Editorial
July 1999

Aftermath of the war over Kosova

As Serb forces retreated from Kosova, ending ten years of apartheid-style rule over the 90%-strong ethnic Albanian majority, the country lay in ruins. Mass graves, looted and burned neighborhoods and villages, and landmines proliferated. In the capital, Pristina, retreating Serb engineers even destroyed the water purification system. Civilians showed reporters a downtown police station that had served as a torture center, complete with grisly instruments, bloodstained walls, and a rape room with bloodstained mattresses. The fact that the Kosovars are returning to such devastation shows the hollowness of NATO's claims of a great humanitarian victory.

SERBIAN GENOCIDE IN KOSOVA

During the war, while NATO planes did nothing to stop them, Serb paramilitaries, police, and soldiers expelled some 800,000 Albanians across the border. Another 500,000 Albanians hid for weeks in the mountains and forests inside Kosova, facing starvation and Serb attacks.

Even the most cautious estimates suggest that Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic's forces killed over 10,000 civilians after the NATO bombing began in March. With Kosova's population only 1.8 million, this is one out of every 180 people, something that would be comparable to 1.5 million killed in a country the size of the U.S.

Every village seems to have its mass gravesite, with many of the bodies cruelly dismembered. However, the full body count may never be known since in the final days Serb forces dug up bodies and may have incinerated a large number of them. There also remains the mystery of what happened to the tens of thousands of Albanian men separated from their families as Serbs rounded up civilians in villages and towns across Kosova.

As in the Bosnian war of 1991-95, in addition to physical elimination, rape, and expulsion, a fourth form of Serb genocide was cultural. Serb forces systematically destroyed Albanian, Ottoman, and Muslim cultural institutions and artifacts including mosques, libraries, bridges, and historic buildings. They also stripped hundreds of thousands of deportees of their identity papers and personal effects. The plan was to wipe out even the memory of the Albanian community in Kosova.

Today, Milosevic remains in power in Serbia. It is a scandal that his indictment as a war criminal had to wait until 1999 because NATO wanted to work with him and refused to turn over evidence to the International Bosnian War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. NATO has also allowed all of his forces to leave Kosova intact, including the worst perpetrators of the genocide. When the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA) arrested a few of these war criminals, NATO quickly released them. In addition, NATO is giving Russia, which openly supports Milosevic, an unspecified role in Kosova. Most importantly, NATO has promised Milosevic not to allow an independent Kosova, the core demand of the Kosovars ever since 1991.

MILOSEVIC'S MISCALCULATIONS, THE KLA, AND NATO IMPERIALISM

Still, the war was a defeat for Milosevic, who made three big miscalculations. First, he assumed that NATO would offer him a generous partition plan after a few days of symbolic bombing. He was correct in his assumption that the NATO imperialists cared little for the Kosovar civilians. However, he underestimated the degree to which his open defiance, including the mass expulsions in view of the world media, would force a humiliated NATO to intensify rather than call off the bombing and even begin to plan a ground invasion. Milosevic forgot that no great imperialist power or alliance could, if it intends to remain one, allow a despot from a small country to defy it so openly.

Second, Milosevic underestimated the war weariness inside Serbia after nearly a decade of his wars. In the initial days of the bombing, patriotic fervor against NATO and an absolute denial of the genocide in Kosova and Bosnia by virtually the entire Serb population may have convinced him that his support was deeper than it was. Here, the Belgrade intellectuals created yet another sorry chapter as they rallied against NATO, without mentionin g the ongoing genocide in Kosova or the past one in Bosnia.

Soon, however, Serbia began to experience something not seen before under Milosevic, a war in which its soldiers and civilians, and not only Albanian, Bosnian, or Croat civilians, could also be killed in significant numbers. As the demonstrations by parents of soldiers in the final weeks of the war in working class towns like Cacak showed, few Serbs were actually willing to die for Milosevic.

Finally, and most importantly, Milosevic underestimated the resilience, organization, and creativity of the Kosovar Albanians. In the days before he ordered a withdrawal, a better organized KLA was engaging Serb forces on several fronts, sometimes taking advantage of the NATO bombing.

One Albanian civilian who hid in a wooded mountain gorge with 5,000 others described how KLA rebels guarded the perimeter for weeks. The Serbs were afraid to move against the KLA without heavy weapons. On several occasions, Serbian tanks moved toward them, but after NATO planes appeared, the Serbs pulled back.

All across Kosova, as the Serbs withdrew, KLA rebels, who had been protecting those hiding in the hills, quickly retook Kosova's towns and cities. They always got there ahead of NATO. Everywhere they seemed to enjoy nearly unanimous support among the ethnic Albanians. The rapid return of many of the expellees from across the border also stunned NATO. The Kosovars were bent on taking their destiny into their own hands, as opposed to allowing NATO to organize their return on its timetable and with who knows what concessions to Milosevic.

As NATO tightens its grip on Kosova, the mass drive for independence is even stronger than before, as those returning share experiences of both Serb brutality and Kosovar heroism. One big question is whether NATO will succeed in disarming the KLA.

A second question is whether NATO will allow Serb paramilitaries in civilian clothing to intimidate and harass Albanian civilians, as they are doing in Mitrovica, right under the noses of French troops. A third question is whether the KLA will use its prestige to take a stand against the way some women are being victimized twice, first by Serb rapists and then by a climate within the Albanian community that threatens to ostracize any woman who comes forward to tell her story.

For the present, NATO and American imperialism have emerged from this conflict strengthened, not only because they largely prevailed militarily, but also because they are now basking in the halo of what they falsely claim was a war for human rights.

Since the war began, we have pointed out that the bombing created a distorting lens that made NATO appear to be on the side of the Kosovars. This made it easier for many to forget 50 years of mass freedom struggles in Eastern Europe. Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, these struggles unfurled a banner of socialist humanism against Western capitalism and Russian state-capitalism calling itself Communism.

THE CRISIS OF THE LEFT

Without grasping the subjectivity of those historic mass revolts, most of the Left, which had devoted little attention to Kosova or Bosnia, jumped uncritically on the bandwagon of anti-intervention. In some cases leftists denied Milosevic's genocidal actions from the Bosnian War onward and called his indictment as a war criminal bogus. Others, such as longtime pacifist David McReynolds, while acknowledging Milosevic's brutality, allowed anti-imperialism to trump anti-racism and anti-genocide. As the Serb forces retreated, he wrote: "Milosevic is a problem for the Serbs. NATO and American arrogance is a problem for us."

As Marxist-Humanist internationalists, we have always opposed such a narrowing of our vision of freedom. Unfortunately, however, much of the Left is trapped in forms of anti-imperialism that leave aside any vision of what we are for.

Some have even gone so far as to applaud as a model for future antiwar movements the sickening display we have seen in recent weeks where the Left rallied alongside reactionaries such as Ariana Huffington or Serbian nationalists. Despite its opportunism, the Left's rallies were sparsely attended, with the June 5 march on Washington drawing only around 3,000, many of them Serb nationalists rather than leftists, even though it had been endorsed by many groups including the liberal NATION magazine.

What most of the Left fails to recognize is that in today's retrogressive climate, some of the forces opposed to U.S. or Western imperialism are even more reactionary. This is true of Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism, Serbian nationalism, Farrakhanism, or the type of Red-Brown alliance that has emerged in recent years in Russia among Stalinists, fascists, extreme nationalists, and anti-Semites.

The case of nuclearly armed Russia is an especially ominous one. As living standards plummet under global capitalism and the rapaciously corrupt Yeltsin government, the Red-Brown alliance is gaining support. This has been fueled by the fact that NATO's bombing of Serbia was genuinely unpopular among the Russian people. While Russia's move into the Pristina airport turned out to be quixotic, there are plenty of areas, from the Baltics, to Central Asia and the Caucasus to Cyprus, where Russia could easily flex its muscles.

The challenge facing us in the coming period is to oppose all forms of racism, class oppression, sexism, and genocide, whether they are perpetrated by U.S. imperialism and its allies, or by forces opposed to them. Only in such a way can we project a humanist vision of a post-capitalist future.

That is why we continue to support the decade-old struggle of the Kosovars for democracy and independence, whether against Milosevic's genocidal regime or against NATO's occupation.

June 24, 1999

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