War in the Balkans - 5
Yugoslavia: the Acid Test
How Socialist Worker and Living Marxism capitulate to Western imperialism and Serbian nationalism in the Balkans
The failure of the British left to come to terms with the issues at stake in the crisis in former Yugoslavia has been unmitigated. From Labour left-wingers to so-called "Trotskyists", people calling themselves socialists have either refused, in a quite cowardly fashion, to make any unequivocal statement on Yugoslavia, or have propounded "Marxist" views which mirror those of British government officials and Serbian chauvinists. Those in the latter category have tended to adopt one of two positions: either a position of ignoring and bypassing all national and democratic questions in favour of an abstract "working-class solution"; or a position of more or less outright support for Serbia.
A prominent example of the former type is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), whose journals are the weekly Socialist Worker and the monthly Socialist Review ; an example of the latter is the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), whose principal journal is the monthly Living Marxism . In practice, if not on a rhetorical level, these two positions amount to the same thing: the tail-ending of the pro-Serbian and anti-Bosnian policy of the British government (If a distinction is to be drawn, then one could say that the SWP’s position mirrors the stated position of the British government, while that of the RCP mirrors the British government’s actual position). This entails an abandonment of Marxism in favour of liberal moralism on the part of the SWP and racist Stalinism on the part of the of the RCP. These charges will be substantiated by exposing the shallowness of the left’s historical interpretation and political theory. Such drivel would, indeed, not be worth answering, were it not for the fact that such drivel is propounded by most of the left today (with a few notable exceptions).
The Second World War in Yugoslavia
The Second World War in Yugoslavia is a good place to start. The War has been used by the British media to back up its widely-accepted assertion that the history of Yugoslavia is the history of ethnic conflict. Despite complaining of this "tribal bloodbath" myth, the only modification which Living Marxism seems to want to make to this myth is that the Serbs are more the "heroes" and the Croats more the "villains", rather than the other way around. Living Marxism thus parrots rather than challenges the media’s interpretation of the Second World War in Yugoslavia.
Most of the media has essentially portrayed the struggle against fascism in wartime Yugoslavia as an ethnic conflict between Communist Serbs and fascist Croats. This serves to portray Serbs and Croats as protagonists in a centuries old ethnic conflict, and hence smear those Croats (and later those Muslims) who in the last two years have taken up arms to defend their national rights against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. However, it has also had the effect of minimising he crimes carried out by the wartime fascists in both Serbia and Croatia. Seen in this light, the massacres carried out by the Ustashe against the Serbs were not so much an act of fascist genocide as simply the worst atrocity in a long-standing ethnic feud.
Furthermore, in order to argue that the Serbs as a nation were the good guys it is necessary to deny the genocide carried out by the Serbian fascists against Serbia’s Jews Living Marxism believes that the Serb fascists who ruled in Belgrade during the war were on the "other side" to the Ustasha, even though both were maintained in power by the Nazis, and believes further that to attack the crimes of the Serb fascists is to apologise for the Croat fascists. Thus Living Marxism denies the crimes of the Serb fascists.
The crimes of the Serbian fascist regime of Milan Nedic, which exterminated as many Jews as the Ustashe, have received scant attention from the British media, since the latter wants to portray the Yugoslav civil war as an ethnic conflict rather than as a revolutionary struggle which proved the possibility of ordinary people of different nations working together for their mutual liberation . Living Marxism is no different in this respect.
Living Marxism feels obliged to apologise on behalf of the Serbian fascists. Unfortunately for them the pro-Partisan historian Jozo Tomasevich, writing in the early seventies, has provided documentary evidence that the Cetniks actually received weapons and political protection from the Ustasha authorities. Thus on 28 May 1942, the Bosnian Cetniks signed a treaty with the Ustashe, Article 5 of which ran as follows:
"As long as there is danger from armed Partisan bands, the Cetnik formations will co-operate voluntarily with the Croatian military forces in fighting and destroying the Partisans and in these operations they will be under the overall command of Croatian armed forces. In these operations Cetnik commanders will be in command of their own detachments.
"The Cetnik formations can engage in operations against the Partisans on their own, but this they have to report, on time, to the Croatian military commanders."
The agreement also provided for the supply of ammunition to the Cetniks, the caring for of wounded Cetniks in Croatian hospitals, the granting of financial assistance to the Cetniks’ widows and orphans equivalent to that given to those of Croatian soldiers and the guarantee of civilian life for Serbs in Cetnik-controlled areas. This agreement was favoured by the Germans, and on July 15, 1942 General Glaise proposed that a central office be established in Zagreb for its implementation.
On 20 December 1941, the Cetnik leader Draza Mihailovic sent a directive to his commanders in Montenegro, describing Cetnik war aims. These included "the creation of a Great Yugoslavia and within it of a Great Serbia which is to be ethnically pure and is to include Serbia [meaning also Macedonia], Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Srijem, the Banat, and Backa"; "the creation of contiguous frontiers between Serbia and Montenegro, as well as between Serbia and Slovenia by cleansing the Moslem population from Sanjak and the Moslem and Croat populations from Bosnia and Hercegovina."
This policy on the part of the Cetniks resulted in the Moslems losing an even higher proportion of their population during World War Two than did the Serbs. According to the Serb demographer Bogoljub Kocovic, 8.1% of all Moslems were killed, compared to 7.3% of all Serbs. Hardly surprising that the Partisans in January 1942 called upon all Serbs, Croats, and Moslems in Bosnia and Hercegovina to take up a "common struggle against the Germans, Ustashe and Cetniks". The call was heeded: by the end of 1942 the Partisan struggle had become a mass movement among Croats; by the mid-1943 Croats and Moslems outnumbered Serbs among the Partisans operating on Ustasha territory, where most of the fighting was taking place (though it should be remembered that the Serbs still formed a larger percentage among the Partisans than among the population of the Ustasha state at large); by the end of 1943 there were eleven Croatian, seven Bosnian and five Slovenian Partisan divisions; by the end of the war the Croatian Partisans numbered 150,000.
Thus the RCP shifts the blame for genocide away from the ideology and political nature of fascism and onto the shoulders of the Croats as an ethnic group. In doing so they minimise the crimes not only of Serbian fascism but also of Croatian fascism. This tendency of the British left, to end up as objective apologists for the forces they claim to oppose, is one we shall return to.
The meaning of Yugoslavia and the Communist Yugoslav state
Given that much of the "pro-Yugoslav" section of the British left seems to believe in Yugoslavism purely in terms of the rights of the Serbs over and against the rights of other nations in Yugoslavia, one is led to wonder why exactly these people are so "pro-Yugoslav". The Yugoslav revolution of 1941-45 was progressive precisely because it was a multinational liberation movement. This must be emphasised: it was neither a war of Serbs against Croats, nor even a war of Yugoslavs against Germans. The partisan leadership at all times viewed their chief enemy as the Cetniks — the Serb nationalist representatives of the pre-war Yugoslav order (Yugoslavia had been described by Communists in the inter-war period as the "prison-house of nations").
This even led the partisans, at their weakest moment in early 1943, to propose a truce with the Germans in order to carry out their war against the Cetniks The partisan movement was a war of liberation at once of Croats, Slovenes and Macedonians etc from Serbian domination; of Bosnian and Croatian Serbs from the Ustashe and of all nations from their own fascists. According to Tito himself in the spring of 1944, 44% of partisans were Serbs, 30% Croats and 10% Slovenes The multinational character of the partisan movement is reflected in the nature of the Yugoslavia created by the Communists between 1943 and 1945. What had been a unitary, Serbian-dominated state was replaced by a multinational federation. The Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians were recognised as different nations within Yugoslavia for the first time (whereas previously the Yugoslav regime had described the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as different "tribes" of the Yugoslav nation, with the Montenegrins and Macedonians being regarded simply as Serbs), and were granted their own national republics equal in status (the Muslims were not recognised as a nation until the de-Stalinisation process of the 1960s).
The position of Croatia and Slovenia within Yugoslavia
It is here that we come to the crux of the issue that has led the left astray over Yugoslavia — their inability to define what exactly they mean by "Yugoslavia", hence their inability to understand Yugoslavia’s collapse. "Yugoslavia" has been generally equated by the British left with the Yugoslav state; and thus its dissolution is blamed on the declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia in June 1991. In fact, as we have shown, the dissolution of the Yugoslav state began with the revolution of 1941-45. Furthermore, every new Yugoslav constitution promulgated between 1946 and 1974 granted a greater degree of economic and political sovereignty to the republics. Thus the period of Communist rule in Yugoslavia witnessed the country’s steady evolution from a centralised state into a loose confederation, until 1980 under the auspices of Tito himself.
The reasons for this were economic and political: as the economies of Slovenia and Croatia developed and the threat of Western or Soviet invasion receded, the ruling castes in those republics increasingly viewed the Yugoslav state and its bureaucracy as an unnecessary fetter to the development of their industry. They thus moved to complete their national revolutions begun in 1941-45. In 1971 in Croatia this resulted in a nation-wide student strike, which was supported by Croatia’s leaders arid attracted widespread working-class support. It stopped short of a full-scale national-democratic revolution when Croatia’s leaders chose to capitulate to the Yugoslav bureaucracy rather than put themselves at the head of the workers and students.
However, Tito granted Croatia and the other Yugoslav republics greater independence in the Constitution of 1974, so that they acquired sole control over their own police and territorial defence forces, budgets arid to a very great extent over their domestic economies, public administrations arid civil and criminal legal codes. Thus when Presidents Tudjman of Croatia and Kucan of Slovenia strove for greater independence for their republics in 1990-1991, they were merely acting in the tradition of post-war Croatian and Slovenian communism. The rulers of Croatia, who failed to create a united and sovereign nation-state in 1918 on the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, succeeded in this task in the two Croatian revolutions of 1941-45 and 1989-91 and the intervening period of reform. In 1989-91, under the pressure of their own working-class from within and the counter-revolutionary Serbian attempt at recentralisation from without, Croatia’s rulers finally attempted to finish the job.
If Yugoslavia is viewed — in its historically progressive sense — as an association of nations rather than merely a state called "Yugoslavia", then there is no reason why Slovenian and Croatian separatism should be blamed for its destruction. In April 1991 Tudjman and Kucan proposed that Yugoslavia be transformed into a loose confederation of republics. This would have safeguarded Croatian and Slovenian sovereignty while preserving the economic and cultural links between the different Yugoslav peoples.
It was only the refusal of Milosevic’s Serbia to countenance Yugoslavia’s further decentralisation — and indeed his attempt to reverse the decentralisation enacted under Tito between 1966 and 1974 — that drove Croatia and Slovenia to secede. "Yugoslavia" as a centralised state was dissolved as a result of the Croatian and Slovenian political and economic development between 1941 and 1991, to be sure, but Yugoslavia in its progressive sense of an association of nations — was destroyed by the Milosevic regime in Serbia.
The position of Serbia within Yugoslavia
The question remains — why was it the leaders of Croatia and Slovenia (and eventually also those of Bosnia and Macedonia) who strove for national sovereignty, while Serbia’s leaders from 1987 onwards were alone in being fiercely opposed to decentralisation? Why was it Croatia and Bosnia who were forced to fight ruinous wars and to go begging for recognition from the international community, while Serbia alone controlled the Yugoslav Federal Army (which the Croatians and Bosnians had themselves paid for) ? The answer is that the Yugoslav Revolution of 1941-45 had failed to smash the old Serbian-dominated Yugoslav monarchical state, and had instead inherited it. As Marx once said of the French state machine after the 1845 revolution, "All political upheavals perfected this machine instead of smashing it" ( The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ).
Lenin himself recognised this phenomenon. Writing in December 1922, he noted:
"It is said that a united apparatus was needed. But where did that assurance come from? Did it not come from that same Russian apparatus which, as I pointed out in one of the preceding sections of my diary, we took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil?
"There is no doubt that that measure should have been delayed somewhat until we could say that we vouched for our apparatus as our own. But now, we must, in all conscience, admit the contrary; the apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and tsarist hotchpotch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and because we have been "busy" most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine. It is quite natural that in such circumstances the "freedom to secede from the union" by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riff-raff like a fly in milk."
Lenin, The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’
In Yugoslavia this took the form of merging the defeated Cetniks into the Partisan army and neglecting fully to purge the Serbian state bureaucracy in a manner at all comparable to the savage Bleiburg massacre of Croatian quislings and their families in 1945. Because royalism had been so strong in Serbia during the war, and because Serbia had been effectively liberated by partisans invading from Bosnia in 1944 in conjunction with the Soviet Army, rather than by specifically Serbian partisans, the Communists had reason to fear the possibility of a counter-revolution in Serbia backed by the West. They consequently came to terms with the old bureaucratic and military order in Serbia Thus, despite the victory won on paper by the Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian and Macedonian partisan movements, in reality the state they inherited remained Serbian-dominated to a very great degree.
The Stalinist Yugoslav state, so beloved by "socialists" in Britain today, was largely the same old Serbian monarchical state under a new regime. With Milosevic’s rise to power in 1987, the Serbian ruling elite opted to use Serbia’s dominant position within the Yugoslav state apparatus to reverse the constitutional changes of 1943-1974 and recreate the Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia that had existed before the revolution. The aim was both to deflect working-class anger into nationalist channels, and to preserve the bankrupt Yugoslav bureaucracy and army in the face of economic change in Slovenia arid Croatia that was rendering obsolete the very idea of a centralised Yugoslav state. Milosevic’s programme, involving as it has the overturning of the Partisans’ settlement of the national question arid the destruction of the sovereignty of Kosova, Vojvodina, Montenegro, Bosnia and to some extent Croatia, is thus a programme of counterrevolution pure and simple.
The status of nations under Communist rule
The British left’s Stalinist defence of the Yugoslav state has led many of its members to deny the very national rights on which Communist Yugoslavia was founded. According to Joan Phillips, writing in Living Marxism in March 1992, "Croatian politicians have succeeded in inventing a national identity which did not exist a few years ago".
Similarly, Chris Harman wrote in Socialist Worker on 24 April 1993:
"Very few people anywhere were prepared to stand against the nationalist current and say the whole process {the rise of nationalism in Yugoslavia] was absurd — that Serbs, Croats and Muslims were virtually identical in language and lifestyle and only differed in religion which few practised."
Let us contrast the opinions of the Yugoslav communists themselves. Article 1 of the Yugoslav constitution of 1946 reads:
"The Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia is a federal people’s state, republican in form, a community of peoples equal in rights who, on the basis of the right to self-determination including the right of secession, have expressed their will to live together in a federative state."
The constitution recognised five nations (Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Macedonians and Montenegrins) and recognised each republic (except Bosnia and Hercegovina) as a nation-state. When in 1971 representatives of the Serb minority in Croatia proposed a redraft of the Croatian constitution that would safeguard their rights more effectively, they proposed the following definition of Croatia:
"The Socialist Republic of Croatia is the sovereign national state of the Croatian nation, the state of the Serbian nation in Croatia, and the state of the nationalities that live in it."
In other words, not only the Yugoslav Communists in 1946, but the Serb Communists struggling against Croatian nationalism in 1971, themselves recognised the existence of different nations within Yugoslavia. Stalinists though they were, the Yugoslav communists recognised that the different peoples of Yugoslavia could co-exist only if national differences were recognised and national rights safeguarded. Sad though it is, a majority of the left in Britain today (including such notables as Tony Benn) are to the right of the Yugoslav Stalinists of fifty years ago, so far as the national question is concerned.
National rights — complementary or contradictory?
As we have seen, the Yugoslav Communists under Tito at least went some way towards guaranteeing the national rights of all the Yugoslav peoples (though the Kosovar Albanians were only accorded minority rather than national rights). Today the British left seems to believe that national rights for Serbs, Croats and Muslims are actually contradictory. Socialist Worker , for instance, has condemned the West’s recognition of Croatia on the grounds that it "ignored" the rights of the Croatian Serb minority and "encouraged Tudjman to carve up Bosnia from one side while Milosevic carved it up from the other."
Thus the SWP believes that the Croatian people should be forced to remain in Yugoslavia, against their will as expressed in a referendum where 94% voted in favour of independence. The SWP seeks to uphold the rights of the Serb minority by denying the rights of the Croat majority, seeming to believe that the former can be protected from the latter by an outside power. Given that the Croatian Serbs had no right to self-determination within Yugoslavia, this position resembles that of Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland.
This results from the SWP’s tendency to view national rights and nationalism in the abstract rather than placing them in their historical and material context. (For instance, the SWP’s interpretation of Croatian nationalism — that it has been whipped up by the Tudjman regime to side-track the anger of the working-class — makes no reference to the possibility that Croatian nationalism might have had something to do with the threatening expansionism of a Serbian regime that had swallowed up Kosova, Vojvodina and Montenegro before the Croatian nationalists even came to power.)
The nature of the oppression of the Serbs in Croatia
At the time of Croatia’s declaration of independence, Serbs were often subjected to petty harassment and some were sacked from state employment. This is largely the same fate as befell the Russian minority in Latvia at the time of Latvian independence in 1991, though unlike the Croatian Serbs, Latvia’s Russians were almost immediately disqualified from citizenship on a large scale. Today the Serb minority in Croatia is to a large extent being forcibly expelled from Croatia while the Latvian Russians are hardly worse off than they were in 1991. How would the SWP, for whom the oppression of minorities in Croatia occurs in a vacuum, explain this difference? Is it not because Croatia, unlike Latvia, was immediately subjected to a war waged ostensibly in defence of the same minority, leading to the partition of Croatia with 30%of the country being annexed to Serbia?
Writing in 1914, James Connolly predicted that the partition of Ireland between Catholics and Protestants would lead to a "carnival of reaction" (i.e. the triumph of sectarianism) in both north and south. So it has been in Croatia, where Serbs and Croats had previously lived peacefully together for forty-five years. With war being waged against Croatia in the name of the Serb minority, and with many Croatian Serbs backing the Serbian army against Croatia, there was inevitably a racist upsurge in Croatia directed against the Serbs, viewed as the enemy within, leading to the expulsion of thousands of them.
On the other hand, the failure of the Croatian regime to respect the rights of the Serb minority has encouraged many Croatian Serbs to back the Serbian army in the war, and made the Serbian Army’s war of conquest that much easier to wage. Failure of the Croatian and Croatian Serb leaders to respect the rights of each other’s peoples has led to both being oppressed.
The violence of the oppressed in Bosnia
In Bosnia the situation is clearer still. There was no oppression either of Serbs or Croats in Bosnia before the war: attempting to equate the Bosnian regime with its Serbian and Croatian counterparts, Socialist Worker has been unable to find any muck to sling at it, except that President Izetbegovic’s Party of Democratic Action was mainly for Muslims (just as the Scottish National Party is mainly for Scots) and the equally damning fact that, in its hour or desperation, the Bosnian government allied itself to Croatia. Muslim ethnic cleansing of Croats has started occurring only very recently, when it became clear to many Muslims that the West was betraying them, the Croats were ethnically cleansing them, and they could hope for nothing better than a small Muslim enclave — which could be established only by the expulsion of Croats.
If some Serbs and Croats are indeed being oppressed by the Muslims in Bosnia today, it is not because the Muslims have asserted their right to live in an independent Bosnia, but because some Serbs and Croats have attempted to prevent them living in an independent Bosnia. Since denial of the rights of any nationality leads to the oppression of other nationalities, any socialist movement in the former Yugoslavia can be effective only if it upholds the rights of all nations and minorities simultaneously.
What self-determination means in practice
What form should these rights take ? First, the right of self-determination can be recognised only for the republics and provinces of former Yugoslavia within their present legal boundaries. This is because these boundaries were drawn or confirmed in 1945 with the agreement of both Serb and Croat Partisans. Any attempt by either Serbia or Croatia to revise the boundaries in their own favour can only be an attempt to overturn the Partisan settlement of the national question for expansionist reasons. To recognise the right of, say, Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia or the Croat minorities in Bosnia to self-determination is to support the distorted conception of national rights advocated by Radovan Karadzic and Mate Boban: in practice, ethnic cleansing carried out by the stronger against the weaker. This is because there is absolutely no way that the Serbs and Croats of Croatia, or the Serbs, Croats and Muslims of Bosnia, can live separately from each other except through ethnic-cleansing. Thus self-determination can only be exercised jointly by the different peoples of each republic who must likewise be able jointly to defend themselves from any attempt to subvert this right (though, at the same time, minorities must have the right to defend themselves from racist attacks). This is similar to the situation in Northern Ireland, where the Protestant minority has no right to an exclusively Protestant self-determination, but must exercise self-determination jointly with the Catholic majority.
To prove our point, we may examine the example of the Krajina region in Croatia, which the SWP seems to believe is part of Serbia rather than Croatia. The so-called Krajina is a piece of territory that Serb leaders, with the backing of the Yugoslav Army, carved out of Croatia in August 1990 and set up as a separate political entity. Like Northern Ireland, the Autonomous Region of Krajina is an entity with no historical legitimacy — during the revolution of 1941-45 the region was considered by both Serb and Croat Partisans as simply a part of Croatia like any other. It contains only one quarter of the Serb population of Croatia, so its separation from Croatia by the Serbian army in August 1990 has not solved the Serb problem in Croatia (even though Serbia has also occupied Eastern Slavonia, a majority-Croat area that contains another 15% of Croatia’s Serbs).
Indeed, by separating Krajina from Croatia, the Serbian army has stated that Krajina is the enclave for Serbs in Croatia, and the corollary of this is the view that the rest of Croatia is just for Croats. The partition of Croatia by the Serbian army has thus led to the expulsion of much of the 60% of Croatian Serbs who remained in Croatia after partition. It has also prevented the people of Croatia from exercising their own right of self-determination and has encouraged the Tudjman government to come to terms with the Serbian government, just as the partition of Ireland turned the Irish nationalist movement into an ally of British imperialism in Ireland. Croatia, unable to liberate itself from Serbia, is instead seeking peace with Serbia at Bosnia’s expense.
Socialists should oppose any attempt to partition any of the former Yugoslav republics, and should call on the Croatian people to oppose their government’s collaborationist policy of allying with their oppressor instead of fighting it. Peace between Croatia and Serbia on any terms which leave part of Croatia under Serbian occupation can only be at Bosnia’s expense, as well as Croatia’s and, for that matter, Serbia’s — the Serbs will also be victims of the creation of Greater Serbia, since the latter condemns them to permanent warfare, state militarisation and economic dislocation. No nation can be free if it oppresses another nation. The democratic rights of the people of Serbia depend upon those of the Croatians and Bosnians being recognised.
The logical fallacy - supporting self-determination but refusing to take sides
Unlike the RCP, the SWP has at least paid lip-service to the principle of national self-determination. However, at no time has it ever explained what it means by "self-determination" in the Yugoslav context. One might be forgiven for thinking that, since 94% of the people of Croatia voted for independence they have the right to become independent and to defend that independence, and that a similar right applies to the Bosnians. But the SWP refuses to take sides. According to Socialist Worker , "Victory for any group in Bosnia is going to be at the expense of the mass of the people, misled by their political leaders, who make up the other groups. It would not be a victory for the workers and peasants of the "victorious group" either, but for the self-serving politicians and the get rich quick profiteers who cluster around them."
This means that, according to the SWP, when the Croatian army prevented the Serbian army from occupying more than 30% of Croatia, it was not a victory for ordinary Croats but merely for the Croatian leadership.
The Serbian army occupied 30% of Croatia and ethnically-cleansed almost all the Croats who lived there. It occupied 70% of Bosnia and ethnically-cleansed most of the Muslims and Croats who lived there. One does not require much of an imagination to realise that, had the Serbian army occupied the rest of Croatia and Bosnia, it would have ethnically-cleansed that too. The SWP seems to believe that ordinary working-class people have no interest in not being ethnically-cleansed. Furthermore, it does not seem to realise that if 94% of the Croatian people and 66% of the Bosnian people vote for independence, and the Serbian army attempts to prevent Croatia and Bosnia becoming independent, then the Serbian army is attacking the right to self-determination of Croatia and Bosnia. Consequently, the ordinary people of Croatia and Bosnia can exercise their right to self -determination only if they are able to defend themselves from the Serbian army. This point might appear self-evident, but needs to be spelt out for the benefit of our theoretically-crude comrades. Just as astonishing is the fact that the SWP has condemned Croatia’s recent attempt to regain parts of Krajina, and opposes arming the Bosnians on the grounds that:
"It might lead to the Bosnian Muslims winning battles rather than the Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats. But it would not bring "ethnic-cleansing" to an end, since the Muslim armies would try to secure captured land by driving out members of the other groups just as the Serb and Croat armies have."
But the SWP has also condemned the Vance-Owen Plan on the grounds that it endorses the carve-up of Bosnia! Comrades, if you do not support the right of the democratically elected government of Bosnia to regain control of territory conquered from it by force, are you not yourselves endorsing ethnic partition? It seems that the SWP opposes the war in Bosnia for much the same reason as that professed by Western leaders, i.e. not because it involves the oppression of one nation by others but simply for humanitarian reasons. Indeed, apart from rejecting the Vance-Owen Plan whose principles they accept in practice, the SWP believes the West should simply give more aid to Bosnia and accept more refugees — a position that is not qualitatively different from that of Western leaders themselves. Apparently, it makes no difference to the SWP whether Bosnia is partitioned between Serbia and Croatia and its population ethnically cleansed, or whether the Bosnians succeed in defending themselves. This is because, as is shown by the above quotation, they are worried the Muslims might end up oppressing the Serbs and Croats, just as many supporters of Apartheid are worried that majority rule in South Africa might lead to blacks oppressing whites.
Let us be rigidly clear on this point: socialists support oppressed nations on principle against their oppressor, and this principle is altered not one jot by members of the oppressed nations committing atrocities or choosing morally impure leaders. During the 1930s, Trotsky supported nationalist China and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia against aggression, even though their regimes were far more reactionary than those of Tudjman or Izetbegovic. More obviously, the Yugoslav partisans themselves engaged in the ethnic cleansing of half a million ethnic Germans and forcible annexation of the Kosovar Albanians, making them, if the SWP’s terms are to be accepted, the "mirror-image" of the Nazis they fought against. Socialists obviously had a duty to support the Partisans against the Nazis while opposing the Partisans’ own acts of aggression and oppression.
Lenin summed this up admirably in The Right of Nations to self-determination :
"Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation."
Applied to Croatia, this would mean that socialists should support the Croatians against the Serbian oppressor, but oppose Croatia’s aggression against Bosnia and oppression of its Serb minority. However, for all the SWP’s talk of state-capitalism, it seems to hold the Stalinist view that Yugoslavia was some sort of paradise of national equality, hence that the Croats and Muslims were not really oppressed nations and are not really being oppressed when the Serbian army massacres them, destroys their cities and partitions their countries, using weapons which, under the Yugoslav system, they themselves had to pay for!
The question of the working-class
Thus the SWP does not support self-determination; does not attempt any historical explanation of the crisis that goes beyond the strike-wave of recent years; and does not, in fact, have any opinion whatsoever on any of the issues actually being fought over. By claiming that the Muslim struggle for self-determination can only be at the expense of Serbs and Croats, the SWP falls into line behind the nationalist views of Karadzic and Boban, that the rights of the three Bosnian nations are contradictory.
Instead of getting involved in petty Balkan disputes over questions which people over there may feel strongly about but which we in the West know to be just silly, Socialist Worker prefers simply to say that the "class struggle" is "the only real basis for ending the war", and cites the example of the First World War, which began with the workers of Europe marching under national flags to slaughter each other, and ended up with those same workers rising up against their rulers.
Of course, for Marxists to say "ultimately, only the working class can solve the problems of Country X" is a bit like a botanist saying "grass is green": it is a statement of the most obvious fact and hardly amounts to a ‘‘line’’, much less a "revolutionary strategy’’. Moreover, it makes all historical and political analysis redundant: what is the point of actually studying the political conditions in any given country, if you know in advance that you are just going to end up saying "grass is green"? Why does the SWP bother having a different "line" on each country in the world, when it would amount to much the same thing if they merely said ‘‘we are always in favour of workers’ unity and nothing else"? Then they would not have to bother holding separate meetings and writing separate articles on South Africa, Peru, Kampuchea, etc.
A socialist alternative can be built in the Balkans only if it recognises the right to self-determination of all nations; the rights of all minorities; and the rights of both nations and minorities to self-defence. Self-determination is not, as the SWP seems to believe, simply an abstract demand which one makes for the sake of form only, without it having any practical implications whatsoever.
Trotsky understood that, when the class struggle is at a low ebb, it is necessary to mobilise the workers behind democratic slogans. It is difficult to think of any country in the whole world where the class struggle is at a lower ebb than Bosnia. This is because there is hardly even a working class left in Bosnia, never mind class struggle: the economy has collapsed, and most workers are engaged in the war effort. The conditions simply do not exist for a revolution on the Russian model (and the Russian revolution itself was destroyed when the working-class was largely wiped out in the civil war). What sort of workers’ unity does the SWP have in mind — unity between concentration-camp guards and inmates? However, since the SWP itself believes that only workers’ action in Serbia and Croatia can stop the war, its position in effect means that the Bosnians should just sit around and be massacred while waiting for the Serbians and Croatians to make a revolution. Has it been the "working-class", or the Bosnian army, which has prevented the people of Bihac, Sarajevo, Tuzla etc from being ethnically cleansed?
The SWP likes to cite the example of 1917-18, when the Russian and German working classes forced their leaders out of the First World War. They neglect to mention that this occurred only after the Russian and German imperialists had been militarily defeated and hence discredited. There is more chance of a revolution in Serbia today if Milosevic’s run of victories is ended and he is discredited by defeat on the battlefield, as the example cited by the SWP itself suggests.
The question of imperialism.
This brings us on to the final question of the role that imperialism has played in the conflict. It is on this question that groups such as the SWP and the RCP feel most secure and politically-correct. Yet it is in fact here that these so-called anti-imperialists have backed the policies of their own imperialists most faithfully. We shall not bother to address some of the more bizarre views put forward by Living Marxism . Suffice to say that, according to that "magazine", the whole of the British media (including award-winning journalists such as Maggie O’Kane who are hostile to the West’s policy) are engaged in a conspiracy to invent a holocaust in Bosnia, in order to make the Nazi holocaust of the Jews seem more commonplace and hence less wrong. This "magazine", which calls itself the "lie-detector", while doubting the testimony of independent journalists and human-rights activists about genocide and mass rape, nevertheless gives full backing to the unsubstantiated claim made by a few American officials that the notorious "bread-queue massacre" in Sarajevo last summer was carried out by the Muslims themselves.
It is a source of constant amazement to this writer that, after all we have witnessed, the British left still generally believes that the West is anti-Serbian and Serbia thus needs to be defended. This could be because the left feels that anyone who gets a bad press from the media (Michael Heseltine, Fergie, Pol Pot, Jack the Ripper etc) must necessarily be on the right side; it could be because they believe Milosevic’s regime is the last workers’ state left in Europe; it could even be because they are anti-German (Germany is invariably singled out for blame by left-wing commentators on this crisis). Since the West is anti-Serbian, it follows that Croatia and Bosnia must be on the side of imperialism.
Thus Socialist Worker claims:
"The regimes in Croatia and Bosnia, militarily weaker [than Serbia], have therefore been much more dependent on outside support [...] The pro-interventionist arguments proceed from a false premise — that the war is a consequence of Serb aggression."
Since the West supports Croatia and Bosnia, it follows that whenever Western leaders say a anything against the Bosnians and Croats, the Western leaders must be right. Alex Callinicos, in the June 1993 issue of Socialist Review , thus quotes the opinion of a British officer to prove that lifting the arms embargo against Bosnia would only escalate the conflict; while in an earlier issue Duncan Blackie quoted the French minister Bernard Kouchner to back up the SWP line that all parties in this conflict are equally guilty.
There are a number of slight problems with these arguments. First of all, the left has failed to produce any evidence whatsoever that Bosnia has received any "outside support" , and the only evidence they have of Western backing for Croatia is the fact that Germany, virtually alone of the major powers, supported recognition of Croatia. Secondly, if Western leaders condemn all sides as equally guilty, it does not follow that all sides are equally guilty, but only that the West wants us to think that they are.
Thus when, after the shelling of Srebrenica in which 56 people were killed, Malcolm Rifkind said "We should remember that the Serbs in Bosnia are not uniquely guilty", this proves either that Rifkind is a closet SWP-sympathiser or that the SWP is tail-ending the imperialists. Let us, however, examine the different forms that intervention has taken in order to determine whether the West is anti-Serbian or whether, in fact, it is pro-Serbian in practice, despite cosmetic attempts to appear otherwise (it is, of course, debatable whether the following actions are all forms of intervention or not, since the left has defined "intervention" in an entirely arbitrary and inconsistent manner).
a)Germany’s recognition of Croatia and Slovenia.
In the view of the left, this was an anti-Serbian move. According to Chris Bambery in Socialist Review "The West is not some disinterested party It was Germany’s recognition of the Croat state which unleashed the war with Serbia." Actually, Chris, the war between Serbia and Croatia began six months before recognition took place; Britain, France and the USA were opposed to recognition, being forced to accept it only by Germany, and even then only after Croatian independence had become a fait accompli. By this logic, most Western countries are pro-Serbian, not anti-Serbian.
Indeed, does recognition amount to intervention, when the overwhelming majority of the population favours recognition, or does recognition merely involve passive acceptance of the will of the majority? If Britain recognises, say, Norway, does it follow that Britain is intervening in Scandinavian affairs?
Would it not be more of an act of intervention if, as actually happened, the Americans and British called for Yugoslav unity to be maintained against the will of the population, thus laying down the law for the Slovenian and Croatian peoples as to what country they should or should not belong to.
By their own logic, it is the SWP, RCP, and other defenders of the bankrupt Yugoslav state, who are pro-interventionist. It is certainly a strange coincidence, that the RCP should contradict the Yugoslav constitution and deny that the Croats are a nation just as its own government denied the Croats’ national rights.
It should finally be remembered that the Kosovar Albanians, whom even the SWP recognises as an oppressed nation, have also declared independence. Would the SWP support Western recognition of Kosova, and hence support imperialist intervention according to their own logic, or would they call for the oppressed Kosovar Albanians to remain in Serbia against their will?
b)The West’s imposition of a no-fly zone over Bosnia.
To prove our point, we need only quote Living Marxism :
"UN observers are stationed at all airports in the federal republic of Yugoslavia, and have access to all flight plans and planes. Awacs airborne surveillance systems based in Hungary and the Adriatic have also confirmed that Serbian aircraft have been abiding by the ban. Meanwhile, Croatian planes violate the UN resolution as a matter of course. America’s insistence on enforcing the no-fly zone clearly has less to do with violations than with giving the Serbs a hard time."
As we’re sure the reader will spot, Living Marxism ’s evidence points to a conclusion that is the exact opposite of that which it actually reaches.
c)The West’s anti-Serbian rhetoric and diplomacy .
When war broke out between Serbia and Croatia in the summer of 1991, the West declared that the two sides bore equal responsibility for the conflict. In Bosnia they have stated that all sides are guilty; that the conflict is a civil war (ignoring the obvious aggression by Serbia and Croatia); and that the democratically-elected multi-national Bosnian government is in fact a purely-Muslim "warring faction" on a par with the warlords Karadzic and Boban. They have consistently pressurised the Bosnian government to negotiate with the aggressors, and have imposed peace-plans upon Bosnia which sign away half the country to Serbia. The West’s diplomacy has been pro-Serbian. Even the supposedly anti-Serbian British media has done much to muddy the waters in Serbia’s favour by describing this conflict as essentially tribal and so not amenable to solution or the taking of sides — a view shared by Radovan Karadzic. It has also upheld the Serbian racist lies about all Croats having been fascists during World War Two and often even about the necessity of Serbia protecting Serb minorities from Croatian fascism and Muslim fundamentalism — one need only mention Guardian columnist Edward Pearce, for example. Most British papers in fact opposed the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia. The Western media has been far from uniformly anti-Serbian and much of it is pro-Serbian.
d) The role of the UN
The UN presence has been used to justify the West’s pro-Serbian position — no action can be taken against the Cetniks either by the Bosnians or by the West, in case the humanitarian-relief programme is endangered. The UN in Srebrenica actually disarmed the Bosnian army. UN forces entered Serbian-occupied Croatia at the start of last year, promising that they would disarm Serb paramilitary forces, restore the "pink zones" to Croatia and allow refugees to return. In fact they have failed to allow refugees to return, failed to disarm the paramilitary forces, allowed Serbian ethnic-cleansing to continue, failed to return the "pink zones" to Croatia and threatened Croatia with sanctions when it attempted to recapture land which should have been returned to it under the terms of the UN mandate. The UN presence has favoured Serbia.
The question of military intervention.
The SWP believes that the West opposes military intervention for largely the same reason that they themselves oppose it. According to Socialist Worker , "The major capitalist governments are trying to avoid military entanglements in Yugoslavia because they recognise their intervention cannot restore order, even on their own terms."
This amounts to an apology for imperialism. It never occurs to the SWP that the West actually has vested interests in not intervening against Serbia. In fact the West does not need to intervene with its own troops, because the Serbian army is intervening on its behalf. Britain and France have backed Serbia throughout this war, because they want a strong Serbia as a counterweight to German influence in the region. This is in the tradition of French imperialism, which allied to Yugoslavia against Germany in the inter-war period; and British imperialism, which traditionally opposed Balkan independence movements which might have strengthened Russian influence. Indeed, these two countries have vested interests in maintaining the post-war order.
The USA under Bush also backed Serbia. Clinton is having difficulty squaring his pre-election promises over Bosnia with the reality of American interests, just as David Owen — who had called for bombing the Serbs while out of office — suddenly became pro-Serbian when appointed UN mediator. We may rest assured that, were Thatcher to take office tomorrow, her stated Bosnian position would miraculously change. As in the Gulf War, Germany has accepted a Western policy that works against German interests. Far from attempting to become a Fourth Reich, as Living Marxism seems to think, the Germans have grovelled before Britain, France and the USA with their pro-Serbian policy.
The SWP is at its most sanctimonious when opposing Western military intervention against Serbia. It is, of course, obvious that we should oppose a military attack on Serbia. However, given that the West supports Serbia, this stance is about as radical and anti-imperialist as opposing a Western attack on South Africa. The irony is, however, that the West are actually intervening militarily on the side of Serbia, by means of the arms embargo against Bosnia. This arms embargo, imposed by that vile den of thieves known as the UN, involves Western warships patrolling the Adriatic to prevent the inflow of weapons to Bosnia.
Yet the SWP, RCP and much of the rest of the left have suddenly become champions of UN intervention, supporting the arms embargo for the same reason as the British government: according to Chris Bambery, "pouring more arms into the region can only escalate the conflict". They not only believe that UN intervention can contain the conflict, they believe that ending the arms embargo is a form of intervention. It is hard to imagine a more disgusting piece of Foreign Office-inspired twisted logic. The Bosnians could receive arms from the Turks and Iranians, or they could simply buy them on the international market arid smuggle then into the country — it need not involve the imperialists.
It may be pointed out, however, that the imperialists armed the Yugoslav partisans in the Second World War without this leading to Western oppression of Yugoslavia. Indeed, since the West is pressurising the Bosnians to surrender, arming the Bosnians would actually frustrate Western policy. Just this morning (22nd June 1993) John Major condemned Helmut Kohl’s call for the lifting of the arms embargo on the grounds that it encouraged the Bosnians in their hope of resistance, at a time when they should be negotiating with the Serbs and Croats for the partition of Bosnia. However, the SWP and RCP choose to line up behind their own imperialists in supporting Western military intervention in the Balkans. Socialists should support as a matter of principle the right of the Bosnians to acquire weapons to defend themselves; instead these groups line up behind the governments of Britain, France. the USA, Serbia and even Croatia in denying them this right, taking sides with imperialists and oppressors against the oppressed Muslim nation.
Let us list the factors on which the SWP and RCP agree with their own imperialism:
1)Regrets about Western recognition of Croatia and Slovenia;
2)Support for the imperialist arms embargo;
3)A stated belief that one cannot take sides in this conflict;
4) Opposition to the Bosnian and Croatian attempts to recapture their lost territories, and consequently objective support for the partition of Bosnia and Croatia;
5)Belief that the national rights of Muslims, Croats and Serbs are contradictory rather than complementary.
Finally, they hold the liberal moralistic belief that the political impurity of the Bosnian and Croatian Presidents, and the atrocities committed by individual Bosnian military commanders, disqualify both peoples from possessing democratic rights. This is again similar to Western imperialists who oppose self-determination for the Irish and Palestinians by citing atrocities committed by the IRA and PLO. The West is playing this trick again: highlighting Muslim atrocities in Travnik in an attempt to smear the Bosnian resistance and justify its own support for Serbian aggression.
The British left’s attitude to the Bosnian conflict is thus the "mirror image" of the attitude of their own imperialists. Above all it is a view that subjugates the interests of the people of the region to their own needs. For just as the British government sacrifices the people of Bosnia to its own imperial interests, so groups such as the SWP completely dismiss all concepts of democracy and national self-determination for the Balkan peoples in order to advance their own apparently radical workerist alternative for their own readers. In practice, as we have seen, this amounts to agreeing completely with the very governments who are oppressing Bosnia. We thus have the following offensive spectacle: while the West, Croatia and Serbia are conspiring to partition Bosnia, the British left does little except denounce the victims of this concerted aggression. This amounts to a capitulation to imperialism as well as to prejudice.