The ability to carry out initiatives is limited and made much more difficult by the lack of any organised activity inside the Labour movement around ex- Yugoslavia. Labour MPs have either supported the front bench - whose position is essentially the same as the government's - or called for military intervention. The wider left is, at best confused, at worst downright reactionary. Sections of the left, including Arthur Scargill, support Serbia The main area open for the left to do any systematic work is around the right of Bosnian refugees to come to Britain (or wherever else they choose to go) and to receive housing benefits etc. There are several thousand Bosnian refugees in Britain - of whom only a few hundred are here legally. The majority live on the margins of society and will increasingly be forced into sweat-shops, crime or begging in order to live. The plight of those Bosnians who do manage to get to Britain is illustrated by the recent suicide of a Bosnian woman, Lejla Ibrahimovic.
Socialists have to explain that the refusal to allow Bosnian refugees into Britain is part and parcel of the "fortress Europe' policy inherent in the Maastricht Treaty. It is part and parcel of the Asylum Bill in Britain, the new asylum laws in Germany, the attacks on the Black communities in France etc. The Asylum Bill, for example, will not only restrict the right of entry to new refugees it can also be used retrospectively. Those refugees already
here remain at risk of deportation to the first safe country they entered. (Since this was probably former Czechoslovakia it is highly unlikely that they will be welcomed in either of the 2 new states).