KOSOVO AND MACEDONIA
U.S.-NATO occupation is colonialism
By John Catalinotto
The 21-month occupation of Kosovo by U.S. and NATO troops has turned the
region into a Western colony
without bringing it either economic progress or stability. Washington's
support for the right-wing nationalist KLA
army now threatens to unleash new wars in southern Serbia and in
Macedonia as this group carries out its plan to
fight for a "greater Albania."
Formerly part of Yugoslavia, Macedonia is now a small country of 2
million people with a large ethnic Albanian
minority and a U.S. military base on its soil since 1992. Firefights
there between KLA commandos penetrating the
border and the weak Macedonian army have led to deaths on both sides and
threaten a wider war.
Articles in a number of British newspapers and in the New York Times have
raised fears that the NATO forces
have "lost control" of the KLA. This group was originally financed by
Berlin and Washington and then
unleashed to provoke a war against Yugoslavia.
Like the reactionary Taliban in Afghanistan, the KLA would never have
become an important factor in the life of
this region had it not received the full backing of U.S. imperialism. The
U.S. poured billions of dollars into the
Taliban, Osama Bin Laden and other reactionary forces in the 1980s to
bring down the progressive Afghan
government and weaken its Soviet allies.
In response to this new crisis in the Balkans, NATO has even begun to
discuss the use of Yugoslav troops with
the pro-Western government of Vojislav Kostunica in Yugoslavia. They are
to enter the "buffer zone" known as
Presevo bordering Kosovo in southern Serbia. Belgrade is considering such
use, though it puts Yugoslav troops
under NATO command and could turn them into cannon fodder.
NATO's armies occupy Kosovo under a United Nations cover called K-FOR.
According to the accord that ended
the 78-day bombing attack on Yugoslavia in June 1999, Kosovo is still
officially part of Serbia.
But the KLA-dominated local regime has driven out 250,000 Serb residents
of the province plus another 100,000
Roma, Gorani, Turkish, Jewish and other peoples who lived there in 1999.
The right-wing KLA carried out this
ethnic cleansing of Kosovo without interference from the U.S., German,
French, British or other occupation forces
in K-FOR. The KLA lost local elections in Kosovo, but its armed force
intimidates the civilian ethnic Albanian
population.
Along with its right-wing nationalism, the KLA is known for running the
illegal drug commerce in Europe and
directing prostitution and other rackets in Kosovo.
Non-U.S. officers in K-FOR have complained that the U.S. military
encouraged the KLA to make incursions into
southern Serbia in order to destabilize the then Socialist Party-led
government of Yugoslavia. More recently the
U.S. has used the threat of the KLA to pressure the Kostunica government
in Belgrade to persecute Socialist
Party leader Slobodan Milosevic. It wants Kostunica to turn him and
others over to the NATO-backed court in
The Hague.
An article in the March 11 issue of the British newspaper The Observer
quotes a European K-FOR battalion
commander as saying, "The CIA has been allowed to run riot in Kosovo with
a private army designed to
overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. ... Most of last year, there was a growing
frustration with U.S. support for the
radical Albanians. U.S. policy was and still is out of step with the
other NATO allies."
During the 1999 war all of the NATO allies backed the KLA against
Yugoslavia. They used claims of "genocide"
against the ethnic-Albanian population to justify the murderous air war
against Yugoslavia and demonized
Milosevic. Major media outlets like the ARD network in Germany have now
exposed these claims as war
propaganda, and this new crisis has obviously nothing to do with
Milosevic.
Now there are differences among the NATO allies about how to handle the
KLA's threat to bring a new round of
war to the Balkans. What makes the situation especially dangerous is that
the NATO allies are also imperialist
rivals for economic and strategic control of the Balkans and the region
to the East in what was the former Soviet
Union.
If its KLA clients threaten U.S. interests in the region, Washington is
perfectly capable of turning on them. But up
to now U.S. forces in Kosovo have done nothing that really stops armed
KLA forces from entering either Presevo
or Macedonia.
In his latest article on Macedonia, Balkans expert and Belgian author
Michel Collon points out that a vital oil and
natural gas pipeline from sources in Central Asia to the Adriatic Sea is
supposed to pass from the Black Sea port
of Burgas through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. Washington thus has
strong interests in maintaining
cooperation with the KLA gangsters.
The struggle among the imperialist powers over oil and gas from Central
Asia gives added weight to any conflict
in the Balkans. Combined with Washington's impulse to rely on its
military predominance to enforce its authority
on both enemy and ally, it raises the threat of new wars.
