Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 126, August/September 1995
As the latest shocking images come out of Bosnia – tens of thousands of refugees expelled from what was absurdly known as the UN ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica – it is difficult to feel anything but despair. This is the latest appalling episode of a war that has thus far cost 250,000 lives and brought officially-sanctioned rape, torture, murder and forced movement of millions of people to the heart of Europe. This is what the triumph of reaction looks like. MAXINE WILLIAMS reports.
The crisis in Bosnia is the inevitable outcome of the handiwork of those Western powers which worked so hard for the overthrow of socialism in Eastern Europe. They fanned the fire of nationalist and ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the full knowledge of its lethal potential.
These latest events should give those who have been calling for a more robust defence of the Bosnians by the UN or NATO, pause for thought. The ‘safe havens’, into which the pincer movement of Croat and, more particularly, Serb nationalists (with the collusion of the Contact Group) has forced the rest of the Bosnian population, have turned out to be a death warrant. In 1993 FRFI wrote:
‘The dreadful fate now being discussed for Muslims or those of mixed origin in Bosnia is to be protected by the UN. The Palestinians, Cambodians and Kurds in Iraq are familiar with this fate.’
The most militarily powerful nations on earth guard these ‘safe havens’ with fewer forces than were mobilised to defeat the miners’ strike in Britain or can be routinely gathered to deal with a riot in South London. The few hundred Dutch troops guarding Srebrenica were forced to flee along with the civilians as the Serbs came in. A US plane was reported to have destroyed one Serb tank and then even that was denied. That was it — that was the defence of Srebrenica by a combination of powers that deny many of their own citizens a decent living in order to spend billions on armaments. The arms-embargoed Bosnian army was, in contrast, capable of forcing a breach in Serb lines to get thousands of its soldiers and male refugees out of the area.
Hidden agendas
This situation is not, as is commonly said, the result of cowardice or indecision on the part of the imperialist powers. What we are seeing is their policy in operation. They each have an agenda and these agendas have nothing whatsoever to do with the interests of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia and everything to do with calculations of national interest by the imperialist powers. The saving of any region of Yugoslavia as a multi-national, multi-ethnic entity is not now, never has been, and never will be part of the agenda. Once Yugoslavia began to break up, rival nationalist leaderships were inevitably drawn into conflict. When the EC recognised the independence of Slovenia and Croatia they must have known that it would fan Serbian nationalism and the fears and ambitions which fuelled it. Yet they promoted the ethnic partition of Yugoslavia, knowing this would be bound to have its most terrible expression in multi-ethnic Bosnia.
They have let Serbia and Croatia carve up Bosnia. Indeed the Contact Group (US, Britain, France, Germany and Russia) plan was for Serbia and Croatia to have most of Bosnia with the Muslims or mixed origin peoples being sandwiched in the middle and corralled in tiny, unconnected dots on the map. Bosnia now has three statelets — the Serb Republic, the Croat Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia and the Muslim-dominated Republic of Bosnia-Herzogovina. The Bosnian army in US-sponsored alliance with the Croats is now more capable of fighting to enlarge or defend some areas and will become more so if, as the USA wishes, the arms embargo is lifted. The newly redrawn map of the region will at some future date be sanctioned by international bodies, yet, drawn in blood, it will bring neither peace nor justice to the region.
Confused? You’re meant to be
Shortly after Srebrenica fell and Zepa came under attack, as the world watched in horror it was revealed that the secret UN policy since the May hostage crisis had been to abandon the ‘safe havens’ like Srebrenica in the East. They failed to tell anyone this, particularly the refugees in Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde. So what was presented in the news as a rather sudden onslaught by the Serbs was actually just UN policy being played out. It is such secret policies and particularly the secret policies of Germany, Britain, France, Russia and the USA that underlie almost everything that has happened in the former Yugoslavia. This secrecy, coupled with the extraordinarily naive or actively misleading commentary in the national press, make it virtually impossible to know what is actually happening in the region.
The commentators collude in the deadly secrecy. Thus Martin Woollacott, writing in The Guardian (29 May 1995) on the occasion when the Serbs had captured 300 UN troops and killed the Bosnian foreign minister by shooting down his helicopter over the ‘safe haven’ of Bihac, said: ‘This is the week in which Western governments ought to agree — not necessarily in public but certainly in their inner counsels — that the search for a peace based on the recognition of Serbian primacy is not only immoral but a chimera.’
Heaven forbid that the public should know what its government’s policy is especially in a region which has historically proved a powder keg for wider wars! No, it should apparently guess the policy by watching the actions because clearly the commentators are not going to let them in on the secret.
Meanwhile, in this fog of secrecy the lies are being told and the dirty deals are being struck that will spew out more columns of refugees. Thus, having decided to abandon the Eastern ‘safe havens’ and, after the Serbs had taken Srebrenica, a mock debate took place between France and Britain about whether Srebrenica could be retaken and was seriously reported in the press. But as the debate goes on, so do the preparations for a full UN withdrawal. The sole function of the Rapid Reaction Force, set up by Britain, France and Holland in May following the Serb seizure of 300 UN troops, is not to rescue any Bosnians but to rescue UN troops and get them and their weapons out should this become necessary. While French President Chirac waxes indignant about Serb aggression, we are expected to forget that in 1991, France nearly upset the international applecart by backing Serbia or that French policy in its former colony of Rwanda helped to bring about an ethnic slaughter even more devastating than that going on in Bosnia.
Whilst world bodies gravely ponder their options, Germany, which did so much to encourage war in this region by forcing recognition of Croatian independence and which clearly has ambitions as a regional power, is rarely — if ever — mentioned. This is another golden rule for the commentaries on this area — ‘don’t mention Germany’. Thus Britain and France are allowed to strut the world stage whilst the big boys — particularly Germany and the USA — talk elsewhere.
And while every military step in the inexorable progress towards a greater Serbia appears to take the Western world by surprise, are we supposed to forget that US and other powers have satellites that are capable of watching a wart grow on the nose of General Mladic, leader of the Serb forces in Bosnia? Are we supposed to forget that Britain has taken the lead in bringing about recent events in Bosnia; that Britain and France negotiated the release of their soldier hostages in May by expressly agreeing to prevent NATO air strikes on the Serbs? At the time of that deal, the now bellicose France was equally vocal in condemning the air strikes that brought about the crisis.
Telling these powers to ‘Do something in Bosnia’ is the moral equivalent of employing Jack the Ripper as caretaker in a girls’ school.
Great power interests
If you do not know what is going on in Bosnia, or in Kosovo, or in Croatia other than that there is a tidal wave of human misery on your screens every night, it is because you are not meant to know. If you do not know what actual interests are driving the seemingly inexplicable policies of the UN and NATO it is because you are not meant to know. We are back to the old days of pre-First World War secret diplomacy in the Balkans, where one power jockeys with another for influence via local national or ethnic groupings.
In some cases such as Britain, as we are told often enough, there are no direct interests involved. That may be so in crude economic terms. But it may equally be the case that Britain is keen to preserve a balance in the area between a Russian-influenced Serbia and a German-influenced Croatia and Slovenia. A strong Serbia would prevent the now unified and still power-hungry Germany from becoming the dominant power in the region. We are also told that the USA has no direct interest in these European affairs. Yet the fact is that the USA has interests in Albania, Bulgaria, Turkey and the Middle East. Hence its more vocal sympathy for the Muslims in Bosnia. It does not want to see a rampant Serbia spreading the war to these regions via Kosovo. US forces are already in Macedonia and they have made it clear that this is where they will become seriously involved should trouble flare. Meanwhile Germany is quietly and systematically becoming the dominant power in Eastern Europe with enlarged investments and direct influence on its former Hapsburg Balkan regions Croatia and Slovenia. Hardly surprising then that in June the German parliament agreed to send air forces to participate in the Yugoslav conflict, only their second military operation outside their own borders since the Second World War.
The UN operation in Bosnia has been humiliated and discredited not merely by the Serbs but more particularly because the Great Powers simply do not share common interests and therefore cannot act in concert. And so — to break the code in which commentators on this event inevitably write — when you read that the breakdown of the international effort will presage disaster, what this actually means is that each power will pursue its own ends, using either its own or, as is more usual (especially for a USA convulsed with first grief and then joy as one of its pilots was lost and then found in Bosnia), its proxy forces in the region. When this happens the smaller regional powers — Turkey, Greece, Russia — will get further drawn in. Then their Great Power allies, already in fierce economic conflict worldwide, will be on a collision course that could lead to wars more terrible than any we have seen.
Can there be peace?
For fifty years in socialist Yugoslavia, a peace was obtained between national and religious groupings whose history was a bloody one. It was the longest period of peace this region had seen and whatever the faults and inadequacies of Tito’s Yugoslavia it was paradise compared to the present chaos and death. The peoples of the region are now reduced to their more traditional role of watching their usually-unelected leaders playing off rival Great Powers, seeking backing, begging arms, making deals.
The Serbs have a leader in Milosevic who the imperialist powers claim they can still do business with, despite his obvious pulling of the strings and arming of Serb ‘rebels’ in Bosnia. It is hard to overstate how dreadful he is. A small sample came when Time magazine taxed him about the rape of Bosnian women and he replied that it was untrue and cited a pregnant Muslim girl who claimed rape by Serbs, whose baby when born ‘was a Negro, no Serb was a Negro, not one.’ The Croatian leadership is fascist in its political leanings, identifying itself with a Croatian nationalist past which included an alliance with Hitler’s Germany and dreadful atrocities against anti-fascist Serbs. The Bosnian Muslim leadership, increasingly fundamentalist in tone, has embraced the USA as saviour.
Painful and harsh though it is to say it, there is no hope outside a democratic movement of the peoples of the region, a movement which acts for all the people, rather than one religious or ethnic grouping. There are those in the region who still support this ideal. But there is no hope that such a movement, if it could be reborn in such dreadful circumstances, will be brought into existence courtesy of the imperialists who destroyed it. The left in Britain has been much exercised trying to find policies in relation to Yugoslavia. These policies are meaningless unless there is a movement here that is capable of taking the first necessary step of forcing an end to the secret deals, the secret policies and the self-interested involvement of the Great Powers that endanger not only the people of the Balkans but the people of the world.
