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Why are we in the Balkans?
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May 99 Joseph Gerson is Program Coordinator for AFSC's
New England Regional Office.
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Clinton's bombing campaign has transformed a
About regional crisis into war for US and NATO
"credibility" that has the potential of
Subscribe Now escalating into a regional war and a US-Russian
nuclear confrontation. After repeatedly
May Index threatening the Milosevic government with NATO
bombing unless it accepted US terms at
Back Issues Rambouillet, Secretary of State Albright, Vice
President Gore, and others in the Clinton
National AFSC Administration insisted that they had to follow
through on their threats if US and NATO were to
NERO Office remain the dominant forces in 21st century
Europe. With the failure of the bombing campaign
------------------- and Yugoslavia's brutal purging of Kosovar
Albanians, the US and its allies are now
American Friends threatening bombing without end, a ground war,
Service Committee and a decades long military occupation to
preserve NATO's "credibility." They fear dominoes
Peacework Magazine falling across Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey,
Iraq, and oil-rich Caspian Sea nations.
Patrica Watson,
Editor Those doing quick studies of Balkan history are
learning that many historic and inter-connected
Sara Burke, struggles are at work in this war. The abuses and
Assistant Editor legacies of six centuries of Ottoman,
Austro-Hungarian, and Nazi German conquests
Pat Farren, continue to take their tolls. Turks and Nazis
Founding Editor used ethnic Albanians to dominate and rule Serbs.
The Hapsburgs and Tito used Serbs to dominate
2161 Massachusetts ethnic Albanians. Postmodern economic globalism
Ave. is also a force. After Yugoslavia borrowed
Cambridge, MA heavily from the IMF and other international
02140 financial institutions in the 1970s and "80s, the
IMF imposed structural adjustments on it. These
Telephone number: resulted in widespread economic insecurities
(617) 661-6130 which, as in the past, proved to be fertile
ground for nationalists in Croatia, Slovenia,
Fax number: Serbia, Macedonia, and Kosovo. In Kosovo, the
(617) 354-2832 Albanian ethnic majority, understandably seeking
to end decades of Serb domination, moved to gain
e-mail address: full control over the province.
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Would that the West had supported the demands for
------------------- autonomy and the parallel governing structures
created in the late 1980s by the nonviolent
Peacework has been movement led by Ibrahim Rugova. Instead, the US
published monthly marginalized this movement at both Dayton and
since 1972, Rambouillet and helped to create and launch the
intended to serve Kosovo Liberation Army which, like the Milosevic
as a source of government, resorted to terrorism and human
dependable rights abuses.
information to
those who strive Rarely are Balkan wars exclusively local, and
for peace and appearances often deceive. Building on a dynamic
justice and are that began with Chancellor Willy Brandt's
committed to "Ostpolitic," the US and Germany have been
furthering the working to extend NATO and globalized
nonviolent social "free-market" capitalism further east.
change necessary Milosevic's Yugoslavia has been seen as an
to achieve them. obstacle compounding Russian support for the
Rooted in Quaker corrupt and eastern-oriented regimes in Rumania
values and and Bulgaria. Thus, to weaken or remove the
informed by AFSC Yugoslav obstacle to NATO and "free market"
experience and expansion, Germany and the US, in violation of
initiatives, international law, encouraged Slovenia and
Peacework offers a Croatian secession-including Croatian ethnic
forum for purging of Serbs.
organizers,
fostering It should also be remembered that even though the
coalition-building US has collaborated with Bonn and Berlin, an
and teaching the unstated purpose of the US-dominated NATO
methods and alliance since its founding continues to be
strategies that containing Germany. NATO is the essential
work in the global foundation of US dominance of western and central
and local Europe.
community.
Peacework seeks to Other forces are also at work. Russia is the
serve as an traditional Pan-Slavic defender of Eastern
incubator for Orthodox Serbs. Despite Russian dependence on
social Western loans and technologies, NATO's expansion
transformation, and Russia's wounded super power identity are
introducing a spurring powerful nationalist sectors of the
younger generation Russian military and public to demand Russian
to a deeper intervention in the Balkan war. There is the
analysis of matter of oil, and "axiom #1" of US foreign
problems and policy: never to allow its enemies or allies to
issues, reminding gain independent access to Middle East oil-"the
and re-inspiring jugular vein of Western capitalism." In the
long-term tradition of WW I, should the war spread to
activists, Macedonia, Greece and Turkey are likely to
encouraging the intervene on opposing sides, destablizing and
generations to fracturing the northern and eastern flanks of the
listen to each oil-rich Middle East and Caspian Sea regions.
other, and Finally, the centuries-old struggles between
creating space for "Catholicism," "Eastern Orthodoxy," and "Islam"
the voices of the in the Balkans should not be underestimated.
disenfranchised.
The bombing campaign was initially advertised and
Views expressed continues to be supported, as a "humanitarian
are those of the intervention" to protect ethnic Albanian
authors, not Kosovars. Instead it has, obviously, made the
necessarily of the situation increasingly dangerous for all
AFSC. involved. Clinton was warned in advance. In
January and February, CIA Director Tenant and the
Joint Chiefs of Staff warned him that the
bombings would multiply the numbers of Albanian
Kosovars expelled. (Former UN refugee and
military officials state that the US/NATO order
for the withdrawal of 2000 OSCE observers in the
days immediately preceding the bombing campaign
made the scale of Milosevic's assault on
Albanians possible.) The bombings also provided
cover for Milosevic's forces to shut down
independent sources of information throughout
Yugoslavia and to repress democratic forces
challenging his rule in Montenegro and Serbia
itself.
The inconsistencies and contradictions of US
policy are painfully obvious and lead to the
question: why Kosovo and not Kurdistan,
Palestine, or Indonesia. If it is incumbent on
the US to intervene militarily to protect people
from "humanitarian crises," why does the US
continue to support and arm Turkey whose war
against the Kurds has claimed tens of thousands
of lives, Israel whose ethnic purging of
Palestinians closely parallels that of Serbia in
Kosovo, and oil-rich and strategically located
Indonesia whose genocide and ethnic purging is
not limited to the people of East Timor. The
US/NATO doctrine of the right to intervene
militarily to prevent "humanitarian crises" and
in support of human rights could logically be
extended to justify any nation that dared to
attack the US for its continuing genocide of
Native Americans, the repression of Puerto Rican
nationalists, and the imprisonment of two million
people-most of whom are people of color.
There is growing agreement that the US/NATO
dimension of this Balkan war results from a
yet-to-be-codified Clinton Doctrine. Michael
Klare made an important contribution to our
understanding of the Doctrine in his April 19
editorial in The Nation. Klare described three
essential components to the Doctrine: 1) an
increasingly pessimistic appraisal of the global
security environment, 2) a vested US interest in
maintaining international stability, and 3) the
necessity for the US to maintain sufficient
forces to conduct simultaneous military
operations in widely separated areas of the world
against multiple adversaries.
A segment from Clinton's 1997 speech to the UN
General Assembly, which he has repeated on
numerous occasions, helps us understand the
simultaneous US bombing of Yugoslavia and Iraq:
"The forces of global integration [read
US-dominated global economy] are a great tide
inexorably wearing away the established order of
things...we must decide what will be left
in...while isolating those who would challenge
[us] from the outside." To this end, the US has
unilaterally, without UN sanction or declaration
of war, bombed Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Sudan within a six month period.
In what the US "national security" elite
understand as the "hegemonic moment" of the sole
remaining superpower, Secretary of State Albright
has joined Jessie Helms in circumventing and
undermining the UN. The lead editorial article of
the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs
celebrates that "The United States and NATO-with
little discussion and less fanfare-have
effectively abandoned the old UN Charter rules
that strictly limit international intervention in
local conflicts...in favor of a vague new system
that is much more tolerant of military
intervention but has few hard and fast
rules....Kosovo illustrates... America's new
willingness to do what it thinks
right-international law notwithstanding." As a
classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown
University's School of Foreign Service, I can
testify that we were taught that "International
law is what those who have the power to impose it
say it is."
While the US and NATO may be able to bomb
Yugoslavia back into the pre-industrial age,
along with Iraq, it is not at all clear that even
with this punishment, Bill Clinton can "right"
Slobodan Milosevic's wrongs. There is no NATO
consensus to move from aerial bombardments into
the quagmire of a ground war in Balkan mountains
that witnessed some of the most intense fighting
of WW II. And it is doubtful that the US'
European allies will tolerate the aerial savaging
of Yugoslavia as they have distant and Islamic
Iraq.
For these reasons, pacifists and practitioners of
"Realpolitic," including members of Congress from
both parties, are calling on the US to do no
further harm. We are doing our best to remind
people that political conflicts are ultimately
resolved through negotiations, not force, and we
are demanding an end to the killing and a return
to diplomacy, and to assist all people victimized
by the war. The outlines of a negotiated
settlement have been articulated, and they may
involve redrawing the map, to allow largely
homogenous Serbian, Croatian, Islamic Bosnian,
and Albanian nations to emerge. Russia is seen
widely as the nation best positioned to mediate
the conflict, and peace proposals have also been
proposed by Germany, Ukraine, the European Union,
and Secretary General Kofi Anan.
We must make our voices heard: Stop the bombing.
Stop the killing. Give peace a chance.
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Peacework Magazine on the web: http://www.afsc.org/peacewrk.htm
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