STOP NATO: �NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Start Your Own FREE Email List at http://www.listbot.com/links/joinlb ---------------------------------------------------------------------- On the face of things, this policy seems to make a certain amount of sense. The U.S. does believe that, despite its enormous power, it is "locked in a race for resources" around the world and that its own economic future will depend on its ability to find new markets and sources of raw materials. [14] And the Balkans is a key strageic region. Our present Balkan policy is also comprehensive and coherent. What more can one ask of any policy? The problem, of course, is that the policy is also arrogant, ahistorical, murderous, based on inadequate analysis, full of contradictions and, ultimately, reckless. It will lead to the complete devastation of the Balkans, including its deindustrialization, and it will pro-duce, and is producing, unpredictable results of all kinds. In all these things it is very similar to the strategy which carried the United States into Indochina in the beginning of the 1960s. The U.S. intervened militarily in Indochina on a significant scale in early 1965 to support a faltering South Vietnamese government. [15] The state of South Vietnam had been created by the U.S. to bypass the Geneva agreements of l954, signed by the French and the Vietnamese after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The Geneva accords had been intended to lead, after a period of two years, to free elections in a united Vietnam and then to the formation of a national government. Even President Eisenhower acknowledged in his autobiography that the the Vietnamese national liberation movement would inevitably have won those elections and constituted a government, indeed a very popular one. Thus Vietnam would have emerged as an independent, Communist state in Southeast Asia. This prospect, as McNamara attests in his recent memoir, greatly worried U.S. policy-makers from the 1950s on. The United States, therefore, acting in secret, undermined and overthrew the Geneva agreements by establishing a U.S.-backed regime, arming it and putting off the scheduled elections. This led to an internal revolt in the southern part of Vietnam, which "South Vietnam" sought to suppress. The Saigon regime, however, was far from popular. And, as the South Vietnamese "government" made increasing efforts to suppress the Viet Minh revolt, with horrible consequences for Vietnamese civilians, the revolt spread. Eventually, the United States, seeing its client threatened, decided to intervene itself to put an end to the resistance. The outcome is well known. The problem in the Vietnamese case was that the U.S. based its creation of the South Vietnamese regime, its support for it, and its eventual entry into the war to save it, on a determination to assert its dominance in Southeast Asia. It pretended to wish to "save Southeast Asia from communism". But in reality it was pursuing what the Kennedys, the Johnsons, the Nixons, the McNamaras and the Kissingers believed to be the strategic interests of the U.S.: control of resources, access to markets, dominant political influence, etc. And it was only decades later that some of our more honorable leaders had the sense and the decency to admit that the strategic schemes were "wrong". Must the same thing now happen in the Balkans? An Artificial State The U.S. involvement in Bosnia-Herzegovina began under the Bush Administration, when U.S. officials and agencies began to co-operate with the Muslim-led Party of Democratic Action in order to position it for taking power early in the 1990s. [16] Our involvement became more public in 1992 when, against the wishes of many U.S. allies, the U.S. and Germany forced the recognition of Bosnia by the international community. Since then, and particularly under the Clinton administration, the U.S. has continued to support the Izetbegovic government in Bosnia through thick and thin. The U.S. appears to be firmly committed to a unitary government under Muslim leadership, with or without Mr. Izetbegovic. The problem is that a government dominated by a Muslim minority, and one tending increasingly to fundamentalism at that, can hardly be very secure in what would, in normal circumstances, be a South Slav state. Like South Vietnam, Bosnia-Herzegovina was an artificial creation. It was not a state created by its people. It was a state created largely by external powers as part of an effort to control a strategic region of the world. As Tucker and Hendrickson wrote: "From the beginning, it was evident that the independence Bosnia and Herzegovina could only be secured if it could muster large-scale support from the international community." [17] This is what made both states weak. They were literally forced on the people of their respective territories by the combined efforts of ambitious and opportunistic ruling groups and powerful foreign sponsors. In the case of South Vietnam, the new state was forced on the majority of the population. In the case of Bosnia, it was forced on a large minority, the Bosnian Serbs. In South Vietnam, a widespread rebellion developed. In Bosnia, a third of the population, the Bosnian Serbs, rebelled. How did a republic of the Yugoslav federation become a putative state led by a minority government? In 1992, Bosnia was a constituent part of Yugoslavia, much like a state of the United States. Its borders were purely administrative and had no fixed historical basis. Its population in 1991 consisted of Muslim Slavs (44%), Bosnian Serbs (31%) and Bosnian Croats (18%). These three nationalities were intermingled throughout the territory of the republic. But the Serbs occupied and farmed some 60% of the land. [18] The Muslims were concentrated in the cities. From 1989, politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina were increasingly dominated by ethnic-religious issues. In particular, the leadership of the largest group, the Muslims, began to mobilize support for an Islamic awakening in Bosnia. [19] Croatian nationalism was also on the rise. [20] The combination of the two was alarming to the Serbs. They had experienced the terror of the holocaust, under direct Nazi sponsorship, at the hands of the Croats and Muslims during the Second World War. [21] There had been similar divisions in Indochina, notably between Catholics and Buddhists and between Communist-nationalists and those who had made their peace with colonialism. In 1990, Bosnia-Herzegovina held the first multi-party elections in the postwar period. Ethnic-religious tensions in the country were high, and the ethnically-based political parties emerged victorious, taking well over 70 per cent of the vote. However, no single party could muster a majority, and the republic had henceforth to be governed by a multi-party coalition of Muslims, Serbs and Croats. The League of Communists had thus been dislodged from government. And Muslims constituted the largest single group in the republic and fielded the largest single political party, the Party of Democratic Action. Muslim nationalists soon began pressing openly for the creation of an ethnically-based state. They wanted the "ethnic nation" and "the state" to coincide. And they wanted independence. However, the Bosnian Serbs did not want to leave Yugoslavia. And if Bosnia were to become independent, they certainly did not want a unitary state. For the proposed new state would inevitably be dominated by an emerging coalition of Muslims and Croats, leaving the Serbs in a minority. So far as the Bosnian Croats were concerned, their coalition with the Muslims was strictly pragmatic. Ultranationalism had already swept through neighboring Croatia. The Bosnian Croats were dominant in Herzegovina, bordering on Croatia in the west of Bosnia. And they wanted to annex Herzeg-Bosna and to join with their ethnic brethren in Croatia. The coalition with the Muslims provided them with a way of doing that, since both shared narrow nationalist aims which the Bosnian Serbs might obstruct. This coalition, however, was extremely fragile, as the outbreak of vicious warfare in 1993 was to prove. Even now, when the United States has forced a Muslim-Croat "confederation" in Bosnia, there is still fighting between the two sides. At this point it is worth expanding on what happened to the Serbs during the 1940s. They had been forced by the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 to live under a Croat-Muslim coalition for four years. The so-called Independent Croatian State was actually a puppet state in which Hitler installed the fanatical Croatian nationalists known as the Ustasha. It included almost all of what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina. With the co-operation of the Muslims -- who raised two SS divisions for Hitler -- the Ustasha proceded to carry out the "racial purification" of Croatia and Bosnia. This resulted in almost unimaginable horrors, and notably the deaths of some 700,000 Serbs. [22 ] Given the past, the Serbs could not possibly accept the situation which was emerging toward the end of 1991. In September of 1991, anticipating the worst, the Serbs proclaimed a number of "Serb autonomous regions" within Bosnia-Herzegovina. In October, Muslim and Croat members of Parliament combined to pass, against Serb objections, a resolution declaring Bosnia-Herzegovina to be a sovereign republic. This was taken to be a first step towards secession. It ended the facade of a tri-partite coalition government. The Serbs then established their own Assembly and declared that the laws of Bosnia-Herzegovina would not apply in the Serb autonomous regions. [23] In late 1991, both Germany and the United States were pressing their allies to recognize the Yugoslav republics wishing to secede from the Yugoslav Federation. On December 19, 1991, Germany overrode the objections of its partners in the European Community and obtained their agreement to recognize Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. [24] The very next day, the Muslim and Croat members of the Bosnian presidency voted to request recognition of the country's independence. The Serb members refused to take part in the vote.. In January, again despite Serb objections, the Muslim and Croat members of the Bosnian parliament voted to hold a referendum on independence. The referendum, held at the end of February, was boycotted by the Serbs. Only two thirds of the population, therefore, participated in the vote. But the referendum produced a very large majority in favor of independence. The EC recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina as an independent sovereign state on April 6, 1992. The Bush Administration recognized Bosnia's independence the next day. And on that same day, the Bosnian Serbs declared their own republic. The actions of both the EC and the United States thus gave international backing to the Muslim effort to dominate the whole of Bosnia. [25] Thus the EC and the U.S. played a crucial role in launching a new state over the objections of a very large minority of its population. It should be noted that Bosnia's declaration of independence was, according to constitution of Yugoslavia, illegal. There was provision in the constitution for secession, but only "nations", not republics, could secede. The constitution of Bosnia, too, provided for secession, but only if all the parties, "the nations", were in agreement. Nor is there any unqualified right to secession in international law. [26 ] This was why the Yugoslav National Army intervened with units stationed in Bosnia when civil order began to break down at the time of the secession. The position of Army leaders was that they were trying to prevent communal fighting. They were, of course, seen as an obstruction and were attacked by Muslim and Croat paramilitary units. Many Yugoslav soldiers were killed and wounded. Under pressure from the European Community states and others to leave Bosnia, the Yugoslav Army withdrew in June. For a variety of reasons, then, it is difficult to disagree with the judgment of Tucker and Hendrickson that: "the recognition of Bosnia's independence itself consti- tuted an illegal intervention into Yugoslavia's internal affairs, to which Belgrade had every right to object." [27] This is a short but fairly accurate [28 ] summary of how and why the Bosnian state came into being. Are there parallels to the U.S. experience in Vietnam? The first clear parallel is that the U.S. played a major role in the creation of this new state. There was no South Vietnam before the U.S. intervened after the Geneva accords. And there was no state of Bosnia-Herzegovina before the U.S. and Germany intervened at the end of 1991. The second parallel is that legality and the norms of international law were ignored in both cases. In Indochina, the U.S. overthrew the Geneva accords and set up a puppet regime, pretending that it was an independent state. In Bosnia, the constitutions of Yugoslavia and of Bosnia-Herezegovina and international law were simply ignored. The United States and Germany were able to do what they did not because they had legally acceptable reasons for doing it, but because of their overwhelming power. The third parallel is that the creation of this state left Bosnia, as Vietnam before it, profoundly divided and therefore weak. In Bosnia, there was the immediate additional consequence that the new state had control over no more than 20 per cent of "its" territory. Bosnia, in other words, did not really have the attributes of a legitimate state. And it was not accidental that the foreign pressures to recognize this state, for reasons which had nothing to do with the welfare of the population of Bosnia, brought about a civil war. The Impasse The weakness of the Bosnian state -- and all the consequences which flow from it -- constitutes the Achilles heel of U.S. policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina For in 1994, the situation in Bosnia was very much like that in Vietnam in 1961. In 196l, General Maxwell Taylor was dispatched to Vietnam to determine whether a significant number of "advisers" should be sent there. Taylor was sent to Saigon, because things were not going as planned, and President Kennedy had to decide what to do. Taylor recommended an expanded U.S. commitment in Vietnam. And, as we know, despite the constant increases in U.S. aid, and the eventual dispatch of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, the South Vietnamese state did not survive. In early 1994, after two years of war in Bosnia, the West again found itself at an impasse. The U.S., Germany and, much less enthusiastically, other Western powers, had been supporting the Izetbegovic government and its claim to exercise sovereignty over the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, owing to the refusal of the U.S. to provide troops in Bosnia, [29] and owing to divisions within NATO itself about what the organization should do in Bosnia, the West had not been able to defeat the Serbs and to impose a settlement favorable to the Muslim-Croat government. The Izetbegovic government was too weak to win the war itself. The U.S. and Germany, in particular, were therefore in a dilemma. They supported the Bosnian government. But the limits to their freedom of action meant that they could do little to help it subdue the Serbs. The United States, therefore, began to seek the same solution which it had seized upon in the late 1960s in Indochina. It began to "Vietnamize" the war in Bosnia. That is, it began an effort to create a much larger and more effective client (Bosnian Muslim) army which could make up for the lack of Western troops with a mandate to impose a settle-ment satisfactory to the Bosnian government. And it began to carry out this "Vietnamization" secretly. The Serbs are well-equipped militarily and very strong. But their pool of military-age personnel is limited. The Izetbegovic government, on the other hand, has a large manpower pool, but lacks adequate organization, training, heavy arms, intelligence and communications. [30] So the U.S. began secretly helping the Izetbegovic government to expand, re-train and re-arms its forces, in the hope that they would be able to deal a fatal blow to the Serbs, or a least be able to force them to accept a "deal" such as the one proposed by the Western contact group. The question today is whether this strategy will work in Bosnia. There are some important differences between the situation in Vietnam in the early 1960s and the situation in Bosnia in the early 1992. In Bosnia, for instance, the Serbs are a minority, although most Croats would not live in a unitary state governed by the party of Mr. Izetbegovic. [31] In Vietnam, the opponents of the government of South Vietnam were a large majority. Nonetheless, as we shall see, there are very good reasons for believing that the strategy adopted to support a unitary state governed by the Muslim minority will fail, and fail disastrously. The Vietnamization of the War in Bosnia In the mid-1950s, the United States created an artificial state in Vietnam in furtherance of its grand scheme of containing communism. That state, however, was corrupt and ineffectual. And it faced a widespread rebellion which grew in intensity from the end of the 1950s. By 1960, despite considerable American economic, political and military support, the rebellion was serious enough to threaten the stability of the state. At that point the United States had only three options. It could abandon Saigon. It could send significant numbers of Americans troops. Or it could try to build a much more coherent and powerful "South Vietnamese" army. There was never any question of abandoning the Saigon regime at that stage. The real choices were between sending large numbers of troops, the classic imperial response, and trying to build a real "South Vietnamese" army which could defeat the Viet Minh insurrection. The idea of sending troops overseas, especially to fight in such a war, was extremely unpopular. The United States had just fought a war in Korea and gained very little by it. By seeking to occupy the north of the country, the U.S. had precipitated China's entry into the war. U.S. forces had been driven south. A stalemate then developed which led to the seemingly permanent division of Korea. But even during that long stalemate, which lasted nearly three years, United States forces sustained significant losses. The war in Korea came to be seen as costly and pointless. No American government could risk repeating that experience in the beginning of the 1960s. The only possible option for the United States in Vietnam in the early 1960s was to try to provide Saigon with economic support and to build up its military. The United States would provide logistical support and training to the "South Vietnamese" military . It would also provide the advisers needed to do the job. Saigon would fight the second American war in Asia for the United States. The dead would be young Vietnamese men and women and not Americans. Time would reveal the flaws in the theory. One of them was that, as the effort to create a viable army for Saigon expanded, more and more American advisers had to be sent to Vietnam. These advisers then became caught in the jaws of the war. There is a danger that the United States can fall into the same trap in the Balkans today. After the war in Indochina, the U.S. military became very shy of foreign involve-ments. They concluded that the U.S. armed forces should not again be drawn into a protracted and unpopular war. This point was made clearly and repeatedly by Gen. Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the debates about U.S. policy toward Bosnia in 1993 and 1994. Neither the U.S. Congress nor the U.S. military wanted to send American troops into Bosnia to help it. The NATO powers were deeply divided over what should be done in Bosnia. Sending arms openly would have contravened the U.N. arms embargo. And Germany could not risk the reaction of its European partners if it intervened itself.. And yet the U.S. and its close allies had to continue to insist that Bosnia was a "state". The existence of such a state was a key to the realization of their strategy for creating a new Balkan order. It must have seemed to U.S. officials that there was an obvious way out of this impasse. The solution, a tried and trusted one used many times in the postwar period, was for the U.S. to do secretly what it could not do openly. The involvement of U.S. forces in the Indochina war was for many years unknown to the American public. Yet both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations, while providing training and aid to Saigon, were waging their own "secret war" against North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front at the same time.. The Clinton administration appears to have made the same decision in Bosnia. It is not known when the Clinton administration made the decision to begin significant covert military assistance to the Izetbegovic regime. But there is every indication that the decision was made sometime in the latter half of 1993, possibly even at the time of the major National Security Council review of U.S. policy in the region earlier in the year. [32] There were reports from 1993 that the U.S. was helping to provide arms to the Bosnian regime. There were even reports of the presence of U.S. Special Forces in the region and in Bosnia. [33} However, the first reliable reports of substantial U.S. military assistance to Bosnia came to light in early 1994. At that time, French officials stated that the U.S. was secretly providing arms to the Izetbegovic regime. These arms, they stated, were Communist-bloc arms from U.S. government stocks which were being shipped into Bosnia from Turkey by air. [34] French officials stated clearly that this was a major U.S. covert operation designed to circumvent the U.N. arms embargo against Bosnia. This was at a time when the German government was also secretly aiding the shipment of arms from stocks of the former GDR. Germans arms were being shipped by sea from Rostock to Durres in Albania and then being sent on into Bosnia. ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
