The War Continues

War is the most effective weapon of capitalism against the working class. Every force involved in the Yugoslavia conflict - the armies, independent militias, NATO, the KLA and the Russians - are doing what they can to keep the conflict they started going. In the 1980's Yugoslavia was riven with class struggle and almost free of ethnic conflict. During the 1990's the international ruling class succeeded in reversing this situation.

The Independent, 14 June, says that NATO is "clearly unable to control the explosive passions of Serbs and Albanians". As usual, the media claims it's the ethnic groups attacking each other, rather than murderous gangs claiming to belong to one ethnic group attacking various others (and sometimes its "own", as when the KLA kills Kosovar Albanians it doesn't like, or the Serbian Army indisciminately bombards multi-racial villages). As always, the media project their own racism onto the innocent victims of war.

According to the papers, the Serbian civilians of Kosovo are afraid of "revenge" by returning Kosovar Albanian refugees. The implication is that "the Serbs" are responsible for crimes carried out by military forces. If they are not responsible, attacks on them are not "revenge", but terrorism. This view was explicitly defended in the New Republic

It was several days before NATO started producing what it claims is evidence of atrocities carried out by the Serbian police, military and paramilitary. The burned bodies may have been caused by NATO missiles. Again, we don't deny that Serbian forces, official and unofficial, have carried out racist attacks on Albanian Kosovars. But given the paucity of evidence, and the need to demonize Serbs to justify murdering them, we expect that these attacks have been exaggerated. At the same time, violence against Serbian civilians has been downplayed or ignored. The media never mention how Albanians came to become a majority in Kosovo - a combination of affirmative action and ethnic terror. This is now escalating with NATO participation.

The only good news has been the death of a few journalists in Kosovo and the continuing doubts about the worthiness of NATO's victory. It hardly needs saying that the working class has just suffered a massive defeat. Though the world is now more dangerous - conflict has increased in Korea, Kashmir, Ireland and Iraq - it looks like the superpowers have resolved their differences by brinkmanship. Viktor Chernomyrdin's dire warnings were a bluff, and Russia contented itself with embarrassing NATO by seizing Pristina airport while the Allies squabbled about which of them was going to get there first.

We overestimated the confrontation

The reasons for the savagery of the attack on the working class in the Balkans are covered in detail in this article about the class struggle in Yugoslavia from 1996

June 15, 1999