17.06.1999
New crises lies ahead for Nato
Michael Malkin discusses the repercussions of imperialism’s victory in Kosova
“Russia invades Kosovo” was the tabloid headline (The Sun June 12). Hype it may have been, but its melodrama accurately reflected the panic and disarray into which Nato’s political and military leaders were thrown by the events of June 11-12. The occupation of Slatina airport in the Kosovar capital, Pristina, by a light unit of Russian airborne forces detached from their Bosnian peace-keeping contingent, caused acute embarrassment. At a stroke, operation Joint Guardian - the planned triumphal and unopposed entry of Nato forces into Kosova - was reduced to a “bitter farce”, a humiliation that meant “Nato leaders have much to answer for” (The Daily Telegraph June 14).
The proximate cause of this debacle was Clinton’s insistence that US marines should be at the front of Nato’s occupation army when the TV cameras started to roll. Perhaps he had in mind the admonition of the spin doctors in Wag the Dog: “Ten years from now, they’ll have forgotten what the war was about. It’s the pictures they remember.” In the event, the “pictures” were of general Mike Jackson behaving like the grand old Duke of York, marching his British paratroops hither and thither in the sweltering summer heat while he waited for the yankees to turn up.
For us communists, the interesting thing is the light which the Russian “invasion” throws on the political situation in Washington and Moscow. So far as the US is concerned, it serves to confirm the long-standing failure of imperialism to set its foreign policy towards post-Soviet Russia on any kind of coherent basis. After the Gorbachev regime’s capitulation to bourgeois ideology and its embrace of capitalism brought about the inevitable counterrevolution in the USSR, Washington’s response was and remains characterised by a puerile triumphalism, the hubris engendered by a bloodless victory over ‘communism’.
True, international capital in the form of the IMF has poured billions of dollars into Russia - most of which ended up in the foreign bank accounts of the criminals who have run the succession of Yeltsin governments since 1991. But the United States and most of its western partners have consistently treated Russia with ill-disguised contempt and high-handedness, symbolised by Nato’s incorporation of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the western alliance. Rumania and Bulgaria may be next. The lessons of Versailles have clearly been forgotten, and there is every sign that imperialism has yet more ambitions in Eastern Europe, dangerous ambitions which could easily provoke new crises.
Where Moscow is concerned, there seems little reason to doubt the assurances of Russia’s foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, that he knew nothing in advance of the Pristina operation, which appears to have been planned and executed under the orders of colonel-general Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of the Russian general staff - a situation which raises justifiable questions about the extent to which president Yeltsin is in effective control of his own armed forces. Whatever the truth of this, it is self-evident that Russia’s generals are animated by the red-brown nationalism that has filled the vacuum created by the demise of the Soviet Union.
The term ‘red-brown’ has been deliberately misunderstood by some comrades on the left, who have come to the erroneous conclusion that is it a synonym for fascism. Not so. Fascism does exist in Russia, in the form of Zhirinovsky’s grotesquely misnamed Liberal Democratic Party and dozens of ‘black hundred’ organisations such as Pamyat. The term ‘red-brown’, however, denotes in this context the sort of Great Russian chauvinism disguised under an increasingly thin veneer of communist rhetoric. It is personified by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, effectively the successor of the CPSU and Russia’s only truly mass party. Having abandoned the formal vestiges of socialism and internationalism, the CPRF was at the forefront of attempts to involve Russia in military support for its Slav brothers in Serbia.
Despite their nauseating espousal of nationalism, the CPRF and its comrades in the Russian military clearly have a case when it comes to Russian involvement in the post-war settlement in Kosova. It was always a nonsense for the western powers to imagine that they could simply exclude Russia from participation: desperate at all costs to avoid a ground offensive, the Clinton administration was happy to use Viktor Chernomyrdin as an intermediary with the Belgrade government; without his intervention, Milosevic’s capitulation to the G8 proposals would probably have taken much longer.
Given the refusal of Hungary and Bulgaria (and probably Rumania, anxious as it is to join Nato) to allow Russia to overfly its airspace with military traffic, there is little prospect of the force at Pristina being reinforced directly from Russia at present. Nonetheless, under the impact of Russia’s “masterstroke” of “dash and daring” (The Times June 14), Nato now has no choice but to concede Russia a major role in the occupation of Kosova. This recognition of political reality was encapsulated in a statement by Strobe Talbott, the US special envoy, to the effect that Russia’s aspirations represent “a legitimate objective and an objective the US supports” (ibid). Talks to be held in Helsinki between US defence secretary Cohen, secretary of state Albright and their Russian counterparts are likely to result in Russia being allotted a zone of occupation, with the thorny question of a ‘unitary command structure’ being solved along the diplomatic lines used in Bosnia. Russian forces will notionally be under the command of General Jackson, but will in practice answer to their own commanders.
Jackson’s position has undoubtedly been undermined by the Russian operation in Pristina. His claim not to be interested in the airport - an unconvincing case of sour grapes - is simply a lie. It is self-evident that Nato planned to use the airport not only as its HQ but as the hub of its reinforcement operations in Kosova. Poor Jackson, landed in this mess by the arrogance and stupidity of his political bosses, must now pretend that running operations from a disused furniture warehouse on the western outskirts of the capital is an adequate alternative.
Nato’s confusion and ineptitude stretches beyond the Russian question to embrace the other issue central to the implementation of Joint Guardian: namely, the problem of what to do about the KLA. On paper, the KLA was to begin disarming from midnight on June 15, the end of phase one of the “Entry into Force Agreement” stipulated by the G8 proposals, but there are already some clear signs that the situation on the ground is rapidly running out of Nato control in a way which anybody could have foreseen. Far from meekly surrendering to its Nato patrons, the KLA has already begun to constitute itself as a de facto indigenous police force and embryonic Kosovar army, not only in the capital but throughout Kosova.
In an interview given to western reporters on June 14, Rustem Mustafer, the KLA’s commander in the Pristina region, made it clear that the KLA rejects the UN resolution calling for their disarmament and demilitarisation. According to Mustafer, the goal of the KLA is to “transform itself into the army of an independent state of Kosovo” (Financial Times June 15). Claiming that senior Nato officers, with whom he is engaged in regular negotiations, had not asked him to disarm his troops, Mustafer stated that “there will be a reconstruction of the KLA and we will keep our weapons and I hope Nato will help us in this” (ibid). Mustafer’s “hope” may turn out to be ungrounded, but his contention that the KLA already controls Pristina (“Most of the city is guarded by our men but not in uniform”) seems credible enough for the time being. KLA members have mounted vehicle checkpoints around the city and have vowed to “execute” any Serb military left in the region after the expiry of Nato’s deadline for withdrawal. Not surprisingly, the dominance of the KLA on the ground has led to an exodus of Serb civilians, who fear that the few isolated cases of reprisals that have taken place so far are merely the harbinger of a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing by their vengeful Kosova Albanian neighbours.
Although the political leadership of the KLA has not yet commented on their strategic aims, it is becoming clear that Kosovar independence (specifically excluded from the G8 settlement, with its references to preserving the “territorial integrity and sovereign status of Yugoslavia”) is merely the minimal demand. Sali Mustafer, the Pristina city commander of the KLA, told the media that “the ultimate aim of the KLA was to unite all the Albanian people in one homeland, including areas of Macedonia” (ibid my italics).
This entirely predictable stance, foreshadowing demands for what amounts to a Greater Albania, incorporating the current Albanian state as well as disputed territory in Macedonia, is obviously political dynamite from the point of view of the imperialists, threatening as it does their own strategic concept of Kosova as a supine protectorate, enjoying purely notional self-governance. Both militarily and politically, relations between the Nato occupation powers and the KLA look set to be heading on a collision course, with Nato embroiled in ‘counter-insurgency’ operations against the very people its ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Kosova was supposed to defend against Serbian terror.
In Serbia itself, Nato’s goal of inducing the fall of Milosevic may be a few steps nearer fruition, but again the costs in terms of political instability and conflict will be high. Milosevic, with characteristic impudence, is trying to depict his capitulation to Nato as a victory. Addressing some 10,000 Serbs in the bombed northern city of Novi Sad, he claimed: “We managed not only heroically to defend our fatherland but also to obtain UN guarantees of its sovereignty and territorial integrity” (Daily Mail June 15). On paper, of course, there is truth in the latter assertion, but the reality is different.
As we predicted, Vojislav Seselj, leader of the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party has left the ruling Belgrade coalition government in protest at Milosevic’s “surrender” to Nato. The departure of Seselj and his 82 deputies from the 250-strong Yugoslav parliament means that Milosevic now has no overall majority. Seselj and other contenders for the succession are likely to call for immediate elections - something echoed by the Serbian Orthodox Church - which could result in defeat for Milosevic. In the event of a Seselj victory (unlikely but not inconceivable) Serb politics would be even more national chauvinist than at present. Whatever the outcome of elections, Russian and Chinese demands for the implementation of the UN Security Council resolution guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia would only serve to deepen existing tensions over the future of Kosova. On top of this threat, the Montenegrin president, Milo Djukanovic, is now openly discussing the possibility of secession, asserting that “Montenegro will look for its own legal status” in the aftermath of the war (ibid).
After only a few days of ‘peace’ in Kosova, it is fast becoming apparent that Nato’s victory has created a raft of new problems, containing the seeds of much greater instability and bloodshed. Such is the fruit of imperialism’s arrogant determination to impose its new world order on the Balkans. No doubt many on the left will relish the west’s predicament. We too have no truck with imperialism and its wars, but unlike many such comrades, we were not seduced by nostalgia for the ‘former workers’ state’ and their own variant of red-brown politics into supporting Milosevic’s brutal regime of terror. As the evidence of his atrocities mounts, will our comrades now denounce Belgrade as the perpetrators of hideous crimes against humanity? I fear they will not, and their refusal will condemn them.
Let us not forget that the central unresolved issue behind the conflict was and remains the legitimate Kosovar demand for self-determination up to and including full independence from Yugoslavia. That demand, betrayed by the supposed ‘liberators’ of Kosova, still stands. We still support it.