THE DESTRUCTION of Gorazde by Serb forces and the impending human catastrophe has highlighted the scandalous position of the British left, including most of the far left, on the war in The large scale ethnic cleansing of Muslim peoples and other major atrocities amount to some of the greatest crimes perpetrated in Europe since the defeat of the Third Reich.
In the first of two articles ALAN THORNETT and DAVE PACKER discuss the response of the far-left to this crisis. The next issue will take up the debate with sections of the Labour Party left. ACCORDING to Socialist Worker, the arms embargo against Bosnia must stay, because lifting it would make the situation worse!
This is the astonishing conclusion the SWP draws from the sight of the Bosnian army trying to defend the 60,000 people in Gorazde against 200 Serbian tanks and 400 heavy guns with rifles and hand guns.
Even now the SWP do not agree that the Bosnians should be given the basic right of self defence. This is actually what they said:
"Lifting it [the embargo] now would see the American and Turkish governments rushing to arm the Bosnian forces which could spark a new spiral of arming all sides. Far from ending the fighting, the war would take on a new intensity as Muslim soldiers sought to retake territory."
Yes indeed. People who have their territory taken away often fight to recover it - like the Palestinians fight to recover Palestine!
This is political confusion in the extreme. Two thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina is under Serbian occupation, 200,000 Bosnians are dead and 1.5 million refugees. (Contrary to the view of Serbiat apologists, most of these people are victims of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Serbian forces). And yet the Socialist Workers Party and the Militant still think this is a 'civil war' between equally reactionary nationalisms.
Like Pontius Pilate they wash their hands and shrug their shoulders, and despite their ever-so principled rejection of all 'nationalisms' (which of course has nothing whatever to do with Marxism), they at best, abstain on the real interests of the working class - to defend their national rights.
This sectarian and profoundly economistic approach objectively ends up, by its passivity, aiding and abetting the most reactionary and aggressive chauvinism embodied in the 'Greater Serbia' project of Milosevic, Karadzic and those sinister forces even further to their right!
Crass
Do they really think that Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs are independent of Milosevic, or that the Bosnian Serbs envisage some separate state to Serbia? Such a view would be crass in the extreme.
Bosnia was a multi-ethnic Republic and then an independent state with proportional representation of all 'ethnic' groups.
The vast majority had lived without cultural or religious conflict for many years, until Milosevic declared for a Greater Serbia and agitated and organised, including planning insurrection, for the Serb minorities in Bosnia and Croatia to join it!
The war does not take place on the soil of the Serbian Republic, it is a war of aggression and territorial expansion perpetrated by the degenerate Serbian bureaucracy, initially as a means of holding on to power. Once the war is over, those parts of Bosnia and Croatia held by the Serbs will become a part of Serbia itself even if covered by a federal camouflage.
An SWP member recently claimed in a meeting that the situation is 'complicated'. This is the typical response of many in the workers movement who do not understand the relationship between the struggle for national rights and the fight for socialism, in other words, the combined character of many revolutions in our epoch.
To ignore the national question, as many economistic groups do, reducing everything to simply 'the workers versus the boss', is fatal. The national question represents historically unfinished business and will always be used to divide the working class, if we do not understand how to deal with it.
Marxists therefore always defend national rights and the rights of national minorities within any state. But crucially, we fight for the independent working class to lead the nation, against the chauvinist national bourgeoisie and imperialism.
This is why we support self-determination for Slovenia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia, but oppose the bureaucratic and pro-capitalist regimes who currently run Many things are complicated in politics but the essentials of this particular war are in fact quite simple: Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Serbia are historic nations and Bosnia, a distinct political-cultural entity, was granted this same status under Tito. They all have the right to self-determination. In fact it was formally written into the 1974 Tito Constitution.
The Greater Serbian project denied these national and democratic rights and invaded and occupied two of its next door states. This outrage only stimulated the growth of right wing nationalism in Croatia in particular.
The issue is not whether the borders were just; a genuinely socialist Yugoslavia would have resolved conflict in the only possible way, through the democratic process and workers' democracy. The Bosnian people were denied this by the Serbian government, who launched a naked war of aggression.
Mixed ethnicity
The peoples of Bosnia, a huge proportion of whom are of mixed ethnicity and inter-married, and want the right to live together, have the democratic right to liberate themselves and determine their own future.
That is not so complicated. Without recognising these rights there will be no class unity. For Marxists its ABC.
In any case where does Socialist Worker think the 'Bosnian Serbs' get their tanks and their SAM missiles from?
How come the 'Bosnian Serbs' have these and not the Bosnian government? The answer is not very difficult - they came from Serbia!
From the beginning the Serbs were armed from the arsenals of the Yugoslavian army who handed over heavy weapons to them, other caches were seized in planned raids.
The International Workers Aid (IWA) film, 'From Timex to Tuzla' interviewed front line members of the Tuzla miners brigade, a proudly working class and multi-ethnic force, who possessed only small arms and were limited to ten bullets each!
As everybody but the British SWP and Militant knows, the arms embargo is only effective against the Bosnians! It is a UN/imperialist policy aimed at forcing the Bosnians to the negotiating table and surrendering to cantonisation.
This is Hurd's 'level killing fields' argument all over again. It is also the argument of Western governments that the important thing is "peace'. But who are 'we', and who are Socialist Worker to propose such an unjust 'peace' for the Bosnian people?
We don't say to the Palestinians that the most important thing is peace and that they should forget the recovery of their country.
Spanish resistance The left correctly defended the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. They did not say that less people would have died if the Republic had had even less arms and had mounted no resistance to Franco. Nor did we say that the NLF in Vietnam should not be armed because it would make the situation worse!
The arguments of Socialist Worker and even the Militant (who, after their debates on the Scottish question, should know better) are nothing less than a rationalisation for political confusion and bankruptcy on the national question in ex-Yugoslavia. They are a typical product of crass workerism and economism.
It is true that Socialist Worker opposes imperialist intervention into the region. That's good, but utterly confused as well - since they are in favour of the imperialists continuing to enforce their arms embargo!
We, along with IWA, are in favour of the right of Bosnia to survive and the lifting of all imperialist/UN embargos, including those against Serbia, which only devastate the lives of the workers there, further feeding right wing nationalism.
Stop the bombing, Imperialist troops out of the Balkans, Lift the arms embargo!
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.61, April 30, 1994, Page 8 Nothing much seems to have gone right for Major: now a new scandal awaits him in the autumn. language would tolerate... obvithat it discussed Matrix Chur-