21.10.1999

Kosova: Independence - against the KLA

John Stone of the LCMRCI calls on the Communist Party to reassess its position

During the Nato bombardment of Yugoslavia, many leftwing groups demanded arms for the Kosova Liberation Army. After its victory, and in the light of what the KLA is doing in government, it might be useful to re-examine some previous characterisations and positions.

I appreciate comrade Michael Malkin’s compliments (Weekly Worker September 30) and the fact that the CPGB has a policy of opening its pages to critiques of its line. I agree with comrade Mark Fischer that the CPGB is a thinking and democratic organisation. I hope that this article might push my CPGB friends towards a rethink of their support for the KLA.

Michael wrote a one-page response to my short letter. Perhaps because he has not read our more detailed material, he has not understood our positions. We do not oppose Albanian self-determination, we do not think of the Serb president as the “beloved Milosevic” and we did not defend Yugoslavia because we imagined it to be a type of workers’ state.

Before Nato prepared its attack, both the LCMRCI and the CPGB were in favour of Kosovar independence from Serbia. Nevertheless, when the largest and mightiest imperialist alliance ever seen attempted to militarily destroy a small country, we said that, despite our mortal opposition to the reactionary regime of this incipient bourgeois state, we were obliged to defend it. In the proper interest of the Albanian, Serb and international working classes we had to demand united action against Nato. As supporters of Kosovar self-determination we have to be against an organisation which has become Nato’s tool for imposing a neo-colonial ‘protectorate’.

Michael wrote that if the KLA adopted a

“subsidiary, internal security role as a local gendarmerie, helping to police a Kosovar ‘protectorate’ ... and particularly if the KLA indulges in ethnic cleansing on its own account, then it would clearly cease to merit support as a force for Kosovar liberation, and really would become what others on the left now say that it already is: that is, a tool of imperialist interests” (Weekly Worker May 6).

Five months later it is crystal clear that this is the actual reality. More than 2,000 Serb and gypsy children, elderly people and civilians have been murdered. The overwhelming majority of the non-Albanian population has been driven away. This is a repetition of the method the KLA’s commander, Agem Ceku, employed when he was one of the leaders of the Croat army that wiped out all the Serbs from Krajina, transforming it into the first post-war European republic from which an entire population was expelled. Kosova is today probably Europe’s most ethnically cleansed and homogenised country.

The Albanian mafia, one of Europe’s most powerful, is making a lot of profit in Kosova. One of its ‘businesses’ consists in expelling non-Albanians and later reselling their abandoned farms and houses. New capitalist bandits are being encouraged to dismantle some nationalised companies and to create a new class of rich Albanians.

Kosova is and will remain for some years a Nato neo-colony. Like in Macedonia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bosnia and the Czech lands, its forces will be there to guarantee the best conditions for capitalist restoration and accumulation against any resistance from the masses or from other disobedient countries. The KLA is encouraging Kosovar workers to attack their Serbs neighbours and to place their trust in the emerging Albanian bourgeoisie and world imperialism.

An article in the Weekly Worker predicted that for Serbia, “Defeat in war, can lead to conditions of social fluidity and instability which provide opportunities for the advance of progressive forces. Wars produce crises which can lead to socialist revolution” (April 22). However, it is one thing for an imperialist power to be defeated in the middle of an imperialist war (like Russia 1917) and another for a new semi-colony to be defeated by all the imperialist powers. The Serb working class is demoralised and dispersed after so much destruction: the pro-western rightwing opposition or Seselj’s fascists are the best placed to capitalise on anti-Milosevic discontent. On a world scale imperialism feels very confident. It has already sent troops into East Timor and is preparing an invasion of Colombia. During Nato’s war the right wing won a majority in the European parliament for the first time. Everywhere IMF austerity measures and the multinationals have been boosted.

Michael described the KLA as “freedom fighters” and “nationalist revolutionaries” (Weekly Worker May 6) and compared it with the Algerian FLN and the East Timorese Fretilin. The latter were petty bourgeois revolutionary nationalist guerrillas who fought against imperialist domination of backward capitalist colonies, for agrarian reform and democratic rights. Their victory weakened the planet’s bosses and encouraged proletarian demonstrations in the ‘third world’ and in the imperialist heartlands.

The KLA never fought against a single imperialist power. On the contrary, it became the loyal puppet of all of them. It never fought against capitalism and servile forms of production. On the contrary, it is working to liquidate all possible remnants of a planned economy in order to develop semi-colonial backward capitalism. It is whole-heartedly supporting the establishment of an imperialist protectorate and a permanent Nato base in an area where it had no presence for around 50 years.

Michael dedicated two thirds of his article to an attack on the way in which I described Yugoslavia. For me it was a degenerate form of a workers’ state which never achieved any form of socialism (or ‘bureaucratic socialism’, as the CPGB suggests), but whose planned economy was a progressive step against capitalism. Such states are non-viable in the long term. When the system collapsed, as happened in Eastern Europe, the bureaucracy opened the way to capitalist restoration. Only its overthrow via an internationalist political revolution based on workers’ soviets could have prevented such a reactionary outcome.

Michael does not provide us with any positive characterisation of the class nature of Yugoslavia. There is no such thing as a classless state. We entirely agree with the CPGB when it says, “Tito’s Yugoslavia certainly had progressive and positive characteristics: the bourgeoisie and big landowners were expropriated, factories were nationalised and nominally run by workers’ councils” (Weekly Worker April 22). That is why we were obliged to fight against its ruling nomenclature, while defending such progressive conquests against reactionary movements. On which side of the barricades did the KLA stand? It openly attacks ‘communism’ and proposes to dismantle all such conquests. It intends to ‘liberate’ Kosova from multi-ethnicity and ‘oriental communism’, aiming to create a western-controlled, capitalist semi-colony.

At the beginning of 1999 the CPGB wrote: “The struggle of the KLA is a struggle for democracy” (Weekly Worker January 28). “Imperialism cannot and will not accept that the war of the KLA is a just war” (February 4). In fact imperialism armed and supported the KLA, considering them fighters for ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’. The KLA, instead of achieving democracy and national liberation, is imposing a pro-imperialist, ethnically cleansed protectorate.

Michael says that my characterisation of the KLA “is just fantasy”: “Go back only a year or so and you find that the KLA’s ideological hero and model was the Stalinist Enver Hoxha” (Weekly Worker September 30). However, Pleurat Sejdiu, the LPK-KLA’s London representative, put this in context in an interview with the paper: “Sejdiu claims that the LPK took on its Enverist political complexion merely because it needed the support of Albania, which was ruled by Enver Hoxha. He volunteered that the LPK would have looked for support from Albania even had it been fascist ... The KLA refused an offer from the Iranian government ... Instead, says Sejdiu, ‘We want to be part of Europe’, and therefore the KLA looks only to Nato for arms ... it aggressively supports the idea of Nato ground troops and accepts as inevitable that a protectorate would then be established under Nato tutelage” (Weekly Worker April 29). At the end of this article readers are encouraged to visit the KLA’s website - where no doubt the KLA would show that it was more pro-Nato than Nato itself.

The CPGB has made many mistakes which I would like it to think about. First, it departed from its traditional line on Afghanistan, Croatia and Bosnia. There the CPGB was not in favour of making a military bloc with anti-communist and pro-imperialist ‘national liberation’ reactionary forces. In Croatia and Bosnia we rejected Serb atrocities, but we did not call on imperialism to arm the other side, which was equally committed to cleansings and capitalist restoration. As in Kosova we call for multi-ethnic militias to fight against pogroms.

Secondly, it equated the KLA with the Kosovar Albanians. The overwhelming majority of Kosovars voted for Ibrahim Rugova as their president. The KLA rejected him and was backed by a minority. The persecuted Albanian dissident and former KLA public spokesman, Adem Demaci, broke with the KLA because he could not accept its call for a Nato protectorate. The KLA had Albanian military rivals. Sejdiu recognised that Nato was not giving the KLA enough weapons because it was worried that the KLA might use them against the official Rugova constitutional government army.

Thirdly, the CPGB puts the bourgeois democratic principle of self-determination above the interests of the anti-imperialist struggle. Lenin said that, taken in isolation, he would have defended Serbia and Belgium against German and Austrian invasions, but since these conflict were part of a global confrontation he subordinated the legitimate right of self-determination of the occupied nation to a policy of revolutionary dual defeatism worldwide.

Fourthly, it does not understand that sometimes you have to side with an oppressive regime against the nationalists of an oppressed nation once they become imperialist puppets. For example, we defended the Ukrainians, Tartars and Chechens against Stalinist massacres and deportations. However, during the war against German imperialism we were obliged to critically side with Stalin - who killed millions of communists - against Hitler and the Ukrainian, Chechen and Tartar popular-based, armed nationalists who collaborated with Hitler. In Afghanistan we sided with Moscow’s army, despite its atrocities, against the pro-CIA clerical-feudalists who demanded national self-rule. In Nicaragua we were in favour of self-determination for the Miskito and Rama, the most oppressed Indian nationalities; but when they made a bloc with Somoza’s Contras we were obliged to coordinate with the Sandinistas.

In all of these circumstances we sided with the non-imperialist country attacked by imperialism and we called on the Ukrainians, Tartars, Chechens, Pashtu, Indians or Kosovars to enter an anti-imperialist united front against the world’s bosses, because they were even worse than their Stalinist or nationalist oppressors. The defeat of imperialism would provide the best route towards achieving their national and social liberation. If they supported Hitler or Washington they would be enslaved even more.

Fifthly, you can still be in favour of Albanian national self-determination and unification while siding with Yugoslavia against imperialism. For instance, during World War II a Greater Albania was founded, incorporating Kosova and Albanian areas in Montenegro, Macedonia and Greece. It was a Mussolini puppet regime. The Stalinists wanted to destroy Greater Albania and reincorporate Kosova into Yugoslavia. Kosova was the main area which resisted Tito’s partisans. However, we were obliged to side with the Yugoslav ‘communists’ against a fascist Greater Albania, despite advocating a socialist united Albania as a part of a Balkan federation, because we must subordinate a just, bourgeois democratic, principle (self-determination) to a more important class principle (the defeat of imperialism and reaction).

Sixthly, supporting the KLA was incompatible with the CPGB’s correct call to “defeat Nato”. In such an unequal confrontation between all the rich and imperialist powers on the one hand and a poor and crumbling state on the other, dual defeatism meant pro-imperialist neutrality. If you advocated victory for what was Nato’s main pawn you were indirectly advocating a Nato victory. The CPGB correctly said: “There used to be, and still are, two types of countries in the world: bombable and non-bombable ones” (Weekly Worker April 1). In consequence you have to defend these “bombable” countries and not help the imperialist puppets which were Nato’s eyes and ears.

Seventhly, this position led to the strengthening of Milosevic. As the example of Iraq shows, when imperialism defeats an oppressed nation, the dictatorship of such a country is able to stay in power, claiming to be the leader of heroic resistance. On the other hand, had imperialism been defeated, working class confidence would have received such a boost, it would have been able to mobilise and impose a new regime.

Eighthly, the same position created the illusion that a reactionary movement was democratic, revolutionary and for national liberation. The struggle for Albanian national and social liberation demanded the most determined opposition to a Nato-armed movement which advocated the transformation of an oppressed province into something even worse: an imperialist enclave.

For the CPGB a “Greater Albania - incorporating Albania, Kosova and the Albanian parts of Montenegro and Macedonia - would be under the domination of KLA revolutionary nationalism” (Weekly Worker April 29). Where was the KLA’s revolutionary character? Which landlords or capitalists were affected? The KLA, instead of advocating agrarian reform or measures to protect nationalised property, is in favour of privatising factories and land. It offers its services as the best supporter of multinational investments and IMF capitalist programmes. The KLA are heroes with Washington and its military and intelligence apparatus. It is one thing to support the right of the Albanians to secede and to reunite in a single country, but another to claim a revolutionary content for a movement that wants to expel other ethnic communities and establish its Greater Albania under the hegemony not only of Rome or Berlin, but in particular of Washington.

The CPGB wrote:

“Nato arms in the hands of a rejuvenated KLA would not be a cause of condemnation. The KLA must be free to obtain its arms from any source. Our support for the democratic demand for Kosovar independence is not dependant on where its freedom fighters manage to get their guns, ammunition and other military material” (Weekly Worker April 15).

Again it is one thing to support the right of anti-imperialists - who are rooted in a revolutionary struggle - to seek arms anywhere. But it is quite another to encourage a movement which was completely dominated ideologically and militarily by Nato to ask for more weapon from their bosses. Where are these weapons now, CPGB comrades? Some have been returned to Nato, while the rest are being used by the new Kosovar corps or militias to repress discontent on Nato’s behalf and to expel Serbs and Roma.

I hope this friendly, albeit critical, reply will provoke a rethink on the part of CPGB comrades. If you want to be the most resolute fighters for democracy and national self-determination, if you want to defend Kosovar workers, you need to fight against the KLA.

During the war Albanian communists were obliged to appeal for a broad struggle against the imperialist bombardment, while organising communal self-defence against Serb pogroms. Now that the war is over, we need to fight for the expulsion of Nato’s troops and for a workers’ independent Kosova - against the KLA.