Burford keeps putting his right wing views onto 'Marxism space" as
he calls it. Burford is a left cover for British imperialism. Just
look at the arguments he brings up to justify NATO interventio. Even
if he is opposes outright bombing, this is because he favours troops
on the ground.
What are his justifications? "Serbs are defending historic
territory". But this is true only of the Milosovic regime and its
supporters. Most Serbs probably are willing to see Kosovo autonomy if
not independence. But of course they react defensively to the KLA
methods. Moreover, even the Milosovic regime agreed to UN
peacekeeping troops before NATO rejected this proposal.
So Burford smears all Serbs with ultrapatriotism and holds them
all accountable for ethnic cleansing. He then magnifies ethnic
cleasing and calls it genocide and fascism. This is to demean real
genocide and fascism, both of which are the product of imperialism,
not tiny isolated and beleaguered states like Yugoslavia. And its
purpose is to say that democratic imperialism is the only progressive
way out in Kosovo.
On the Kosovo side he accepts that the KLA may not be a pure
liberation movement. But then he seeks to sanitize the KLA which is
a guerrilla band with little support from the Kosovon Albania,
bankrolled by the US and its Albanian backer Sali Berrisha, and
committed political to Greater Albania. It seems that he falls into
the trap of most of the left - write off the national question -
either because the front against NATO requires it, or because both
sides in Kosovo as mutually oppressive. In his case he takes the
latter route - only imperialism can stop the ethnic cleansing.
The Marxism which he finds so weak after the fall of the SU etc. is
not so weak that it doesnt recognise in Burfords arguments a not so
subtle defence of democratic imperialism. Why, he says, be in
'opposition' all the time? Precisely to identify and repudiate the
rotten politics of the Burfords! Moreover, Bolshevism and Trotskyism
have answers for the situation in Yugoslavia once decontaminated from
bourgeois ideology.
They are that this struggle is to defend Yugoslavia from imperialism.
It is imperialism that lead to the breakup of Yugoslavia as well as
the fall of the SU. The attack on Yugoslavia is another step in the
US seeking to assert its strategic control over Europe and Asia.
Therefore, any victory for NATO over Yugoslavia is a defeat for the
worlds workers.
However, there can be no victory over imperialism without the
international unity of workers. While workers are divided by
nationalism there can be no unity. That's why we have to recognise
that the national question which is being used as a reactionary
divide and rule tactic by imperialism has to be transformed into a
class question before working class unity is possible. In the
current war, the only way that this can be done is for Serbian
workers to recognise the right of Albanian Kosovars to
self-determination.
This will prove to Kosovar workers that the way out for them is not
Great Albania, but Balkan socialism. Once the working class in the
Balkans is united by respecting the Marxist dictum that no nation can
be free while another is in chains, they will refuse to get drawn
into patriotic blood letting in the name of establishing puny client
states of imperialism, and fight for a Federation of Socialist
Republics of the Balkans.
Dave Bedggood
> 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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>
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