Kosova and the political and moral collapse of the left in 1999

Submitted by Janine on 1 January, 2000 - 10:49

This is the text of a Workers' Liberty leaflet handed out at the SWP's 'Marxism' event in 1999:

The ethnic Albanians of Kosova were Milosevic's first victims. From the late 1980s the ethnic Albanians of Kosova lived under an ultra-chauvinist Serb regime, led by Milosevic, which imposed Apartheid-style rule on the region.

In 1990 the area's limited autonomy was abolished. The only Albanian-language daily paper, Rilidja, was banned, as were all TV and radio broadcasts in Albanian.

In the following months 115,000 Albanian workers were fired from their jobs, to be replaced by Serbs. All Kosovars working in state hospitals were fired. By the mid-1990s most ethnic Albanian workers in Kosova were either permanently unemployed or working in Western Europe.

At Pristina University all teaching in Albanian was stopped when the 800 ethnic Albanian lecturers were sacked. Almost all of the 23,000 Kosovar students were forced to give up their courses. During the 1990s the Albanians of Kosova responded to Serb repression by setting up a parallel state structure, teaching in the Albanian language in underground schools.

These schools were often raided by Serb police thugs who arrested and beat teachers, and burnt Albanian books.

In 1998 the population of Kosova stood at under 2 million - over 90% were ethnic Albanians.

By 1998 Milosevic's turn to extreme nationalism - and the nationalist responses the Serb state had produced in Croatia and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia - had destroyed Yugoslavia, leaving a rump 'Federal Republic' under Belgrade's domination.

Milosevic began his drive against the Kosovars - intending to keep the area, while killing or driving out as much of the Albanian population as possible.

State terror increased in the rural areas, and at this point the Kosova Liberation Army emerged as a ramshackle rural militia for self-defence. The KLA had won mass support, but in the Autumn of 1998 it was routed by Serb forces - and thousands of refugees left for neighbouring countries, to join those already there.

By this time almost every ethnic Albanian in Kosova wanted independence from Belgrade.

The West became alarmed - and not because Milosevic was mistreating the Kosovars (Milosevic had been a regional strongman who they had 'done business with' in the '90s), but because the Serb state was using so much terror and brutality it was threatening the stability of the whole region.

The West was worried that Milosevic would trigger a new, major war in the area, perhaps even drawing in Greece and Turkey; that Macedonia, another artificial state with a compact, sizeable Albanian minority on its western border, would be pulled to bits.

The West attempted to force Milosevic and the Albanian leaders to sign up to a 'compromise' at Rambouillet. The deal was a lousy one - offering the Kosovars far less than independence.

The West's policy - no matter what Clinton's and Blair's methods are at any given time - has been consistent: they want the area 'stable' for profit making - and they've even been prepared to bomb and create short-term instability for medium term peace on their terms.

Your history and ours

Why is it necessary to re-state the basic facts? Because readers of Socialist Worker will not have read them in SW. And when, at the end of March, the NATO bombing campaign began, SW turned itself into a one-sided propaganda machine against NATO and so - effectively, through silence - for a Serb victory. A Serb victory would have been the worst possible ending, for it would have led to unrestrained ethnic cleansing by Milosevic.

And the history of atrocities committed became - in the hands of the editors of SW - simply the history of NATO's atrocities against Serb civilians.

Example: the cover of SW (8 May): headline: 'NATO's week of slaughter' (accompanied by only details of NATO bombings) - at a time when Serb state and paramilitary thugs were killing far more people, and had already driven over half the ethnic Albanian population of Kosova out of the area.

Example: the cover of SW (22 May): 'Clinton, Blair: How many kids did they kill today?', accompanied by a box 'Stop NATO's war'. What about Milosevic's war of genocide and racist ethnic cleansing against the Kosovars? - of which there was no mention in the whole issue.

Idiotically SW even blames NATO for the ethnic cleansing: "The NATO bombing provoked the ethnic cleansing", they write, letting Milosevic off the hook. By the same token Churchill was to blame for ("provoked") the Holocaust?

SW and the murder of trade unionists

Milosevic's ethnic cleansing singled out young men, teachers, intellectuals and ethnic Albanian political leaders for murder. The Serb state aimed to prevent a whole people resisting the destruction of their society by killing those expected to lead the resistance.

At the end of March Serb police assassinated Agim Hajrizi, President of the Assembly of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Kosovo (BSPK), together with his 11 year old son and his mother. Hajrizi had been the president of the metal workers' union, SPMK. Would the readers of SW know this? No. The murder of the Kosovan equivalent of the leader of the TUC was not worthy of a mention.

SW and Kosovar solidarity

Many international workers organisations prioritised solidarity work with the Kosovars and the Kosovan workers' organisations. Three Italian union federations asked their members for an hours wages for relief work, so did the Scottish TUC. Would the readers of SW know this? No, they would not. Did SW print the appeal of a leader of the Kosovan teachers' union for help? No. Does SW promote Workers Aid for Kosova or Trade Unions for Kosova? No. Did SW encourage its readers to help the appeals for solidarity with Kosova launched by Durham NUM and Camden Unison? No.

Moreover, SW treated the question of Kosovar refugees as a simple question of their right to come and live in Britain. Of course this is a demand every socialist should back. Of course Blair is a hypocrite - on this question, as in much else. However the question of Kosovar refugees was not even mainly about their rights to live in Britain - it was mainly about their rights to live, unmolested, in Kosova! - about which SW had little to say.

Demands and politics

  • At the start of the bombing SW dropped the demand for Kosova's independence - at the very time the Kosovars needed it most. Independence was clearly demanded by the big majority of the population, and something which - even if we did not favour such a demand - should be supported by all socialists and democrats.
    Alex Callinicos wrote in SW: "arming the KLA and backing Kosovan independence would make the situation worse." Why? because: "An Albanian nationalist army, hardened by war and enjoying mass support in refugee camps could threaten the integrity of half a dozen states throughout the region." Callinicos believed socialists should take responsibility for the crazy way the Balkan borders had been drawn up. He had weighed up the right of the Kosovars to fight against annihilation, and the preservation of bourgeois stability (by Milosevic!), and come down on the side of bourgeois stability!
    So Kosova should remain part of the Serb state dominated by an ultra-nationalist government? - a Serb state which has, very recently, attempted to kill or drive the Kosovars out? This is absurd.
  • SW, at the start of the war, avoided the issue of independence by proclaiming the need for a 'socialist federation of the Balkans'. It is something we favour too. But the creation of such a federation requires a socialist revolution in the area; a socialist revolution requires a united, revolutionary working class movement - which, in the Balkans, is a million miles off.
    A democratic or a socialist Balkan federation are both more rational ways of structuring political life in the area. But such ideas should not be used as a method of avoiding support for the rights of a small, terribly oppressed people to separate if they choose - to independence, now.
  • SW did not demand the withdrawal of Serb state forces from Kosova - when these forces were fighting a war to obliterate a whole people. By the end of the war - after a matter of only a few weeks - 90% of the Kosovar Albanians had left their homes, to either hide in the mountains and woods of Kosova, or to live in tent cities in Albania and Macedonia.

The nature of the war and the issues it raised

The main aspect of the recent Balkan war was the just colonial revolt of a terribly oppressed people - the ethnic Albanians of Kosova - against Milosevic's racist ethnic-imperialism. NATO's policy - as the right-wing Economist expresses it - is to 'cool down' the region (which in the short term even led them to war). In the process NATO - to a limited extent and for their own reasons - helped the Kosovars.

That imperialist governments sometimes help the enemies of their enemies should come as no surprise to socialists. During the first world war, for example, the German imperialists attempted to send guns to Irish rebels; Lenin was helped to get back to Russia. Was Lenin wrong to take German help? Would the Irish have been wrong to accept German guns? Of course not - and, likewise, the Kosovars had the right to take help from wherever they could get it, including NATO.

Should German workers have prevented the shipment of guns to the Irish? or attempted to halt Lenin's 'sealed train'? Of course not - and, likewise, socialists should not have protested at any help NATO happened to give the Kosovars.

Does this make us 'pro-NATO' - no, simply against the slaughter of the Kosovars. And if the editors of SW have some secret, better way to protect the Kosovars, they should speak up.

And the tragedy is that the Western powers still refuse - like Socialist Worker - to respect the democratic right of the Kosovars to independence; they imposed an arms embargo on the KLA and did relatively little to help the Kosovar fight against the Serb state's ethnic cleansing.

For NATO? For the KLA?

Workers' Liberty opposes NATO. It was not our job to advise or support NATO's war. It is, however, our job to remain rational. The idea that 'the main enemy is at home' is absurd during this war, a war in which Milosevic attempted to destroy a whole people.

Were Blair and Clinton attempting to colonise Serbia? No, they were not. Were they attempting to destroy Serbia or drive out its population, or anything comparable to what Milosevic attempted in Kosova? No they were not.

Is this 'pro-NATO'? No, just rational and sane.

And what about the KLA? Workers' Liberty supports the just struggle of the Kosovars for their democratic rights - against Serbian aggression and, potentially, now, against NATO. If the KLA play a good role - good. Do we support the KLA? - the KLA is a bourgeois nationalist organisation - we do not politically back such parties or groupings. That's not the role of socialists. Our role is to develop an independent, internationalist, working-class movement.

'Stop the Bombing'?

SW failed to support the Kosovar rebellion and, instead, campaigned only to 'Stop the NATO bombing' and for 'Stop the war'.

But an end to the NATO bombings would not stop the war - the war Milosevic was waging to scatter and destroy the Kosovars. If the single demand of the one-sided British 'anti-war movement' had been carried out, Milosevic would have proclaimed a great victory and turned on the Kosovars to finish them off.

And because SW simply demanded 'stop the bombing' - which was exactly and precisely Milosevic's demand - SW was able to march alongside flag-waving Serb bigots and assorted Stalinist riff-raff; an SWP organiser in Manchester was even photographed shaking the hand of a Chinese embassy official 'in solidarity with the Chinese people' after the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed - a nice way to mark ten years since the Tienanmen massacre, giving the murderers of the Chinese people a propaganda coup to be used against the Chinese workers at home!

How low can you go?

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