Editorial
May, 1999

Support the Kosovar resistance!

The failure of six weeks of U.S. and NATO bombing to stop Serbia's genocidal attack on Kosova has brought the region to a crossroads. Serb troops have forced 1.5 million Kosovars from their homes and have murdered and raped thousands. Faced with a major debacle, the U.S. is planning an extended bombing campaign and possibly the introduction of ground troops, while leaving the door open to a Russian-mediated deal with Serbia's Milosevic. Yet the U.S. continues to shunt aside the force which can stop Serbia and reverse ethnic cleansing-the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA).

When Serb troops invaded Kosova in force in March, Milosevic boasted that he would eliminate the KLA in five days. He failed to do so. Despite massive destruction and loss of life and a shortage of arms and materiel, the KLA is regrouping and has expanded its operations. Thousands of Kosovars arriving in Albania from Germany, Switzerland, England and elsewhere, as well as thousands inside Kosova and in the refugee camps fleeing Serbian forces, are swelling the KLA's ranks.

The extent of this was shown in late April when thousands of KLA fighters defended 250,000 Albanian civilians from ethnic cleansing in the Lapski and Shalja region of north Kosova, which contains the Trepca mines. According to one report, "Along with trying to protect Kosova Albanians, the KLA fighters are trying to prevent Yugoslav forces from completely depopulating it and securing the northern region as part of a potential partition offer. Fearful of such a deal between Belgrade and the West, KLA sources say they are concentrating their men and materiel in these strategic areas in the north, which Belgrade would need to control before suing for peace."

Meanwhile, the KLA's fourth brigade, operating in the mountains along the Yugoslav-Albanian border, has stepped up its operations. Mike Boettcher of CNN who accompanied it reported that "the guerrilla army shows signs of a gathering momentum aimed at striking back into the heart of Kosova." The events of the past weeks have transformed the KLA from a group of disparate rebels into a force which has the support of virtually all Albanians inside and outside of Kosova. A potentially revolutionary subjective source of resistance to genocide has emerged which demands our solidarity!

THE KLA DEMANDS OUR CRITICAL SUPPORT

Since the outbreak of the bombing campaign, KLA commanders say they have been increasingly brushed aside by the U.S. and NATO. The KLA's calls for material and logistical support have gone unheeded. One KLA commander stated, "We have a well organized army and if we get armed very well, we can confront Serb forces. Neither Americans nor Germans nor British can push Serbs from Kosova. This has to be done by us."

The U.S., however, remains averse to allowing the Kosovars to decide their own fate. It has long opposed independence for Kosova. When the KLA began to undertake major actions in response to Serbian attacks in 1998, the State Department denounced it as a "terrorist" organization. When the U.S. promoted its "peace" plan at Rambouillet this spring, it stipulated that the KLA disarm. Though the KLA at first balked at this, it signed on after coming under intense pressure from U.S officials.

When the U.S. finally decided to intervene against Serbia, it was not out of any desire to aid the KLA or the Kosovars, but rather to assert the power and hegemony of the NATO alliance. According to Barton Gellman's detailed analysis in THE WASHINGTON POST (April 18), U.S. officials expected that Milosevic would capitulate to U.S. demands after a few days of air strikes. That Milosevic might use that period to try to eliminate the KLA did not bother U.S. officials in the least. Gellman writes, "Policy makers generally assumed the Serb leader would try to eradicate the rebel KLA, as he boasted he could do in five to seven days. They did not foresee Serb efforts to depopulate Kosova of its 1.6 million ethnic Albanians, some two-thirds of whom are now homeless and many thousands believed dead, and therefore made no military plans to halt them."

Milosevic had originally planned to invade Kosova later this spring under the code-name "Operation Horseshoe." ("Horseshoe" refers to the Serb tactic, first used in Bosnia, of assembling villagers inside a horseshoe-shaped ring; paramilitaries then move in to vent their appetite for rape and murder, with the exit road left open for those who survive.)

When Milosevic decided to move up his full invasion of Kosova in response to NATO's bombing, a new situation was created. Serbia's intransigence has so embarrassed NATO that it has been put into the position of fighting an extended air war and/or using ground troops. Yet the U.S. continues to disregard those already on the ground who can hit back at the Serbian forces-the Kosovars themselves.

Shrem Dasgobia of the KLA states, "When we signed the Rambouillet agreement, we were led to believe that NATO and the USA would help the Albanians. So we stopped arming and mobilizing ourselves. If NATO will not aid the victims of genocide, then our wish is that they leave us alone to resolve our own problems. We're convinced we can handle the Serbs by ourselves, provided we get arms."

THE LEFT IN DISARRAY

What stands in the way of the needed solidarity with Kosova is the disorientation in the Left. Many are responding in a knee-jerk reaction to the U.S. bombing by supporting Serbia, as if it has any right to sovereignty over a people it ethnically cleanses. Others blame the Kosovars for starting the problem, as if they have no right to independence. And others stoop so low as to call the KLA a "CIA front."

This is a vicious lie. The KLA grew out of a core of Marxist-Leninist guerrillas who fought Serbian rule in the 1980s. It was until recently a small and rather marginal force, since most Kosovars supported Ibrahim Rugova's Kosova League for Democracy which advocated non-violent resistance. That approach, however, proved a total failure by 1997 in light of increasing Serbian attacks. By that time the KLA merged with the Kosova Parliamentary Party of Adem Demaqi who favored armed struggle. As against any narrow nationalism, Demaqi proposes that Kosova join in a federation of equals with Serbia and Montenegro after gaining independence.

By mid-1998 the KLA had grown rapidly-not because of support from the U.S., but because its resistance to Serbian ethnic cleansing won it the full support of the local populace.

Those who attack the KLA in the name of opposing U.S. imperialism remain trapped in the mind-forged manacles of the past. Throughout this century radicals have made excuses for one or another state-capitalist regime that called itself "Communist" on the grounds that it resisted U.S. imperialism. Those regimes are now largely gone, but the nostalgia for some state power to serve as the "Other" of the U.S. is very much with us. Yet this now means tailending an outright fascist power!

Others oppose the KLA not out of support for Serbia, but because they desire a "peaceful" solution. But a pacifist approach is absurd when an entire people is subject to genocide. It fails to differentiate between the violence that inflicts oppression and the violence that resists it. From whatever standpoint, those who fail to extend solidarity with the Kosovars today are taking an accommodating position towards genocide itself.

As Ian Williams of BALKAN WAR REPORT writes, "Many are inveighing against NATO intervention in tones far more strident than we ever heard them use during the siege of Sarajevo, the massacre of Srebrenica and certainly more angrily than they speak now about Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in Kosova. There was a time when the Left supported liberation struggles by oppressed peoples. Now, too many seem prepared to condemn them to remain quiescent victims of nationalist terror. Activists who called for unconditional support for the IRA, for the ANC, for SWAPO, and hundreds of other acronyms of varying merit, unite with the Serbs in regarding the Kosovars as beneath the rest of humanity in their claims" (BOSNET, April 14, 1999).

Williams also says, "Soon NATO will be faced with two alternatives-either to stop the bombing and 'negotiate,' or to commit ground troops." This may be how NATO sees the matter, but why should we? Why narrow the choices to supporting U.S. bombing or capitulating to Milosevic? There is a very different alternative we can choose-that the KLA be allowed to obtain the arms and materiel it needs to defend the Kosovars and to defeat Serbia.

A TALE OF TWO OPPOSITIONS

The Kosovars are not the only opposition to Milosevic. Montenegro has declared itself neutral in the fight between Milosevic and the U.S., and many Montenegrin youth refuse to have anything to do with the Serbian army. On April 13 workers at Bar, Montenegro's largest commercial port, denounced Milosevic as a warmonger and protested Serbia's use of the port to shoot at NATO warplanes.

The opposition in Serbia itself is more muted. This is not only because of severe repression and the way the U.S. bombing makes it easy for Milosevic to accuse anyone who opposes him of being a traitor. It is also because the opposition in Belgrade, to the extent that it exists, has never come to grips with Serbia's responsibility for genocide in Bosnia and now in Kosova. Until it does so, it will not be able to pose any kind of meaningful opposition.

Solidarity with Kosova is not only needed by those in the Balkans. The genocide occurring there may well reflect the kind of future the rulers have in store for us here at home. Racism and ethnic cleansing have long been integral to U.S. history, from the genocide against Native Americans to the decimation of Africa through the slave trade to the lynchings and mob violence against African Americans. As capitalism faces new crises and instability, it is returning anew to the ethnic cleansing and racism that marked its origins. It is seen in everything from the draconian cutbacks against welfare to unbridled police abuse against African Americans and Latinos.

Can the movements opposing police violence and state-sanctioned racism in the U.S. willfully ignore the fact that in Kosova a militarized police force is violently expelling an entire people from their towns and villages because of their ethnic identity? We cannot generate freedom for ourselves if we ignore genocide against an entire people. That is why we call on all our readers to support independence for Kosova and the right of the KLA to obtain arms.

-April 28, 1999

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