20.05.1999

SPEW’s empty words

Kosova Liberation Army

Critical support for the Kosova Liberation Army is gaining ground on the left, but the Socialist Party in England and Wales remains resolutely semi-detached.           

This is a pity, because in many respects SPEW’s position on the Serbian war is principled, its slogans and demands partially correct. Certainly, SPEW’s attitude is superior to the banal bourgeois pacifism of the Socialist Workers Party, let alone the nauseating ‘Yugoslav defencism’ of the CPB, NCP and others. Nonetheless, SPEW’s most glaring defect is its failure to get to grips with a number of fundamental questions concerning the KLA, particularly the complex dialectic of the KLA’s political and military relationship with the Nato powers.

Readers of SPEW’s pamphlet on the Serbian conflict (End Nato’s war undated) will note that it advocates the right of all peoples to “armed self-defence” in the abstract, but they will have to wait until the last of its 20 pages for any substantive statement on the KLA. This is what they will find:

“Socialists cannot endorse the policies of the leadership of the KLA ... The leadership of the KLA is nationalist, and politically they are closely tied to Kosova’s landlord and business elite who aspire to rule their own capitalist state. Most of the KLA leaders, under intense pressure from the US, eventually agreed to collaborate with US proposals, accepting autonomous status within Serbia, the disarmament of the KLA, and a Nato peace-keeping force ... The KLA will only be able to lead an effective mass resistance struggle against the forces of the Serbian regime if they maintain independence from the western powers and link national liberation to a struggle for social change in the interests of the overwhelming majority of Kosovars.”

Either this passage was written before the G8 meeting in Bonn on May 6, or SPEW’s journalists do not read the bourgeois press. Leaders of the G8 countries, as is well known, reiterated their intention to disarm the KLA as part of a ‘peace’ settlement, whereby Kosova would be given the status of an ‘autonomous’ statelet within rump Yugoslavia. The prospect of disarmament was immediately and unequivocally rejected by the KLA, who denounced the decisions of the Bonn meeting (correctly) as an act of treachery towards the Kosovar nation.

SPEW’s statement about the KLA’s acceptance of the western powers’ proposals is evidently a reference to the Rambouillet agreement, signed by Hashim Thaci, the leader of the KLA and one of the principal Kosovar negotiators. Thaci’s tactical reasons for signing up to Rambouillet were not hard to discern. He and the rest of the KLA leadership knew that their acceptance, and the Milosevic regime’s adamant rejection of the proposals, would precipitate military intervention by Nato. Did Thaci’s action constitute a fatal compromise of the KLA’s position, as SPEW implies? We do not think so. As we have consistently argued, the cause of Kosovar self-determination, their right to independent statehood, is a just one. The KLA has a right to obtain military help wherever it is to be found. In any event, Rambouillet, as everyone knows, is now a dead letter.

What of SPEW’s other contentions about the politics of the KLA? Whilst it is true that the KLA’s aspirations to independence are based on bourgeois nationalism, SPEW’s claim that the KLA leadership is effectively a tool of Kosovar capitalism is unsubstantiated by any evidence. Again, the weakness of SPEW’s approach is revealed in its tendency to view the KLA in an abstract, static way. Since the outbreak of hostilities, the KLA has evidently been undergoing almost constant change in reaction to the complex developing situation. Information about the internal political dynamics of the KLA is scant, but what is absolutely clear is that the KLA enjoys mass popular support among the Kosovar population. Its democratic credentials as the authentic focus of the Kosovars’ struggle for independence are undeniable.

Although the pamphlet does not categorise the KLA as a mere cat’s paw of imperialism, it does make disapproving reference to the fact that the KLA is receiving military support from Nato “through undercover channels”. Insisting that the KLA must separate itself completely from the western powers is all very well, but in so doing SPEW demonstrates a truly astounding lack of realism, combined with a flight into abstraction. What, in the opinion of SPEW, should the Kosovars be doing in order to repel Serb genocide and repression in their country? The answer is similarly abstract and frankly utopian:

“We support the organisation of Kosovar workers, labourers, peasants and small traders into democratic armed militias capable of defending their communities against Serbian forces, local warlords, and gangsters, and Nato forces.”

How, we might ask, can such “militias” be “capable” of doing anything at all without weapons? Are they supposed to use their bare hands against Serb tanks and artillery? The pamphlet characteristically leaves this question unaddressed, because the answer is only too obvious - the KLA had and has no choice but to accept military assistance from the Nato powers. However, as the theorists of SPEW would have it, such recourse to the west is unacceptable and renders the KLA’s struggle ineligible for ‘endorsement’ by socialists.

SPEW’s simplistic and ultimately sterile analysis, the outcome of its overwhelming need to preserve its ideological ‘purity’, renders the pamphlet’s core arguments incoherent. The authors do not appear to have noticed that the relationship between Nato and the KLA is increasingly marked by tension and ambivalence. To those who maintain that the KLA is effectively a mere instrument in the hands of imperialism we would pose one question: if this is the case, how is it that Nato still steadfastly refuses to arm the KLA?

True, there is evidence that some Nato special forces (including the SAS) are cooperating with the KLA on the ground, providing training and perhaps some small quantities of light weaponry. Yet Nato has persistently declined to provide the KLA with the artillery and armoured support that would make them into an effective fighting force capable of confronting the Serbs on an equal basis. Similarly, while ad hoc contacts between the KLA and Nato troops are certainly taking place at local level, Nato commanders are unwilling to establish any formal relationship with their counterparts on the KLA general staff.

We do not need to guess or speculate about why Nato has adopted this extremely cautious approach. As one Nato source put it recently, “We are acutely conscious that at some point, in enforcing a peace agreement, we may have to disarm the KLA and even fight them” (my emphasis The Sunday Times May 16). Indeed, given the KLA’s determined refusal to countenance disarmament before they have won an independent Kosova, the latter possibility seems highly probable. Perhaps, if this happens, our Socialist Party comrades will find it possible to ‘endorse’ the KLA - but perhaps not.

Until SPEW is able to will the means as well as the end, its “support for the right of the Kosova people to self-determination and to their own independent state” will remain just empty words

Michael Malkin