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A NEW INTERNATIONALISM?

On Friday 30th July those "saviours" of the Balkans,Tony Blair and Bill Clint on , arrived in Sarajevo to hold a press conference at the Zetra Olympic stadium, wherein they revealed their agenda for the "reconstruction" of the kegion.Anyone still enamoured of the notion that NATO bombarded the people of Yugoslavia out of humanitarian concerns for the Kosovar Albanians will have found little rational cause to harbour such delusions after the Bill and Tony show laid out their stalls.The NATO agenda for the Balkans,then;"Balkan countries that build democracy and market economies will be embraced by Europe and NATO-but Serbia will stay in the cold until it gets rid of Slobodan Milosevic." (qu lan Black- " Summi t Warning To Serbs" The Guardian 31/6/99.)

NATO 's commitment to a humanitarian agenda always rang hollow.Tony Blair talked of a "new internationalism where the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated."

NATO,meanwhile, was warned in advance that air strikes would lead to massive displacement of refugees ,and proceeded with a course of action which left 670,000 Kosovans in Albania and Macedonia,70,000 in Montenegro and 75,000 outside the region. When the KLA tried to reach refugees displaced within Kosovo NATO refused it any air cover.When Serb gun emplacements shelled the refugees it stood back and watched.0ne could be forgiven for thinking that,far from being an unfortunate consequence of facing down Serb aggression,the mass movement of refugees was a consequence NATO actively embraced .And if,as is now admitted,the agenda was only ever the securing of market economies in the region,and if the prospect of a drawn out and bloody civil war in Kosovo was a clear obstacle to such aims, then indeed it makes sense to engender such displacement;the end result-the ariel suppression of Mi los evi c , and the weakening of the KLA by i) the dispersal of its communities of support and 2) its disarmament in the face of such dispersal and the filling of the subsequent vacuum of control by K-For troops- facilitating the restoration of stability on the US and Europe 's terms in a way which the other option-leaving the contending forces to seek their own resolution-could not ,in the short term,allow.It is clear enough that the Kosovar Albanians elicited little "moral concern" in Washington or Whitehall when yugoslav tanks rolled in to deny them the taste of democracy in 1989.In February 1998 the US condemned the KLA as "without any question a terrorist group." The BBC has su Jgested, rightly, that this statement gave Milosevic the green light to step up his ethnic cleansing programme in the region. At the EU General Affairs Council Meeting on 8 December 1998,with Milosevic's brutality a matter of public record,the GAC expressed its concern at the "intensification of military action" but pinned the blame on "increased activity by the RZIA.". One cannot but be reminded of the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq, when US Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein that the US had "no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait." Having set the trap, all the NATO forces had to do was wait for Milosevic to blunder in. At the Rambouillet talks, the sole obstacle to a settlement was Yugoslavia's refusal to sign up to a deal which was to tie them to a process whereby(to quote the New York Times) "a purely NATO force was to be given full permission to go any where it wanted in Yugoslavia,immune from any legal process." On March 23rrejecting the Rambouillet deal ,the Serbian National Assembly called on the OSCE and UN to facilitate a peaceful diplomatic settlement (in terms not dissimilar to those presented by NATO subsequently as a "ViCtoTyá")

Simply, then,Washington gave Milosevic the go-ahead to suppress the KLA, then used his actions as a basis to threaten war in the region. When the Serbs indicated their willingness to negotiate,albeit under duress, they were faced with an ultimatum that abused their national sovereignty to such degree that it was clear to all parties that they could not accept it.War,in effect, was presented by NATO as a fait accompli, in the clear knowledge that such conflict would lead directly to the displacement and murder of the Kosovar Albanian community.Not then,quite the picture the media has tried to sell us;"Milosevic's refusal to accept ...or even discuss an international peace keeping plan was what started NATO bombing on March 24",as the New York Times tries to pass it.

The "war" with Serbia was the end game of a strategy with one clear aim-the entrenchment of European and US capital in the Balkans.As Doug Henwood has observed "It's no mere detail that Yugoslavia came under the tutelage of the IMF in the early 1950s,and the country borrowed heavily and disastrously.Over the decades,the IMF promoted decentralisation,competitionrand a weakening of development policies that favoured poorer regions,and the promotion of market principles.In the 1970sImar ket liberalisation and nationalism went hand in hand ; for example, Croatian nationalists demanded to keep their foreign exchange earnings." (qu Left Business Observer April 1999). Peter Gowan, one of the few left academics to consistently document the means by which the American government and business elites have attempted to entrench the US as the power that controls the major economic and political outcomes across the globe ( and whose book The Global Gamble (Verse 1999) is one of the most comprehensive investigations of the aims and methods of American expansion available) r comments that " the Western powers r by their deliberate acts of commission and omission,played a central role in creating the conditions in which barbaric acts were bound to flourish. "(New Left Review 234). Gowan contends that the logic behind the war ,far from humanitarian,lay entirely with the strategic US European interests of the NATO alliance."Success would decisively consolidate US leadership in Europe.Success outside the framework of UN Security Council permission would ensure no collective security in Europe by the UN back door of a Russian veto.And it would seal the unity of the alliance against a background where the launch of the Euro-an event potentially of global political significance-could pull it apart." (ibid).

So;thousands dead,hundreds of thousands displaced,and the infrastructure of Kosovo and Yugoslavia destroyed .What, thoug the "cause" of multi-ethnic democracy' NATO has established a Kosovan protectorate on the same basis as that established in Bosnia under the Dayton agreement.The Kosovo Accord,like Dayto"ris only binding on the Balkan parties to it,not on the international organisations which have ap~ointed themselves to bring "democracy" to the region.The Dayton A~Jreement was supposed to allow for a year of supervised transition.In 1997,the transitional international administration prolonged its own juri sdiction indefinitelyáThe Chief of the Implementation Mission (or High Representative under Dayton) will oversee implementation of the Accord.The High Representative has the authority to impose economic sanctions at local or regional level on bodies which do not comply with his recommendatj.ons-He has the power to curtail or suspend any media network or programme which can be held to contravene "either the spirit or the letter of Dayton."He can impose restrictions on travel abroad for obstructive Bosnian representatives. As the Bosnian High Representative himself defines it "if you read Dayton carefully.ááit gives me the possibility to interpret my own authorities and powers." David Chandler notes that "Far from facilitating autonomyrthe transformation of the Dayton mandates has led to the creation of a US run international protectorate in Bosnia . President Cli nt on r the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have,in practice,established the framework of international engagement in the Bosnian state and the UN r OSCE, EU r World Bank, IMF and other international bodies have run their own empire building projects within this. Compar ed with the vast international bureaucratic-military machine of around 50,000 international troops and administrators I the elected institutions have little capacity for policy making or im~lementation." (New Left Review 235.) As for Bosniarso too r under the terms of the Accord,for Kosovo.

In the run up to East Timer 's ballot on independence from Indonesia, over 25% of the population has been displaced by pro Indonesian militias.Britain meanwhile has,since May 1997,approved 91 arms licences to Indonesia. Between 1990 to 1994 over 1 million Kurds were displaced by Turkish repression. Turkey is the single biggest importer of US military hardware r and is the world's largest arms purchaser.So much,then r for that II new i nter na t i onal i sm where the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated. " Still,as Bill Clinton put it, on 23rd Marchr "If this dome st i c policy is going to work r we have to be free to pursue it.And if we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world,Europe has got to be a key.And if we want people to share our burdens of leadership with all the problems that will inevitably crop up,Europe needs to be our partner.Now r that ' s what this Kosovo thing is all about ... it' s about our values." (qu.Left Business Observer April 1999).