Butchery in the Balkans (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended, many in the West breathed a sigh of relief. Western democracy and the free market were seen to have triumphed and the Red Spectre that hunted Europe had been finally exorcised. Politicians and bureaucrats began speaking of a “New World Order" and of a “peace dividend" whereby money saved on military expenditure could be put to social use and channelled into health and education programmes.

Few anticipated that the end of the Cold War would open a new can of worms. From Prague to Vladivostok, republics and tiny enclaves became caught up in a tidal-wave of nationalist fervour. Overnight, even the most recently published atlases became out of date as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia disintegrated.

Nowhere has nationalist upheaval been as intense as in the former "Socialist Federal Republic” of Yugoslavia. So enmeshed have become the politics here that a brief look at Yugoslavia’s history is in order.

Artificial creation

After the capitalist-instigated madness known as the first world war the Austro-Hungarian territories of Croatia. Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were joined with Serbia and Montenegro under the Serbian king Alexander, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was founded. Although a new constitution was proclaimed. rivalry between Serbs and Croats for political supremacy led Alexander to impose his own dictatorship in 1929, the year the republics were re-named Yugoslavia. This accentuated Croatian enmity to centralization and Serbian predominance.

Under the new Regent, Paul, Yugoslavia came increasingly under threat from the Axis powers, Germany and Italy, after 1933, and the hostility of the Soviet Union, which urged the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (formed in 1937) to work towards the fragmentation of the country. Germany took advantage of a popular uprising and invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, creating a puppet fascist state out of Croatia and territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the rest being parcelled between Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and Hungary.

Resistance groups soon emerged to confront the Nazis—the Serbian Chetniks under the leadership of Draza Mihailovic and Tito’s Communist Partisans. However, not only did many Croats support the Nazis, but many Chetniks collaborated against Tito’s partisans. By 1943, Tito had emerged as victor against Mihailovic and formed the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council, which assumed power when the Nazis were finally driven out.

In November 1945, the provisional government abolished the monarchy and set up the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Six months later the country adopted a constitution based upon that of the Soviet Union in 1936, and later nationalized transport, industry and banking, and brought agriculture under collectivization.

In 1971, after stating his intention of liberalizing the government. Tito established a 22-man collective presidency which he hoped would manage affairs after his death. This "liberalization" had the effect of sparking Croatian nationalism, culminating in mass demonstrations and widespread rioting. In 1981, Albanians in the autonomous province of Kosovo protested against ill-treatment by the Serbian administration. This was followed by further unrest in 1988 when Serbia moved to end provincial autonomy there.

Yugoslavia thrived during the Cold War, chiefly because both blocs paid handsomely to maintain Yugoslav non-alignment. The Serbian political leadership advocated a centralized state and tough authoritarian rule. This brought it into direct conflict with Slovenia and Croatia, both of whom favoured greater autonomy, more so in the wake of the break-up of the Yugoslav League of Communists in spring 1990.

The Yugoslav federal machinery wasn’t made to take the strain of political pluralism. The federal government, led by free-marketeer Ante Markovic, was paralysed by wrangling among the republics. No procedure could be agreed for federal elections.

In April 1990 both Croatia and Slovenia held free elections in which the centre-right Slovenian Democratic Community Party and the Croatian Democratic Union swept to power on nationalistic, pro-independence cards. When these two republics declared independence they were invaded by the Yugoslav Army. The same thing happened when on 1 March this year Bosnia-Herzegovina too declared its independence. All three republics have since been granted recognition by the EEC and the USA.

The history and politics of Yugoslavia are indeed complicated, and while it is true that the end of the Cold War hastened the break-up of the republics, this alone does not explain the conflict that has raged there for over a year. Indeed, few commentators can agree on the cause of the crisis, or why some republics want autonomy while others wish to stay within the federation.

The Croatian president Franjo Tudjman echoed Thatcher's views when he asserted that Serbs and Croats “were not just different people but different civilisations’’, and that the conflict was one of "democracy against communism” (European, 18 August 1991). Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, claimed that the trouble was caused by the secessionist demands of other republics, adding that "all processes in the contemporary world tend toward integration” (Time International, 8 June).

Richard West, writing in the Guardian, sees the “difference between the Yugoslav people” as “one of religion” (17 September 1991), while Branka Magas (Marxism Today, November 1991) declared that “the war being waged against Croatia is . . . in reality little more than a war of territorial conquest”.

Few, if any, are putting forward a socialist analysis of the causes of the conflict and blaming the capitalist system for the crisis. It is true that nationalism is a factor, but it is only a banner used as a means to an end—profit.

Uneven development

The influence of the world market in recent years has accentuated economic disparity in the Yugoslav republics. Both Tudjman and Milan Kukan (respective leaders of Croatia and Slovenia) saw the economic advantages in independence, manipulating nationalist sentiments for financial ends.

The conflict was sparked by greed for profit. The north-west republics of Croatia and Slovenia, tired of subsidizing their southern neighbours chanelled economic indignation into a raw form of nationalism—the Croatian leadership digging up wartime fascist insignia—fearing that a more centralized Yugoslav federation would mean a greater redistribution of their wealth.

Croatia and Slovenia are by far the wealthiest of the republics. Heavy industry is concentrated in Croatia and production centred on iron ore is thriving in Slovenia. Croatia is Yugoslavia’s biggest producer of oil and in 1987 attracted 7.2 million tourists, boosting the economy by USS3 billion. Although Slovenia has only 7.8 percent of the population, it accounts for an estimated 25 percent of Yugoslavia’s GNP and 30 percent of exports.

Slovenia has for some time been the most wealthy and economically efficient of the Yugoslav republics. Average earnings are more than double those in Croatia and reputedly six times those of the southern province of Kosovo, where unemployment stands at 40 percent.

It is little wonder, then, that a centralized Yugoslav federation which pumped 55 percent of the federal budget into maintaining the armed forces, looked so unattractive to capitalists in the northern republics. And little wonder that Croatian and Slovenian capitalists object to shouldering the burden of subsidies—development aid, federal projects, natural disaster relief, etc—to the poorer south.

So the basic, economic cause of the conflict boils down to a clash of interests between those capitalists who wanted and those who opposed a redistribution of profits.

Just as Franjo Tudjman and Milan Kukan have sought to secure their republic’s economic futures, appealing to nationalistic sentiments, so too has Milosevic reawakened Serbian nationalism by rallying his people against the richer north-west with rash promises of raised standards of living and long-term economic security.

War in Bosnia

War is now raging in Bosnia-Herzegovina where 44 percent of the population are Muslims. The UN has imposed sanctions and a naval blockade on Serbia and there is talk of military intervention. Serbia, however, is nearly self-sufficient in food production and has stockpiled goods and fuel—although the latter could run short as Serbia produces only 20 percent of what she uses. So it is likely that Serbia will not be too badly affected by sanctions.

The recalcitrant Milosevic sees sanctions as “the price Serbians have to pay for supporting Serbs outside Serbia” (Independent, 1 June), but neglects to tell the workers who do his fighting that war is the price they must pay for the right to be exploited by Serbian capitalists. And Tudjman never tells Croats fighting for Croatian enclaves that they are really fighting to make bigger profits for their masters under German economic rule.

It is a great sadness that so many have died in what was Yugoslavia from the virus of nationalism, injected into them by leaders suffering from the disease of capitalism.

Enlightened workers will be aware that the only remedy for the present world malaise is socialism. Workers in reality have no nation, but hoodwinked by their leaders they seek sanctuary inside artificially-constructed borders. Workers bind themselves with the chains of regional and national identity, giving their masters the keys. They forget that there is only one country—planet Earth—on which all wealth and the means of living in comfort and security is produced by themselves. Workers must unite and break these chains. The world is theirs for the taking.

John Bissett

The Yugoslav Wars: Myths & Realities (1995)

From the September 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again the socialist assertion that nationalism can never serve the interests of the working class is being attested to daily amidst the horrors of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Despite claim and counter-claim of atrocities committed by one side or the other the simple fact is that worker is butchering worker — for the privilege of rearranging capitalist state borders!

Early August brought what could be a turning point in the Yugoslav wars with a major offensive by the Croatian army which recaptured almost the whole of the Krajina region including Knin, the capital of the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina, and an offensive by the Bosnian Army’s 5th Corps who successfully broke out of the besieged Bihac enclave and linked up with the Croatian Army in Krajina. This has thrown into disarray not just the whole of the Serbian nationalist political apparatus but also the foreign policies of the great powers.

Not inevitable

Contrary to the ramblings of the “ancient hatreds” school of thought, war in Yugoslavia was not inevitable. Major constitutional changes were very much on the agenda and even though there was a tendency towards fragmentation, and with it a potential for violence. But full-scale war and genocidal carnage were not preordained.

Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics and two autonomous provinces each having its own regional government within the federal structure. The two richer republics of Slovenia and Croatia wanted free-market-type reforms akin to those being implemented in live former state-capitalist bloc, together with a looser confederal political structure and moves towards EC membership. For a time it looked as if this was the direction in which Yugoslavia would move, with Prime Minister Ante Markovic presenting a reform package that allowed for foreign ownership of Yugoslav industry and tied the Dinar to the Deutschmark. Such proposals met with the approval of the EC, who also made it clear that they were only interested in Yugoslavia as a single market and not as a number of smaller states. Similarly George Bush stated that the US would not recognise any breakaway republics from Yugoslavia (partly because Bush did not want to encourage secessionist tendencies in the Soviet Union).

In purely economic terms total breakup of the federation was in no-one’s interests. Even for Slovenia and Croatia, the Yugoslav federation though a drain on their economies was also the biggest market for their goods. To secede would have meant not only losing that market but losing also the possibility of EC membership, while for the poorer republics secession would mean losing a source of funding for economic development. In terms of international politics the West (and Moscow) feared that the break-up of Yugoslavia would not only destabilise the Balkans but provide a model and source of legitimacy for the break-up of the Soviet Union into a number of smaller and less stable states, some with a nuclear capability. The continued existence of the Yugoslav Federation appeared to be agreed upon by all concerned.

Ancient hatreds?

According to John Major the Yugoslav wars are primarily the results of "the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the discipline that that exerted over the ancient hatreds in the old Yugoslavia. Once that discipline had disappeared, those ancient hatreds reappeared and we began to see their consequences when the fighting occurred” (Hansard, 23 June, col. 324). This view is repeated by many western politicians, partly to excuse their failure to have guided Yugoslavia peacefully into post-Cold War Europe (a not impossible task given the consensus noted above), and partly because it mirrors the racist propaganda of the nationalist regimes in Serbia and Croatia, the two regional imperia to emerge from the disintegration of Titoist Yugoslavia and behind whom the great powers are lining up against one another. It is, however, a view which bears no resemblance to historical reality.

The idea of ancient hatreds and longstanding ethnic feuds is wholly mythical. For centuries Serbs and Croats were barely aware of each other’s existence, being separated by the border dividing the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires—the military frontier or Volna Krajina to use its Slavonic name. The Serbs who inhabited this region were descended from semi-nomadic Vlachs who were encouraged to settle along the frontier by the Austro-Hungarian authorities to function as a buffer against incursions by raiders from Bosnia. In return they were awarded certain privileges such as semi-autonomy and freedom of worship (the Vlachs were Orthodox Christians unlike the Catholic Hapsburgs). The idea that these Genzers, as they came to be known, were Serbs running from religious persecution by Muslims is a myth fabricated by Serbian nationalist intellectuals.

It was only in the latter half of the nineteenth century that Bosnia’s Orthodox Christians and Catholics began to regard themselves as Serbs and Croats, and again this was due to propaganda by nationalist intellectuals. The often bloody conflicts for which the Balkans are known, and which at times took on an ethno-religious dimension, were in essence economic and political conflicts—manifestations of the class struggle between the predominantly (but not exclusively) Christian peasantry and their predominantly (but not exclusively) Muslim overlords.

Only in World War II did Serbs and Croats finally confront each other directly, but even this is shrouded in mythology. The Ustase regime of Ante Pavelic which Serbian Nationalists claim illustrates the inherent fascism of all Croats was deeply unpopular and would not have lasted a day without the blessing of the Vatican and the support of the Nazis. Its victims were not just Serbs but Croats too. Many Croats, including the young Franjo Tudjman, fought with the Partisans led by Tito, another Croat. Serbs also fought Serbs in a three-way slaughter involving the pan-Yugoslav Partisans, the Nazi puppet regime in Belgrade and the Monarchist forces of Draza Mikailovic. Bosnian Muslims fought on both Partisan and Axis sides, and proportionally suffered more than either Serbs or Croats. The Yugoslav war of 1941-45, then, was not an ethnic conflict but ideological and political.

Similarly the Yugoslav wars of today have their origins in political struggles. Not in the political struggles of secessionist republics against the Federation as a whole, but in the political struggles occurring inside the Federation’s most powerful republic, Serbia.

The bones of Prince Lazar

Slobodan Milosevic was at one time hailed in the West as a Balkan Gorbachev, tire first Yugoslav to realise Tito was dead, as the phrase went. Inside Yugoslavia he was known as something else, as the Saviour and Protector of the Serbs who, the nationalists claimed, were oppressed in Tito-the-Croat’s Yugoslavia—despite the fact that Serbia dominated the political system, the army and was creaming off the profits from Slovenian industry and Croatian tourism.

In 1989 when tire rest of Europe was celebrating the fall of the state capitalist empire and extolling the virtues of civic nationalism, Milosevic was staging rallies commemorating the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Polje and parading the bones of Prince Lazar around towns and villages across Serbia in a campaign calculated to whip up ethnic nationalist sentiment.

Milosevic began his rise to power in 1987 when he opportunistically latched on to the issue of the Serb minority in the province of Kosovo. The situation of these Serbs, though poor, was no worse and probably better than Kosovo’s Albanian majority; but in taking on the issue Milosevic was able to establish a power base among the nationalist intellectuals of the Serbian Academy of Sciences from which to launch an assault on the ailing Titoist political system. The Kosovo issue, which eventually led to the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina being swallowed up by Serbia, showed that the post-Cold War Yugoslavia was to be a Serbian-dominated centralised unitary state; thus further provoking confederalist tendencies in tire other republics.

The Chetniks

The Yugoslav wars began in June 1991 when the Yugoslav Army entered the breakaway republic of Slovenia under the pretext of securing Yugoslavia’s borders. The Slovenian war lasted ten days, left less than seventy dead and ended with the army’s withdrawal. This allowing of Slovenia—which had no sizeable Serb population—to secede indicated that the Serbian Nationalists in the Yugoslav Army had won their power struggle with the “Yugoslavists” who wanted to retain Yugoslavia within its previously existing frontiers, and that Greater Serbia would be exactly that: a single state that incorporated all areas of the former Yugoslavia populated by Serbs.

Croatia and Bosnia did have sizeable Serb populations. As securing of borders could no longer be used as a front for Yugoslav Army intervention, the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia were induced to turn on their neighbours through a combination of propaganda and terror. When the army was deployed it was usually under the pretext of “peace-keeping” or protecting the Serb minority from attacks they themselves had provoked by actions instigated by Belgrade.

For the most part Serbian intervention came in the form of the Chetniks, volunteer units recruited from the underworld and far-right groups often commanded by gangsters and neo-fascist politicians. The Arkanovci, for example, were responsible for many of the atrocities committed at Vukovar and around Banja Luka in Bosnia. This unit take their name from Arkan, nom de guerre of Željko Ražnatović, a Belgrade mafia boss, wanted by Interpol for murder who became an MP in Milosevic’s Serbia.

Arkan was last sighted around Srebrenica in the company of General Mladić prior to the town’s fall. Another unit, the Dusan Silni, forced elderly Croats to walk through a minefield in Slavonia, while the Seseljovci were responsible for the first documented incidence of mass rape in the Bosnian war after rampaging through Zvomik, a defenceless town on the banks of the Drina. This latter group are the paramilitary' wing of the Serbian Radical Party headed by the rabid nationalist Vojislav Seselj.

Workers are always the victims

Needless to say, in this as in all wars it is the working class who suffer most. They do the fighting and the dying, they are raped and “ethnically cleansed", and it is their lives and homes that count for most of the “collateral damage”—whether or not they swallow the nationalist filth of their leaders. The people of Tuzla, for instance, an industrial town where Serbs, Croats, Muslims and others have lived and worked together for generations, didn’t even vote for Bosnian secession. Yet now they find themselves fighting and dying together for what will be, if Bosnia survives, a capitalist state that exploits them as surely as any other, for to lay down their arms will mean certain extermination at the hands of the Chetniks. The story is much the same throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Yugoslav experience shows us what can happen when structural changes in the capitalist economy result in power struggles that spiral out of control. These wars are not the results of ancient hatreds or a peculiar Balkan mentality, they are the result of capitalism and can therefore happen anywhere in the world, even here. The choice, as ever, is simple: Socialism or Barbarism.

Ian Simpson

Letters: Legal war? (1999)

Letters to the Editors from the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Legal war?

Dear Editors,

I am horrified to watch that NATO are waging war on Yugoslavia without declaring war, in fact, no UN Resolution was passed by the Security Council permitting NATO’s barbaric bombing of Serbia.

I do not condone ethnic cleansing anywhere on this planet, equally I cannot condone Anglo-American-led NATO International Gangsterism in the Third World, getting one country or religion against another and promoting proxy wars for hegemonistic goals.

The Western alliance which arrogantly describes itself as the “International Community” has now embarked on a multi-faceted aggressive campaign to bring Iraq, Yugoslavia and other Third World countries to their knees.

Curiously, Russia and China, permanent members of the Security Council of the UN, are not being consulted; on the contrary they are being rebuffed. China is more interested in her world-wide economic interest and as such China is not challenging the Anglo-American aggressive designs anywhere. The US has become the UN and Kofi Annan its General Secretary, is reduced to an American stooge.

I often ask myself: what have we done to deserve this. “New World Order” or more appropriately “New World Disorder”, especially after the ending of the Cold War.

Is this what is called the “Ethical Dimension” of foreign policy? The self-appointed “International Community” has become judge and jury and executioner.

In the political dictionary, the word “imperialism” is out of style but the barbaric bombing in Serbia, Yugoslavia tells us that “imperialism” is alive and kicking, bullying, intimidating, bombing and killing small nations of the third world.

Avtar Pabla, 

Coventry  

Reply:

It is true that, unless they conform to the UN Charter, wars are technically illegal under international law. Yet even since it was adopted in 1946, wars have gone on in some part of the world, the biggest of which, the Korean War, was waged under the UN flag. This merely illustrates what Socialists have always argued, that peace treaties are merely worthless scraps of paper. We have never placed any confidence in the UN as a means of stopping war. As wars are caused by the rivalry between capitalist states over markets, trade routes, investment outlets and raw materials that is built into capitalism, only the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by the world-wide system of common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit can do that- Editors.  

Mistaken identity

Dear Editors,

I can’t work out your rationale on Serbia—Stop the bombing!!—Stop the bombing!! And? Then what? Count how many hundreds and thousands of Albanian Kosovan refugees have been forced out of their homes?

Count how many unmarked, mass, civilian Albanian Kosovan graves are currently being filled over by Serb tractors?

Count how many Albanian Kosovan women, young and old, have mysteriously “disappeared” into “Serb safekeeping”?

Count how many Albanian Kosovan houses, shops, workplaces, villages and small towns have been left in smoking ruins by the Serb military?

Count how many mines the Serb authorities are placing around all the Kosovo borders so that Albanian Kosovans “who have nothing to fear” can feel safe and wanted in their own country?

Is this the same SPGB who claim to be on the side of the oppressed and powerless? Supporting the demands of one of the most brutal, right-wing, authoritarian, unreconstructed, military regimes in Western Europe? With the Serbs’ proven track record in Bosnia and Croatia over the last 10 years?

Shame on you?

“Uncle Vladimir”, 

London N16

Reply:

Although we are in favour of the immediate stopping of all wars, i.e. of the killing of innocent workers on both sides, the posters you have seen proclaiming “Stop the Bombing” have not been put up by us, but by some Trotskyist group which is no doubt supporting Serbia as the lesser evil in the current NATO-Serbia war. So your criticism is misdirected. Besides, of course, as V.I. Lenin you may be their uncle but you’re no relation of ours.

And just because we don’t support the NATO bombing campaign does not mean that we therefore support the Serbian army. We are against both sides, Serbian capitalism as well as NATO imperialism who are fighting over an issue—who should control the territories of the former Yugoslavia—which is not worth the sacrifice of a single worker’s life- Editors.  

“Socialism” or what?

Dear Editors,

Your pathetic reply to Paul Azzario’s letter (April Socialist Standard) illustrates quite convincingly the need to change the name of the party.

When the “S” word is propagated by Socialists, the bemused recipients will have mental pictures triggered of anything stretching from the Labour Party, the “Socialist” countries via Russia’s Soviet past. Surely, even you must admit that nearly 100 years of dedicated slog, has produced no discernible dent in the solid front of political ignorance.

Socialist propaganda goes in and out of the mind with the greatest of ease, because actual examples of Socialism in action are difficult to point to, thus the mind has nothing to work on.

Whatever Socialists do, life will be difficult, so I am suggesting that they try “Lateral Thinking” to assist in getting around part of the problem.

At the moment Socialists use “Direct Thinking”!, e.g. we are “Socialists”! and refuse to change our name no matter how great the confusion! It is the “Charge of the Light Brigade” mentality, the ruinous head-on clash! We count the few survivors and honour them but we are no nearer to Socialism.

Why not attack from the flank. Disarm the enemy by changing your name and use only meaningful words, where others cannot follow. E.g. “One World, Free Access to Everything Produced”. This is a bit of a mouthful, but it is pure Socialism, where no-one else can follow!

I am sure that a competent wordsmith can improve on such a heading, which cuts out all mistaken ideas associated with that “S” word. Supporters of Blair, Benn, Yeltsin, Castro, Trotsky and others will have the ground cut from beneath their feet and be forced to start thinking positively—for the first time.

Sam Levitt, 

London NW3

Editorial: The Balkan War (1999)

Editorial from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again European cities are being bombed. Once again displaced persons are on the move. This has never ceased to be the lot of people in Africa and Asia but one of the claims of Western capitalism was that it had at least established peace and prosperity in Europe. Now full-scale war has returned to Europe. The illusion that permanent peace and prosperity is possible under capitalism has been shattered.

The NATO bombing raids on Yugoslavia are aimed not just at direct military targets but at the industrial infrastructure of power stations, fuel depots, factories, chemical plants, roads, railways and bridges which serve civilian purposes as well as supplying the Serbian military machine. All this represents the destruction of useful wealth. As Socialists have always said, war means social regression.

But is it sometimes necessary? Although we are not pacifists (we would countenance fighting should a pro-capitalist minority take up arms to try to prevent the democratic establishment of socialism) we say there is no such thing as a “just war”. Wars are fought over markets, investment outlets, raw material sources and trade routes and strategic points to control them.

The present Balkan War is no different. It is a continuation of the process that started in 1991 when Slovenia declared its independence from Yugoslavia, in which the stake has been: who shall control the territories of the former Yugoslavia—Serbia or the West, in particular Germany?

When “communism” (in reality state capitalism) collapsed, the NATO powers had a choice. Let the Serbian ruling class continue to maintain order and stability in the area so that trading and profit-making there could continue normally. Or apply the principle of “national self-determination” in the hope that a collection of smaller, more “ethnically pure” states would provide greater stability.

Reunited Germany, with its historic enemy Russia on its knees, was able to revive its ambitions in Eastern and Central Europe and it led the way in working for the break-up of Yugoslavia so that it, rather than Serbia, could dominate the area. First Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia, then Macedonia broke away or rather were broken away. The result, however, has not been stability. Quite the reverse, with only a NATO army of occupation maintaining a fragile peace in Bosnia and eastern Croatia.

And now Kosovo. Serbia claims that it is fighting to retain Kosovo because this is the cradle of “Serbian civilisation”, but there is more at stake than the bones of Prince Lazar. As retired Canadian Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, who commanded UN troops in Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo, has pointed out: “Quite frankly, they want the northern half of Kosovo. That’s where the mines and natural resources are” (Times Colonist, Victoria, 26 March). There has been speculation in the media that this may be the compromise that will emerge once the killings and bombings have stopped: the partition of Kosovo with Serbian forces controlling an ethnically-cleansed north and a NATO army of occupation looking after the impoverished refugees in the south.

Faced with this latest manifestation of capitalist barbarity and cynicism we once again place on record our abhorrence of all war and call upon workers everywhere to unite to bring the war-prone capitalist system to a speedy end.

Watching the war go by (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The capitalists have never gone to war to promote Justice and they never will.

Last year The Most Dangerous Man In The World was Saddam Hussain. Pronounced Sadaaam Hoosayn by the plastic propagandists employed to spin the latest line for CNN. There had never been a nastier dictator than the Evil Saddaaam and that was why forces of the American Empire—sorry, NATO—had to “go in there and kick ass”. Any resemblance to a gangland settling of scores should be ignored. After all, that upright defender of virtue, Slick Willy Clinton, had cast himself as Batman against the Iraqi Joker, with wee Tony doing his best to look like Robin.

But let us not distract ourselves with nostalgia. That was yesterday’s war. Now, in the world of CNN-speak, an even more demonic evil has come to threaten the stability of the globe. Plucky little Kosovo must be defended. Think not of the fact that nine out of ten Americans had never heard of Serbia, let alone Kosovo, until CNN told them about it fifty times a day. The threat to the New World Order has been identified. Milosevic must be banged to rights. The propagandists, using a script uncannily similar to Wag The Dog (a fictional account of a sleazy US President saving his reputation by a bogus war against Albania), invite us to shout and curse against the crimes of the Belgrade regime.

And, blinded by the light of the TV screen, large numbers of decent people are weeping for the oppressed Kosovars and cheering NATO as it drops its bombs on Serb towns and villages. Because most people are decent and they hate to see injustice against a defenceless minority, so they are sucked in to the drama of war.

But there are some other defenceless minorities whose plight is not shown on CNN. There are some defenceless minorities for whom NATO would not so much as fire a shot from an air gun. In fact, the NATO states are the very ones which have sold the weapons by which these defenceless minorities are oppressed. For example . . .

There are the Kurds in Turkey. Between 1990 and 1994 about one million Turkish Kurds were driven from their homes. Over 40,000 Kurds have been killed. And in 1994 Turkey became the biggest single importer of US military equipment and the world’s largest arms purchaser. Turkey is a member of NATO. Its troops are currently part of the NATO forces in Yugoslavia. Why is NATO attacking Serbia and not Turkey? The US administration justifies Turkish state atrocities on the grounds that they are defending “law and order” against Kurdish terrorists. The Serbian regime uses precisely the same logic: that it has only slaughtered people and burnt villages to the ground in a war against Kosovar terrorism.

Within the past month 10,000 people were killed in a war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. There are countless refugees. When did we hear about this on the TV News? Where are the calls from those incorrigible humanitarians, Albright and Cook, to send aid to these refugees and to stop the fighting? Since 1994 820,000 have died in Rwanda. Since 1986 a million and a half have died in Sudan. Where was CNN?  

What about East Timor? Conduct a simple experiment. Go on to the streets of Kansas City or, for that matter, White City in London and ask people what they think about the slaughter of the Timorese people. Most will never have heard about East Timor. The propagandists have forgotten to tell them about that atrocity because that one is a NATO-armed assault on a defenceless minority. East Timor was taken over by Indonesia in 1975, since when one third of its population has been killed—that’s 200,000 people. Since 1975 the USA has sold over $1 billion of weapons to the Indonesian dictatorship. The other main arms suppliers are Australia and Britain. Just as the NATO troops were whizzing off to knock the shit out of Belgrade, Indonesian militia entered a church full of people in East Timor and slaughtered them. Reports have not made it on to the CNN News, perhaps because the reporters are too busy congratulating the West upon its humanitarian campaign to help oppressed minorities.

There is something deeply disgusting about the pretence that bombing is a civilising mission. The people who drop bombs from the sky upon towns and villages are bullying cowards and deserve no respect from anyone. The people who give them the orders to drop their bombs are self-serving hypocrites whose concern for the safety of Kosovar refugees is about as genuine as their domestic concern for single mothers, the unemployed and the disabled. The minority who own and control the world—the Directors of USA Inc and UK Plc—are ruthless, exploitative thieves whose primary interest is in the fast buck and protecting what they imagine their interests to be. The capitalists have never gone to war to promote justice and they never will. Indeed, the notion that justice can be furthered by violence can only make sense when you have a social system that is rooted in violence and plunder.

We will no doubt be told that by opposing the military escapades of Clinton and Blair we are siding with those who are committing unspeakable acts against defenceless Kosovars. Socialists side with no state, for all states are merely organised forces of national coercion. We are opposed to the lot of them and support the interest of the oppressed, not selectively, but wherever they are. In time of war we refuse steadfastly to be deluded by the crass propaganda of any section of the ruling class or to become entrapped in the rhetoric of militarist terror.

Instead of taking sides between this nation or that, we oppose all nationalism. Workers have no country. None to live for. None to die for. Workers should refuse to fight, for every drop of working-class blood shed in battles within capitalism is wasted.  

CNN’s viewing figures have gone up since the war in Yugoslavia started. What exciting pictures the explosions make. What a terrific diversion from thinking about the poverty of life under the profit system it is for wage slaves to be presented with 24-hour live coverage of Clinton’s Heroes. CLOBBER SLOBBA, says the Sun, ever eager to find new depths of banality, illiteracy and tastelessness by which to woo its prey. So, we sit at home and we watch the war and just occasionally we might wonder how much it cost to build the US bomber planes (more than the total GDP of Albania, as it happens) and what kind of world we might live in if those resources were not used to produce ever more sophisticated weapons of death, but libraries, homes and hospitals for all.

Steve Coleman

Letters: Not my war (1999)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not my war

Dear Editors,

Like you I am opposed to dropping bombs on my fellow human beings. My “side” is opposed to the “sides” of Milosovic, the KLF and the NATO powers, including “our” government. My “side” is for peace and live and let live against power politics, territorial urges and militaristic posturing.

Having no shares or property to defend, I give all Tommies permission to take it easy and stay at home with their wives and bairns. The airmen and soldiers are victims too of a cynical, greedy two-faced hypocritical bunch of warmongers.

If war is ever “necessary” this should proceed by the politicians heading the column into battle.

Robert J. Taylor,  

South Shields 

We have a dream

Dear Editors,

We have a dream, it’s a big one too. Our dream embraces the whole of humanity and they don’t come much bigger than that. In our dream we see every person on the face of the Earth having the same value, priceless! In our dream gone will be the days where one person’s life will be considered more valuable or less valuable than any other. Gone will be the days when someone will be paid as much for reading the News for a day as a nurse will receive for a whole year of looking after the sick. Gone also will be the days when some have a life of untold luxury, wealth and privilege just because they happen to be born in a certain bed.

We have a dream . . . in a socialist world buildings will be built to the highest possible specification (just like banks are now) to be inhabited by people and not to house lumps of gold, bits of coloured glass and pretty pieces of paper. We don’t know how long it might be before our dream becomes a reality, it might take quite a while. We realise that there are plenty of people who have a vested interest in retaining the demeaning values upon which society is based . . . for the time being they are doing alright thank you, Jack.

Capitalism is a reality, but the dream that once was, for too many, has now become a soul-destroying nightmare. One million people in this country alone take a daily dose of Prozac (anti-depressant) to help them get through each day. This is a legal drug, just imagine how many more are getting away from it all by “fixing” on anything that they can lay their shaking hands on.

The fact is of course that capitalism has and continues to fail people in their millions, they see no hope, they have no hope, worse still they don’t even have a dream.

John Phazey, 

Sutton Coldfield

 

Labour no good

Dear Editors,

Re your article “What’s New about New Labour?” (March, Socialist Standard), it is of course, perfectly true that (so-called) “New” Labour is no different from Old Labour. The Labour Party never was a socialist party. Over the years it has had many far left hot-heads in it; one of the most notable being Aneurin Bevan (although, towards the end of his life, he mellowed considerably). The Labour Party in its policies was only really a left-wing conservative party. That is why, in my opinion, it has spent most of the years of its existence in opposition.

When in government, it has introduced means testing for the for the very poor, cut dole money, introduced a compulsory two years’ national service for all young men on attaining the age of 18, banned strikes making them illegal, operated wage freezes, limited wage increases. True, they introduced child benefit after the war; but, in old money, Hugh Dalton, then Chancellor, put a shilling on 20 fags and sixpence on 10 fags to pay for it. The aforementioned policies seem more like the policies of a far right Thatcherite party than a so-called Labour Party.

One of the first assertions in the Labour Constitution was: “The Labour Party is a Socialist Party”. It wasn’t and never has been. But the one that always amuses me sadly is the old Clause 4: “To secure for the workers by hand and by brain, the full fruits of their labour and the most equitable distribution thereof.” Jolly decent of them eh! Who was anyone to deny the workers by hand or brain the full fruits of their labour?

I always remember in the long ago, November 1956 to be exact, as a young engineering apprentice in the Ford Motor company, I was invited to join the AEU. I had to fill in a form and attend the branch I had chosen with my seconder who had joined me. The new recruits stood out at the front of the meeting and the Branch Chairman read a text out to them (I suppose they still have it). The first part of the text had in it: “Our ancestors and predecessors were vilified and persecuted and, what prosperity we have now, is the fruits of their labour.”

Most of the text, however, has faded from my memory. The part I do remember is the end part: “May you live to see the day when we have ended the system that causes unemployment, that causes poverty in the midst of plenty, and replace it with a just and equitable one.” In the intervening years, particularly during the Thatcher years, my thoughts have often gone back to that far-off night. Would I ever live to see that day?

Stuart P. King, 

Romford, Essex 

Become a socialist

Dear Editors,

I think that most folks have heard of Socialism but I doubt very much that their definition coincides with mine—a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community—a world-wide community of 5½ billion of us humans.

We Socialists are quite satisfied that the only way to achieve this goal is by political action. Use your vote to bring about an end to the present system, capitalism, which deprives the worker of the wealth they alone produce.

The solution to most of the ills of the world is a simple one, establish Socialism. However it cannot be done without a majority of Socialists. Our socialist candidates will flat-out tell you that they don’t want your vote unless you want socialism. Reforming capitalism is not on the agenda. Our political opponents have been doing that for over 200 years.

The socialist can point the way but they will not adopt the role of “leader”. Have you heard this before? “Where there are leaders there are led, where there are led there are bled.”

We must first cast off the role of being a follower. You may think you cannot be hoodwinked. That you are extremely intelligent. That you are too wise in the ways of the world. The facts prove otherwise. You have voted for the Whigs and Tories, the Democrats and Republicans, the Liberals and Conservatives for the past 200 years. These are facts. Let us face it: you have been misled year after year. Your “leaders”, with their smooth talk and promises, have proven that followers are made to be bled. Become a Socialist and learn how this capitalist system operates and why it cannot function in the workers’ interests.

Bill Hewitson,  

Santa Monica, California

Bombing for peace—the real crisis in NATO (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Western liberals are in a flap about NATO’s bombardment of Serbia. Whichever position they take appears to condone violence against somebody, and the shallowness of liberal thinking has never been more cruelly exposed than now. Yet the cynics are having trouble too, because they can’t see an economic motive behind NATO’s actions, and nobody can believe that the West would spend £2 billion on a purely humanitarian exercise when it didn’t show the slightest concern over East Timor, Rwanda or any other killing ground of recent years.

It’s easy to see the economic value of Kosovo to Milosevic, but what’s in it for NATO? The West don’t seem to be after land or resources in the area, and is facing a huge bill for its pains. So is NATO really a cuddly philanthropic defender of the weak?

Wars, though generic to capitalism, do in fact interrupt the process of wealth accumulation and are frequently against the interests of large sections of the capitalist class, who will therefore try to prevent them. You can’t make money when some gangsters are shooting up your casino. Hence capitalism’s need for an international police force. But as with a domestic police force, the willingness of populations to accept law enforcers whose main concern is private property and money-making depends on those enforcers also preventing other types of crime, like mugging, rape, murder and street violence, which don’t directly concern the owning class but which worry the hell out of the rest of us. If the police couldn’t prevent a gang war on your doorstep you’d start wondering why you bothered respecting the law yourself. And when the law breaks down, the looting starts.

At the heart of this crisis is the problem of credibility, not only for NATO in its efforts to keep the peace, but for the Western Liberal Democracy model of capitalism. This is more serious than it sounds. Capitalism, as everyone knows, requires majority support and participation. Now you can enforce this support the hard way, by having a police state with heavy duty surveillance, martial law, “disappearances”, 24-hour border patrols and a huge state propaganda machine. This is the 1984 approach of George Orwell, but there are severe practical problems, because such a system is incredibly expensive to maintain and, being so crude, unable to get the best out of its workers. The collapse of state capitalism in Eastern Europe had long been predicted by the Socialist Party for these very reasons (although it lasted much longer than we expected).

The other way to ensure support is much cheaper, more efficient, more stable, and more user-friendly. It is called Liberal Democracy. Nobody is going to rebel if they believe that they are already free, and this belief is central to the West’s perception of itself. Consequently the capitalist class is obliged to tolerate a (semi-) free press, the vote, and open criticism of itself, because there has to be evidence of this “freedom” for all to see. And there are other costs. We will not co-operate unless capitalism supplies us with a reasonable safe and secure environment. The police rule by popular consent, and could not rule otherwise. Employment has to be supplied, or else a dole, otherwise food riots will ensue. 

 

The credibility of “Western democratic capitalism” is in bad shape, even for Westerners. We are better informed than we’ve ever been, and we are not impressed by what we see. Nobody believes in leaders like they used to. Nobody doffs their cap to their local MP as they once did. We are accustomed to think of them as generally useless and usually corrupt. Governments, we realise, don’t really care a damn about us except for that little X once every five years or so. Thirty percent of the population doesn’t even bother to give them that.

After the pyramid-selling fiascos in Albania a couple of years ago, capitalism in the region has a poor public image. Millions in Eastern Europe were hoping it was going to be better than Leninist state-capitalism but the bread queues are still there and instead of the secret police they now have the Mafia, that ultimate expression of the free market. If it now appears that NATO, the international Police Department, can’t even stop some tinpot dictator from murdering his way to power, the capitalist hold over workers’ minds will be weakened. We will begin to see through their cosy propaganda and their self-serving laws that nobody else obeys anyway. We might turn back to fascism. But what is worse, we might go forward to socialism. There are no bars on our windows, thanks to the money-saving logic of capitalism. There is only our belief in the system that prevents us acting, and that is increasingly under strain.

Paddy Shannon

The Rise of Yugoslavia - Part 1 (1962)

From the October 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

The creation of Yugoslavia (the word means "State of South Slavs") was the culmination of an historical process which began fourteen to fifteen centuries ago.

The Slavs came originally from the Russian Steppes and the northern forests of Byelorussia and their history over the years had been very turbulent. Wars and skirmishes had been waged back and forth between various Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian Princes, each trying to extend the territory under his control.

But these rulers all had to submit to a more powerful enemy when the Turks invaded Europe during the fourteenth century. Bloody indeed were the battles, but the invaders relentlessly forced their way north as far as Vienna, eventually retreating some way under pressure from the forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The new line of demarcation split the territory roughly in half, bringing Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovinia, Monte Negro and Macedonia under Turkish rule, while Austria-Hungary retained control of Croatia and Slovenia. The new conquerors lost no time in imposing their religious ideas. Worship under the old Bosnian Church was forbidden. The Roman Catholic Church replaced it in the north, and the Eastern Orthodox Church in the South. Although there was considerable resistance to this, it would be a mistake to think that the many peasant revolts during the next six centuries were over religious issues.

Eighteenth century poets and philosophers of that unhappy land often scratched their heads over the cause of these conflicts. Only by Marx's Materialist Conception of History are we able to grasp their true significance and realise that they had their origin in the oppressive social conditions of feudalism. Religion served only to mask the more deeply rooted troubles. For instance, the feudal set-up peculiar to the area was such that peasants owned no land whatever. They were allowed merely to work the lord's land, surrendering about fifty per cent. of the products to him. This was a constant source of struggle over the centuries and peasant claims to land ownership met with stubborn refusal. Then again, large numbers had been driven to the Velebit Mountains along the coast during the Turkish invasion, but this was very poor land. Subsequently migration took place eastwards to the fertile plain lands of Vojvodina in Serbia, to be met with fierce resistance from those already established there.

The Turks were eventually ousted from the Balkans in 1877. The Serbs did this with Russian backing, and Serbia became an independent kingdom. King Alexander 1 of the Obrenovich Dynasty was the first ruler, but he was assassinated in 1878 and was succeeded by King Peter Karadjordjevicb. Independent Serbia, it seemed, set the pace for Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia still under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was a living inspiration to nationalist dreamers, and for the power-hungry in Belgrade this was indeed a time of plotting and intrigue.

From the turn of the century there were popular demonstrations in favour of Slav unity and in opposition to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Cries of working class discontent were now added to those of the frustrated petty nobility and a thwarted Bourgeoisie. Such was the state of affairs when on that fateful June day in 1914, one student Gavrilo Princip felled the Archduke Franz Ferdinand with a gunshot which rang round the world and sparked the dry tinder of European capitalist conflict into the flame of World War 1. Four years later, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed and the Versailles Peace Treaty established a new unified Balkan State under King Peter Karadjordjevicb. Yugoslavia had arrived.

Six different regions were incorporated in the new state, each of them still under the influence of one or other of the major powers. Economic development had been patchy and uneven. Most industrialisation had taken place in the north which had been influenced by the rapid growth of European capitalism. The rest of the nation was still largely feudal with peasants representing about eighty per cent. of the population.

Yugoslavia was now a political democracy, but in 1918 the Royalists still held popular sway. Organisations such as The Social Democratic Party, the Nationalist groups “Young Bosnia" and “Serbian Youth” and the Yugoslav Communist Party, were left standing. At the general elections of 1921, however, the Communist Party won 59 seats and came within an ace of forming a government. There followed a bitter struggle with the Royalists that reached its peak with the assassination of Minister of the Interior Drashkovich. The Royalists promptly blamed the C.P. for this crime, imprisoned its leaders and declared it an illegal organisation.

From now on, the C.P. had to exist, clandestinely. It received financial support from Moscow and followed faithfully (or should we say slavishly) the Russian party line. In 1936 the Party was dealt a further blow. Its General Secretary Gorkich disappeared while in Moscow during the trials and his office was handed over to Josip Broz, otherwise Tito.

But the war clouds were gathering again, and in April, 1941. Yugoslavia was overrun by the Nazis. King Peter fled to England. From then until 1945, it was the familiar story of a peasants’ resistance movement to the German occupiers, but this again was divided broadly into two opposing sections. First there were the Royalists, known as the Chetniki, under the command of General Milhailovich. The Partisans were the other major group, organised and led by members of the Communist Party. Both groups had their eye on the future and fought with the intention of establishing their own type of government after the war.

Various minor parties such as the Social Democrats, Trotskyists, and Liberals hated both Royalists and Communists and were quite prepared to support the Nazis against the resistance movement. The Nazis were quick to see the value of "divide and rule" tactics and in 1943 by promising the Royalists a share in post-war government, managed to enlist their aid against the Partisans.

The Partisans fought on against gigantic odds, but it would be wrong to suppose that their heroism and courage were inspired only by a desire to be rid of the German invader. The peasants sighed for an end to the conditions of pre-war Yugoslavia, which had many similarities to Tzarist Russia. They lent a ready ear to the Communists who promised land reform and industrial development, and clearly compromise with the old order to any extent was impossible. Capitalist development was due for a fillip after the war.

"Peoples Republic"
In 1945 a plebiscite was held and declared heavily in favour of the establishment of a "people’s republic”. The Communist Party won the ensuing General Election by a large majority and the Royalists were eliminated as a political force. A formidable task faced the new government. Forty per cent. of the towns were in ruins and one-tenth of the population had perished during the war. The survivors were asked by their rulers to work hard and deny themselves now for happier times in the future. Millions gave their enthusiastic but misguided support to the government having been told that this was the path to Socialism Where have we heard all this before?

The Communist Party leaders were now in control of the state machine and theirs was the job of changing the feudal face of Yugoslavia into a Capitalist one —with the co-operation of the workers, of course. What matter that they called the new conditions "Socialism” or the "transitional period to Communism"? Mass working class ignorance would see that they remained in power for some time to come at least. Marshal Tito, the tireless underground leader in pre-war days and fearless partisan during the war, became the dictator of the new Yugoslavia, the man at the helm of the young capitalist State.

Like their brothers elsewhere, the Yugoslav Communist Party had many times said that they would grab the state machine as a temporary measure only, and use it to usher in Socialist society, It would then wither away, they claimed. How little they understood the role of the state machine. Since their rise to power it has become progressively stronger in the administration of Yugoslavia's private property society.

The C.P. cry of "Electrification and Industrialisation" meant sweeping changes in favour of the industrial capitalists. But there had to be a compromise because agriculture was and still is a major industry, and the transformation of the peasant into a wage worker had to slow down. The average peasant had no desire anyway to exchange the devil he knew for one he did not, and stoutly resisted attempts to drive him into the factories and workshops. Collectivisation of farms was then abandoned, at least for the time being.

Remy Starc.

[To be concluded]

Link to Part 2

The Balkan war (continued) (1999)

Editorial from the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

NATO’s war to complete the final break-up of the former Yugoslavia continues with increasing civilian casualties.

NATO claims to be waging war to save the Albanian-speaking population of Kosovo. If this really were their aim then their war would have to be pronounced a failure. The Albanian-speakers of Kosovo are manifestly worse off than they would be had there been no war. Burned out by the one side and bombed by the other, in the biggest displacement of population since the end of the last world war, the majority of them are now languishing in miserable refugee camps in Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro.

But NATO’s aim never was humanitarian. It has been, in the words of their Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark last March when it started, to “degrade and diminish” the old Yugoslav army, the one military machine in the area capable of standing up to them, and which had been thwarting their plans to turn the former Yugoslavia into a collection of weak, ethnically pure states in which the economic laws of the market could operate unimpeded, for the benefit, as they always do, of the strongest—in this case Western capitalist enterprises.

Wars are inevitable under capitalism because of the economic competition between states that is built-in to it, but is normally only a last resort when a state’s “vital interest” is involved. In this war that Serbia’s vital interest is at stake is clear, but it is difficult to see that this is so for the NATO states. Serbia under Milosevic was not that much of a threat to their interests and they have learned to live with dictators before—indeed they have learned to live with General Tudjman’s regime in Croatia whose record of ethnic cleansing is just as bad as Milosevic’s.

Probably NATO expected that the threat of war, or at most a short bombing campaign, would suffice. If so, they miscalculated and are now in a real mess from which they can only extricate themselves, unless they are prepared to admit defeat, by a further sacrifice of working-class lives and a further destruction of the civilian infrastructure in both Serbia and Kosovo.

What is going on is a turf war with the Serbian ruling class fighting to defend their already considerably reduced territory and NATO trying to grab Kosovo from them. It is for these sordid aims that the Albanian-speakers of Kosovo have been driven from their homes and that the workers of Serbia are being bombed and deprived of basic amenities such as water and electricity.

Capitalism is an abomination and a crime against humanity. It ought to have been done away with ages ago.

Bacon and Steam Trains: The Serbian Pork War and the Berlin-Baghdad Railway (2014)

From the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the centenary commemorations of the First World War start to build up, we look at some of the causes of the conflict.

The rivalry between Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia for territories and influence in the Balkan region was a fundamental cause of the First World War. The rivalry between the Hapsburg and the Romanov dynasties  manifested itself in the economic rivalry between the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the landlocked Kingdom of Serbia, and this rivalry was prosaically expressed in a customs war about pork. Between 1906-09 the huge Austrian-Hungarian Empire imposed a customs blockade on the importation of  Serbian pigs.

The friendly relations between the German Reich and the Ottoman Empire were seen as a threat by both  Tsarist Russia and the British Empire. Russia feared losing influence in the Balkans (its close ally was Serbia), and German control of the Dardanelles, while the British felt threatened by German access to the Middle East which would affect the Suez Canal, the oil rich Persian Gulf and the vital route to India. These fears for Russia and Britain were manifested in the building of the Berlin to Baghdad Railway.

In 1903 90 percent of Serbia's foreign trade was with the Austrian-Hungarian Empire which was mainly livestock in the form of pigs. This economic arrangement with Austria-Hungary guaranteed trade and revenue for the Kingdom of Serbia but it also impeded Serbia's industrial growth. In 1903 the Austrian-Serb commercial treaty was expiring, and negotiations were foundering because Serbia wanted to reduce its economic dependence on Austria-Hungary. In order to evade the economic control of Austria-Hungary, Serbia started to build economic links with other counties such as Bulgaria and France.

Serbian pork

In January 1904 Serbia arranged a loan through a French businessman who would purchase 150,000 Serbian pigs per year, and then placed a large artillery order with Schnedier, a French munitions firm. Previously, Serbia purchased munitions from the Skoda factories in Bohemia in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

In April 1904 Serbia entered into secret commercial negotiations with Bulgaria which became public in June 1905, and the Serbian-Bulgarian Customs Union became effective in March 1906. Trade negotiations between Serbia and Austria-Hungary came to an end. Tariff-laden Austrian goods became unsellable in Serbia.

In retaliation, Austria-Hungary closed its borders to all trade with Serbia with effect from 1 March 1906. The Imperial authorities claimed there was an outbreak of disease in Serbian pigs which threatened to infect Austrian livestock.  This meant the end of exporting Serbian pigs to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and the beginning of what became known as the Serbian Pork War.

Initially the end of pig exports to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was a shock to the Serbian economy. Serbia framed the issue of its pigs in terms of Serbian nationalism and Balkan independence from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The trade embargo forced Serbia to find alternative export markets. French investment was sought to build new packing plants for international trade, materials were ordered from Germany, construction projects were financed with capital from France, and  trade agreements were signed with Romania, France, Russia, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Germany. Serbia also put pressure on the Austria-Hungary protectorate of Bosnia-Herzegovina to allow a rail link  so it could have an economic outlet on the Adriatic Sea. Serbia also made an arrangement with the Ottoman Empire to export livestock from the port of Salonica on the Aegean Sea,  and received  aid for the construction of processing plants, modern slaughterhouses and canning factories for livestock. The net economic result for Serbia was that its foreign trade surpassed what it had been before the embargo and its agricultural industry was thoroughly modernised, pig farming was vertically integrated into a single operation.

Serbia was also interested in expanding its territory to include Bosnia-Herzegovina where many ethnic Serbs lived.  Austria-Hungary, fearing greater Serbian economic power, formally annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina to their empire in October 1908 which angered Russia and Serbia but they were unable to take action because they received no support from Britain or France. The annexation had to be accepted by Russia and Serbia in March 1909.  Austria-Hungary also planned to build a railway line to the Aegean Sea through Austrian occupied former Ottoman territory which would by-pass Serbia and also create a commercial barrier between Serbia and the Adriatic Sea.  The annexation coupled with pork embargo only fanned the flames of Serbian nationalism at home in Serbia and amongst Bosnian Serbs. In fact it was a Bosnian Serb who assassinated  Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary  in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo which precipitated the First World War.

German ultimatum

In 1909 the economic war over pigs between Austria-Hungary and Serbia came to an end when tensions over Bosnia-Herzegovina between Austria-Hungary and Russia reached such a level that international war was a possibility. Germany intervened and issued an ultimatum demanding the ending of Russian aid to Serbia. Trade was normalised between Austria-Hungary and Serbia but increased Serbian nationalism was the result of Austria-Hungary's economic war.

The major international issue of the nineteenth century was the 'Eastern Question' or what to do with the 'sick old man of Europe' which was the decaying Ottoman Empire on the European mainland. By the turn of the twentieth century the Ottoman Empire had little territory left in Europe  but it still held vast swathes of territory in Asia Minor, the Levant, Palestine, Mesopotamia and the Arabian peninsula which was all resource-rich with oil, chrome, antimony, lead and zinc, and with effective irrigation had a thriving agricultural industry. What was needed was a railway transportation system to move minerals and resources through the Ottoman Empire to link up with industrialised Europe.

The 'Orient Express' reached Istanbul in 1889, and in 1892 the railway was built from Istanbul to Ankara in Asia Minor by a syndicate of German businesses. The German Reich and  the Porte (Ottoman Empire) were on friendly terms, and both opposed to Russian attempts to control the Dardanelles and yielding influence in the Balkans. The proposed 'Berlin to Baghdad' railway line would link Germany to the oilfields in the Persian Gulf, in striking distance of  British oilfields in Persia, Russian oilfields in the Caucasus, close to British India,  and a railway  from Baghdad to Basra would also be a connection to Germany's African colonies in East and South West Africa and thereby avoid the British-controlled Suez Canal.

In 1903 the Deutsche Bank was awarded the concession to build the railway line from Konya in Anatolia through the Levant (Syria), Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Baghdad and thence to the Persian Gulf at Basra. By 1915 the railway line was 300 miles short of completion. The line was eventually completed in 1940. German advice and support was involved in the building of the Hejaz railway from 1900-08 which linked Damascus through Palestine to Medina in the Arabian peninsula. This line connected with the Berlin to Baghdad railway but was principally for the Ottoman Empire to strengthen its control over the desert tribes of the Arabian peninsula.

Threats to the Empire

The main issue for the British Empire was the economic threat posed by Germany in the competition for oil and trade  by the existence of the Berlin to Baghdad railway. The British believed that the Persian Gulf  with its oil resources and strategic importance was 'their' sphere of economic and political influence; the British Residency of the Persian Gulf was a diplomatic posting from 1763 to 1971.

The British policy in regard to Kuwait is testament to British attempts to exclude Germany from the Persian Gulf.  In 1899 Kuwait signed a treaty with Britain that gave the British control over Kuwait's foreign policy in exchange for British protection and an annual subsidy. The treaty was prompted by British fears about the proposed Berlin to Baghdad railway which with a link to Basra would lead to an expansion of German economic influence in the Persian Gulf. The creation of the artificial state of Kuwait at the head of the Gulf blocks access from Basra to the Gulf. In 1913 Britain signed a convention with the Porte that the Emir of Kuwait was diplomatically recognised by both the Ottoman and British Empires as the ruler of the autonomous city of Kuwait and hinterlands. With the start of the First World War and the Ottoman Empire in alliance with Germany, the British invalidated the convention and declared Kuwait an independent principality under the protection of the British Empire.

In 1901 British capitalists had negotiated a concession to explore for oil in Persia and in 1908 an oilfield was discovered which led to the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) which would later become BP.  Production of Persian oil products started at the Abadan refinery in 1913, and in the same year APOC was awarded a contract with the British government, in the shape of the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, as part of a three year modernisation programme for the Royal Navy to convert from using coal to oil. The British government took a controlling share in APOC.  Earlier in 1912 APOC had taken a 50 percent share in the new Turkish Petroleum Company to explore and develop oil resources in Mesopotamia (Iraq) which would eventually bear fruit with the discovery of a massive oilfield in 1927. 

It is clear British economic interests in the region were vital and the threat posed by Germany and its Berlin to Baghdad/Basra railway was very real. The British war aim in the First World War was to restrict German access to Mesopotamia and its oil, and strategic exclusion from rail access to the Persian Gulf was to be enforced by British military presence, and afterwards by removal of German ownership of the railway. The British Empire fully engaged  in a war against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, capturing Basra in 1914, defending the Suez Canal, supporting the Arab Revolt (Colonel T.E. Lawrence) 1916-18,  capturing Baghdad and  Jerusalem in 1917, and Damascus and Aleppo in the Levant (Syria) in 1918. The armistice of 30 October 1918 ended six hundred years of Ottoman rule in the Middle East and left the British and French in charge of the region.

A book called The War and the Baghdad Railway: The Story of Asia Minor and its relation to the present conflict  by Morris Jastrow was published in 1917. Jastrow wrote that 'Baghdad and the Persian Gulf in the hands of Germany would be a 42-centimetre gun pointed at India.' The contemporary history book  Pollard's Short History of the Great War (1919) notes the importance of the Berlin to Baghdad railway: 'on the 26 October 1918 Aleppo fell, and on 28 October we reached Muslimeh, that junction on the Baghdad railway on which longing eyes had been cast as the nodal point in the conflict of German and other ambitions in the East.'

The 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty accomplished everything that the British Empire wanted.  Germany lost its colonies in Africa which became mandates of the British Empire, Germany lost the ownership of the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the Ottoman Empire was broken up and Britain received as mandates Mesopotamia and Palestine, and  economic influence in Persia and the Gulf continued. But as we said in this magazine after the war, further wars were inevitable within this capitalist set-up:

'While competition between capitalist groups for routes, markets, and control of raw material exists, the cause of war remains' (Socialist Standard August 1919).

Steve Clayton

Nationalism and Destruction in the Balkans (2014)

Film Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

We review a recent film about the break-up of Yugoslavia.

'The Weight of Chains', a documentary written and directed by Boris Malagurski (2010)

‘Who in their right mind would actually want to be a colony? ‘So begins The Weight of Chains, a documentary written and directed by Boris Malagurski (2010) which argues that the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was orchestrated by Western powers in furtherance of imperial ambitions. Director Boris Malagurski, hailed by the Belgrade press as the ‘Serbian Michael Moore’, claims his film ‘takes a critical look at the role that the US, NATO and the EU played in the tragic breakup of a once-peaceful and prosperous European state’.

The film is narrated by Malagurski himself and begins with a whirlwind history of Yugoslavia: the country was first established as a kingdom in 1918, and encompassed people of various religions and ethnicities, including Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosnians (all of Slavic extraction), as well as sizeable Hungarian and Albanian minorities. The country was reorganised as a federation of six national republics in 1943, the Titoist ruling party opting for an economic model which mixed state and private ownership of capital. By the 1970s Yugoslavia came to enjoy levels of social and economic prosperity which rivalled even many of its avowedly capitalist neighbours.

The historical background thus set, Malagurski pinpoints the beginning of Yugoslavia’s decline to the early 1980s, when it took out an IMF loan to shore up its waning economy. Around the same time, Ronald Reagan issued a secret memo, National Security Decision Directive 133, which committed the US to widen its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe by aggressively promoting Western-style market capitalism in Yugoslavia. US-sponsored NGOs promptly began funding Yugoslavian opposition groups, journalists, free-market economists, and trade union activists. By the late 1980s, this ideological groundwork had paved the way for ‘privatisation through liquidation’: US-guided Yugoslavian bankers and legislators started implementing monetary and economic reforms which triggered the bankruptcy of thousands of state-run firms. This, explains Malagurski, deepened the state’s massive debt and led to runaway inflation and unemployment, cuts to welfare spending, and tension between the subnational governments. Foreign speculators snapped up failed companies at rock-bottom prices, and the federal government, cut off from further foreign credit, was forced to accede to American demands for ‘free’ multiparty elections in the constituent republics.

Lured by the promise of Western favour and financing for their individual republics, regional politicians sowed the seeds of ethnic discord; these in turn were eagerly cultivated by the impoverished workers who were searching desperately for someone to blame for their sudden misfortune. Malagurski aptly shows how the ensuing nationalist secessions brought their leaders into open and often very bloody military conflict over land and resources.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should – long-term readers of the Standard will recognise this part of Malagurski’s analysis of the Yugoslavian breakup and ensuing wars as much the same one we have always presented. Like Malagurski, socialists eschew the ‘ancient hatreds’ theory which holds that interethnic hostility is biologically innate and genocidal violence preordained. Instead, we observe how a faction of the ruling elite, when confronted with rivals to its privileged position as owners and controllers, is compelled to enlist masses of the working class to defend that position. One way of rallying this support is to seize upon some unimportant characteristic – say, religion, language, or ethnicity – which the workers share with the ruling faction, but not with the workers of the rival faction. By exaggerating such differences and ignoring or obscuring the more important commonalities, leaders convince the workers that they share a common interest with their masters, and to happily march off to war in support of it.

By this point in the film, therefore, Malagurski has set things up wonderfully for a scathing indictment of nationalism, irredentism, and capitalist warmongering. Unfortunately, this indictment never comes: as it turns out, Malagurski is just another nationalist, albeit one pining for the ‘good old days’ of pre-breakup Yugoslavia (which, rather tellingly, he himself is far too young to remember). While he correctly surmises that the new ‘Bosnian’, ‘Kosovar’ and other national identities are largely artificial distinctions, invented or overinflated by their respective governments in order to win the support of their electorate and of foreign powers, he ignores the fact that the same was true of the even more artificial ‘Yugoslav’ national identity they supplanted.

In support of its pan-Yugoslav agenda, the film devotes considerable screen time to documenting how the political and economic leaders of the newly independent states enriched themselves at the expense of the common people. Malagurski explains how they did this by cutting back social programmes, skimming foreign investment funds, and selling off entire domestic industries to foreign concerns. But what he fails to establish is how any of this could have been prevented had Yugoslavia remained united, nor why foreign private ownership of industry is any worse for the workers than local private ownership. Russia, for example, emerged from the USSR with a strong national identity and a much greater proportion of its industry in local hands, though its workers also experienced widespread poverty and massive social cutbacks. Of course, even Titoist Yugoslavia was never the paragon of social and economic equality Malagurski seems to think it was. The Yugoslavian nomenklatura may have avoided the conspicuous consumption typical of Western capitalists, but it remained a privileged ruling class which was just as keen to enrich itself through exploitation of its workers.

Many of the film’s flimsier claims and arguments can be explained as the work of a naïve but well-meaning patriot, but others cannot be so innocently excused. For example, Malagurski outright denies that the ethnic minorities in Serbia were oppressed, conveniently omitting any mention of the mass protests and general strikes that led to the revocation of their political autonomy in the late 1980s. In another segment, he paints Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović as a rabid jihadist, quoting from a thirty-year old Islamist manifesto which the man had long since repudiated. Most controversially, he presents the infamous Srebrenica massacre as a ‘stage-managed’ ploy by the Bosnians and Americans to justify NATO military intervention against Serbia. Whatever the plausibility of this theory, it’s particularly distasteful how Malagurski trivialises the village’s civilian death toll as ‘no larger than the number of Serbs killed’ in the surrounding area, without any pretence of distinguishing between combatant and non-combatant deaths.

Given this it is not hard to see why Malagurski’s detractors accuse him of being a pro-Serb whitewasher and historical revisionist. Are they correct?  With so many of the post-breakup events still under active historical and criminal investigation, it’s hard to say for sure. But at least one thing about Malagurski is clear: for all the effort he spends exposing and decrying the dishonest propagandising which fuelled the Yugoslavian implosion, he certainly has no qualms employing many of the same tricks when it suits his own agenda. Whatever that agenda may be, the conclusion is that he has a very low estimation of the intelligence of his audience.