A Craven Capitulation to Imperialism on the Balkans
Usec Says: Send In the Troops
While NATO imperialist bombardment ravages Serbia, one of the most repugnant capitulations before the capitalist warmongers by leftists internationally has been that of the late Ernest Mandel's United Secretariat (USec). Like much of the left, these social democrats masquerading as Trotskyists gave tacit support to the imperialist assault on Serbia in the name of defending the "national rights" of the Albanian Kosovars. But the USec went further than most, as its flag-ship French section, the Ligue Comununiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), refused to call for the withdrawal of French and other imperialist troops from the Balkans. But they didn't stop there. Following the logic of their prostration before "human rights" imperialism, the LCR openly called for imperialist military intervention in Kosovo under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)-a European-dominated military block of the United Nations. This is the nationalist, anti-American line being pushed now by both the French and German governments in a clear attempt to minimize a direct U.S. role.
The NATO bombing of Serbia has provoked and uproar among considerable sections of the French bourgeoisie, which are apprehensive over the danger of destabilization in the Balkans and expanded U.S. power in the region. Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin's government coalition has openly divided over the question as both the French Communist Party (PCF) and the bourgeois Movement of Citizens denounced the bombing and the leading role of the U.S. and NATO. Jospin’s Socialists called for a meeting of European social-democratic-parties –i.e, the ruling parties of most west European countries-to initiate a European conference on the Balkans.
The LCR's pronouncements on the war are a catalogue of contradictions reflecting their vestigial pretensions to Marxism in words and their opportunism in deeds. Swept up in the orgy of social-chauvinism buttressing the ruling class as it wages war in the Balkans, the LCR has stepped into line as capitalist Europe's little drummer boys, disguising imperialist slaughter as "justice" for Kosovo Albanians. The LCR's initial reaction to the imperialist bombing campaign was a March 25 declaration by Alain Krivine, who pleaded: "The left majority in parliament should demand an immediate end [to the bombing] and the withdrawal of the French commitment." Krivine continued: "The Belgrade regime must he isolated and the Kosovo people must be provided all the means, including military means, to defend their lives and impose their freedom." With the Kosovo Liheration Army having become simply an instrument of imperialist war aims in the region, such a call to arm the Kosovo Albanians is nothing but backhanded support to NATO attacks against Serbia. As we previously wrote of Krivine's declaration, "The unity between these hypocrites posturing as and 'antiwar' movement and the imperialist warmongers themselves couldn't be clearer" (WV No. 710, 2 April).
One week later, the LCR Political Bureau issued a statement which pointedly refused to call for the withdrawal of French troops from the Balkans (Rouge, I April). The LCR leadership now virtually screamed for Serbia to be brought to heel:
"No hesitation: The Milosevic regime must be fought as firmly as possible." Offering themselves as loyal advisers to the bourgeoisie, the LCR proposed an alternative to the bombing:
"There were other ways to act if one really wanted to force the Belgrade regime to give Kosovo its freedom: The great powers have the means, if they so desired, to impose effective economic pressures and a militarv blockade of the Belgrade regime."
This is an appeal to hit Serbia with sanctions like those the imperialists imposed on Iraq; Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the imperialist starvation blockade has led to the death of well over one million Iraqis for lack of food and medical supplies.
The same issue of Rouge published a "Call By Public Figures" signed by LCR leader Daniel Bensaid, among others. Taking up the demand for an international conference on the Balkans, the call demanded an end to NATO bombing because it "is leading not only to a political impasse but to legitimizing the role of NATO outside of any international framework of control." This French nationalist call concluded with the demand for "a parliamentary debate on the future of French participation in NATO." But its key demand was for intervention by military forces under the European~dominated OSCE:
"NATO was not the only, and above all not the best, linchpin for an accord. The conditions for a multinational police force (particularly composed of Serbs and Albanians) could he found under the auspices of the OSCE to enforce a transitional accord."
The following issue of Rouge (8 April) contained yet another call for imperialist intervention, this time under the banner of the UN. Assuring its readers that "Our opposition to NATO is not based on primitive anti-Americanism," the LCR proposed an "accord" with Serbia based on an end to anti-Albanian repression, the return of refugees to Kosovo and "cooperation with the International War Crimes Tribunal to investigate the massacres":
"A multinational force under UN control must guarantee and oversee on the ground the application of such an accord. It would be a question of effectively defending the Kosovars, and this would have much greater legitimacy in Yugoslavia and internationally than the NATO bombing."
This is an undisguised call for military intervention in Kosovo by imperialist ground troops. The UN has been nothing but a fig leaf for imperialist militarism from the 1950-53 war against the North Korean deformed workers state to the racist colonialist occupations of Somalia and Haiti. Under UN auspices, U.S. and other imperialist forces slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqis in the 1991 Desert Slaughter. The U.S. and NATO didn't even bother using the UN as a fig leaf in the current war against Serbia.
On April 6, the LCR co-sponsored a demonstration in the industrial town of Elbeuf with the PCF and the local CGT trade-union federation on the basis of unalloyed French chauvinism. The demands-"Stop the massacres in Kosovo," "Resume negotiations," and "For the right of peoples to self-determination"-didn't even make a pretense of seeking to mobilize the working class against the bourgeoisie's dirty war. The LCR and PCF carefully refused to demand that French or other imperialist troops get out of the Balkans. Calling NATO bombing of Serbia "a big failure," the protest call declared:
"In this war, France, at the initiative of the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister, has dropped its role as mediator to act as a 'gendarme' on the side of NATO, under the leadership of President Clinton. The involvement of our country represents a break with the friendly relations established over the past century in this part of Europe."
France's "role as mediator" in the Balkans was to join Britain as Serbia's main big-power allies against Germany in World Wars I and II. Anyone who buys the lie of the French bourgeoisie's "friendly relations" should recall the Algerian War for independence, in which French forces slaughtered more than one million people and inflicted hideous tortures on thousands more in their defeated effort to prevent the Algerian people from smashing the bonds of French colonialism.
The LCR's disgusting social-chauvinism was echoed by other USec sections. In Ireland, a leaflet distributed on April 1 by Socialist Democracy called for "the arming of Milosevic's victims" and "building a broad solidarity movement" with the Albanian Kosovars. This harks back to the "Workers Aid for Bosnia" campaign, which the USec was mainly responsible for propagating internationally. Under the guise of providing humanitarian aid for the working class in Bosnia, Workers Aid was really a stalking horse for direct imperialist military intervention against the Serbs (see "What's Behind 'Workers Aid for Bosnia'," WV No.604, 5 August 1994).
"Workers Aid" cynically used the plight of the multinational working class in Bosnia to promote imperialist support to the Bosnian Muslim government in the three-sided fratricidal war between Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims. "Workers Aid" lobbied for the UN "peacekeeping" forces to secure "safe passage," especially through Serb-held territory in the northern corridor of Bosnia. USec members bragged that their supporters actually drove the convoy trucks. But this was nothing new for the USec, which did the same thing for Polish Solidarnosc in the early 1980s, running supplies "donated" by the CIA through its conduits in the German Social Democracy and other West European social-democratic parties.
In August 1995, the U.S., Britain and other NATO powers embarked on a massive bombing attack against the Bosnian Serbs. A major pretext for the imperialist terror bombing was ensuring that food and other necessities were delivered to Bosnian cities designated as "safe havens," substantially the same program as "Workers Aid for Bosnia."
In sharp opposition to the fake Trotskyists beating the drums for war and fostering illusions in the benevolence of military action by the capitalist states of Europe now ruled by treacherous "Socialists" and former "Communists," we in the International Communist League act on the understanding that war cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and socialism is created. In the crucible of World War I, Lenin broke with the so-called socialists of the Second International who repudiated Marxist proletarian internationalism by supporting their own ruling classes and preparing the proletariat for nationalist slaughter. The LCR's Krivine and the other products of the decomposition of the "class of '68" are now beating the drums for war in the Balkans and offering their services to the capitalist ruling class. Lenin exposed their predecessor, Karl Kautsky, in his 1915 pamphlet Socialism and War:
"Opportunism and social-chauvinism have the same politico-ideological content-class collaboration instead of the class struggle, renunciation of revolutionary methods of struggle, helping one's 'own' government in its embarrassed situation, instead of taking advantage of these embarrassments so as to advance the revolution."
Part of the struggle of the ICL to reforge Trotsky's Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution is to politically clear the road of these latterday Kautskyites, the "stinking corpse of social democracy.
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