03.08.1995

Reactionary jamboree

All soldiers in the Bosnian war are led by reactionary regimes

IT SEEMS that the Workers Revolutionary Party’s support for the reactionary Bosnian government has brought it into contact with even more reactionary forces.

Another Trotskyite bulletin, Socialist Organiser (July 27), reported that the Muslim Solidarity Committee was added to the list of sponsors for the recent WRP-inspired ‘Workers Aid’ demonstration. The MSC distributed a leaflet about “the current campaign organised by Amnesty International against Sudan”. Sudan is using the Koran to justify stoning to death, crucifixion and the chopping off of hands to terrorise the mainly Christian people of southern Sudan and the Nubians of central Sudan in support of its own ethnic terrorism.

The sectarian nature of the WRP’s friends was rammed home at the demonstration by the audience of Bosnian Muslim refugees’ refusal to listen to a pro-peace message from Serb dissidents in Belgrade. Although SO makes these criticisms, it still supports the WRP campaign and indeed makes its own call for “solidarity with the Bosniacs [Bosnian Muslims]”.

The Bosnian project is not multinational, but designed to contain Serb power - in effect to institutionalise ethnic hatred. Recently the Bosnian Serbs ethnically cleansed Muslims from Srebrenica and Zepa. Presently the Bosnian Croats are doing the same to Serbs in the Bihac ‘pocket’. All sides have the same programme to build states around the principle of ethnic rivalry.

Frederick Engels described the southern Slavs as “non-historic peoples”, by which he meant their existence was guaranteed only by acting as hired butchers for this or that imperialist power. This is the settlement presently being brokered by the UN on behalf of the ‘great powers’.

At the moment only separation seems to offer the possibility of a future for working class politics and the eventual evolution of workers’ organisations, as opposed to bourgeois ones. Self-determination is a democratic demand which must extend to Serbs who do not want to be part of a Muslim-dominated Bosnian state.

The implementation of national rights in so ethnically mixed a region is fraught with difficulties, but the point is that it needs the participation of all factions on the basis of free choice, not at gunpoint.

National democratic rights are to enable peoples to make their own choice, not to prevent them from exercising it.

Phil Kent