign "loyalty oaths" to Serbia.

Imperialist intervention
In an April 3 press conference, Rugova praised the UN Security Council for adopting the arms embargo against Yugoslavia and welcomed the "energetic engagement of U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright." Rugova also described the UCK as small groups of "desperate people" who may be encouraged or used by Belgrade's secret services.

The Milosevic regime has been exploiting Rugova's openly pro-Washington stance to garner popular support for its repressive measures against Albanians. In doing so, Belgrade is also trying to deflect criticism of its devaluation of the dinar, the Yugoslav currency, by pointing to the threat of additional sanctions by imperialist powers that are opposed by a big majority in Serbia. The April 1 devaluation of the dinar by 45 percent has already caused a rise in prices of gasoline and many other goods in Yugoslavia, which affect adversely working people for the most part.

For its part, Washington is seeking tougher sanctions against Belgrade and is laying the groundwork for deepening U.S. intervention in the Balkans. This includes organizing to open a new NATO training center in southern Macedonia, to be used for a U.S.-led Balkans rapid deployment force that could be dispatched to Kosovo; maintaining U.S. troops in Macedonia even if the current 1,000-strong UN "peacekeeping force" there leaves; and dispatching NATO advisers to Albania to "train" that country's army. The April 1 Washington Post reported that a number of U.S. troops in Macedonia have been shifted to observation posts at the Macedonian border in direct sight of Kosovo. Washington also maintains 8,000 troops in Bosnia that dominate the 30,000- strong NATO force occupying that republic.

The U.S. push for deeper intervention into the Balkans has stirred opposition from Moscow, which has balked at additional sanctions on Belgrade at the UN Security Council. The pro-capitalist government of Russia has been on a collision course with Washington over expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and U.S. attempts to not only dominate the oil in the former Soviet republics of the Caspian Sea region, but to establish a stronger regional line of influence and pressure along the southern flank of Russia - from the Caspian Sea all along the Silk Road.

"NATO expansion is the equivalent of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that authorized the war in Vietnam," said Michael Mandelbaum of the John Hopkins institute recently.

Within NATO, Paris has diverged with Washington over tactics in the Balkans and Iraq - divergences that reflect the continuing U.S. push into Europe and the Middle East. As a March 12 article in the Wall Street Journal put it, "Poland's unwavering support for possible U.S. military action in Iraq was celebrated in Washington and lamented in Paris, where the newspaper Le Monde warned of a new American- British-Polish alliance committed to the `rejection of a European policy dominated by France and Germany, to the benefit of a NATO under U.S.-U.K. control.'"

Poland, along with Hungary and the Czech Republic, has been approved for NATO membership by the Atlantic military alliance. The accord awaits ratification by the U.S. Congress.

Washington's main aim in the Balkans and with the encirclement of Russia is to use its military might to reestablish capitalist social relations in these countries - a goal that remains far away eight years after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

`Better under Soviet times'
An article in the March 28 Economist of London, titled "A truly dreadful perspective," cited a poll in the Ukraine expressing the deep dissatisfaction among working people and other layers of the population over "market reforms" in that republic of the former Soviet Union. In response to the question "When were you and your family better off?", 79 percent said in Soviet times and 4 percent said now. A majority also said they expected they'll be worse off a year from now under the current course of the regime there. A plurality, 32 percent, said they favored union with Russia and only 3 percent supported NATO membership for the republic.

A number of articles in the big-business press have been recently pointing to similar attitudes among broad layers of workers and peasants throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics - from Yugoslavia to Slovakia and Belarus.

"Entry of new competitors into the market is inhibited by state regulations and a shortage of entrepreneurial talent," said an article in the April 7 Wall Street Journal, for example, referring to Romania. "Not to mention the welfare- state psychology that has conditioned so many Romanians against undertaking risky new ventures."

The financial daily and other mouthpieces for the U.S. capitalist class are worried about the resistance working people are putting up to the attempts to bring back the system of wage slavery - from the workers states of Central and Eastern Europe to Siberia. Some 3,000 agricultural workers marched through Bucharest, Romania's capital, April 8 to protest low wages and government austerity policies.

"Give us subsidized credits," many shouted. And more than 10,000 workers demonstrated in two Romanian cities the day before to demand wage raises, higher pensions, and lower taxes.  
 
 
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