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 Overnight, even the most recently published atlases became out of date as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia disintegrated.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

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

There’s no such thing as an ethical foreign policy (1999)

From the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ethical foreign policy? What a joke! How, in a capitalist world where each state is competing against every other state for a share of profits, can a government base its foreign policy on anything except economic self-interest—the economic self-interest, that is, of its capitalists?

“Obtain profits or die”, that is the economic law governing the conduct of states under global capitalism. And it cannot be otherwise for as long as global capitalism lasts.

Everybody knows that the reason for the Gulf War nearly ten years ago can be summed up in three letters O-I-L. Iraq, a virtually land-locked country wanted secure access to the sea for its exports and imports, so it invaded Kuwait. This represented a threat to the oil supplies of the capitalist West, so they went to war—and are still bombing and killing and starving ordinary people in Iraq to remove this threat. This has nothing to do with the fact that Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator who couldn’t care a damn about human rights. There are plenty of other dictators in the area—beginning with the King of Saudi Arabia and the other hereditary Gulf despots—who are left alone because they are on the side of the capitalist West.

It was the same earlier this year in Kosovo. Serbia wasn’t attacked because it was a dictatorship under Slobodan Milosevic but because it was a state with a powerful army that had been causing problems for Western capitalist interests in the area and had overstepped the mark. Neighbouring dictator and fellow ethnic-cleanser, Tunjman of Croatia, was left alone because he was “our bastard”.

East Timor? Who had heard of East Timor before last month? When Indonesian troops marched into this former Portuguese colony in 1975 the UN passed a resolution saying Indonesia had broken international law and left it at that. In the following years the Western capitalist powers competed amongst themselves for lucrative contracts from the Indonesian military. The ruling generals were invited to arms shows to buy guns, tanks, warplanes, ships, any military hardware they needed to maintain their grip on the country they were exploiting for their own ends.

“Please don’t use these weapons against your own people,” requested an ethically-minded diplomat. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” replied the generals. “That’s all right then,” replied the diplomat. When confronted with evidence that the generals were using British weapons for internal repression, a British Minister replied, “if we didn’t sell them arms, then the French would.” Questioned in the Assemblée Nationale on the same point, a French Minister replied, “if we didn’t sell them arms then the British would.”

When oil was discovered in the sea between East Timor and Australia, the Australian government decided that the Indonesian invasion of East Timor was not so contrary to international law after all. In order to get a share of the oil they signed an agreement recognising East Timor as part of Indonesia. Now they are leading the forces sent in to take East Timor from Indonesia. No wonder their erstwhile friends, the Indonesian rulers, regard them as two-faced double-dealers.

And of course a place like East Timor can never survive on its own. It’s obviously going to end up as an Australian dependency, no doubt giving Australia an even better oil deal.

That’s the way of the world—the capitalist world. And it’s no good just protesting about this and appealing to governments to base their foreign policy on ethical considerations. They can’t (except in words) even if they wanted to, since this would hamper them in the struggle for profits—and the trade routes, and investment outlets, and raw material sources, and strategic areas, to secure them.

The only way out is to get rid of global capitalism and replace it by a world socialist system in which all that is in and on the Earth becomes the common heritage of all humanity so that it can be used for the benefit of every man, woman and child on the planet irrespective of where they live, a small island or the industrialised heartlands.

Adam Buick