March 11, 2006

In September 2001, in an article on the «Democratic Opposition» in Yugoslavia I asked what was the fundamental source of conflict, civil war and ethnic antagonisms first in Bosnia then in Kosovo. The cries in unison from Washington, Berlin and Paris and backed by the military might of NATO was that it was the «ethnic cleanser» Slobodan Milosevic. Jumping on this bandwagon was the liberal or pseudo left like Jeremy Scahill's report for Democracy Now blaming equally the «dictator» Milosevic and the NATO bombing. One can add to the list The Brecht Forum, The Vietnam Vets Against the War, assorted neo-marxists and the new Left.

The liberal-Left, lacking a class analysis, accepted the bourgeois media's distortions and lies without asking who benefits.  They also failed to ask why western imperialism provided the mercenaries, labeled freedom fighters with  money, Intelligence and weapons from the C.I.A.  In addition our good guys were provided radio frequencies of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe in order to bring "democratization to Yugoslavia,"   Or we might ask why Serbia lifted Kosovo's autonomy since that would lead to the fact that the so called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was funded to destabilize Yugoslavia and protect the corporate mining interests in the Trepca mining complex.   That is why British, Danish and French troops were sent in to secure the 5 billion dollar profit making oil, lead and zinc operations. 

The liberal-Left was also taken in hook, line and sinker regarding the alleged genocide by Serbs in Srebrenica in 1995 including the fake photographs of alleged atrocities provided by the war criminals Clinton and Albright.  The orchestrated lies were put under the umbrella of a humanitarian concern.  Similar lies were put out by a PBS "documentary" about mass graves found in the town of Vinnitsa in the Ukraine in 1942 attributed to Stalin.    Later, Reuters and German prisoners of war confirmed that they were grave sites the Nazis used for their victims.

Who was this Milosevic and what were his alleged crimes?   He was a Communist turned nationalist politician who told the imperialists that they could not stations their troops on Yugoslav soil in order to build a pipeline going through the Balkans to the oil rich Caspian Sea.   This was a no-no for imperialism and he had to be "neutralized."  Milosevic was an obstacle in that he not only refused to play the imperialist game of privatization,  and selling the resources of the country to the Transnationals as did Russia.   He committed the ultimate sin of safeguarding portions of what remained of the socialist/collective base of the Yugoslav economy. 

The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was the result of the imperialist governments attempt to obtain a client state in the Balkans and that's why Bush gave a billion dollars to the "opposition to kidnap Milosevic in order to stand trial in the Hague. The pseudo-Left succumbed to an anti-communist scenario in Left disguise.