After toppling Milosevic …
Serbian workers must break from nationalism
There can be no doubt that what happened in Belgrade on Thursday 4 October was a revolution.
Slobodan Milosevic was overthrown by a mass uprising of the Serbian people. His downfall is to be welcomed by all socialists.
The revolution in Belgrade demonstrated the validity of the socialist argument that when the working class is united and prepared to take decisive action it can achieve anything.
In the face of determined action the repressive forces almost melted into thin air.
Nevertheless, while we can undoubtedly rejoice at Milosevic's demise, we also have to have a sober assessment of what it means. Certainly it opens up new possibilities, but there are also many new dangers.
Milosevic lost the presidential election despite massive fraud. His attempt to have the election nullified and re-run at a time of his own choosing was the last straw. Large numbers of former Milosevic supporters began to withdraw support. In particular Serbia's miners struck and occupied their pits. The official trade union movement gave its support to strike action.
This entry onto the scene by the organised working class was decisive. It encouraged the leaders of the opposition to believe they could win and, more importantly, undermined the willingness of Milosevic's security forces to take repressive action. Support for Milosevic evaporated within a few hours. Hence the revolution was virtually bloodless.
Milosevic also lost because the disparate forces of the opposition managed to maintain unity. In fact they attracted further support.
Vuk Draskovic, who had stood his own candidate against Milosevic, quickly gave his backing to the coalition backing Vojislav Kostunica, admitting his error in refusing to support Kostunica's candidacy.
Draskovic's candidate had received a derisory vote.
Vojislav Seselj, leader of the far-right Radical Party, whose Presidential candidate also did extremely badly, announced he was considering breaking from his coalition with Milosevic.
KOSTUNICA is now President of Serbia, though for how long he will continue to have much influence is open to question. In fact one of the reasons the opposition coalition won the elections was precisely because Kostunica was a relative nonentity.
Unlike most of the opposition leaders, he had never been a Milosevic supporter and he also had no record of corruption. His modest living standards and his lack of past involvement in the internecine squabbles of Milosevic's opponents is what made him so attractive to large numbers of Serbs. That is both his strength and his weakness.
The coalition was held together only by hostility to Milosevic. But now that Milosevic has been overthrown all the differences will start to re-emerge. The political differences are enormous and are likely to be exacerbated by personal hostilities and ambitions.
We should be under no illusions about the nature of the majority of the opposition parties. The vast majority of these organisations were not opposed to Milosevic because he had waged wars of aggression against the peoples of former Yugoslavia. They opposed Milosevic not for starting wars, but for losing them.
Kosova was the last straw. Not only did Milosevic lose the war in Kosova but, for the first time since the break-up of Yugoslavia the people of Serbia had to face war.
In the short term, the massive destruction of Serbia by NATO rallied Serbs around the regime. Nevertheless, the economic hardships resulting from that destruction led to rapid disillusionment.
By focussing solely on the responsibility of Milosevic for Serbia's plight, the opposition leaders have ignored their own complicity in the crimes committed in the name of Serbian nationalism. No doubt they hope that by putting all the blame on Milosevic the west will ignore their responsibility. In that they will almost certainly be right.
The west has shown that it will back even the most virulent anti-Milosevic nationalists, such as Biljana Plavsic in Bosnia.
Kostunica's support for the war in Kosova, and Zoran Djindjic's backing of Radovan Karadzic against Milosevic in Bosnia will probably be quietly forgotten in western capitals.
THE INABILITY of the Serbian opposition to grasp the fundamentally reactionary and destructive nature of Serb nationalism is a massive weakness. It infects virtually every sector of the organised opposition.
This is not, of course, a product of the Serb psyche. It is a reflection of the collapse of the Stalinist leaders of the League of Communists of Serbia into Serbian nationalism during the 1980s: a collapse that brought Milosevic to power.
The rise of Serbian nationalism certainly pushed the Stalinist leaders of the other Republics of the former Yugoslavia in nationalist directions, but they never capitulated completely to nationalism.
This is most clear if we contrast Croatia and Serbia. The leaders of the League of Communists of Croatia certainly supported Croatian independence, largely in response to the Greater Serbian nationalism that was dominating the party in Serbia.
Nevertheless, they also maintained criticisms of the Croatian chauvinism of Franjo Tudjman. In particular they opposed Tudjman's brutal aggression against Bosnia, a stance supported by Croatia's independent trade unions.
Opposition to Tudjman also came from within his own party, the HDZ. The current President of Croatia, Stipe Mesic, was one of the founders of the HDZ, but he broke completely from Tudjman over the war in Bosnia.
Criticism of Tudjman's nationalism from the former Communist leaders - now transformed into social democrats - and sections of the HDZ was on a generally principled basis of opposition to Tudjman's chauvinism.
It found strong echoes amongst large numbers of Croats. That is why Ivica Racan, former leader of the League of Communists of Croatia, is now Prime Minister and Mesic is President.
Moreover, Racan and Mesic have not been averse to taking action against those responsible for war crimes in Bosnia. The sacking of seven Croatian generals is only the latest in a series of moves that have been taken against those responsible for implementing Tudjman's policies.
We can, of course, criticise Racan and his followers for many things: not least their willingness to embrace capitalism and their illusions in the EU. The development of a socialist opposition in Croatia will emerge in conflict with such policies.
Nevertheless, the willingness of Racan (and Mesic) to wage a fight against nationalist hardliners is in stark contrast to the situation in Serbia where large parts of the opposition are the hard-line nationalists, whose hostility to Milosevic has centred around his failure to win wars, not against the brutal nature of those wars or the nationalism that fuelled them.
THE COLLAPSE of both the League of Communists and the trade unions into support for Serb nationalism meant there could be virtually no challenge from the left. In fact the left in Serbia became primarily identified with Mira Markovic's JUL (United Yugoslav Left), part of Milosevic's coalition.
It is too early to predict Milosevic's fate. He has announced his intention to step down from politics to spend more time with his family, but has not ruled out returning to political activity at some time. Of course Milosevic is hardly, even if belatedly, recognising that Kostunica easily won the elections.
He is recognising a much more serious reality: that he can no longer rely on his repressive apparatus to stay in power. Some of his family, moreover, do not show the same enthusiasm for cosy domesticity, having fled the country, no doubt taking as many of their ill-gotten gains as they could carry.
Whether or not Kostunica will be pressed into handing over Milosevic to the Hague war crimes tribunal is also not yet clear. At present Kostunica says he has no intention of doing so, though a combination of carrots andticks from the west could probably induce him to change his mind and retract much of his anti-NATO rhetoric.
Kostunica is right to criticise NATO's brutal war against Serbia, and therefore we would not demand that he hands over Milosevic to western governments who hypocritically maintain their right to do as they see fit throughout the globe.
HOWEVER, MILOSEVIC should certainly go on trial for his crimes. The Serbian people must settle accounts with crimes committed in their name. That requires a coming to terms with the reactionary nature of Serb nationalism. It means recognising that many of those who now wish to demonise Milosevic also bear heavy responsibility for the crimes of the regime.
A real settling of accounts would demonstrate the complicity of large parts of the new leadership and, especially of the Orthodox church hierarchy, for the crimes committed by the Serbian state.
The new rulers are hardly likely to carry out such an investigation. After all it would reveal their own criminal responsibility. For any real settling of accounts to take place the Serbian working class will be decisive.
The Serbian working class has shown it is capable of acting. Without the strikes throughout Serbia over the last week the overthrow of Milosevic would have been much more difficult, if not impossible.
But the Serb working class has now to begin to develop a programme to defend its own interests. That can only be done by recognising that the interests of Serb workers are the same as those of other workers throughout the Balkans, irrespective of their nationality.
That will mean them coming into conflict with the new leaders of Serbia.
This will be most apparent in potential conflicts that lie ahead over the status of Kosova and Montenegro, as well as relations with Bosnia.
For many of the new rulers of Serbia, hostility to Montenegrin and Kosovar independence will be almost a point of principle.
Although it is possible that the change in regime ion Belgrade will weaken support for independence in Montenegro - though that is by no means certain - it is unlikely that the Albanian majority of Kosova will give up their aspirations for their own state.
It is equally unlikely that whatever government Kostunica forms will meekly accept the further break-up of the Yugoslav state - not least because western governments are also hostile to Montenegrin and Kosovar independence.
WE CAN EXPECT to see massive pressure on the Montenegrins and Kosovars by western governments to remain within Yugoslavia.
Nor is it likely that Kostunica's government will abandon support for Bosnian Serb Republic and argue for its integration into a unitary Bosnian state. Much of the opposition was united in hostility to Milosevic's abandonment of the Bosnian Serb leadership at Dayton, when the west still saw Milosevic as the best guarantor of stability in the region.
The interests of Serb workers, however, demand support for the right of Kosova and Montenegro to independence if the Kosovars and Monte-negrins choose that road. They demand abandonment of the reactionary Serb entity in Bosnia and its reintegration in a unitary, multi-ethnic Bosnia.
Failure to distance themselves from Serbian nationalism will seriously weaken the tremendous potential the Serb workers have already shown to dramatically transform the political situation throughout the Balkans.
Socialists should certainly welcome the overthrow of Milosevic. But we also have to open up a dialogue with Serb workers.
International Workers Aid for Bosnia has made such attempts in the past, in much more difficult conditions. Now the opportunities for more fruitful discussions are opening up we have to seize them rapidly.