The War Against the Working Class

by Will Podmore

  The US government continued to stir up trouble on Russia’s borders. When the second Chechen-Russian war broke out in August 1999 with the Chechen invasion of Dagestan, the US government backed the invasion, ignoring its jihadi nature. Brzezinski and retired general Alexander Haig, a former secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, set up an advocacy group for the Chechens.

  In 2003, Russia and Moldova agreed the Kozak Memorandum, which settled the conflict in Moldova’s republic of Transnistria, but the US government and the EU sabotaged the agreement: US Secretary of State Colin Powell and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana pressured Moldova’s President Vladimir Voronin into rejecting the Memorandum. Later, in the referendum held in Transnistria in September 2006, the vast majority voted for association with Russia.

  In 2004 NATO and the EU backed the pro-NATO, pro-EU ‘colour revolutions’ in Georgia and Ukraine. When the vast majority in South Ossetia voted in November 2006 for independence from Georgia, the US and EU governments encouraged Georgia to attack South Ossetia. Georgian forces bombed South Ossetia’s capital Tskhinvali, killing 100 civilians and 19 Russia peacekeepers. Only then did Russian forces intervene. This led to a short war, in which Russia defeated Georgia’s forces. An EU study concluded that Georgia ‘started an unjustified war’ against Russia not the other way round.

  The US and EU governments caused trouble in other ways too. Their proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was an attack on all other states, especially those that had started to cooperate independently of the USA, like Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa in the BRICS group, the Latin American countries in ALBA, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, linked to Iran, in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and Southeast Asia’s nations in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Economic Community. TTIP would override all previous trade rules and cause worldwide damage. As the European Commission admitted, “China, India and the ASEAN region will face decreases in their relative terms of trade on the world market, as the result of an ambitious EU-US FTA [Free Trade Agreement].”

  In response, the BRICS group agreed in July 2014 to create the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as an alternative to the IMF. Russia strengthened its ties with the countries of Latin America, China, Iran and its longtime ally Syria. It decided to conduct its trade with Iran in rubles and its trade with China in both rubles and the Chinese yuan, instead of in US dollars. Russia also agreed two huge deals with China to build pipelines and sell oil and gas, cleaner-burning fuels which would reduce China’s huge pollution problems.

  In November, the G20 summit strengthened the US-led drive to war. NATO, the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf despots united against Russia. The Saudi autocracy, acting as usual on the US government’s behalf, used its dominance of the world’s oil market to drive down oil prices, to hurt Russia and therefore Syria (and also Venezuela and Iran). Financial markets in New York and London ‘shorted’ the ruble, selling it short to undermine its value. The US, Australian and Japanese governments agreed on ‘increasing military cooperation and strengthening maritime security’ in the Pacific against China.

  Chapter 13

  Eastern Europe – counter-revolution and war

  Yugoslavia under attack

  In 1970, Yugoslavia changed its constitution to recognise its six republics - Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro - as ‘sovereign’. It upheld ‘the right of every nation to dispose of its own realised surplus value’.1 This made each republic, not the Yugoslav working class, the driving force of self-management.2 It led to the resurrection of Croatian separatism, backed by the fascist ustashe organisation based in West Berlin. The state also promoted Islamism in Bosnia: between 1950 and 1970, it built 800 new mosques in Bosnia. By 1970, there were more mosques than there had been in 1930.

  Yugoslavia adopted another new constitution in 1974 which granted even more powers to the republics and to the two autonomous provinces. This fragmented the national market into eight sub-markets, each with its own taxes, foreign exchange system, investment policy, and regulations. The result was wasted investment, as each republic tried to develop a full range of industries.3

  Pavel Kolář summed up the moves towards splitting the country: “In Yugoslavia the 1963 reformist constitution, amended in 1968, brought in elements that reinforced national differences between the federal republics. The legislative independence of each republic was increased by enhancing the power of the Chamber of Nationalities and by granting Kosovo and Vojvodina the status of provinces within Serbia. The whole of political and economic life, including worker self-management, was increasingly organized along ethnic lines. The Constitution of 1974 promoted decentralization still further, practically transforming Yugoslavia into a confederation. During the 1980s, internationalism and class consciousness, embodied by the Yugoslav slogan ‘Brotherhood and Unity’, gave way to ethnic identification in the working class itself.”4

  Yugoslavia borrowed hugely in the 1970s, making it vulnerable to high interest rates. Between 1975 and 1981, its debt quadrupled to $19.3 billion. The government agreed with the IMF to refinance the debt, exposing the people to the usual IMF poverty programme of spending cuts, wage cuts, higher prices, privatisation, marketisation and the ending of food subsidies. So, in the 1990s, more than a tenth of the peoples of Kosovo, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia emigrated.

  After the Soviet Union’s demise and the counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Yugoslav government, unlike the other Eastern European governments, refused to let NATO base its forces in the country and refused to apply to join the EEC. So the NATO and EEC powers decided to destroy it. As Warren Zimmerman, the US ambassador to Yugoslavia, said, “We are aiming for a dissolution of Yugoslavia into independent states.”5 The EEC declared the internal borders between Yugoslavia’s republics to be international and inviolable and that the majority people in each republic, not the Yugoslav people as a whole, had the right to self-determination.6

  The UN tried to keep Yugoslavia united. UN Security Council Resolution 1244, adopted on 10 June 1999, reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.7 Rosalyn Higgins, a former President of the International Court of Justice, stated, “Contrary to popular belief, international law does not permit self-determination, by way of national secession, to national minorities.”8 There was no right to secede.9

  UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali warned that recognising Slovenia and Croatia would ‘fuel an explosive situation especially in Bosnia’. Lord Carrington also warned that recognition ‘might well be the spark that sets Bosnia-Herzegovina alight’.10 President Izetbegovic of Bosnia-Herzegovina asked Germany not to recognise Croatia because it would mean war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

  But Thatcher called for recognising and arming the individual republics. On 16 December 1991, the EEC said it intended ‘to recognise the independence of all the Yugoslav republics’ and on 23 December, Germany recognised Croatia. The Vatican recognised Slovenia and Croatia on 13 January 1992. The EEC and Thatcher followed suit on 15 January.

  As Higgins stated, “By recognizing Croatia and Slovenia prematurely, the United Kingdom actively assisted in transforming the matter from an internal war to an international war. These countries were recognized as independent states at a time when they manifestly did not fulfil the criteria of statehood that the United Kingdom has always insisted upon for recognition – they were not in effective control of their own territory. This premature recognition, in subservience to German pressure, has been an unfortunate exemplar for a common EC foreign policy.”11

  Susan Woodward summed up, “For those who were the object of sanctions, European actions had been duplicitous. Europeans told Yugoslavs to honor the sanctity of international borders while they were themselves violating the norm of sanctity by applying it to the republic
an borders instead of Yugoslav and after some European nations had counselled secession and helped secretly to supply alternative national armies in the republics.”12

  In the Croatian war (1991-95) that followed, 20,000 people were killed and 550,000 people became refugees or were displaced.

  Three bodies – NATO, the EU and the Warsaw Pact – had all claimed to keep the peace in Europe. When the Warsaw Pact went, the EU, composed of NATO members, sparked this war, proving that it was the Pact that had kept the peace.13 With the Pact gone, war also broke out in the Middle East with the first Gulf War. The end of the Soviet Union brought a new round of wars: from 1990 to 2000, four million people were killed in 49 countries.

  On 25 January 1992, the Bosnian government held a referendum on secession, approved by the EEC. On 6 April (the anniversary of Hitler’s attack on Yugoslavia), the EEC recognised the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, sparking the war. Al-Qaeda, with Saudi support, used the Bosnian war to build itself, just as it had used the Afghan war in the 1980s. The US and British governments backed the Bosnian jihadists, just as they had backed the Afghan jihadists. One outcome of this disastrous policy was 9/11: Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the so-called ‘mastermind’ of 9/11, had been a jihadist in Bosnia. So had two of the hijacker pilots.

  In September 1993, Izetbegovic told Srebrenica’s representatives, “President Clinton told me that if the Chetniks enter Srebrenica and massacre five thousand Muslims, then there will be military intervention.”14 Izetbegovic then weakened Srebrenica’s defences, enabling local Serb forces to take the city in July 1995. NATO at once accused President Slobodan Milosevic of ordering the killing that followed. But, as the leading expert on the events at Srebrenica, the Dutch scholar Cees Wiebes, testified at The Hague, “we never found evidence that Milosevic was involved or ordered the mass murder at Srebrenica.”15

  The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia estimated in November 2004 that the 1992-95 war in Bosnia killed 102,622 people. Two million people became refugees or were displaced, of a population of 4.3 million. Production fell by 80 per cent. The war cost tens of billions of dollars in devastated factories and real estate.

  There was peace in Kosovo until February 1998, when the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] launched its terrorist campaign. KLA leaders traced their roots back to a fascist unit set up by the Italian occupiers during World War Two.16 The UN condemned ‘acts of terrorism by the Kosovo Liberation Army’.17 The Scotsman wrote, “the KLA was being armed, trained and assisted in Italy, Turkey, Kosovo and Germany by the Americans, the German external intelligence service and former and serving members of Britain’s 22 SAS Regiment.”18 Jane’s Defense Weekly confirmed that SAS units and US Special Forces aided the KLA.

  President Clinton admitted on 23 March 1999, “And if we’re going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key … Now, that’s what this Kosovo thing is all about.”19 The New York Times denounced Milosevic’s determination to ‘keep state controls and his refusal to allow privatization’.20 The Washington Post complained, “Milosevic failed to understand the message of the fall of the Berlin Wall … while other communist politicians accepted the Western model … Milosevic went the other way.”21 The US government and the EU imposed the 1999 Rambouillet Accords which stated, “The economy of Kosovo will function in accordance with free market principles. … There shall be no impediments to the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to and from Kosovo.”

  Clinton and Blair accused Serbia of committing genocide against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. David Scheffer, US State Department ambassador-at-large for war crime issues, claimed that ‘225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59’ might have been murdered. But after the war, a UN tribunal concluded that the final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788, including combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma killed by the KLA.

  NATO’s 1999 attack on Yugoslavia even violated the NATO treaty, whose Article 5 defined NATO’s function as only defensive. The UN General Assembly condemned NATO’s attack as illegal in Resolution 54/172. NATO Commander General Wesley Clark wrote that the Kosovo war “was coercive diplomacy, the use of armed forces to impose the political will of the NATO nations on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or more specifically, on Serbia. The NATO nations voluntarily undertook this war.”22

  International lawyers agreed that, as Jonathan Charney asserted, “Indisputably, the NATO intervention through its bombing campaign violated the United Nations Charter and international law.”23 John Murphy stated, “NATO’s use of force in Kosovo could not be justified under existing international law. … the Charter requires that Security Council resolutions afford more than ‘some measure of legitimacy’ for the use of force by states to be legally justified. They must authorize the use of force, and none of the Council’s resolutions adopted before the bombing began provides such authorization.”24

  NATO’s attack killed 10,000 people and wrecked industry and infrastructure, costing Serbia more than $17 billion. General Herteleer, Chief of Staff of the Belgian Army, said, “Maybe we do have to make the bombings felt by hurting the Serb population itself. Let’s inflict losses on them. Let’s hit them where they’re comfortable.”25

  The British press backed NATO’s war. For example, when the Serbian government deported Kosovans to safety in Macedonia, the Daily Mirror commented, “The forced evacuation was reminiscent of SS troops sending Jews to the gas chambers.”26 The Guardian made the same comparison.27 Both newspapers thus equated sending civilians away from war-zones with killing them. The Mirror called NATO’s destruction of the RadioTV Serbia building, killing 16 civilians and wounding 19, ‘a vital blow against Slobodan Milosevic’s evil propaganda machine’.28 The Mirror’s warmongering surely qualified it as an ‘evil propaganda machine’.

  The Greek people opposed the NATO/EU attack on Yugoslavia. NATO then destroyed the Greek consulate in the southern city of Nis.

  After the wars ended, the only multi-ethnic country in the region was Serbia – one inhabitant in five was not Serbian. It had the largest number of refugees in Europe, one million people who had fled from Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia (territories run by NATO), including 70,000 Muslim refugees.

  After the war, the US government and the EU said they would only end their sanctions against Yugoslavia if the people ousted Milosevic in the presidential election of 2000. The US government spent $100 million backing the pro-US candidate Vojislav Kostunica. The EU gave $6 million to media which backed him. But Milosevic supporters won a majority in parliament, so the US government backed the 5 October coup which overthrew the elected government. Then the US government said it would not allow Yugoslavia an IMF loan unless Milosevic was arrested by 31 March 2001 and then that Yugoslavia would not get the loan unless it handed Milosevic over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia by 29 June.

  NATO forces have occupied Kosovo since 1999. In the following years, Kosovans drove out hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Roma in acts of ‘reverse ethnic cleansing’. Kosovo was run by a UN Special Representative, backed by Kosovo Force (KFOR), which was complicit in trafficking women for the sex slave trade.29 The Washington Post reported, “The sex-slave traffic in East European women, one of the major criminal scourges of post-communist Europe, is becoming a major problem in Kosovo, where porous borders, the presence of international troops and aid workers, and the lack of a working criminal-justice system have created almost perfect conditions for the trade. … The first case of sex-slave trafficking came to light in October [1999] – four months after NATO-led peacekeepers entered the province … In the last 10 years, according to women’s advocacy groups, hundreds of thousands of women from the former Soviet republics and satellites have been trafficked to Western Europe, Asia and the United States.”30

  Kosovo’s citizens were the poorest in Europe, with GDP per head
just $7,600 in 2013. 30 per cent of the people lived below the poverty line. By November 2014, 40 per cent were unemployed. It housed a US military base which was a Guantanamo-style torture camp. NATO also had other new bases in Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia.

  From 2000 onwards, the US government and the EU pushed for Montenegro to secede from Yugoslavia. The US government spent $62 million, the EU $36 million, ‘to advance Montenegro toward a free market economy’. NATO destabilised Macedonia, using the KLA, reborn as the National Liberation Army. The BBC reported, “Western forces were training guerrillas.”31 Albanian terrorists also founded the ‘Liberation Army of Chameria’ to ‘free’ Thrace (‘Chameria’) from Greece.

  In 1989, the World Bank had demanded the closing down of 2,435 Yugoslav companies, putting two-thirds of Serbia’s workers out of work. In 2002, the Bank said, “At least 800,000 Serbian workers in public services and state-run enterprises must be laid off.”32 Two decades after the wars, millions were still in poverty in all parts of former Yugoslavia.33 The UN said that two-thirds of Yugoslavia’s people lived on less than $2 a day. In 2008, Montenegro’s GDP was 91 per cent of its 1989 GDP, Croatia’s 83 per cent and Serbia’s 72 per cent. In 2012, 19 per cent of Montenegro’s workers were unemployed. From 2008 to 2013, Serbia’s unemployment was about 20 per cent and half the 18-29-year-olds were out of work.

  In Croatia, President Franjo Tudjman’s privatisation policy damaged industry and trade: he wanted to create 200 wealthy families to start up a ‘successful’ economy. Economist Zarko Modric observed, “But only his aides could get funds for such privatisation. Once-successful production and export companies were sold for small amounts to people who had no knowledge of how to run them.”34 Croatia’s accumulated foreign debt soon equalled its GDP, $55 billion. By 2013, unemployment was 21.6 per cent and 21 per cent were below the poverty line. Slovenia’s economy shrank by 2.5 per cent in 2012, 1.1 per cent in 2013 and 1 per cent in 2014. Unemployment was 13.1 per cent and 13.5 per cent were below the poverty line.