Column: Our Life and Times
June, 1999

Serb genocide, NATO bombing intensify

During two months of NATO bombing, Serbia's dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, has turned Kosova into a giant killing field, brutally deporting nearly one million ethnic Albanians, holding tens of thousands more as hostages, and raping, torturing, and murdering untold numbers. Flying from 15,000 feet or higher, NATO pilots have not been able to see, let alone attack, the Serb forces carrying out the genocide. This is not accidental.

NATO does not aim to protect, let alone liberate, the Kosovars, who have suffered under Milosevic's apartheid-like regime since 1989. Instead, NATO's aims have more to do with pressuring the man they still refer to politely as "President Milosevic" into some type of rotten compromise they will call peace, just as they did in Bosnia in 1995.

That is why the mass-supported Kosova Liberation Army (KLA) is still hemmed in by an international arms embargo. That is why NATO refuses to risk planes being shot down even to drop food supplies to starving refugees inside Kosova, let alone military supplies to the KLA's 15,000 fighters. The latter are the only ones directly engaging the perpetrators of the genocide on the ground.

A wide variety of Albanian voices has consistently opposed partition: "What shocks me is the idea of a partition of Kosova. This is a dangerous idea for a region where most of the states are multiethnic. The most important thing is to encourage multiethnic societies," stated President Rexhap Mejdani of Albania in a recent interview (LE MONDE, April 29, 1999).

While NATO's policies are rife with contradictions, Milosevic has been, in the words of Balkans analyst Michael Ignatieff, "tenaciously consistent": "From 1990, Milosevic followed one simple principle. In any country [of the former Yugoslavia] where there was a Serb minority substantial enough for him to arm, he armed it, and fought. The deaths of a quarter million people and the creation of two million refugees [in the Bosnian war] are a result of his unwavering application of this principle" (THE NEW YORKER, May 10, 1999).

Some on the Left and in the peace movement have fallen into a narrow type of focus on NATO imperialism that ignores both the ongoing genocide and the history of Milosevic's regime since 1989. THE NATION, for example, which published an editorial on Feb. 22 entitled "Independence for Kosovo," has forgotten about that today, concentrating instead on pacifist sloganeering.

This type of attitude was given a fitting answer recently by the German leftist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whose writings have been so important ever since the 1960s: "I have never been a pacifist because I owe my life to the victors of the Second World War. Instead of sending ground troops, one should arm the Kosovars. They know how to wage partisan warfare" (LE MONDE, May 8, 1999).

Even more troubling than the attitude of some on the Left is the specter of a new form of Pan-Slavism. Not only in Serbia but also in Russia, a Red-Brown alliance has emerged, uniting nationalists, fascists, reactionary members of the Eastern Orthodox clergy, and Stalinists, all of whom claim that Slavs are being targeted for attack by global capitalism as well as by national minorities of Muslim or Jewish origin.

We need to recall that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky each condemned Pan-Slavism as an extremely reactionary and dangerous force in world politics. Trotsky, for example, wrote in 1913 with regard to a previous war over Kosova that had Pan-Slavist dimensions: "The Serbs...in their endeavor to correct data in the ethnological statistics that are not quite favorable to them are engaged quite simply in the extermination of the Muslim population."

CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO NEWS AND LETTERS