Many working people in Yugoslavia are rightly suspicious about the "humanitarian" pretensions of Washington, which in 1999 unleashed a savage 11-week bombing campaign against Serbia. In the name of going after the chauvinist Milosevic regime for its brutal repression against the Albanian population in Kosova, the U.S. and British warplanes targeted Serbia's industry and infrastructure, with devastating effects on workers.

The U.S. rulers are using economic and political blackmail--sanctions along with a $1 billion carrot of "aid"--to pressure the Yugoslav regime to bow to their dictates, from turning over Milosevic for a political show trial in The Hague, to accepting more and more dependence on the capitalist market. Those who will be affected by the U.S. and other imperialists' demands for economic "reforms"--and the resulting mass layoffs and economic dislocation--will be workers and farmers.

But the imperialist powers cannot reform capitalism back into existence. Their biggest obstacle is not the regime--which speaks for would-be capitalists--but Yugoslavia's working people, who will resist the onslaught on their social and political rights. That is why Washington's long-term aim is to weaken and eventually overthrow the workers state in Yugoslavia, which can only be done by direct military force.

From the early 1990s, Washington and other imperialist powers seized on the warfare between rival bureaucratic gangs in Yugoslavia to intervene militarily, first in Bosnia, then in Kosova, where the chauvinist Serb regime unleashed a brutal assault on the Albanian population and its aspirations for national self-determination. Wrapping itself falsely in the banner of defending the Albanians from repression, the U.S. government used military power in Kosova and Serbia to try to assert its domination over its European imperialist rivals and to assault the working people of Yugoslavia. Today, U.S. occupation troops in the region are exploiting the unfolding conflict in Macedonia to flex their muscles and crack down on anyone who gets in the way, whether Albanians, Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, or others.

The increased U.S. reliance on military might, brutality, and trampling of national sovereignty is not an aberration. It is how imperialism works--what the imperialist rulers have in store for working people around the world.

Milosevic deserves to be judged for his crimes against working people. But only by the workers and far-mers of Yugoslavia, not by the imperialist powers--the world's biggest war criminals. Washington--which is responsible for the brutal bombing of Serbia, the slaughter of 150,000 soldiers and civilians in Iraq in 1991, and the incineration of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945--has no right to sit in judgment of anyone.

It was workers and farmers in Serbia--not Washington and its cohorts--who brought down Milosevic's government last year through massive protests and strikes. It was the workers and farmers of Yugoslavia who carried out a deep-going socialist revolution in the 1940s. It is only working people in Yugoslavia who can confront and resolve the problems they face today. The job of working people in the United States is to answer Washington's lies and hypocrisy, and to explain their warmongering aims in the Balkans and worldwide.
 
 
Related article:
Milosevic 'war crimes' trial will boost U.S. intervention  
 
 
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