U.S. ATTACKS LITTLE YUGOSLAVIA: A DAY OF INFAMY
By Deirdre Griswold
In a day that will live in infamy, the United States began
a brutal military assault on Yugoslavia under cover of
darkness on the night of March 24.
All the excuses given by President Bill Clinton cannot
conceal the naked truth: the world's biggest nuclear power,
a country of some 272 million people, has launched a war
against a small, mostly agricultural country of 10 million
people on the other side of the globe.
This act of blatant big-power aggression can't be
prettified by calling the attacks "NATO air strikes." The
U.S. calls the shots in NATO. This attack was cooked up in
Washington, in the secret war rooms of the Pentagon.
And Clinton's attempt to label Yugoslavia the aggressor is
a total lie. Yugoslavia hasn't sent one soldier outside its
national territory. The U.S., on the other hand, has
thousands of soldiers stationed in territory it has broken
away from Yugoslavia in recent years--like the former
Yugoslav republics of Macedonia and Bosnia.
Moreover, it has surrounded Yugoslavia with aircraft
carriers and other warships bristling with high-tech
weaponry. The Pentagon has recently tested these weapons on
other small countries--like Sudan and Afghanistan--in order
to set a terrifying example for the world.
YUGOSLAVS SAY: NO PASARAN!
It is amazing that under these circumstances the Yugoslav
government, parliament and people have the tremendous
strength to stand up and say, in the words of Spain's anti-
fascists: "No pasaran!" They will not let foreign troops be
stationed on their soil, even if it means having to endure a
bloody assault. That was the "choice" presented to them by
Clinton envoy Richard Holbrooke, one that they bravely
refused.
Why doesn't Clinton even use the right name for the
country, Yugoslavia? Why does he insist on calling it
Serbia? Because the U.S. strategy is to tear apart what was
once a peaceful, multinational socialist country so Wall
Street banks and corporations can add its fragments to their
collection of neocolonies around the world.
Serbia is just one of the republics still left in
Yugoslavia. Kosovo is a province of Serbia. But four other
republics--Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Macedonia--have
already been ripped away in recent years as Yugoslavia was
weakened by U.S.-imposed sanctions.
This is the real "ethnic cleansing" going on in the
Balkans: the dividing up of what was a multi-ethnic
territory into warring mini-states. And it is being stage-
managed by President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, special
envoy Richard Holbrooke and Secretary of Defense William
Cohen.
Just four years ago, they hurled the same kind of charge
against the Serbs as today: that they were oppressing the
Muslims in Bosnia and therefore U.S. forces had to stop
them. But a report just released by the international war
crimes tribunal in The Hague shows that it was the Croatian
Army that carried out the real "ethnic cleansing": the
indiscriminate shelling in the Krajina region that forced an
exodus of 100,000 Serbs from their homes in just four days
in the summer of 1995.
And it was carried out with the blessing of the United
States. A report in the March 21 New York Times even
strongly indicates that U.S. generals planned the whole
offensive, called Operation Storm.
Yet now the U.S. has the utter gall to claim they are
attacking Yugoslavia to ensure "peace in Europe." War is
peace, aggression is defense, and everything is being done
to help a small, oppressed people. This kind of bald-faced
lie worked for Hitler--why not for Bill Clinton?
NATO A ROBBERS' CABAL
Washington is working hand-in-hand with German imperialism
in NATO. But at the same time, the governments of these two
capitalist industrial giants are also in a fierce
underground struggle over who is to get the spoils.
Clinton's rush to plant both feet securely in Yugoslavia
before other imperialists get there may explain why Clinton
has moved so aggressively, even before being able to secure
political support at home.
Even before the first missile was fired, support for this
war was lukewarm, at best. Everyone knows how expensive
these military adventures are, even when few U.S. lives are
lost. Billions of dollars go down the drain. One B-2 bomber
alone costs a billion dollars.
Meanwhile, health care, education, social security and all
other social services deteriorate in the richest nation on
earth. Fully half the budget gets sucked up paying for past
and present wars--even without a major conflict.
In this war, as Clinton himself has admitted, there may
very well be significant U.S. casualties. That hasn't
happened since the disastrous war against Vietnam--in which
the Vietnamese defeated the U.S. invaders even when the
Pentagon, in the words of Gen. Curtis Lemay, tried to bomb
them "back to the Stone Age."
The few times since then when U.S. troops have been caught
by surprise--by car bombs in Leba non and Saudi Arabia, and
in a ferocious fire fight in Somalia--the Pentagon has
pulled the rest out immediately, fearing a crumbling of the
chain of command.
The Republican Party has tried to position itself as the
lightning rod for opposition to this war, while fully
intending to betray it once the fighting starts. As the
other party of U.S. big business and imperialism, its
criticism is only over tactics and who gets the spoils, not
over the basic objective.
However, a real anti-war movement already exists, based on
the interests of the masses of people here and solidarity
with oppressed peoples all over the world. It will quickly
gather support now that the ugly face of imperialist war has
been revealed. Its base will be all the progressive
movements that struggle against racism and oppression.
The youths in particular will bring to it the fighting
spirit of the 1960s. It is already getting a sympathetic ear
from many inside the armed forces of this country who don't
want to be cannon fodder for billionaire investors.
YUGOSLAV HISTORY OF RESISTANCE
Yugoslavia is a small country, but it has been truly
independent for much of this century, and therefore able to
build a strong defense. It has many veterans of the anti-
Nazi Partisan struggle during World War II. They are
refusing to capitulate with the full knowledge of what
resistance to aggression means.
Washington, for propaganda purposes, may try to confuse
the na<ve here about who was on what side in that war, but
all the Yugoslavs know that the anti-fascist struggle was
led by the communists and that the present capitulators to
the West are descended from the pro-Nazi quislings.
The U.S. attack on Yugoslavia is motivated by the same
lust for imperialist super-profits that drove Washington and
Wall Street to launch wars against Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.
The drive for economic domination by U.S.-based corporations
and banks has in this century led to invasions of the
Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala,
the Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Lebanon,
and some 200 other military interventions, almost all of
small, oppressed countries.
The attack on Yugoslavia follows in this same sordid
tradition.
Those attempting to justify this heinous act to the U.S.
population and to world public opinion have created a new
vocabulary. The invading occupation troops that the U.S.
plans to install in Yugoslavia are called "peacekeeping
forces." Terrorizing the world with a ferocious display of
U.S. military might is called "saving NATO's credibility."
In fact, this kind of outrageous war propaganda is nothing
new. Adolph Hitler--and U.S. politicians are fond of pinning
the Hitler label on anyone who defies the Pentagon--used the
same language when he overran Eastern Europe before World
War II.
Hitler, on behalf of German imperialism, wanted to gobble
up the eastern states to prepare for a war against the
Soviet Union. His plan to attack the USSR, Operation
Barbarossa, depended on him first establishing a strategic
base in Czechoslovakia.
HITLER INVADED FOR `SELF-DETERMINATION' TOO
How did he accomplish this? First the Nazis stirred up a
separatist movement among the Germans living in
Czechoslovakia. According to Nazi propaganda, these fascist
agents just wanted to "liberate" the territory they called
the Sudetenland. When the Czech government, knowing Germany
was trying to swallow them up, suppressed the uprising of
the Sudeten Germans, Hitler then accused Prague of crushing
"national self-determination" and invaded.
Sound familiar? The government in Washington today is as
determined to move into the vacuum left by the collapse of
the USSR in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics
as Hitler was determined to overrun the East in 1938. And it
is just as contemptuous of the rights of smaller nations.
The idea that this war is about the rights of minorities
is ludicrous. Turkey right now is slaughtering the Kurds,
and has killed 35,000 in recent years. But Washington
doesn't care. It recently helped capture the Kurdish leader
and turn him over to the Turkish authorities.
When a right-wing military regime in Guatemala slaughtered
200,000 Indigenous people--now documented in an official
report--it was done with the blessing and training of the
U.S. CIA. No indignant speeches from the White House over
that. No mobilization to crush Gen. Rios Montt and his
bloody army.
But suddenly Clinton has discovered "brutal repression of
the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo." Why? Because the "Kosovo
Liberation Army," which came into existence less than two
years ago with mercenary troops and outside money, is today
playing the same role as the fascist movements in eastern
Europe that gave Nazi Germany the excuse in the 1930s to
invade in the name of "self-determination."
This is not to say that the U.S. today is politically the
same as fascist Germany in the 1930s. The Nazi political
establishment went to unbelievable extremes because of the
tremendous economic crisis that hit the capitalist world in
the 1930s. Hitler won the support of the Krupps and other
rich industrialists for a ruthless dictatorship over the
workers in order to militarize and revive German capital by
grabbing a larger share of the world markets.
The U.S. ruling class isn't in such a position today. In
fact, it is still riding an economic wave, although no one
knows when it may crash down on the rocks. But even in times
of relative prosperity this ruling class is capable of
viciousness bordering on genocide--as in the carpet-bombing
and napalming of Vietnam--unless the masses of people refuse
to be cannon fodder and tie up the war machine.
TIME FOR MASS RESISTANCE TO WAR
The U.S. corporate ruling class, since the collapse of the
socialist bloc, is driving to become unchallenged master
over every inch of the earth's surface. Isn't that the
implication when any country refusing to toe the line is
immediately branded a "rogue state" and a fitting target for
military suppression?
In so doing, it pits the people of this country against
the rest of the world in an endless round of interventions
and wars.
But the frightening implications of this new war don't
have to happen.
There's another "scenario," as the military experts like
to say. Those who benefit from imperialist expansion are a
tiny fraction of U.S. society. The bulk of the population,
the working class, has nothing to gain from it and much to
lose--jobs, wages and even their lives, not to speak of
priceless intangibles like solidarity with the rest of the
human race.
The people can struggle and win against even this
seemingly invincible war machine linked to the military-
industrial-banking complex. It happened before. It can
happen again.
Demonstrations in New York, Washington, Detroit,
Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., and
Claremont, Calif., and San Francisco took place
instantaneously as the U.S. shelling of Yugoslavia began on
March 24. Other protests around the world are being reported
as we go to press. A second round of actions will hit U.S.
cities on Saturday, March 27. The web page of the
International Action Center, www.iacenter.org, will provide
details. The IAC can be called at (212) 633-6646 in New York
and (415) 821-6545 in San Francisco.
- END -
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