John Wight writes:
November
1991 is a month and year that will forever live in infamy when it comes to one
of the most grievous crimes committed under the rubric of Western foreign
policy.
It was on this month in this year that the break-up and destruction
of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was set in train.
The Arbitration
Commission of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia was a body set up in
1991 by the Council of Ministers of the European Economic Community (EEC).
It was set up in
response to the conflict that had broken out between separatists in Slovenia
and Croatia and the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) earlier that year.
It was
tasked with providing the peace conference with legal advice, and on 21
November, in the first of its legal opinions on the crisis, it determined that
Yugoslavia was “in the process of dissolution.”
Just four simple words, yet taken
together they constituted a blatant violation of the Yugoslav Constitution.
They are words which still today call to mind Rome adjudicating on the
destruction of Carthage.
From that moment on, Yugoslavia’s
fate was sealed.
Though it would take a protracted and bloody civil war before
it was finally consigned to history, ending a multiethnic state founded on the
principle of international brotherhood and solidarity that had emerged from the
ashes of a Central European continent devastated by the 1936-45 war against
Fascism.
The Western depiction of the
break-up of Yugoslavia would have us believe that it was down to the inherent
barbarity and cruelty of the Serbs, the largest ethnic group in the former
SFRY, in attempting to suppress the legitimate right of the other constituent
Yugoslav peoples – Slovenes, Croats, Kosovan Albanians, etc. – to
self-determination.
In this narrative, the Serbs – a people who numbered among
the most of any single ethnic group killed by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Second World War – were
summarily and disgracefully demonized to an extent unparalleled in the postwar
period.
In order to understand the
break-up of Yugoslavia it is important to understand something of its history.
The six Balkan republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia,
Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia were brought together after the Second World
War in 1945 to form the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under the
leadership of Josip Broz Tito.
He was a Croat who led the Partisan resistance to the
Nazi occupation of the Balkans and the old monarchist Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
Their resistance was so effective and determined that the Germans were forced
to divert considerable men and resources in order to meet it.
Between 1960 and 1980, Yugoslavia
enjoyed a period of sustained economic
growth that funded its
commitment to social and economic justice.
Free health care and education was
provided as a right for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity, as was the
right to work, a living wage, affordable housing and utilities, while most of
its economy came under state ownership.
As a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement of nations that refused to be subsumed
into either the Soviet or the Western Bloc during the Cold War, Yugoslavia enjoyed
considerable influence and prestige on the international stage.
Yet despite Tito’s refusal to be subsumed
into the Soviet Bloc, Yugoslavia remained safe from capitalist penetration
while the Soviet Union existed as a countervailing force to US-led Western
imperialism.
As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, however, this protective
cloak was removed and the die was cast.
Fuelling the economic growth
enjoyed by Yugoslavia during the ‘60s and ‘70s was its decision to borrow
heavily from the West in order to invest in industry and the production of both
export and consumer goods.
This rendered the Yugoslav economy vulnerable to the
fluctuations of global capitalism.
And so it proved, when as a result of the
world recession of the 1970s export markets contracted with the result that
Yugoslavia’s export production dried up along with its ability to service its
debts.
In response, the IMF demanded a restructuring of the state’s economy in
order to prioritize debt repayment.
Stuck between the hammer of indebtedness
and the anvil of continued borrowing in order to subsidize its commitment to
the provision of education, health care, housing and social security for its
citizens, by the late 1980s the Yugoslav economy was in free fall.
It was at this point that central
banks moved in at the behest of policy-makers in Washington, London and Bonn.
Determined to break up the last socialist country in Europe, they threatened to
institute an economic blockade unless the Yugoslav Government agreed to hold
separate elections in each of its six republics.
The passing of the US Foreign Operations
Appropriations law 101-513 in
1991 contained a section relating specifically to Yugoslavia, stipulating that
all loans, aid and credits would be cut off within six months unless elections
were held.
The most devastating provision of
the law stipulated that only the forces within Yugoslavia deemed democratic by
Washington would now receive loans from the US.
Various right-wing factions in
each of the six republics benefited directly from this provision and became the
recipients of US largesse.
In a climate of growing economic crisis it was a
measure guaranteed to exacerbate ethnic tensions and give succor to centrifugal
and separatist forces within SFRY.
Germany recognized the secession
of first Slovenia and Croatia in December 1991, whereupon civil war ensued.
It
lasted for the next eight years until a three-month NATO air war unleashed against the Serbs, who had
refused to acquiesce in the break-up of the Federal Republic, brought it to an
end.
As Tariq Ali observed at the
time, “American strategists, desperate to retain NATO as their battering-ram in
new Europe, maneuvered Europe into a war in order to prove that NATO had a
permanent function, that it was the ultimate arbiter and could act alone,
presenting the rest of the world with a fait accompli.”
Atrocities were committed by all
sides in the conflict, yet it was the Serbs who carried the can.
During the
trial of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s in The Hague evidence of genocide against his government was never
produced.
Yet the former Serb leader was only personally exonerated in March of
this year in a five-volume ruling of the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the prosecution of Bosnian Serb leader
Radovan Karadžić.
NATO’s relevancy and continued
purpose was affirmed with its role in the break-up of Yugoslavia, the last
socialist state and economy left in the heart of Europe, which for obvious
reasons could not be allowed to survive.
Its descent into the ugly swamp of
ethnic conflict came as a result of economic crisis, creating a political
crisis that was exploited by the West in the interests of securing new markets
and sources of raw materials in service to Western neoliberalism.
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