Mass protests continue in Serbia
Since December, students from 65 of the country’s 80 faculties have been on strike. Schools are also on strike, and at major demonstrations, farmers have blocked main roads with dozens of tractors.
•Markus Salzmann
The 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia
Beginning in April 1999, the major imperialist powers launched an unprecedented multilateral war against Serbia. NATO, led by the United States but including forces from Britain, Germany, France, Italy and other allied countries, rained bombs down on the tiny country, the largest fragment of the former Yugoslavia.
The nominal pretext for the war was the conflict in Kosovo, a Serbian province with a predominately Albanian population. A separatist movement, closely linked to gangsters and drug smugglers, received backing from the US and Germany and grandiosely and misleadingly called itself the “Kosovo Liberation Army.”
The middle-class “left” groups, which had opposed imperialist bullying of small countries during the war in Vietnam, the US attacks on Cuba and Nicaragua, and the French colonial war in Algeria, rallied to the side of Washington, London and Berlin during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, first backing US intervention on the side of the Bosnian Muslims, then defending the bombing of Serbia.
The World Socialist Web Site maintained a strong and principled opposition to the US-NATO bombing of Serbia, which killed thousands of innocent civilians and decimated much of the country’s infrastructure.
As the WSWS explained, the devastating bombing campaign had nothing to do with preventing a “humanitarian disaster,” as government and military officials cynically claimed, but was the product of an increasingly bellicose US foreign policy. Washington saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to create a “unipolar” world order, with the United States as the unchallenged hegemon.
The analysis presented by the WSWS cut through the pretense of concern for the fate of the Albanian Kosovars and revealed the real reasons for the war, most notably in a May 24 statement entitled “Why is NATO at war with Yugoslavia? World power, oil and gold,” which outlined the world-historical context of the bombing campaign.
We warned that with the outbreak of the first armed conflict within Europe since World War II, escalating antagonisms among rival powers threatened to extend the war well beyond the boundaries of the former Yugoslavia. It was the precursor to far wider and more dangerous military adventures.
The WSWS also analyzed the origins of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the economic and social crisis of the late 1980s, which led to the demise of the Stalinist-ruled regimes throughout Eastern Europe. In the late 1980s, millions of Yugoslav workers were laid off as state firms were shut down and state services slashed. The ex-Stalinist leaders of the various Yugoslav republics turned to chauvinist rhetoric in an attempt to divert widespread anger and social misery away from revolutionary channels.
This process underlay the rise of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Stalinist who came to power as the advocate of Serbian nationalism. While the media propaganda in Europe and the United States presented Milosevic as a new Hitler, he was in reality a former favorite of Washington, which backed him because he was a proponent of the capitalist market.
In “After the Slaughter: Political Lessons of the Balkan War,” published June 14, after Serbia’s surrender, David North noted that a vast historical retrogression was underway: “The dismantling of the old colonial empires during the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s appears more and more, in light of contemporary events, to have been only a temporary episode in the history of imperialism.”
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Returning to the scene of the crime
Ex-US President Clinton visits Kosovo to celebrate 20th anniversary of NATO bombardment of Serbia
The imperialist onslaught against Yugoslavia was launched by the Clinton administration under the hypocritical banner of “human rights.”
•Jordan Shilton
Twenty years since the US bombing of Yugoslavia
The imperialist crime was launched by the Clinton administration—with the backing of the pseudo-left—under the hypocritical banner of “human rights.”
•Bill Van Auken
Ex-German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and international law
Gerhard Schröder described Putin’s actions in Ukraine as a violation of international law, but the former German chancellor also accepted that he had been in breach of international law in Yugoslavia.
•Johannes Stern
Kosovo: Evidence of KLA torture and murders revealed by BBC
More revelations have emerged about tortures and murders carried out by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) during the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999 and the occupation that followed.
•Paul Mitchell
After the slaughter: political lessons of the Balkan War
The capitulation of Serbia to the US-NATO onslaught brings to an end the last major strategic experience of the 20th century. Its bloody conclusion endows the century with a certain tragic symmetry. It began with the suppression of the anti-colonial uprising of the Chinese Boxers. The century closes with a war that completes the reduction of the Balkans to the status of a neo-colonial protectorate of the major imperialist powers.
•David North
Dutch leaders involved in NATO bombing of Yugoslavia testify at The Hague
The first Western leaders involved in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 have appeared before The Hague District Court in Holland. This is the first time since the Second World War that Western politicians have testified in a national court about their alleged crimes against humanity.
•Paul Mitchell
Long-term environmental damage due to NATO bombing in Yugoslavia
The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 breached international humanitarian law and caused long-term environmental damage, a report by the American based research group, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), has found.
•Tony Robson
Milosevic and Sharon: when is a war criminal not a war criminal?
In the aftermath of the Jenin massacre, some questions beg to be asked. One obvious query should, by rights, be posed by every major newspaper in the United States and Europe: Why is Slobodan Milosevic on trial, but not Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon?
•Chris Marsden
Behind the Milosevic trial: the US, Europe and the Balkan catastrophe
Whatever one’s opinion of formerYugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic—the World Socialist Web Site is decidedly not among the defenders of this former Stalinist apparatchik turned Serb nationalist and advocate of capitalist restoration—the events surrounding his capture and transfer to The Hague make a mockery of Western governments’ claims to be defending democratic rights and the rule of law in the Balkans.
•Chris Marsden, Barry Grey
"It Began With a Lie": German TV report refutes government propaganda in Balkan War
Germany's Social Democratic (SPD)-Green party coalition government employed fabrications and manipulated facts to overcome popular opposition to the participation of the German armed forces in NATO's war against Yugoslavia two years ago. A German TV report by journalists Jo Angerer and Mathias Werth entitled “It Began With a Lie” provides proof of this.
•Dietmar Henning
What the British Foreign Affairs Select Committee on Kosovo reported
The following article summarises some of the main findings contained in the report on NATO's war against Yugoslavia issued last week by the British parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee. ( See accompanying article: “British parliamentary committee admits NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was illegal”).
•Julie Hyland
British parliamentary committee admits NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was illegal
Last week the British parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FSC), a body with representatives from the major parties in Parliament, issued a 315-paragraph report on the lessons of NATO's war against Yugoslavia. The report makes the admission that the NATO bombardment was illegal under international law. It nevertheless argues that the war was justified on “humanitarian” grounds. (See accompanying article: “What the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on Kosovo reported”).
•Julie Hyland
NATO admits to use of radioactive munitions in Yugoslavia
NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson has finally provided limited details of the Alliance's use of depleted uranium (DU) ammunition during its war against Serbia last year. Robertson disclosed the information in a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan last month—four months after it was first requested.
•Julie Hyland
Killings of Kosovans continue under NATO occupation at pre-war rate
The International Crisis Group (ICG), a private strategy organisation chaired by former United States Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, reported last week that approximately the same number of Kosovan civilians were being killed every week under NATO's military occupation as in the months preceding the March 1999 onset of the US-NATO war against Serbia.
•Chris Marsden
Investigations belie NATO claims of "ethnic genocide"in Kosovo
Substantial evidence has emerged refuting the central justification for NATO's war against Serbia—the claim that the Milosevic regime was conducting "ethnic genocide" against Albanians in Kosovo.
•Chris Marsden, Barry Grey
East Timor and Kosovo: Indonesian atrocities expose US hypocrisy on “human rights”
Only a few months ago the US government and the American media were engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to portray the war against Serbia as a crusade for human rights. The American and international public were bombarded with daily reports of mass murder, rape and forced expulsions of Albanian Kosovars by Serbian forces, and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was routinely compared to Hitler.
•Barry Grey
Protectorate Kosovo: What NATO's war and occupation have wrought
A “civil” and “democratic” society was to be established in Kosovo—such was the official rationale for the transformation of the province into a protectorate of the Great Powers. Three months after the intervention of NATO troops, the divisions in this society are emerging ever more clearly, and it would be hard to imagine a more repellant scenario.
•Peter Schwarz
Serbs and Roma flee KLA terror in Kosovo
Propaganda claims that the US-NATO war against Yugoslavia was conducted in a humanitarian effort to halt “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo lie in tatters as Serbs and Roma (gypsies) continue to flee the province to escape harassment, intimidation, beatings and murder at the hands of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
•Michael Conachy
The Austrian writer Peter Handke, European public opinion, and the war in Yugoslavia
Although many German-speaking artists took cover during the war in Kosovo, the Austrian writer Peter Handke stood out by sharply criticising NATO's actions from the very beginning as criminal.
•Bernd Reinhardt