------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Feb. 13, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
YUGOSLAVIA: WASHINGTON'S HSITORY OF "REGIME CHANGE" By John Catalinotto Iraq is not the first country where Washington has demanded "regime change." A collection of related articles in the Jan. 27 Christian Science Monitor compared U.S. threats of "regime change" by warfare in Iraq with its successful overthrows of governments in Guatemala, Chile, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Grenada, and some less successful attempts, as in Cuba. To accomplish its goals, Washington has used economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, trade embargoes and support for local forces trying to overthrow the targeted governments. It has also used bombing and military invasion. The Monitor articles mention another brutal regime change the United States carried out, in Yugoslavia. What is significant is that this establishment newspaper is now exposing some of the lies it and other media told about Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2000 to demonize the Yugoslav government and its president, Slobodan Milosevic. In 1999, only a few tens of thousands of people in this country, about half of them Serbian immigrants and their families, actively protested the Pentagon's brutal bombing of the Balkans. Today, protesters in the hundreds of thousands in the United States, and millions more across the world, are actively demonstrating, signing petitions, writing letters and marching in the streets in an attempt to stop a murderous U.S. aggression against Iraq before it begins. Probably few are sympathetic to or supporters of the Iraqi government. But they know that the Bush administration's plan to invade Iraq has nothing to do with improving the Iraqi government and everything to do with oil profits and geo-strategic power. In 1999, however, the media-industry propaganda machine managed to mislead a large section of progressive public opinion into believing that the Clinton administration's war in the Balkans had to do with ending dictatorship and stopping genocide against some of the non- Serbian peoples of Yugoslavia. It was successful in hiding the real goal of the United States and Western European big powers:turning all of Eastern Europe back into a colony of Western imperialism. At that time, the European imperialists supported the U.S. war. The Monitor articles give an opportunity to re-examine that period and to reinforce resistance to future propaganda offensives. ADMITS MILOSEVIC NO DICTATOR Four years ago, as the countdown for war against Yugoslavia was on, the corporate media in the United States and Western Europe depicted Serbs as beasts and Milosevic as a Hitler. Now, the Monitor admits that far from being a brutal dictator, "Milosevic never resorted to dictatorial repression of his political opponents at home. "Indeed, opposition parties ran all the country's major towns and cities after municipal elections in December 1996; independent radio and TV stations managed to broadcast; opposition-leaning dailies and weeklies published." The Monitor doesn't add a relevant point here. After a U.S.-backed coup overthrew Milosevic in October 2000, the so-called Democratic Opposition of Serbia, which took over, turned out to be not so democratic. It took over the media that had been favorable toward the then-ruling Socialist Party of Serbia and its allies, while keeping control of all the non- government media. These had been described in the West as an "alternative" media, but in reality were funded by U.S. and Western European imperialism. The biggest source of funds was billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute. This group opened up shop in Belgrade in 1991, "and over the next nine years distributed more than $100 million. ... The money bought newsprint for independent papers, kept publishing houses alive, and funded the growth of [anti-Milosevic radio station] B-92 as it set up local stations in towns controlled by the opposition." The U.S. Congress voted additional funds. U.S. agents pushed the 18 political parties in the DOS to unite for the election. As the Monitor put it, "U.S. diplomats knocked their heads together until they formed a cohesive and united coalition" that was a "credible alternative." They picked Vojoslav Kostunica to run against Milosevic because he was "reputed to be honest, and sufficiently nationalistic to broaden the opposition's appeal." It took nine years of subversion and economic sanctions--and three months of bombing that targeted Yugoslavia's economic infrastructure-- before the U.S. succeeded in "regime change." During the first six of those nine years Western European--especially German--and U.S. imperialism were undermining and tearing apart Yugoslavia by fostering the breakaway of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia, leading to civil war. The Monitor now admits that the overthrow of Milosevic in October 2000 "brought to fruition a three-year campaign by the U.S. and other Western governments to dislodge the Yugoslav leader by strangling his country's economy with sanctions and rocking it with bombs during the Kosovo war." This is an admission that the effort to bring down the Yugoslav government began at the latest in 1997, before the struggle in Kosovo that was allegedly the reason for U.S. intervention. Since the overthrow, two-thirds of Yugoslavs have sunk below the poverty level. The suicide rate among elderly people has reached new heights. Health care has become unaffordable for most. And so few people voted in Serbia's presidential election that it was voided twice last fall. Kostunica became virtually without power after outright Western puppets like Serbian Premier Zoran Djindjic took over. ROLE OF MILOSEVIC Some of the recent media attacks on Workers World Party, centering on its participation in the anti-war movement, charge WWP with being followers of Milosevic. Yet any serious researcher could find WWP articles in the early 1990s that raised criticisms of the Milosevic leadership in Yugoslavia from a socialist perspective. Once U.S. imperialism and its NATO partners--who are also rivals-- targeted Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav leadership resisted having their country turned into a colony, WWP supported Yugoslavia against NATO. WWP would defend any government's resistance to being colonized by the imperialists. This is in the best internationalist traditions of the left, which supported the feudal emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, when he led the resistance to an invasion by the Italian imperialist government in the 1930s. Since Milosevic was captured in 2001 and kidnapped to The Hague to stand "trial" in a NATO court for alleged war crimes, he has conducted a political defense, with very little outside support, that has skillfully bared the intrigues of the imperialists to dismember his country. Washington meant the farce in The Hague to be a show trial, but the former Yugoslav president has effectively turned it into an exposure of U.S./NATO war crimes against Yugoslavia. That's why it gets so little media coverage here--and why Milosevic has earned the respect of working-class activists worldwide. The writer is co-editor of a book about the 1999 war on Yugoslavia entitled "Hidden Agenda: the U.S.-NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia," published by the International Action Center in 2002. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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