SOCIALIST UNITY

By George Galloway MP

Some might call it a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. For others, however, the bitter aftertaste of Tony Blair’s saccharine-coated “doctrine of the international community” was all too obvious when he outlined it nearly a decade ago.

The reheated cold warriors who’ve fulminated over events in the Caucasus this month would do well to go back to that speech at the Chicago Economics Club in 1999.

Nato bombs were raining on Belgrade, eviscerating TV make-up women and destroying civilian infrastructure. Shamelessly, Blair posed as the stoic British prime minister who had voyaged across the Atlantic to remind America of its world historic role at the hour of Europe’s need.

“On its 50th birthday Nato must prevail,” he said, “Success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider.”

He went on to locate the Kosovo war in the context of the then fashionable cliches of globalising capitalism and the changing roles of states and international alliances. The war’s salience lay in recognising that the advance of the global free market depended on the preparedness of an undefined “international community” to, as he would put it two years later, “reorder this world” by force when necessary.

Thus, according to Blair in his address to Chicago neo-liberals, “The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts”.

That meant riding roughshod over the doctrine of the sovereignty of nation states dating from the peace of Westphalia – clearly his urge to modernise outdated notions had burst beyond such trifles as the welfare state and the Labour party.

Those of us who protested were castigated and calumniated against as the real dyed in the wool conservatives who had not understood that the world had moved on. In fact, our concern was that the Kosovo intervention and its justification were taking the world back. The sovereignty of nations was never an inviolable and faultless principle – and none of us on the left had said otherwise. But Blair’s humanitarian interventionism, his 21st century civilising mission, was no advance on it.

It was a throwback to the Gladstonian liberal imperialism of the 1880s, which also was born with ballyhoo about Balkan atrocities, at that time Bulgarian. Two consequences flowed at the end of the 19th century.

First, peoples across the globe rapidly came to suffer murder and mayhem far worse and more extensive than any visited by one Balkan nationality upon another. The carnage in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australasia still evades the North American and European imaginations because, quite simply, the victims were not white and the perpetrators were.

Second, as other states decided that they too had a duty to civilise, the scramble for Africa, China and elsewhere brought the European powers first into diplomatic conflict and skirmish, and then, when conquests in neither the east nor the west had filled their maw, into a cataclysmic clash on their own continent.

It’s worth recalling the scorn heaped on those of us who raised these points nine years ago, warning of the vicious circle interventionist wars would unleash, and then turning to events today in the Black Sea’s own Balkans.

Perhaps the mandarins of King Charles Street have a manual on how to hold a straight face and keep talking when all around are gasping incredulously. Maybe there’s an homage to Kipling along those lines. Or maybe it’s just the way our current foreign secretary is eerily adopting the tics and mannerisms of our former prime minister. Either way, David Miliband’s performance over Georgia has been a spectacle to behold.

There was the bluster about the territorial integrity of small nations – this from a government that had only months previously proclaimed its support for ripping out Kosovo from what is left of Yugoslavia. The recognition by Washington and London of Kosovo’s secession prompted a warning from Moscow, which, thanks to many years of Russian weakness and US triumphalism, was predictably ignored.

There are other nations besides Kosovo that might want to secede elsewhere and with greater claim, said the Kremlin, and if you recognise Kosovo against our wishes, don’t be surprised if we end up recognising other secessionists against yours.

The frothing from Miliband and Condoleezza Rice when Russia did just that exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of western policy as outlined by Blair. When it comes down to it, for all the talk of universal moral objectives in international affairs, the right to pursue them turns out not to be universal, but to be vested in particular powers, and, it seems, some nations’ rights are more inviolable than others.

They call it the international community, but it is not even the community of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, still less the UN General Assembly. It is, as with Kosovo, a community that is coterminous with the biggest military alliance on the planet, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which has strayed very far indeed from the Atlantic.

For more than a decade, successive British and US governments could get away with this sleight of hand. Russia was enfeebled, robbed blind by foreign-domiciled billionaires. China was just a manufactured-in stamp piled high in the pound shop.

Not now. The unipolar future turns out to have been a moment in the past. And that makes the hubris that led from Kosovo through Iraq to today’s missile shields and Cold War rhetoric all the more dangerous. One of the “collateral casualties” of the Kosovo war was the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The result of a similar air strike in “rogue” capitals today doesn’t bear thinking about. Nor do the consequences that would have flowed had Georgia been a member of Nato with its mutual military obligations.

The Russian action in Georgia has underscored the limits of US power, but Anglo-US arrogance is unabated. For the US – despite the dying days of the Bush administration – there is a logic. It is a global power, still the only true global power. However dangerous the game, it’s not difficult to see why the US establishment, and not merely the Bush regime, plays it.

But why should Britain? Maybe it was the gap between western bombast and Russian facts on the ground, but there was something truly ridiculous about Miliband travelling to Ukraine to shake his fist at the east. He preached extending Nato membership to a country where two thirds of the people are not in favour of it and which is already ruptured by east/west tensions and internal conflicts that make Georgia look like Switzerland.

The Labour government in London again managed to outflank to the right Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and even Silvio Berlusconi – but for what? To share this time not in foolish, short-lived triumph in the Middle East, but in Bush’s humiliation.

The world is at that most dangerous of places: where one way of ordering states and systems is giving way to another. That usually doesn’t happen without some major rupture and frequently with attendant violence. The worst place to be in such circumstances is as some ersatz power, an imperial hangover not of yesterday, but of the last century, busy threatening rising or renewing powers with the armies belonging to an ailing one.

Georgia’s hapless president, the New York lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili, has just learnt what it means to plunge into dangerous waters on the ebb tide. It’s a lesson that Britain’s political elite would do well to heed.

There is a first class discussion of the problematic nature of Kosovan independence published over at the Splintered Sunrise blog, which argues: “There is a strong case in the abstract for Kosovo Albanians having the right to self-determination. In the here and now, I’m opposed to independence for Kosovo because the place is run by a bunch of mafiosi, its economy is based on the trafficking of drugs, arms and women, and giving this basket case the attributes of statehood will make a bad situation worse.”

As I have argued before the break up of Jugoslavia has been orchestrated by the Great Powers, serving their own grubby agenda.

Strangely the British leftists who swallowed exagerated  NATO propaganda  in support of an independent Kosovo are rather silent about the brutal reality Of Kosovo today. Not only is the province now a wild west haven of gangster capitalism, domiated by prostitution and drug trafficking, but as I have written before, NATO ruled Kosovo has also seen a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing.

In March 2004, up to 50000 ethnic Albanian rioters launched a pogrom against their Serb and Roma (Gypsy) neighbours. The pogrom followed delibertely inflammatory and untruthful broadcasts that the tragic drowning of three Albanian boys at the village of Cabra was due to them being driven into a river by a mob of Serbs. An account that the well respected agency Human Rights Watch concluded was completely untrue.The account of the following pogrom in 2004 by Human Rights Watch is truly shocking. As they report “Once the violence began, it swept throughout Kosovo with almost clinical precision: after two days of rioting, every single Serb, Roma, or Askaeli home had been burned in most of the communities affected by the violence, but neighboring ethnic Albanian homes were left untouched.”

NATO troops took 6 hours to respond to calls for help by Serbs in Pristina, despite elderly defenceless and disabled people being attacked in their homes by the mob of Albanian extremists.It is important to note that according to HRW the ethnic cleansing of minorities by the NATO backed KLA/UCK started immediately after the Serbs withdrew: “Before the 1999 war, some 350 Ashkali families lived in Vucitrn, many of them engaged in the butcher trade. After the war, many of the Ashkali were attacked by ethnic Albanians. At least five Ashkalis from the town were abducted and “disappeared” and more than a hundred Ashkali homes burned. Almost the entire Ashkali community of Vucitrn fled, with only ten to fifteen families deciding to stay.”In 2004 the Albanian supremacists came to finish the job, watched and not hindered by NATO troops: “the Ashkali recalled the terror they felt when their homes were set on fire with their families inside and no-one came to help them. Nejib Cizmolli, a thirty-seven-year-old Ashkali [man], recalled being trapped on the second floor of his burning home with eleven people, including children aged three, eight, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen”

 It amazes me that some on the left support this Albanian fascism, due to an utterely mechanical understanding of the politics of nationality.

In an astonishingly incompetent letter sent to the Guardian, the excellent journalist Ed Vulliamy added his signature to the effect that Noam Chomsky denied the “‘genocide’… at Srebrenica”. Although this was a remarkably ill-considered letter on many fronts, even more remarkable was the fact those who added their signatures were seemingly unaware that they themselves were guilty of using the very same terminology (and in the body of the text of the dispatched letter!) that Chomsky does: the use of the word “massacre” instead of “genocide”. Like “fascism”, “genocide” is a word that ought to be used accurately and therefore sparingly, and so once faced with genocide one would not resort to using the term massacre. Does not the Nazi “massacre” of the Jews appear somewhat lacking in the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Appearances may be deceptive, but in this case I venture to suggest that deception is the aim if one were to contort oneself in the way David Irving does on a good day.

In the last of five remarkably bizarre charges, some surely knowingly mendacious, the signatories state: “Finally, both Johnstone and Chomsky reject the use of the term ‘genocide’ in reference to the actions of Serb forces at Srebrenica or in Bosnia as a whole.” Now, one may claim that by using the term “genocide” one is by definition accepting a massacre, whereas the contrary position is not valid. That would be a necessary but not sufficient position, though, because then one would have a responsibility to explain that Chomsky’s argument is whether the legal definition is in fact consistent with the etymology, which is certainly a substantial point, to say the very least. My rebuttal and defence of Chomsky can be read here.

One would therefore expect that in yesterday’s Observer - its “cover story” in the Review supplement, no less – that Vulliamy would mention the “genocide” in Srebrenica. But no, not at all. He refers three times to the “Srebrenica massacre” and once to the “mass executions at Srebrenica”. There is not a whiff of the term “genocide” except for when Vulliamy’s interviewee Cara Del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, refers to it as such. Of course, if we have no reservations concerning the legal definition of “genocide”, the massacres at Srebrenica are undeniably genocidal, but then, given the specific definition in international law of “genocide”, there would also seem very few outbreaks of mass murder that would not fit the legal definition of “part” or “whole”, as I have pointed out elsewhere.

In a recent thread on this blog there have been some questions asked about whether I accepted that the Nato action in Kosovo was justified and regret the West’s “failure to intervene” in Bosnia. With respect to the first question regarding Kosovo, I replied that the United States engineered a situation such that war would break out: at Rambouillet, once a peace deal had been agreed by the Serbs and the Kosovars, the U.S. insisted on adding an appendix to the agreement such that Nato could enter Serbia proper and, moreover, that Nato would have legal immunity from legal redress. Predictably, this scuppered the peace agreement and led inevitably to war. This was yet another case of the United States not taking yes for an answer. Why the U.S. precipitated the war is another matter. That it did so, however, is undeniable. It did so without even bothering to satisfy the low requirements of the old adage of “plausible deniability”.

The second question concerned the West’s “failure to intervene” in Bosnia. I responded that the question didn’t make any sense and was somewhat puzzled that the questioner could not fathom the contradiction, if not in terms of absolute logic, in a juxtaposition that should furrow the brow. There was no Western “failure to intervene” in Bosnia, but far too much intervention – and of the most cynical variety at that. Simply put, the objective was that Bosnia would be partitioned, with Croatia’s aim of a “Greater Croatia” in Bosnia realised. Since that aim clashed with Milosevic’s own of a “Greater Serbia”, also in Bosnia (and elsewhere for that matter), Bosnia was then seized by a bloody war in which all actors were responsible, but with some far more responsible than others, and with few willing to compromise and make peace.

As reprehensible in many ways as President Izetbegovic of Bosnia was, it is undeniable that Milosevic’s Serbia and Tudjman’s Croatia are ultimately responsible for the disaster that befell Bosnia. Two Jinnah-lke figures (and an aspiring one in Izetbegovic) is two too many, especially in a region replete with extreme violence, let alone anywhere else. And notwithstanding the territorial ambitions of both countries, it is possible that had it not been for the especially sordid mindsets of Milosevic and Tudjman may have been spared much of what it then was made to endure. It was Milosevic and Tudjman who fostered the extreme nationalism, xenophobia and religious bigotry – with Tudjman probably out-doing Milosevic in this race to depravity – that unleashed the types of crimes against humanity Europe, or at least the citizens of Europe, had hoped it would never witness again.

The standard narrative is that the West “helplessly stood by” or “impotently looked the other way” while a savage war raged in the Balkans – the Balkans, for pity’s sake! – one area that the Western powers knows is in no one’s interests, least of all its own, to “ignore”. The other piece of received wisdom is of the saintliness of Franjo Tudjman, or as I wrote some time ago, “a name to be mentioned in the same breath as those other godly figures of the twentieth century: JFK, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, Anwar Sadat and Princess Diana.”

And in an article almost entirely devoted to Radovan Karadzic, and the plausible theory that there is no hunt for him and no intention of ever bringing him to justice, Vulliamy is almost of the same opinion as the so-called “revisionists” on the West’s supposed inaction in Bosnia: “As the war drew to a close with Srebrenica, the doctrine of appeasement of the Serbs advocated by Britain and the UN had become demonstrably grotesque [but wasn’t that grotesque until then?] and America took the reins in a final effort fronted by the envoy Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke’s first action was to stop the Bosnian army in its tracks as it was finally turning the tide, then knock the heads of the leaders of all sides together to produce the Dayton peace agreement of December 1995, partitioning Bosnia into the Republika Srpska Karadic wanted and a Muslim-Croat Federation. Rarely in European history has mass murder been so bountifully rewarded at the negotiating table.”

Well, “appeasement” is certainly one way of putting it; another way of putting it is the active aiding in the destruction and partition of Bosnia and the rewarding of the aggressors. One further point missing from Vulliamy’s summation is the West’s deplorable collaboration with Franjo Tudjman’s desire for a “Greater Croatia”. That, essentially, is the story of Bosnia: a cosmopolitan and remarkable nation torn between the insatiable appetites of its neighbours Serbia and Croatia (as well as, it must be said, those of Izetbegovic), with Western Europe and the United States favouring Croatia’s territorial ambitions over those of Russia-allied Serbia.

Now as war clouds loom again over Kosovo and the seeds of war clouds start to coalesce over pitiful Bosnia, expect further outbreaks of delusion and outright mendacity as the pro-war “Left” propagandises about the West’s alleged “failure to intervene” in Bosnia, and the concomitant chorus of “never again”, and how Kosovo can be made more of a success story. As elsewhere, the history of the Balkans is written by the victors, albeit in an incoherent fashion, but in the process this history has now become as Balkanised (divided, fragmented and hostile) as the region the historian, especially those in the “first draft” category, sets his or her mind to comprehend.

As victims of injustice go, then perhaps Slobodan Milosevic is not the highest priority. As John Pilger described him: “Milosevic was a brute; he was also a banker once regarded as the west’s man who was prepared to implement “economic reforms” in keeping with IMF, World Bank and European Community demands.”

The old dictator died in prison during 2006, perhaps somewhat fortuitously for the prosecutors in the Hague, as the prospect of Milosevic’s acquittal was a real one.

Strange things happen in the Blogosphere, and Dave Osler bundled a celebration of Milosevic’s death in with Pinochet, Niyazov and Saddam. In the thread of comments supporters of the AWL have repeated the NATO lie that Serbia was planning a “extermination or expulsion” of the Albanian population of Kosovo. Yet for some reasons Dave’s blog wouldn’t allow me to reply to them. (This problem seems to have been solved)

The dismantling of Yugoslavia, and the subsequent NATO attack on Serbia were an historic turning point.

In particular, it saw the manufacturing of a casus belli through NATO seeking to impose a military occupation of the whole of Serbia in the first draft of the Rambouillet agreement, under terms that no Serbian government could accept – a condition that NATO removed after weeks of bombing to secure an agreement. NATO then attacked Serbia in alliance with the terrorist Albanian supremacist organisation, the KLA. (shown in the picture)

And most significantly it was a rehearsal for manufacturing consent for a war under cover of a specious humanitarian intervention. John Pilger quotes UN Balkans commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, “We have subsidised and indirectly supported [the KLA’s] violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary.” The Serbia war also saw parts of the British left line up with NATO, uncritically repeating allegations of atrocities, and misrepresenting the dismantling of Yugoslavia as national liberation from Serb domination.

Even the usually pro-US NGO, Human Rights Watch, (who supported the war) documented human rights abuses by the KLA in the lead up to war that are symmetrical to those committed by Yugoslav forces:

There is an excellent demolition of this NATO spin, in Herman and Peterson’s article in ZNET. They argue: “The word genocide was applied to Serb operations in Kosovo even before the NATO bombing, although the number killed in the prior 15 months was perhaps 2,000 on all sides and despite the fact that there was no evidence of an intent to exterminate or expel all Albanians. The Kosovo conflict was a civil war with defining ethnic overtones and brutal but not unfamiliar repression (less ferocious than that carried out by the Croatian army against the Krajina Serbs in August 1995, in which some 2,500 civilians were slaughtered in the course of a few days). Even for the period of the bombing the term genocide is ludicrously inapplicable. The Serb reaction to bombing, while frequently savage, was based on their correct understanding that the KLA was linked to NATO and that NATO was giving it air support (Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty, “CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army,” Sunday Times [London], March 13, 2000). Their brutalities and expulsions were concentrated in KLA stronghold areas, and those expelled were sent not to death camps but to safe havens outside Kosovo. The intensive postwar search for killings and mass graves has produced under 3,000 dead bodies from all causes—killings of the same order of magnitude as the 1995 Krajina massacres of Serbs, carried out with U.S. support.”

A good summary of the arguments is in John Pilger’s article, originally from the New Statesman: “the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body effectively set up by Nato, announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo’s “mass graves” was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army. “

Had NATO been seeking to prevent an actually occuring genocide, then then choice of targets was eccentric. For example bllowing up the bridges in the Northern City of Novi Sad, as far from Kosovo as it was possible to be. Pilger reports. ” In the bombing campaign that followed, it was state owned companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted. Nato’s destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares with its bombing of 372 centres of industry, including the Zastava car factory, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed.

Strangely the British leftists who trumpeted the exagerated atrocity claims in support of an independent Kosovo are rather silent about the brutal reality Of Kosovo today. Not only is the province now a wild west haven of gangster capitalism, domiated by prostitution and drug trafficking, but as I have written before, NATO ruled Kosovo has also seen a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing.

In March 2004, up to 50000 ethnic Albanian rioters launched a pogrom against their Serb and Roma (Gypsy) neighbours. The pogrom followed delibertely inflammatory and untruthful broadcasts that the tragic drowning of three Albanian boys at the village of Cabra was due to them being driven into a river by a mob of Serbs. An account that the well respected agency Human Rights Watch concluded was completely untrue.The account of the following pogrom in 2004 by Human Rights Watch is truly shocking. As they report “Once the violence began, it swept throughout Kosovo with almost clinical precision: after two days of rioting, every single Serb, Roma, or Askaeli home had been burned in most of the communities affected by the violence, but neighboring ethnic Albanian homes were left untouched.” NATO troops took 6 hours to respond to calls for help by Serbs in Pristina, despite elderly defenceless and disabled people being attacked in their homes by the mob of Albanian extremists.It is important to note that according to HRW the ethnic cleansing of minorities by the NATO backed KLA/UCK started immediately after the Serbs withdrew: “Before the 1999 war, some 350 Ashkali families lived in Vucitrn, many of them engaged in the butcher trade. After the war, many of the Ashkali were attacked by ethnic Albanians. At least five Ashkalis from the town were abducted and “disappeared” and more than a hundred Ashkali homes burned. Almost the entire Ashkali community of Vucitrn fled, with only ten to fifteen families deciding to stay.”In 2004 the Albanian supremacists came to finish the job, watched and not hindered by NATO troops: “the Ashkali recalled the terror they felt when their homes were set on fire with their families inside and no-one came to help them. Nejib Cizmolli, a thirty-seven-year-old Ashkali [man], recalled being trapped on the second floor of his burning home with eleven people, including children aged three, eight, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen”