Rob made many points and asked me whether some at least do not have impact.
I have changed the thread title because the COC statement was a statement
in its own right.
I am taking one passage and then I will comment more generally.
> 2000 people were killed by Serbian militias throughout all of 1998. A
>lot more than in the years before that, but a lot less than in the few
>months 1999 has produced. Horrible, and much of it unconscionable, sure.
>But let's put ourselves in Serbian shoes for a minute. The KLA comes along,
>initially unsupported by the majority of Albanian Kosovars in their demands
>for independence, and starts shooting up cop shops and the odd Serb
>civilian. What did the Yanks do in the guerilla war in Vietnam - what must
>one do in a guerilla war? One must suspect every hamlet, every town,
>everybody - the enemy is among them, but they are not all enemies. The
>enemy gets his food, shelter and morale from them, but not all offer them
>these. It's a short step from there to My Lai, Chris. And I'm sure there
>were good blokes among the butchers of My Lai. Some were shit-scared
>teenagers and all were in a situation completely beyond their control - and
>good blokes have done terrible things before. Calley didn't do anything a
>hundred other captains weren't doing just down the road. And the Serbs
>weren't in someone else's country either. Unconscionable but
>understandable. Not genocide, not the holocaust, not Nazis. Just hellish
>tragedy.
It is all understandable. So was Nazism. There is not a genetic reason why
Hitler found some willing executioners. There is not a genetic reason why
Arkan found some willing executioners. There is not a genetic reason why
the London Police Force connives in and arguably assists racists murders of
black people.
And it is genocide, by international definitions. It is a holocaust.
Did the holocaust only emerge fully formed at Wannsee in January 1942?
Yes let's see it from the Serb point of view. They are trying to cling onto
their historic territory. Unfortunately the majority population are
rebelling and have perfomed all sorts of acts of civil disobedience against
the suspension of their autonomy for more than five years. Now armed
actions start. Clearly they have to be dealt with decisively. Worse, there
is evidence that the armed liberation fighters have intimidated some of the
people they claim to support. Of course whether any of this is provocations
no one will completely know. What is clear is that there must be decisive
action.
We Brits understand this well enough.
When the Boers defied not our enlightened views about black people in South
Africa, so much as the need for economic integration of the whole of
Southern Africa into the British Empire, we realised that their guerillas
were drawing support from their community. Hence it was necessary to
concentrate the Boer population in camps. Of course removed from their
farmland, they were rather helpless as well as truculant and under the
influence of the guerillas. 20,000 died. Any comparison with concentration
camps as later run with higher technology and efficiency by Germans was
completely unintentional. But it just happens to be perhaps the only
invention that we Brits do not emphasise we nobly contributed to human
civilisation.
In the 20's, Brits faced a similar problem in Ireland. Unfortunately the
majority population did not seem to accept the obvious terroristic and
absurd nature of the Easter 1916 attack on the Dublin post office, and
indeed seemed to regard its dead leaders as heroes. Despite the subjugation
of Ireland by the English Crown from even longer ago than 1389 (the
critical date for Serb legitimacy in Kosovo) the population of Ireland
after the first world war appeared to be seething. An efficient and zealous
armed police force, known disrepectfully as the Black and Tans were only
doing their duty. Rough justice was inevitable if the terrorists insisted
on taking up an armed struggle. And rough justice there was. Unfortunately
there was no where for the refugees to go and the British authorities
lacked the resolution of Cromwell who had been prepared to put thousands to
the sword at Drogheda and Wexford. So the majority stayed in place, and
British rule was doomed.
The human comprehensibity of what the Serbs did is no problem for Brits.
Granted that the NATO intervention triggered the ethnic cleansing on Kosovo
as an intense campaign there is every evidence it was planned before. eg
the systematic removal of identity documents, and number plates.
As for the stimulatory effects of terror on the speed of departure of the
population, no doubt reasonable Serb nationalists would admit that some of
Arkan's followers showed excesses, but there is really no two ways about
it. When a group of soldiers and military police arrive at an Albanian
village and need to ask all its inhabitants to leave, it is unfortunately
necessary to do so in such a manner as not to provoke any lengthy
discussion. At least during the truce to mark the Orthodox Easter Serb
authorities gave villagers 1/2 hour's notice rather than 5 minutes.
Young men who could not prove that they did not support the KLA had to be
assumed to be possible members of the KLA. Indeed informants from the
locality, necessarily shielded by masks and balaclavas to protect their
identity, might be needed to point out those who had been most active in
the resistance movement. (This detail is probably selected out of reports
by the bleeing heart NATO news media who hang round the refugee camps.)
Rather than risk them escaping to the hills on the trek out of the country,
on numerous occasions it was necessary to round these young male KLA
sympathisers up in a house, and shoot them, a dozen or two dozen at a time.
Straw or benzene might burn the bodies.
Really the logic of guerilla war in modern conditions leads to
counter-insurgency war against the civilian population. Only for
complicated imperialist reasons did Britain send troops to Northern Ireland
and prevent the otherwise inevitable ethnic cleansing by the loyalists
which would have been the logical response to the provocations of the IRA.
No, the sequence of events and the momentum beyond anyone's will, was
inevitable once Serb nationalism accepts that the ethnically compact
Albanian population of Kosovo did not have the right to self-determination.
The inevitable implication is apartheid, albeit in the name of socialism.
NATO's intervention accelerated a process for which the politics had
already been aligned.
All armies commit atrocities. All armies commit a number of rapes. We
cannot judge a war by its atrocities. We need to judge a war by its
politics. War is the continuation of politics by other means.
The war against the Albanian Kosovans was begun in 1989.
________________
More generally Rob asks how come access to a wide range of data produces
different responses in intelligent serious people.
As I suggested in the post on the COC statement there are a number of
overlapping contradictions in this situation, and any intelligent
discussion does not ignore the existence of various features, but has the
more difficult question of which aspects are primary and which
contradictions are primary, and from what point of view.
I think this latest development has stretched everyone but the most
complacent, in marxism space. I suggest it is beyond the ability of any one
person to think through in the idealism of their own mind, what the answer
should be. The COC statement is clearly the result of serious collective
thinking, but its limitations, I suggest, are apparent.
NATO is highly vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, and manipulation. If the
Pentagon had sound intelligence reports prior to the NATO attack that the
Serbs were ready to launch open war against the Albanian civil population
of Kosovo, why did they not declare this and why did the politicians not
spell out the options? I presume because had they done so, they would have
found it impossible to get their electorates to take any action. They would
have been left with the principled option of walking away from the Balkans
altogether, or merely of providing well organised humanitarian relief,
including new identity papers, bereavement counsellors and morning after
pills, for one group of a hundred thousand displaced persons after another
as the plague moved across the Balkans.
I became involved in what was going on in 1994 / 1995 when the
Conservative government had sent in British ground troops to Bosnia who
were trying to distribute food, while being unable to stop regular shelling
of Sarajevo from Serb gun emplacements. Nothing more could be done because
the poor British ground troops were themselves hostage. Also because Serb
sources were sending funds to support the British Conservative Party.
That was appeasement. I am opposed to appeasement of fascism. The western
imperialist nations should either have nothing to do with the Balkans or
they should intevene in a more positive rather than a less positive direction.
I am in favour of a multi-polar world. I do not think westerners should
have got involved to stop civil war or genocide in Africa. In Europe I
think European governments should take the lead in resolving the conflicts
of their neighbours without relying on massive US air-power. But it is
bourgeois pacifism to say it should not under any conditions use armed force.
More generally, the left has lost direction after the fall of the Soviet
Union.
The level of understanding of marxism is weak. There is little
understanding of the united front against fascism, and people generally
prefer the simpler line of being against their own governments by reflex
action. All reforms are by definition ruled out. Marxism is approached
more to find some sort of identity politics distinct from ordinary people
rather than as a way of understanding events to unite more closely with
ordinary people.
Marxism is used as a way of staying permanently and romantically in
opposition.
The instincts of revulsion at the violation of rights of fellow humans with
funny Albanian names, are progressive in nature. Only if marxists can find
ways of uniting with this do they have a chance of articulating concretely
in practice a programme on these wars, that undermines imperialist cooption
of those emotions for the cause of capital.
Chris Burford
London
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