01.07.1999

Blind to the truth

Kosova crisis is a crisis of the left

The map in front of me speaks for itself. Each skull, of which there are dozens, marks a town or village in Kosova where Milosevic’s armed forces butchered ethnic Albanians. The victims were shot or burned alive in a systematic attempt to extirpate the Kosovar nation.

As the full extent of Serb war crimes emerges, the attitude of left groups to these acts of barbarism assumes great importance, for it serves as a yardstick by which the principles that underlie their politics should be judged. Sad to say, the approach taken by some groups betokens not just the theoretical impoverishment and crisis which characterises the current period; it also reveals a distressing moral atrophy rooted in a chronic inability or unwillingness to face the truth.

The most abject example of this phenomenon can be found in the pages of the Morning Star. Last week, I asked how the left, particularly the ‘Yugoslav defencists’, would handle the question of wide-scale Serb atrocities during the war. I wrote: “If they have the guts to tackle the question at all - which we doubt - they will almost certainly attempt to draw an equation between Milosevic’s armed forces and the KLA, along the lines of ‘the Serbs may have made some mistakes, but the KLA are just as bad’” (Weekly Worker June 24). As we shall see, I was right in some cases, but not in that of the wretched Morning Star.

The paper makes no attempt to justify the Serbs’ actions by setting up some kind of moral equivalence. Just a deafening silence. Scan every column inch and you will find not a single reference to ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Serbs. What you have instead are allegations of atrocities committed by Kosovars in the wake of Nato’s victory. Under lurid headlines such as “KLA gangs wage war against Serbs”, we read that “Tens of thousands of Serbs have fled Kosovo in the face of advancing KLA forces which have indiscriminately shot Serbs who they consider to be collaborators and ransacked Serb villages” (June 22).

This putrid one-sidedness should come as no surprise. Throughout the conflict, the Morning Star functioned as little more than the voice of Belgrade. Little wonder, therefore, that it should print a thank-you letter from professor Dr Vladimir Stamnbuk, international secretary of the Yugoslav Left. The professor speaks of his “high hopes that UN forces (K-for) will do their best to disarm uncontrolled Albanian terrorists”. This ‘socialist’ stooge of Milosevic’s regime has the gall to contend that “the Yugoslav left urges respect for the human rights of members of all national communities ... it seeks equality and equity in everyday life, which will lead to the establishment of substantial autonomy in the province of Kosovo” (June 26).

The reference to “Albanian terrorists” should remind us that the Morning Star, sycophantically echoing Tanjug, has consistently sought to portray the KLA as mere “terrorists”. Back in April, the paper printed an article by Brian Denny entitled ‘Trafficking to the west’ - a classic smear, which aimed to ‘prove’ that the KLA were not simply terrorists, but also at the centre of an international drug-dealing conspiracy involving the German and US secret services. Any intelligent reader must have seen at once that Denny’s hysterical allegations about the so-called “Kosovo-Albanian cartel” were nothing more than a crude fabrication.

When it comes to theoretical analysis of the current situation in Kosova, all the Morning Star has to offer is a couple of articles by Kenny Coyle - international secretary of the CPB. In his so-called “war analysis”, comrade Coyle begins by sneering at “the photogenic woman soldier, captain Vicki Wentworth, pictured poignantly, head in hands, in front of an alleged ‘massacre site’” (June 22).

His argument, if such it can be called, is one that we find deployed elsewhere on the left: namely that “it was the air forces of [Nato] which are primarily responsible” for the Kosova tragedy.

In accord with the paper’s general line on the post-war situation, Coyle devotes all his attention to the plight of the Serb population of Kosova. Quoting figures supposedly provided by the United Nations commissioner for refugees, Coyle tells us that 9,000 Serbs fled Kosova for Serbia and Montenegro in the first days after the suspension of hostilities - this was, according to his highly dubious figures, more than twice the number of ethnic Albanians who left their homeland in the first few days after the onset of Nato’s air offensive on March 24.

Hence, according to Coyle’s twisted logic, the Serbs are suffering more than the Kosovars did. It is the Serbs, not the Kosovars, who have been the victim of pogroms.

The nearest the Morning Star comes to the forbidden territory of actually admitting that Serbian armed forces were involved in any form of violence against ethnic Albanians comes in a reprinted article by Kartik Rai of the People’s Democracy newspaper of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Comrade Rai tells us even-handedly that “It is a tragic fact that wars of secession are always bloody while the protagonists on all sides perpetrate acts which can be labelled as ‘ethnic cleansing’” (June 26). Therefore no opposition to the violence of the oppressors and no support for the violence of the oppressed.

While the Morning Star’s coverage continues to be characterised by blatant falsification, Socialist Worker’s position is shot through with weasel-worded equivocation. The Socialist Workers Party, in the person of Charlie Kimber, at least has the decency to admit that “the Serbian government and security forces are responsible for the massacre of hundreds and probably thousands”. But then comrade Kimber begins to haggle about the numbers.

“They [Nato] throw out widely varying figures of those dead, reports of torture and rumours of atrocities with no regard for the truth. Over the last two weeks we have heard claims of 100,000 dead, 30,000 dead, 10,000 dead and then figures rising again ... It is a ghoulish bidding war designed to divert attention from what really happened and to hide Nato’s role in the whole process” (June 26).

The SWP’s central thesis is that Nato made an admittedly bad situation much worse: “Nato ... played a crucial role in accelerating the terror faced by Kosovan Albanians ... The scale of killings and ethnic cleansing soared after March 24, the day the Nato bombing began ...There were killings before March 24, but they were on a relatively small scale, similar to those which, disgracefully, go on every day in regimes throughout the world. Nato created the climate in which murder and torture became a hundred times more likely” (my emphasis). In other words, had it not been for Nato’s air offensive, Milosevic would have limited himself to killing only “relatively small” numbers of Kosovars. This would have been “disgraceful”, to be sure, but it would have been better thus. In its fatuity, the SWP’s argument is akin to suggesting that the Nazi holocaust was actually the fault of the RAF, without whose intervention Adolf Hitler would have contented himself with exterminating only a “relatively small” number of Jews.

This abhorrent position directly results from the SWP’s failure to address the central democratic question about the Kosova conflict - the legitimate demand of the Kosovars to self-determination. It was this failure at the level of basic principle and theory that led the SWP to adopt a stance of hand-wringing, bourgeois social-pacifism, bemoaning the “catastrophe” and “horror” of the Balkans war - chastising the Milosevic regime, but placing the blame for Serbian ‘ethnic cleansing’ firmly on Nato and imperialism. To make a bad argument even worse, Kimber enunciates precisely that notion of ‘moral equivalence’ which we predicted. He states: “Today Nato intervention has given local control to the Kosovo Liberation Army in many areas ... The KLA is now carrying out its own atrocities” (ibid).

Something of the SWP’s theoretical disarray on the whole Kosova question can be seen in an article by Chris Harman in the latest number of the party’s theoretical journal, Socialist Review (July-August). On the one hand, Harman concedes that Milosevic’s campaign of terror against Kosova was “a crime against humanity, which you couldn’t defend”; echoing a recent reported statement by Alex Callinicos, he even accepts that the Kosovars’ democratic demand for self-determination is “legitimate”. Yet Harman goes on to argue that, notwithstanding these facts, the left has somehow missed the point in its approach to the war. Stressing the “absolute intellectual confusion of the far left” [among whom he would doubtless include the CPGB and the Weekly Worker], Harman claims that we have “not understood the tradition of opposition to imperialist war ... We have to remember who our main enemy is ...”

Comrade Harman is wrong - at least so far as the CPGB is concerned. We are quite clear that our main enemy is at home. For the last 13 weeks we have argued with absolute consistency against Nato bombing. We unreservedly condemn imperialist war aims, wherever they manifest themselves. But our principled position has been founded on the logic of the democratic question at the crux of the whole Kosova issue. As Harman himself points out, in reference to an earlier case, “The best sections of the French left did not merely support the right of Algeria to self-determination during the French war with Algeria, but identified with the FLN.” Quite so. And we, unlike the SWP, have chosen, on the basis of Leninist principle and a commitment to democracy, to ‘identify’ with the KLA.

We have not done this blindly. Just as Marx, Engels and Lenin - seizing on the Irish question as a weak link in British imperialism - supported Irish self-determination despite the petty bourgeois nationalism of the Fenians and the Irish republican movement, so we have supported the KLA, despite their comparable politics. We know that the KLA are not angels, but they do represent the interests, and enjoy the mass support, of Kosova’s ethnic Albanians.

This leads naturally to the question of the CPGB’s attitude to “atrocities” supposedly or actually carried out by the KLA. Let nobody misunderstand or misconstrue our position: as consistent democrats, we are categorically opposed to any acts of ‘ethnic cleansing’ or anti-Serb terror carried out by the KLA or other ethnic Albanians on their own account. We comprehend (who cannot?) why, in the aftermath of three months of horrific slaughter, some Kosovars have evidently taken the opportunity to exact retribution on some of the local Serb population, but we do not condone these acts of vengeance.

The KLA leadership has, understandably, denied that their forces have been responsible for the crimes in question. It is not improbable that many of the essentially isolated incidents, however reprehensible, have been the work of individual Kosovars, returning from enforced exile to find their relatives murdered and their homes destroyed or occupied by Serbs. At this stage, there is no way of knowing whether the KLA leaders are telling the truth or not. What is clear to any objective observer, however, is that the scale of such largely spontaneous violence bears no comparison with the planned and systematic campaign of mass terror instigated by Milosevic with the aim of exterminating the Kosovar nation.

The necrophiliacs of the CPB (and their counterparts in the NCP, the SLP and other organisations) are evidently beyond redemption. They cannot claim ignorance as a defence, since their whole position is founded on the conscious propagation of lies intended to bolster the authority of Milosevic and his “former workers’ state”. But other forces on the left can and must take a stand on the future of Kosova, a stand determined by rigorous analysis and a firm regard for the truth.

Michael Malkin