The truth is the opposite. Describing the record of the NATO military intervention in Bosnia over the last decade, an article in last week’s issue explained that the aim of the U.S. rulers and their allies was not to stop “ethnic cleansing” and establish “democracy.” It was to overthrow the workers state established in that country through a revolution by workers and peasants and create the conditions for restoring capitalism. One of Washington’s goals was also to strengthen U.S. supremacy in Europe.

This week we focus on how U.S. imperialism and its allies fueled the war.

The slaughter in Yugoslavia in the 1990s was not the product of “age-old ethnic hatreds,” but the result of the breakdown of the capitalist world order. It was the product of intensifying conflicts between rival capitalist classes in the imperialist countries and would-be capitalists in the deformed workers states.

The war in Yugoslavia also demonstrated in blood that Stalinist leaderships cannot unite toilers from different national origins on a lasting basis to open up a broadening federation of soviet republics working together to build socialism.

Several years after the October 1917 revolution in Russia, the Bolsheviks under the leadership of V.I. Lenin formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a voluntary federation of workers and peasants republics. The Bolsheviks in Lenin’s time were a revolutionary workers vanguard that fought uncompromisingly for the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, for the complete equality of nations and nationalities, and against every vestige of national privilege, arrogance, and chauvinism. They led in placing that internationalist perspective at the heart of the program and practice of the Communist International.

As part of a political counterrevolution carried out by a petty-bourgeois social caste whose spokesman was Joseph Stalin, however, this proletarian internationalist course gave way to the return of Great Russian chauvinism.

The federated Yugoslav workers state that the imperialists and rival Stalinist gangs went out of their way to tear apart was a gigantic accomplishment of the Yugoslav revolution of 1942-46. Workers and peasants who were Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, and from other nationalities forged unity to oust the Nazi occupation forces and their local collaborators, carry out a radical land reform, and expropriate the capitalist exploiters—establishing a workers state. It was one of the great revolutions of the last century, a proletarian socialist revolution.  
 
Stalinist leadership
The Stalinist leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party, headed by Josip Broz (known by his nom de guerre Tito), however, blocked the toilers of different nationalities from building on their conquests and cementing the federation together. The Yugoslav revolution was deformed from birth.

The groundwork for the war in which NATO intervened was laid out more than a decade before the formal breakup of the Yugoslav federation in 1991-92. The country’s economy was already in crisis due to the anti-working-class methods of planning and management by the Tito regime.

Despite asserting national independence against Stalin’s regime, the Tito leadership was forged in the Stalinist mold. Its policies were those of a privileged bureaucratic caste that lived at the expense of working people. It sought accommodation with imperialism, rather than pursuing a foreign policy in the interests of workers and farmers. Belgrade’s call for neutrality during the imperialist invasion of Korea in the early 1950s and its lack of solidarity with the Vietnamese liberation struggle in the 1960s are just two examples. Tito also kept those who opposed his course under close surveillance, imprisoning large numbers of them.

Tito’s regime had opened up Yugoslavia to international finance capital and loans from imperialist institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), much earlier than other regimes in Eastern Europe. Belgrade began to introduce capitalist market methods into the planned economy in the 1950s, dubbing them “workers self-management.”  
 
‘Managerial capitalism’
“The enterprises compete among themselves in the national market as if they were capitalist entities,” said Ernesto Che Guevara, a central leader of the Cuban Revolution, after his visit to Yugoslavia in 1959. “In broad strokes, with an element of caricature, you could describe Yugoslav society as managerial capitalism with socialist distribution of profits. Each enterprise is viewed not as a group of workers but as a unit functioning more or less in a capitalist manner, obeying laws of supply and demand.”

These measures made the country more vulnerable to world capitalism and its social ills: inflation, unemployment, and increasing wage differentiation among factories and regions. These policies helped deepen national divisions and aided those who began favoring the restoration of capitalism.

In the 1960s and ’70s, for example, sections of the ruling bureaucracy in Croatia called for income from the lucrative tourist trade on the Dalmatian coast to be allocated entirely to the local, not the federal government. They resisted using such resources to even out the imbalances across Yugoslavia through “affirmative action” measures for the least developed areas. Provinces and republics closed their markets to one another, seeking to become self-sufficient. This worked to the detriment of the least developed regions, especially where oppressed nationalities lived, like the Albanians in Kosova. When the 1974-75 world recession hit, it affected working people in Yugoslavia, too, but in a differential manner, exacerbating national divisions.

That economic crisis was marked by rapidly rising oil prices, which Belgrade imported from abroad, and declining markets for Yugoslavia’s manufactured goods, which were largely exported to capitalist countries.  
 
Finance capital fanned flames of war
Then came the infamous IMF “stabilization” plans, through which financial institutions in imperialist countries robbed a portion of the wealth Yugoslav working people produced. During the 1970s, the Tito regime had run up sizable foreign debts. In order to continue providing loans, the IMF demanded austerity measures that Belgrade implemented in the 1980s—lifting price controls on many goods, cutting jobs in state firms, and freezing investments in infrastructure and social services.

As a result, inflation skyrocketed. Unemployment grew to an average of 14 percent throughout Yugoslavia. But it was much higher in less developed areas—23 percent in Bosnia, 27 percent in Macedonia, and 50 percent in Kosova.

This reality registered the reversal of earlier policies that boosted growth in underdeveloped regions. By 1985, for example, residents of Slovenia had an income about 70 percent higher than those in Macedonia; four years later, it was 125 percent higher.

By 1990, economic growth was about negative 11 percent. In the first half of that year, inflation shot up 70 percent and real wages fell 41 percent.

By the opening of that decade, the working class in Yugoslavia had been weakened, for two reasons. First, the decades of Stalinist misrule had alienated working people from politics. Second, the revolutionary upsurge in Europe of the late 1960s and ’70s—marked by the May 1968 revolt in France, the rebellion in Italy next year, the 1974 revolution in Portugal, and the fall of the military junta in Greece that year—had ebbed due to the misleadership of Stalinist and social democratic parties that dominated the workers movement. Working people in western Europe had not succeeded in altering the balance of class forces against imperialism, and thus aiding their brothers and sisters in Yugoslavia.

When conflicts exploded between rival sections of the ruling bureaucracy, all of them used nationalist demagogy to justify maintaining control of as much land, factories, and other resources as they could to perpetuate their privileges and parasitic existence. These would-be capitalists—with the principal culprits being the Milosevic regime in Serbia and the Croatian government headed by Franjo Tudjman—succeeded in overcoming initial working-class resistance and dragged working people to war.

At the center of this resistance were miners and other working people in Kosova who led massive strikes and demonstrations in the late 1980s against austerity and for working-class unity, backing the national rights of the Albanian majority in Kosova. That’s where Milosevic began his nationalist tirades to divide the labor movement and justify Belgrade’s clampdown.

The flames of war, however, had been fanned by international finance capital.  
 
‘Let it bleed’
To begin with, the German ruling class gave substantial impetus to the war. It immediately recognized Croatia and Slovenia as independent states and then sent diplomatic personnel, military advisers, and weapons to these regimes run by former leaders of the League of Yugoslav Communists.

Washington initially adopted a policy of “let it bleed.” Let the murderous bombing of civilian areas by the rival regimes of the formerly federated Yugoslavia go on and let the capitalist powers in Europe get into the fray first and encourage a civil war through military intervention disguised as “peacekeeping.”

At the same time, the White House ensured some weapons got into Bosnia during the U.S.-backed UN arms embargo. But Washington made sure that not enough heavy weapons could reach the Bosnian army to endanger an outright victory for its forces over Belgrade, so the war could grind on.

The Clinton administration also promised it would back “peace initiatives” by Paris, Berlin, or others, while sabotaging each one of them. Anytime an accord seemed close to being struck, another slaughter would derail it. In this way, the U.S. rulers humiliated their allies in Europe to win support for the notion that only Uncle Sam could save the day. European troops, for example, were increasingly disgraced in bourgeois public opinion as responsible to a degree, or incapable of stopping the killings—like the 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica by pro-Milosevic forces while Dutch soldiers stood by.

As failures mounted for the European “peacekeepers” in Bosnia, and as diplomatic initiatives foundered, Washington successfully organized NATO air strikes and naval and ground shelling against pro-Belgrade forces—3,000 of which took place between February 1994 and September 1995. After exacting much blood from the people of Yugoslavia, U.S. officials marched the representatives of the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian forces to the Wright-Patterson Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, and dictated the new “peace” accord, which paved the way for the NATO occupation of Bosnia.

Throughout the 1990s, many working people in Yugoslavia—Bosnian, Serb, Croat, or other nationalities—resisted the horrors thrust on them by the rival bureaucratic gangs that emerged from the crumbling Stalinist apparatus and imperialist intervention. As last week’s article indicated, only the end of the NATO and UN occupations will give working people there a chance to find again the course to defend their interests.  
 
 
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