Why are we in the Balkans?

Joseph Gerson is Program Coordinator for AFSC's New England Regional Office.

Clinton's bombing campaign has transformed a regional crisis into war for US and NATO "credibility" that has the potential of escalating into a regional war and a US-Russian nuclear confrontation. After repeatedly threatening the Milosevic government with NATO bombing unless it accepted US terms at Rambouillet, Secretary of State Albright, Vice President Gore, and others in the Clinton Administration insisted that they had to follow through on their threats if US and NATO were to remain the dominant forces in 21st century Europe. With the failure of the bombing campaign and Yugoslavia's brutal purging of Kosovar Albanians, the US and its allies are now threatening bombing without end, a ground war, and a decades long military occupation to preserve NATO's "credibility." They fear dominoes falling across Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Iraq, and oil-rich Caspian Sea nations.

Those doing quick studies of Balkan history are learning that many historic and inter-connected struggles are at work in this war. The abuses and legacies of six centuries of Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Nazi German conquests continue to take their tolls. Turks and Nazis used ethnic Albanians to dominate and rule Serbs. The Hapsburgs and Tito used Serbs to dominate ethnic Albanians. Postmodern economic globalism is also a force. After Yugoslavia borrowed heavily from the IMF and other international financial institutions in the 1970s and "80s, the IMF imposed structural adjustments on it. These resulted in widespread economic insecurities which, as in the past, proved to be fertile ground for nationalists in Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Kosovo. In Kosovo, the Albanian ethnic majority, understandably seeking to end decades of Serb domination, moved to gain full control over the province.

Would that the West had supported the demands for autonomy and the parallel governing structures created in the late 1980s by the nonviolent movement led by Ibrahim Rugova. Instead, the US marginalized this movement at both Dayton and Rambouillet and helped to create and launch the Kosovo Liberation Army which, like the Milosevic government, resorted to terrorism and human rights abuses.

Rarely are Balkan wars exclusively local, and appearances often deceive. Building on a dynamic that began with Chancellor Willy Brandt's "Ostpolitic," the US and Germany have been working to extend NATO and globalized "free-market" capitalism further east. Milosevic's Yugoslavia has been seen as an obstacle compounding Russian support for the corrupt and eastern-oriented regimes in Rumania and Bulgaria. Thus, to weaken or remove the Yugoslav obstacle to NATO and "free market" expansion, Germany and the US, in violation of international law, encouraged Slovenia and Croatian secession-including Croatian ethnic purging of Serbs.

It should also be remembered that even though the US has collaborated with Bonn and Berlin, an unstated purpose of the US-dominated NATO alliance since its founding continues to be containing Germany. NATO is the essential foundation of US dominance of western and central Europe.

Other forces are also at work. Russia is the traditional Pan-Slavic defender of Eastern Orthodox Serbs. Despite Russian dependence on Western loans and technologies, NATO's expansion and Russia's wounded super power identity are spurring powerful nationalist sectors of the Russian military and public to demand Russian intervention in the Balkan war. There is the matter of oil, and "axiom #1" of US foreign policy: never to allow its enemies or allies to gain independent access to Middle East oil-"the jugular vein of Western capitalism." In the tradition of WW I, should the war spread to Macedonia, Greece and Turkey are likely to intervene on opposing sides, destablizing and fracturing the northern and eastern flanks of the oil-rich Middle East and Caspian Sea regions. Finally, the centuries-old struggles between "Catholicism," "Eastern Orthodoxy," and "Islam" in the Balkans should not be underestimated.

The bombing campaign was initially advertised and continues to be supported, as a "humanitarian intervention" to protect ethnic Albanian Kosovars. Instead it has, obviously, made the situation increasingly dangerous for all involved. Clinton was warned in advance. In January and February, CIA Director Tenant and the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned him that the bombings would multiply the numbers of Albanian Kosovars expelled. (Former UN refugee and military officials state that the US/NATO order for the withdrawal of 2000 OSCE observers in the days immediately preceding the bombing campaign made the scale of Milosevic's assault on Albanians possible.) The bombings also provided cover for Milosevic's forces to shut down independent sources of information throughout Yugoslavia and to repress democratic forces challenging his rule in Montenegro and Serbia itself.

The inconsistencies and contradictions of US policy are painfully obvious and lead to the question: why Kosovo and not Kurdistan, Palestine, or Indonesia. If it is incumbent on the US to intervene militarily to protect people from "humanitarian crises," why does the US continue to support and arm Turkey whose war against the Kurds has claimed tens of thousands of lives, Israel whose ethnic purging of Palestinians closely parallels that of Serbia in Kosovo, and oil-rich and strategically located Indonesia whose genocide and ethnic purging is not limited to the people of East Timor. The US/NATO doctrine of the right to intervene militarily to prevent "humanitarian crises" and in support of human rights could logically be extended to justify any nation that dared to attack the US for its continuing genocide of Native Americans, the repression of Puerto Rican nationalists, and the imprisonment of two million people-most of whom are people of color.

There is growing agreement that the US/NATO dimension of this Balkan war results from a yet-to-be-codified Clinton Doctrine. Michael Klare made an important contribution to our understanding of the Doctrine in his April 19 editorial in The Nation. Klare described three essential components to the Doctrine: 1) an increasingly pessimistic appraisal of the global security environment, 2) a vested US interest in maintaining international stability, and 3) the necessity for the US to maintain sufficient forces to conduct simultaneous military operations in widely separated areas of the world against multiple adversaries.

A segment from Clinton's 1997 speech to the UN General Assembly, which he has repeated on numerous occasions, helps us understand the simultaneous US bombing of Yugoslavia and Iraq: "The forces of global integration [read US-dominated global economy] are a great tide inexorably wearing away the established order of things...we must decide what will be left in...while isolating those who would challenge [us] from the outside." To this end, the US has unilaterally, without UN sanction or declaration of war, bombed Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan within a six month period.

In what the US "national security" elite understand as the "hegemonic moment" of the sole remaining superpower, Secretary of State Albright has joined Jessie Helms in circumventing and undermining the UN. The lead editorial article of the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs celebrates that "The United States and NATO-with little discussion and less fanfare-have effectively abandoned the old UN Charter rules that strictly limit international intervention in local conflicts...in favor of a vague new system that is much more tolerant of military intervention but has few hard and fast rules....Kosovo illustrates... America's new willingness to do what it thinks right-international law notwithstanding." As a classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, I can testify that we were taught that "International law is what those who have the power to impose it say it is."

While the US and NATO may be able to bomb Yugoslavia back into the pre-industrial age, along with Iraq, it is not at all clear that even with this punishment, Bill Clinton can "right" Slobodan Milosevic's wrongs. There is no NATO consensus to move from aerial bombardments into the quagmire of a ground war in Balkan mountains that witnessed some of the most intense fighting of WW II. And it is doubtful that the US' European allies will tolerate the aerial savaging of Yugoslavia as they have distant and Islamic Iraq.

For these reasons, pacifists and practitioners of "Realpolitic," including members of Congress from both parties, are calling on the US to do no further harm. We are doing our best to remind people that political conflicts are ultimately resolved through negotiations, not force, and we are demanding an end to the killing and a return to diplomacy, and to assist all people victimized by the war. The outlines of a negotiated settlement have been articulated, and they may involve redrawing the map, to allow largely homogenous Serbian, Croatian, Islamic Bosnian, and Albanian nations to emerge. Russia is seen widely as the nation best positioned to mediate the conflict, and peace proposals have also been proposed by Germany, Ukraine, the European Union, and Secretary General Kofi Anan.

We must make our voices heard: Stop the bombing. Stop the killing. Give peace a chance.