BY GEORGE FYSON AND JONATHAN SILBERMAN
Yugoslavia is gripped by a murderous conflict orchestrated above all by the regime in Serbia, as well as by leaders of Croatia and other republics. Yugoslav working people, who almost five decades ago began a mighty socialist revolution, are the ones who are paying with their lives.

Into this situation the rival imperialist powers of Europe and the United States are seeking ways to intervene, wield their forces, and place their stamp on the outcome of events. Acting through the United Nations, they placed an embargo on Serbia in May 1992 and at the beginning of 1993 were weighing the prospects of military involvement substantially beyond the UN forces already stationed there.

The military conflict in Yugoslavia began in June 1991, when skirmishes in Slovenia were followed by a devastating war in Croatia, where some 10,000 people were killed. In March 1992 the slaughter began in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Indiscriminate massacres of civilians and devastation of cities to a degree not seen since Washington's war against Iraq resulted in at least 7,000 deaths in the first three months of the year. (In mid-1992, the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina put the death toll as high as 50,000.)

The war had created as many as 1 million refugees in Croatia, and some 1.2 million in Bosnia-Herzegovina by mid-1992. The number of refugees in Bosnia-Herzegovina--estimated at one quarter of its population--is the highest anywhere in Europe since World War II. The former Yugoslavia had a population of 24 million.  
 
Not tribal or ethnic strife
Capitalist-minded political commentators argue that the current conflicts in Yugoslavia are the modern expression of centuries of tribal or ethnic strife that has gripped this part of the world. They use this claim to justify the need for outside intervention in the form of an economic embargo and possible military attack.

The truth is the opposite. Today's conflicts in Yugoslavia have nothing in common with the historic rise of nation-states that accompanied the bourgeois-democratic revolutions against feudal conditions in the period from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Nor are they similar to modern national liberation struggles against colonialism and imperialist oppression. Instead, what is involved is a crude drive for control over territory and resources between the conflicting bureaucratic gangs that rule in the regions of the former Yugoslavia.

As in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, elements of the old Stalinist bureaucracy have discarded their previous verbal claims to "communism" as easily as a snake sheds its old skin. Now they are acting as would-be capitalists to grab as big a portion of the loot as they can, just as any mafia operates to protect and enlarge its turf. And they are competing among themselves for a poor cousin's place at the table of world capitalism.

The main aggressors on the Yugoslav battleground are the bureaucrats based in Serbia, the dominant republic in the former Yugoslavia, whose largest city, Belgrade, had been the federal capital. The regimes in Croatia and the other republics have shown themselves to be no less keen to plunder resources for themselves, as the Croatian regime's annexation of a piece of Bosnia-Herzegovina in July 1992 demonstrated.

None of the fights being waged by the regimes and their surrogate forces in Yugoslavia today are in the interests of working people there, whose parents and grandparents carried out a powerful revolution in the 1940s, a revolution that overturned the rule of the exploiting landlords and capitalists of different tongues and creeds, and forged a united Yugoslavia.

The conflicts since 1991 have been noteworthy for the inability of the regimes to mobilize large numbers of working people to fight; for the large number of desertions from the Yugoslav army; for the cases of fraternization between soldiers and those they were supposed to be fighting; and for the protests against the war, especially in Belgrade. In June 1992 alone, tens of thousands took part in protests against the war, including one rally of 100,000.

Despite the nationalist demagogy of the would-be capitalists, what is taking place is not national, religious, ethnic, or tribal struggle. It is the modern class struggle.

The petty-bourgeois and aspiring bourgeois layers in Belgrade and elsewhere are interested only in safeguarding their own privileges, diverting workers from acting in their own class interests, and continuing the fruitless attempt to be welcomed as equal partners into the world capitalist system.

Today this is a less realistic perspective than ever. The world capitalist system is in the initial throes of a historic crisis. Instability, economic depression, social crisis, and war are what this system holds in store.

The events in Yugoslavia are not the product of communism. The Yugoslav crisis is one in a series that has gripped the deformed and degenerated workers states in eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union since the late 1980s, bringing down governments and shattering the ruling Stalinist parties.

Today the components of the former Yugoslavia have an enormous debt to imperialist banks and financial institutions, rampant inflation, and massive unemployment. Yugoslav workers have been forced to migrate in search of work. Even before the wave of war-generated refugees in 1992, there were 600,000 Yugoslav workers in Germany alone.

Different sections of the ruling stratum in Yugoslavia advance variations on a single approach to getting out of the mess the country is in. Although they drape their rhetoric in different "national" colors, they share the desire to shove the effects of the crisis onto the backs of working people.

Out of the class struggles that will inevitably result, workers will have their chance to build communist parties capable of leading revolutionary anticapitalist struggles to establish governments of the workers and farmers and join in the worldwide fight for socialism. The future battles that workers face in the former Yugoslavia, in overthrowing the parasitic caste that today presides over the bloody dismemberment of the federation, are part of this worldwide struggle.
 
 
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