Kosovo/a Discussion: A Left-Interventionist View

Manuela Dobos

[from New Politics, vol. 7, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 28, Winter 2000]

MANUELA DOBOS teaches East European history at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. She has written extensively on the former Yugoslavia where she has lived and worked, most recently from 1997 to 1998.

 

FOR THOSE WHO ADHERE TO THE PRINCIPLES OF SELF- DETERMINATION, resistance to fascism and basic human solidarity, a bottom line for socialists, simply and exclusively opposing U.S. intervention anywhere is not the way to defend those principles. The enormity of what has happened and will continue to happen in the former Yugoslavia makes it impossible for socialists to stand idly by, or take seriously self-styled anti-imperialists who simply deny it and call it war propaganda.

Only a military campaign could have stopped the Serbs back in 1991. But because U.S. and European leaders refused to arm the local populations against Serb aggression, and then refused to fight it themselves, the task of stopping genocide only grew harder over the next eight years. Any setbacks Serb forces have suffered since came only from military attack. Therefore, I believe we had to demand 1) arming the organized resisters to Serb (and later Croat) aggression but also 2) getting the U.S. to intervene militarily on the side of those victims. I have found the argument against U.S. intervention to be too weak to justify abstaining from meaningful action in solidarity with those who suffer such persecution and with those who are fighting back.

According to the anti-interventionist argument, the U.S./NATO have only their own imperialist motives for any international action. They will never act out of concern for the victims of genocide, and any military action they undertake will only be aimed at advancing their global power. All this is supposedly manifest in the war the U.S. launched against Serbia instead of negotiating, beginning with the Rambouillet ultimatum in February 1999 -- and in the catastrophe that this caused the Serbs to bring down upon the Kosovars.

The U.S. government, itself the subsidizer or perpetrator of genocide and war crimes in Central America and Southeast Asia, has never been humanitarian in its interventions. True, it acts only for its own agenda. However, I believe that there is not one but several agendas, and they can be unclear and contradictory. U.S. world policies have fluctuated among different ambitions. Star Wars plans continue alongside capitalist cooperation with Communist bureaucracies; military hegemony and world market domination are pursued but so is the image of righteousness, and any other images the politicians need to win elections.

It is therefore at least theoretically possible that a movement for socialism and democracy will find in this complexity moments in which its objectives overlap with government policy, or at least contradictions to take advantage of. It has worked in the past. Imperialist America was compelled to fight Hitler, and not out of compassion for the Jews. But this fight was backed and joined by progressive movements, and fascism was overthrown. Later, the role of defending the "free world" against Soviet imperialism conflicted with supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the divestment movement, led by African-Americans, succeeded in removing that support. The peace movement was able to undermine popular support for the war in Vietnam by showing the immense contrast between the projected image of the U.S. as defender of democracy and the reality of puppet regimes and decimated villages.

When the war in Bosnia began, these considerations prompted people like me to demand that this government act in the way we would expect a really democratic government to act: to lift the arms embargo against Bosnia, arm the Bosnian Army (and later, the KLA) and, if necessary (as it soon was), send ground troops to defeat the Serbian Army once and for all. We want to confront the U.S. with its hypocrisy and shame it into doing the right thing -- it just might do it and save some people. If it does not, we must demand more loudly because by doing so we are showing the kind of government we want and would have if we had real democracy; not to do so means abandoning fellow human beings to unspeakable horror.

To assess which imperialist agenda informed U.S. policy in the Balkans, you need evidence for the whole decade, not merely the four months in which the U.S. finally mounted an offensive against Serbia. That evidence, I believe, can only lead to the conclusion that the U.S. imperial agenda consisted precisely in avoiding use of its military arsenal and above all its troops. The U.S. wanted trade and investment to proceed in Eastern Europe uninterrupted by social and national revolution, with deals to be made with known, reliable, stable power-wielders.

 

THE U.S. INTERVENED IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA IN JUNE 1991 to insure that the strongman of the area, Milosevic, would maintain stability, that is, preserve existing borders and control unruly populations. This was another version of U.S. attempts to prevent the crumbling of the USSR, and, after August 1991, Russia. When Milosevic unleashed the Yugoslav Army against the Slovenes and then the Croats, the U.S. fell in behind Britain and France for a "diplomatic" solution to the "civil war" rather than military engagement against the Serb aggressor. In short, it was appeasement from 1991 right up to the ultimatum of February 1999. That this policy was self-contradictory and blew up in the faces of the U.S. and NATO does not alter the fact that refraining from the use of military power was the policy throughout, and refraining from the full military power necessary to smash the Serbian army was the reason for high-altitude bombing -- an historically ineffective tactic -- of Serbia and Kosovo/a instead of a ground invasion.

The contradiction which eight years later led the U.S. to military confrontation of Milosevic instead of continued diplomacy, was that this "force for stability" actually derived his power from destabilizing. He is a strongman exactly because he has been able to create a fanatic mass out of the majority of Serbs, unleash them on their neighbors and violently recreate borders. While the U.S. was tacitly supporting Milosevic in June 1991 because he was ostensibly keeping Yugoslavia together, he was in fact destroying it. Over the next four years, Milosevic and allied warlords continued with wholesale murder and land-grabbing in Bosnia. The victorious defenders of the "free world" directly helped him get away with it.

Though the U.S. talked tough, this was designed to convince the Bosnians that Washington was on their side. The Bosnians could then be lulled into taking American advice to negotiate a "political" solution and stop demanding arms or else military intervention. Somehow, the U.S. would make things right in the end if the Bosnians agreed to partition along ethnic lines, thereby destroying their state and their culture. And this is indeed what happened with the Dayton Pact, the triumph of "diplomacy."

It is true that in the summer of 1995 the U.S. was acting tough. It armed the Croats and Bosnians to defeat the Bosnian Serbs in the west, and NATO bombed Bosnian Serb military installations. This is what made the pact possible by November. But Milosevic was allowed to entrench himself again in power. He was now to be the grand stabilizer of the shambles of former Yugoslavia, curbing the Bosnian Serbs; in return, the sanctions against Serbia were to be lifted and the Bosnian Serb para-state legitimized. (It is significant that Washington turned to the second local strongman, Franjo Tudjman, to effect the military offensive. The U.S. then permitted him to ethnically cleanse the formerly Serb-held part of Croatia of 150,000 Serbs, thus reinforcing ethnic partition as a basis for the deal.)

Making Milosevic the Dayton guarantor meant Washington had to shut up about what the Serbs had been doing to the Kosovars since 1989. The non-violent independence movement of Kosovo/a was not allowed to speak at Dayton. Returning home empty- handed after having placed their faith in the U.S., the movement's leadership was soon challenged by the emergence of an armed guerilla force, the KLA, in the next years. In 1998 this precipitated the blow-up of diplomacy with Milosevic.

The American course was to desperately seek diplomatic agreement throughout 1998. During the first months Serb forces were successful in attacking the popular base of the KLA in the countryside through several massacres and destruction of villages. The U.S. obliged Milosevic by calling the KLA terrorists. The initial scorched earth actions by the Serbian police merely caused young men to join the KLA, which succeeded in gaining control of many areas in Kosovo/a by May. But Serbian retaliation, even more virulent, seriously cut back the KLA by July and forced 400,000 to hide in the hills as their villages were torched. Sixty thousand refugees were thrown out into neighboring countries. Serb forces cleared great swaths of land near key border areas, ominous signs for the future. While U.S. officials continually asserted that Kosovo/a would not be allowed to become another Bosnia, they also announced they would never send troops. And privately they were saying it was not such a bad thing that the KLA had been brought down a notch or two (International Herald Tribune, Sept. 15, 1998). The famous 1992 "Christmas Warning" by Bush and Clinton that the U.S. would tolerate no Serb military action in Kosova was conspicuously ignored.

Along with weekly threats of bombing for deadlines unmet, the U.S., with the help of the Russians, fostered the "diplomatic initiative" (numerous European dignitaries traipsing to Belgrade, Holbrooke brokering the October deal). The number of refugees grew to 100,000 by September. The Holbrooke deal called for the Serbs to reduce their troops and accept OSCE monitors. But Milosevic openly flouted the agreement and deployed more troops instead. The monitors, who were supposed to have stopped the violence "from both sides," could do nothing but record mounting Serb atrocities. By year's end, there were 200,000 refugees and an estimated quarter of a million internally displaced. By this time, after countless unmet deadlines and failures to act, the U.S. and NATO had a major credibility problem. They either had to decide finally to make a deadline stick or be seen as a paper tiger. Only then did they begin to seriously plan to bomb.

 

THIS HISTORY COMPLETELY BELIES THE CLAIM THAT THE U.S. was out for military hegemony. It shows instead that it was following exactly the sort of policy the anti-interventionists demand it should have taken. Similarly, a longer look at the enormously intensified mass expulsions show them to have been a part of larger Serb plan for which the bombing was an excuse, not the result of any spontaneously erupted rage. It also shows that the only way to attack NATO's cynicism (and incompetence) in ignoring this obvious consequence was to demand the ground invasion, and not, as the anti-interventionists wanted, a withdrawal. This is precisely what we "left-interventionists" did in the weeks prior to the bombing, warning that bombing alone would simply lead to a huge Srebrenica.

As we know from the testimony of one of those seeking diplomatic agreement in November with Milosevic (German General Klaus Naumann), a Serb general, soon to be purged, secretly warned that Milosevic's intentions were to lead the Serb Army against NATO. Plans for "Operation Horseshoe," the deployment of troops to carry out the specific function of wholesale expulsion, had already been made in December, and carried out throughout January 1999 (Washington Post, April 11, 1999). Not only did NATO bombs not make the Serbs go any wilder than they had already gone, but this disclosure shows that for Milosevic, Rambouillet in February was not going to be about negotiations. This was clear when Milosevic not only did not show up but sent second- stringers. He knew that the U.S. and NATO would have no choice but to issue an ultimatum challenging Serb sovereignty, and that was okay with him. In rejecting it, he would look like David against Goliath, gamble on the divisions among NATO members, particularly with Russian help, and exploit the historical ineffectiveness of bombing in order to accomplish a great mission, the final solution to the Albanian problem.

For the Albanians in Kosovo/a, the carefully planned and executed expulsion of almost a million of them was the culmination of Serbian state practice that reached back to its conquest of Kosovo/a in 1913. This policy was designed to correct the demographic imbalance in favor of Serbs. It consisted in making life miserable for Albanians by killing and robbing them and destroying their livelihood so that they would leave, thereby making Serbs a majority. Tito's Yugoslavia, in which Kosovo/a was autonomous, had made this goal impossible. But it was renewed with the military dictatorship imposed by Milosevic in 1989. As Helsinki Human Rights Watch reports from 1992 attest, "cleansing" was already occurring in northern towns of Kosovo, and Albanian emigration was precisely the aim of the apartheid laws of that regime. The ethnic cleansing of March to June, 1999, threw out over half the population. (The opposition in Serbia, supposedly marginalized by the bombing but which actually had sidelined itself in 1997, has as its outstanding characteristic the inability to face any of these facts and convince the Serb public that they happened. Until the opposition does this, it is meaningless.)

The anti-interventionists point to Washington's violation of international law by avoiding going through the UN; but they fail to take note of the violation of the UN Charter that the U.S. and Europe committed when they did not come to the aid of a member state, Bosnia, and sent in UN peacekeepers instead. And they overlook American disregard for the Genocide Convention to which the U.S. is a signatory, when those peacekeepers failed to prevent genocide, and even collaborated with Serb forces. Indeed, the arms embargo on Bosnia was illegal, particularly after three votes of the General Assembly to lift it. In fact, the UN has all along been the instrument of U.S. policy toward the successor states of Yugoslavia: it was supposed to go in and "stabilize" by treating both aggressor and victim equally. As a vehicle for American agendas, the UN has not been that different from NATO, in which there are also other nations with which the U.S. has to contend: last May, for example, Britain wanted ground troops, and Germany wanted to stop the bombing.

Obviously, U.S. intervention to stop genocide is only going to happen in special circumstances, and it will probably not turn out the way we want it to. Thus today, the refugees are back, but Milosevic remains in power; the Serb military is intact and now threatens Montenegro. And the real work is helping to strengthen a multi-ethnic, region- wide, authentic democratic opposition representing working people and civil society. We also need to construct a better UN, with a global police force. Only then can we start preventing situations that impel urgent and desperate responses. Meanwhile, we need not shrink from calling on the U.S. to take arms against killers.

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Contents of No. 28

Kosovo/a Discussion

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