"Victory" in Kosova: but who really wins after NATO blitz?
NATO never expected that the war in the Balkans would last more than a few days. A quick display of US air power would bring Milosevic to heel and force him to accept the Rambouillet "agreement", they thought. But it did not work out that way.
Within weeks they had more than trebled the number of aircraft originally deployed (from 300 to 1100). After seven weeks of the most intense bombing the world has ever seen, they got a deal which they could probably have got at Rambouillet.
Those talks broke down over Western insistence on two conditions which were virtually impossible for Milosevic to accept: that NATO should have free run of not just Kosova but all Serbia, and that there would be referendum on independence for Kosova after three years. (These conditions were now dropped. But although the KLA would still be disarmed the whole of the Serb military and police would have to leave Kosova).
By the end of the bombing the economic and social infrastructure of Serbia (including Kosova and to a lesser extent Montenegro) was smashed up, the region destabilised, and nearly a million Kosovans driven out in an orgy of ethnic cleansing the intensity of which would not have been possible if the bombing had not taken place.
A war which was launched ostensibly to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Kosovars, which had been on the increase in recent months ostensibly in an offensive against the KLA, escalated it many times over. Instead of the grizzly 240,000 of the previous two years over a million people were displaced (internally and externally) in the course of a few weeks. Ethnic tension which had been deliberately fostered since the rise of Serb nationalism 10 years previously, intensified massively as the first bombs fell.
Once the war started the ethnic Albanians were a vulnerable minority who were held responsible for it and persecuted as a result. If a policy could be devised which would ensure that ethnic tensions were driven as deep as possible, such bombing was it.
Many of the massacres now being discovered in the aftermath of the war were committed in the backlash which took place in the days following the start of the bombing.
This does not at all excuse them – they are brutal crimes against humanity – but it does put them in context. Milosevic was not about to miss the opportunity nor were the various Serb nationalist and fascist paramilitaries who arrived on the scene to vent their racist hatred.
But it was not just them. The bombing whipped up hostility between Serb and Albanian communities which had been living together for generations many of them right up until the bombing started. Now it is hard to see how they can live together in the short term without some serious safeguards in place.
The 19 NATO governments held together, with some divisions and difficulties, in order to carry out an extraordinary (NATO) casualty-less war, conducted from 15,000 feet up.
But there was never an agreement reached on the ground invasion being advocated by Tony Blair and new Labour in Britain.
Clinton always ruled this out, as did a number of the European members of NATO. A bombing war was the only tactical approach open to them and they conducted it to the full, increasingly smashing up the economy of Serbia.
The results are shown in the casualty figures. NATO zero. Serbian soldiers maybe four or five thousand. Serb civilians over two thousand dead, many more wounded.
More casualties will follow the war; from the residue of uranium tipped shells, unexploded bombs, land mines; to health problems caused by pollution and damage to the infrastructure.
Certainly tens of thousands of Kosovars dead, maybe many more. To this must be added the refugees, tens of thousands internally displaced and 80,000 driven out of the country.
Many of these may never go back, despite the current rush, if only because there is not much to go back to. Others will be driven back into intolerable conditions to escape the conditions in the camps.
Then there are the casualties which will follow the war, from the residue of uranium-tipped shells and unexploded bombs and land mines to health problems caused by pollution and damage to the infrastructure.
Much of this is the responsibility of Milosevic, of course (about 3000 had been killed in Kosova before the bombing), but NATO created the best conditions for an escalation of his slaughter.
Not that creating this kind of mayhem gives NATO and US imperialism, which provided most of the hardware and resources for the war, any less of a victory. Or at least not much less.
The war may not have been planned, but it fitted into the general geo-political aims of US imperialism. NATO needed a new role after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the USA needed to reinforce its global hegemony as well as its role in Europe and in the region. These goals have now been achieved in a way which exceeds their expectations.
NATO has been reborn with a new authority and US imperialism and its main supporters like new Labour in Britain have been strengthened. Sections of public opinion, particularly in Western countries, have been further desensitised to this kind of action.
Bombing people - particularly with zero casualties for those doing the bombing - is now more publicly acceptable and easy to carry out in the future. At the same time the anti-war movement was marginalised and the left who opposed the war defeated.
The war caused tensions within the EU, although in the end there was no breaking of ranks. The war gave a new impetus to the drive for a common defence policy and common military capacity in order to be able to conduct wars without such reliance of US hardware, but the problem is too big to be tackled with the current EU financial structures.
Fortress Europe held the line against the mass of Kosovan refugees. The policy of keeping them in tents to ensure that they went back when the time came was successful.
From the point of view of the Serbian people the war has been an unmitigated disaster. Not only has the country been bombed to pieces but Milosevic is still in power. The bombing drew most of the Serbian opposition, many of whom are nationalist anyway, towards Milosevic. How soon the defeat will now undermine Milosevic’s position is very hard to say, although eventually it may well do so.
Currently, as NATO forces deploy across Kosova, the Serbian and Roma populations are being driven out, their property destroyed, and dozens of them killed. We condemn this unequivocally.
A multi-ethnic society has to be defended in Kosova and the urge to blame all Serbs for the actions of the army and the paramilitaries strongly opposed.
It is true that NATO has exacerbated the problem and certainly has no solution. At least initially (until it became politically indefensible) NATO was in favour of all Serbs leaving Kosova - which would be ethnic cleansing. This was reflected in their demand that all Serb reservists leave with the Serb army, which means all men between 18 and 50.
As for the future of the region we now have the reconstruction plan, or new Marshall Plan as it is being called (war reparations as it should be called).
Despite the huge figures being banded around, much of it is promises which may or may not be kept. In any case there are deep divisions over the implementation of the plan, not least over whether Serbia should be included in it whilst Milosevic is still in power.
Even if this resulted in the removal of Milosevic as an individual, it will not undermine the power of Serb nationalism - it is more likely to increase it. At the same time it is hard to see how the infrastructure of the region can be rebuilt without rebuilding sections of the Serbian infrastructure on which others depend.
In Britain the antiwar movement failed to make any impact on the situation both because of the success of government and NATO propaganda about a "just war", and because it was politically focused towards Serb nationalism.
Those leading it saw Serbia as the last bastion of socialism in the Balkans and refused to give any profile to either the ethnic cleansing of Milosevic or the national rights of the Kosovans. The biggest far left organisation within it, the SWP, collapsed into this position.
The campaign against NATO, though correct in itself, was used to subordinate the rights of the Kosovans which, at best were relegated to a subordinate position.
With the inevitable discovery of mass graves on a grand scale since the end of the war it is time for those who denied or played down the ethnic cleansing and atrocities by Serb forces to put the record straight and admit they were wrong. The experience of Srebrenica and the Bosnian war should have been enough to show them what the Serb amy and the Serb paramilitaries were capable of doing.
Others on the left went in a completely different direction. Ken Livingstone and others supported the bombing, whilst the AWL, stopping short of that, were ambiguous (even neutral) on the role of NATO and held the view (for example) that once the bombing had started it would have been a disaster for the Kosovans if it "had stopped after the first few days". They deny that US imperialism had any strategic interest in the war at all.
Socialist Outlook, throughout the war, opposed both the NATO intervention and the oppression of the Kosovans by Milosevic. We were for getting NATO out of the Balkans and Milosevic out of Kosova.
We fully supported the right of the Kosovans to determine their own future including the right to an independent state. We were for the defeat of the NATO military intervention and for the defeat of Milosevic in his war against Kosova. And we were for the arming of the KLA, with all its political problems, as the means by which the Kosovans could pursue their own future.
We recognised that the KLA was created as a response to the ethnic cleansing of Milosevic, and to defend the Kosovan Albanians against it.
So what is the future of Kosova? If there was never an easy road to Kosovan independence, there is certainly not one now. Kosova is now a UN/NATO protectorate – and as such is to remain a part of Serbia.
Hostility between the different communities has been massively compounded by the bombing. The KLA is being disarmed by NATO.
Yet their remains no solution other than self determination for the Kosovan people ,with full rights for minorities, if they choose an independent state.
The compromise agreement with Milosevic is not a solution, it is a means of preventing a political solution. It leaves the key political problem - the denial of national rights – completely unresolved.
There is no other solution in the region as a whole. Bosnia under Dayton remains a NATO protectorate in the way that Kosova is becoming a protectorate. The starting point for a political solution in the Balkans is the right of all the peoples of the region to determine their own future, free from outside interference.