December, 1999 - Socialist Action

International alliances against NATO

1st December 1999 Socialist Action 0

First published: December 1999

When, on 24 March 1999, NATO launched its biggest bombing campaign in Europe since the Second World War, it expected a rapid and complete victory over Yugoslavia – a state of little more than 10 million people. Instead the people of Yugoslavia held out for 11 weeks of 24-hour bombing and the majority of the world’s population opposed NATO’s aggression. As a result, the United States had to retreat from some of its original objectives and hundreds of millions of people throughout the world were alerted to the threat they face from an imperialist alliance committed to offensive military action whenever it wishes over a vast area of the globe.

Yugoslavia – alliances to fight NATO’s new age of imperialism

1st December 1999 Socialist Action 0

First published: December 1999

For anyone who thought NATO was serious about a ‘humanitarian’ war, the facts are now clear. NATO claims to have killed 5,000 Serb troops in Kosovo. In addition more than 1,000 civilians have been massacred by NATO, and thousands of others wounded and maimed. The combined total is nearly 20 times more than the 340 deaths of which Slobodan Milosevic has been accused by the war crimes tribunal. In addition, NATO will be responsible for the thousands of other deaths of the young, the sick and the old which will result from its destruction of the civilian infrastructure of an entire country.

NATO’s plan for Kosovo is a colonial dictatorship. Its model is Bosnia, where the United States and European Union have imposed a colonial administration in which their appointed ‘High Representative’ can and does depose elected leaders at will, has his own army and where the head of the central bank is appointed by the IMF. So much for the idea that NATO bombing had anything to do with self-determination for anyone.

If the people of Yugoslavia continue to refuse to submit to Washington, NATO has already made clear that the economic blockade will continue to amid plans to further break up the country.

NATO’s goals in Yugoslavia

1st December 1999 Socialist Action 0

First published: December 1999

NATO’s goals towards Yugoslavia are well established. Through the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Yugoslavia had enjoyed rapid economic growth, industrialisation and relative political stability on the basis of three pillars. First, its planned economy gave it the possibility of a relatively independent path of economic development, not subordinated to more powerful outside imperialist powers. Second, its federal constitution, together with economic planning, united the great majority of its different peoples on the basis of almost unprecedented constitutional respect for the national rights and redistribution of economic resources from the richest to the poorest parts of the country. Third, its international position, as a non-capitalist state outside the Warsaw Pact at the height of the Cold War, allowed it to balance between east and west, being courted by both, and enjoying access to western financial credits.

10 years after 1989

1st December 1999 Socialist Action 0

First published: December 1999

Ten years after 1989, the consequences of the re-introduction of capitalism into Eastern Europe are clear and acknowledged even by some of the international agencies which sponsored the process.

The World Bank reports in its 1999 World Development Indicators: ‘In 1989 about 14 million people in the transition economies were living under a poverty line of $4 a day. By the mid-1990s that number was about 147 million, one person in three. The distribution of income in the communist period was relatively egalitarian, primarily because of a relatively flat wage distribution, but also because of the virtual absence of income from property and the redistribution of income through social transfers… Today, some eight years later, income distribution has worsened sharply, particularly in the former Soviet Union… the stress is showing in the declining or stagnating life expectancy and sharply worsening adult mortality. Today, for example, the probability that a 15-year-old Ukrainian male will survive until his sixtieth birthday is a mere 65 per cent, down from 72 per cent in 1980. The Europe and Central Asia region is the only part of the developing world with rising adult mortality rates. Even Sub-Saharan Africa, with its AIDS epidemic, is seeing a reduction in adult mortality.’

After the bombing of Yugoslavia – the US prepares to confront China

1st December 1999 Socialist Action 0

First published: Dec 1999

The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia set a precedent for unilateral military action by the United States and its allies outside of any framework of international law – making clear that such wars would not be subject to vetoes by China or Russia within the United Nations Security Council. This was not an ‘accident’ necessitated by the urgency for humanitarian intervention, as NATO claimed. The bombing was meticulously planned many months in advance. The destruction of the post-World War Two international political order was rather a central goal of the bombing and the way in which it was launched.