04.07.2001

Milosevic on trial

Slobodan Milosevic's incarceration in the Netherlands, facing charges of "crimes against humanity" in Kosova, will undoubtedly again bring to the fore divisions on the left and in the labour movement about his record.

It is the imperialists who have, for their own squalid reasons, brought the indictment against the former president of Yugoslavia. They have cajoled and bribed the Serbian government into handing him over with promises of over a billion dollars worth of economic aid. Nevertheless, from the point of view of the working class, Milosevic is a bloody criminal. However, so are his captors, the imperialist powers of Nato and their so-called 'international community', whose wars from Vietnam to the Gulf, to the Balkans are waged not for 'humanitarian' reasons, but to maintain imperialist domination of the world.

Unlike in Vietnam, central America or some of the wars the imperialists have been involved in the Middle East, Milosevic's fight against the Nato cabal did not express even in a deflected way any struggle of oppressed peoples for relief from imperialist robbery and depredation. Rather, Milosevic's regime was an extreme national chauvinist regime, which, coming to power in the context of the disintegration of the old Soviet bloc, used some residues of Stalinist 'anti-imperialist' demagogy to justify monstrous acts of barbarism against peoples who were in the way of its project of creating an ethnically pure greater Serbian state.

Milosevic's regime was not unique in this regard - Tudjman's Croatia also had a similar project with regard to non-Croatian populations in territories that were on its shopping list. But Milosevic's regime was the most powerful in the region, and used that power to the full - attempting to impose its own will on the region against weaker neighbouring states, and repeatedly pushing the Serbian regime and its appendages into confrontation with the western powers.

The west's main concern in opposing Milosevic was to prevent the establishment of a dominant regional power in the Balkans outside its control - one that could not be trusted to uphold its own strategic interests. Classic great-power motives, in fact. For Marxists, however, that does not make Milosevic's own regional power ambitions in any way supportable. What counts for us in deciding whether to give any support to a particular state in a war is whether that war is in any way a struggle against oppression and for democracy.

But for much of the left, of course, in their despair with this reactionary period, all that matters is giving a bloody nose to the Nato imperialists. Never mind that at the front of Milosevic's war aims was the forcible retention of a territory inhabited by a viciously oppressed people, the Kosovar Albanians. Never mind that the result, in the event that Milosevic had managed to achieve his war aims, would have been the displacement of an entire population that could only be compared with the plight of the displaced Palestinians in the Middle East.

For much of the left - on the one hand those Stalinists and semi-Stalinists who were seduced by the cynical 'socialist' verbiage coming from Belgrade, and on the other elements of the Trotskyist left whose analysis of events of the contemporary world is not derived from current reality, but rather from 50-year-old quotes from Marxist 'scripture' - the rights of the Albanian population did not matter a jot.

Such staunch anti-racists as the Socialist Workers Party were even quite happy to march on demonstrations alongside rabid exponents of the forced expulsion of all Albanians from Kosova. SWP placards were adapted by Serb nationalists to evoke the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje as a justification of their claim on Kosova.

This particular grotesque piece of nationalist mythology is even further to the right than the Paisleyites' evocation of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne to justify protestant supremacy in the Northern Ireland statelet. After all, the Paisleyites can at least claim that this particular battle was part of a wider movement that had a real progressive content - the 'Glorious Revolution' in late 17th century Britain.

The Battle of Kosovo Polje, on the other hand, was a mere episode in the disintegration of the reactionary sphere of influence of Byzantium against the up-and-coming state of the Ottoman Turks. Not that such matters have any decisive relevance in today's world, except as an illustration of the deeply reactionary, backward-looking and oppressive nature of the regime that many on the left see as their ally.

We do not support the imperialists' arraignment of Milosevic, just as we do not demand that the imperialists deal with our enemies in general. Marxists did not support, for instance, the Nuremberg trials, sponsored by the US, Britain, France and the USSR, that resulted in the execution and/or imprisonment of many leading elements of Hitler's regime in 1946. Imperialist courts are not institutions we can have any confidence in, and indeed their actions in initiating such judicial procedures always have an ulterior motive - the assertion of the imperialists' right to imprison their enemies, and indeed to rule the world.

Since ultimately the most feared enemies of the imperialists are the working class and the oppressed and those who struggle for their liberation, obviously Marxists have no interest in giving them the legal and moral means to do so. We have the same class-based scepticism and hostility to the imperialists' judicial process in the case of Milosevic as we did in the case of Pinochet, whom various imperialist liberals unsuccessfully attempted to bring to trial a couple of years ago.

The working class should be very wary of providing the imperialists with new legal precedents or methods that can equally well be used against representatives of the oppressed - tomorrow a Yasser Arafat, or even a Fidel Castro (who in some ways is, despite his Stalinism, a genuine symbol of anti-imperialist struggle in Latin America), could be ensnared in a similar way. In any case, the imperialists' war crimes and 'human rights' facade will not bring justice - the bloody tyrant will be kept in 'humane' custody and is in no danger of being executed. Indeed, it is that very 'humane' sentence that the imperialists use as just one more ideological weapon in their cause - "human rights" and "due process" for the oppressors.

But neither do we defend reactionary scum like Pinochet and Milosevic. While it would be class treason to express confidence in, or support, the imperialists' war crimes tribunals, it would be an insult to Milosevic's victims to in any sense demand that he be freed. In the absence of the ability of the working class to seize Milosevic ourselves and dispense to him the revolutionary justice he so richly deserves, if anything, we should demand that the imperialists release him into the custody of the Kosova Liberation Army in Pristina.

Ian Donovan