Kosovo/a Discussion: Self-Determination, Not Intervention

DURING THE COLD WAR, MOST AMERICAN RADICALS OPPOSED U.S. military intervention around the globe. Of course there were some exceptions, leftists who "chose the West" and its military power. Though they didn't support every specific military action, these supporters of the West had no basic objection to American intervention; they saw the exercise of U.S. military power as a lesser evil against the greater evil of Communism and the Soviet Union. In contrast, particularly with the baring of the horrors of the Vietnam War, most of the left, joined by increasing numbers of ordinary Americans, broadly condemned U.S. military forays into other countries. They saw such intervention as an attempt to bully and subordinate the rest of the world in the interests of a narrow elite, not on behalf of democracy and freedom.

Unfortunately, many radicals temporized in their opposition to Soviet interventionism, fearing that to condemn it wholeheartedly would somehow give credence to the supporters of American imperialism. And some leftists became outright supporters of Communist movements and regimes, especially in the third world. This temporizing and support exacted a heavy price during the Cold War, a price progressives continue to pay, because they have made it all too easy for defenders of U.S. military power to tar the left with the brush of being apologists for totalitarianism. Nevertheless, the mainstream American left was right to recoil from support to the U.S. military. Strangely enough, many leftists seem to have forgotten the reasons for their past opposition, even though these reasons remain as compelling today as they ever were. After all, weren't there plenty of wrongs to be righted in the world during all those Cold War years? Certainly, but the left understood that the sway of corporate power at home had implications for U.S. foreign policy: it meant that the American government's arms establishment couldn't serve as the instrument for righting international wrongs.

So what has changed? The Soviet bloc no longer exists. But why does this justify leftist calls for the United States to send its forces around the world, to Haiti, Bosnia and Kosova; even, for some, to the Persian Gulf? Is the U.S. today any more capable of using force to promote international democracy and social justice than it was before 1989? Manuela Dobos, herself a justly proud veteran of the 60's, has to my knowledge thus far limited her concrete calls for American intervention to the Balkans, but her reasoning would logically lead her to exhort the U.S. to "do the right thing" by sending its troops by air, land and sea to sites of gross injustice around the globe. In the case of the Balkans -- Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and now Kosova -- Manuela rightly says that only armed force could have succeeded in repelling Milosevic's advances. But from that truth, which implies that supporters of democracy everywhere ought to have demanded that their governments give Milosevic's victims full access to arms along with diplomatic and moral support, Manuela makes the unwarranted leap to arguing that the U.S. should have sent in its forces. She dismisses the idea that America could make imperial gains from such intervention by invoking the fact that from 1991 to 1999 the U.S. looked to Milosevic as the stabilizer of the region and avoided deploying its forces to oppose him.

But simply because the United States cynically avoided intervention against Milosevic in the interests of a corrupt stability doesn't obviate the fact that when it did intervene militarily in the face of Milosevic's unanticipated obstinacy, it was in order to defend and expand the credibility of NATO and its ability to mount "out of area" force projection -- not in defense of the democratic self-determination rights of the Albanian Kosovars. President Clinton made it perfectly clear from the outset that he had no interest in independence for Kosova, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of its citizens clearly wanted to be liberated from oppressive Serbian rule. He begged Milosevic to accept the Rambouillet accords on the grounds that this was Serbia's last chance to hold on to Kosova. Now that the war is over, the victorious Americans and their allies are doing all in their power to deny self-rule for the Kosovars -- disarming the KLA to the extent that they can, preventing the emergence of self-governing structures such as courts and civil administration, and keeping open the possibility of partition of the country. Thanks to their own independent efforts and resistance to Western attempts to suppress them, the Kosovars may yet be able to turn the defeat of the Serbs into a victory for themselves. We hope for their success, but they will face an uphill battle given the deep hostility the U.S. and the other great powers harbor toward the self-determination struggles of weaker nations and groups.

Of course, if one believes that domination by the U.S. and its wealthy allies is not, or is no longer, a grave threat to the rights, safety and well-being of the world's peoples, then enhancing NATO's power and reach poses no significant problem. In my opinion, such a view is profoundly mistaken. I believe that the next several years will show that U.S. military might is a crucial complement to its imperial economic power, and that NATO's successful 1999 battles in the Balkans have helped to strengthen and legitimize that military might. The implications go beyond NATO. Military force will continue to be an indispensable element in the ability of the U.S. and its wealthy allies to coerce people into acquiescing in their exploitative system; when progressives call for intervention by these great powers, they are suicidally helping to strengthen the very forces that are and will be arrayed against them and the people they care about.

IN THE LAST ISSUE OF New Politics (#27), while the war was still going on, Steve Shalom opposed U.S. intervention, using arguments with which I largely agree. I disagreed, however, with his call for diplomatic compromise through involvement of the U.N. Security Council and the Russians, as opposed to support for the KLA's self-defense of Kosova against the Serbs. These disagreements, debated in an exchange in that same issue, continue in the aftermath of the war.

First, Steve's opposition to U.S. intervention relies heavily on the contention that it has made matters worse for the Kosovars. He states in a post-war article in the September issue of Z magazine that "the bombing unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe for the Kosovar Albanians on a scale far worse than what was going on before the bombing," and suggests that NATO's actions in no way mitigated the suffering of the ethnic Albanians. In the midst of the conflict, with tens of thousands of refugees fleeing their homes, this contention could have seemed to have some merit. But those of us who opposed NATO and the U.S. (as well as Milosevic) gain nothing by refusing to acknowledge the extent to which the Kosovars are probably better off now than before the war. They have a greater measure of independence from Serbia than they once had: despite the U.S.'s intention to keep Kosova totally under Serbia's domination, Milosevic's unexpected intransigence led to a series of events that made this very difficult, and the suffering the Kosovars endured during the war was probably, in their eyes, worth it in light of the outcome. Meanwhile, though, the fundamental reasons for opposing U.S. military intervention remain: the U.S. is hostile to self- determination, grants it on rare occasions only if forced to by pressures beyond its control, and looks toward strongmen like Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein to maintain stability in a world dominated by the wealthy and powerful. America's military force is used repeatedly to perpetuate and recreate conditions of oppression and poverty. Support to that military force is self-defeating for progressives hoping to create the conditions for a democratic and just peace.

Steve argues in his Z article that Milosevic would not have been able to carry out his extensive ethnic cleansing had he not been provided with the opening and excuse to do so by the NATO bombing. Manuela counters this line of argument with the fact that Milosevic had already developed his "Operation Horseshoe" plans for massive expulsion of the Albanians. However, it cannot be assumed, as Manuela does, that Milosevic would have been able to mount his full-scale attempt at ethnic cleansing if the bombing hadn't taken place. In fact, it is virtually impossible to know, one way or the other, how far Milosevic might have gone in the absence of the bombing. But Manuela is right that the Albanians would always have lived in extreme peril under Serb rule, permanently threatened with ethnic cleansing.

However, my basic disagreement with Steve is of a different nature. He condemned, as I did, U.S. bombing, which I believe should have been opposed whether or not it opened the way for Milosevic's ethnic cleansing campaign. Where we differ is that Steve didn't support the KLA's armed struggle against Milosevic, arguing that such resistance could only lead to worse repression. But the Kosovars and the KLA didn't undertake their resistance lightly, without awareness of its risks. As a people totally dispossessed in their own land, they were driven to it. The KLA had already suffered major attacks from the Serbs before the U.S. bombing, and the Albanian population as a whole had been subjected to years of police terror and horrific systematic discrimination that denied them education in their own language, excluded them from most decent jobs, and caused massive unemployment. As the failure of Ibrahim Rugova's non-violent campaign became apparent when the Kosova problem was deliberately left out of the Dayton accords, ordinary Kosovars turned to the KLA and its armed resistance as the only alternative. Diplomatic solutions sponsored by the U.S., the Russians, or the Security Council that would effectively protect the Kosovars were not on the table. Though the chances of winning were clearly very slim, the Kosovars' only real alternative to armed resistance was acceptance of Serb domination and the permanent reign of terror that it inevitably entailed.

Besides his argument that armed resistance was inevitably doomed, Steve withheld his support from the KLA on the additional ground that it was not sufficiently committed to building a multi-ethnic Kosova. Yet both before and after the war the KLA stated that it is in favor of just that, and has on several occasions intervened to prevent harassment and violence against Serb civilians. Perhaps these declarations and interventions were insincere, perhaps most if not all of the members of the KLA, in their heart of hearts, favor driving all Serbs out of Kosova. This would certainly be understandable -- though wrong -- given the complicity of many Kosovar Serb civilians as well as paramilitaries in barbaric acts of murder and torture of Albanians. But the need for international recognition and support continues to provide significant reasons for the KLA to discourage acts of revenge by its leadership or ranks and by ordinary Kosovar civilians.

Persecution of innocent Serb civilians in Kosova is deplorable and criminal; all friends of Kosova should speak out against it and insist that the KLA has a responsibility to protect the Serbs -- although Serb war criminals should be brought to justice and tried by Kosovar courts. But victimization of innocent Serbs is not an argument against self- determination. When Czechoslovakia was liberated from Nazi rule, it brutally -- and far more predictably than in the case of Albanian actions against Serbs in Kosova -- expelled some three million Sudeten Germans. Who, among us, would say that this crime -- for that is what it was -- meant that no support should have been given to the Czechoslovak resistance under German occupation? And more recent examples abound, unfortunately, of peoples taking advantage of newly-won independence to settle scores with ethnic minorities in their midst -- the treatment of Russians in the Baltic states comes to mind. It is wrong and terrible, but it cannot mean that Latvia, say, should have remained an occupied province of Russia. Similar issues are raised in the unfolding of the struggles of other oppressed nations such as Tibet.

TIME AND AGAIN WE SEE THE UNITED STATES and other wealthy countries supporting the very despots -- Suharto, Milosevic, Duvalier, Saddam Hussein -- whose evil deeds are later invoked to justify intervention. Rather than strengthening U.S. imperial legitimacy by calling on the American military to act as a liberating force, we should be supporting struggles for economic equality, human rights and democracy -- including the democratic right to self-determination -- even as our own government refuses to do so. Support for these struggles need not, should not, be uncritical; the KLA or any other movement needs to be held accountable for its actions. However, hope for a better world lies in the success of these various and diverse popular movements, not in advancing the power of the U.S. military or the self- appointed leaders of the UN Security Council.

Contents of No. 28

Kosovo/a Discussion