Library:To kill a nation/Rational destruction: eliminating the competition

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Whatever the issue or policy at hand, it is the function of bourgeois intellectuals, academics among them, to deny that material interests are at stake. So with the NATO mission in the Balkans. While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia, many liberals and progressives were convinced that "this time" the US national security state was really fighting the good fight. "Yes, the bombings don't work. The bombings are stupid!" they said at the time, "but we have to do something." In fact, the air campaign was worse than stupid: it was profoundly immoral. And in fact it did work, destroying much of what was left of Yugoslavia, moving it closer to becoming a more privatized, deindustrialized, recolonized, beggar-poor country of cheap labor and rich resources available at bargain prices, defenseless against capital penetration, so divided that it would never reunite, so battered that it would never rise again, not even as a viably competitive bourgeois country.

When the productive social capital of any part of the world is obliterated, the potential value of private capital elsewhere is enhanced—especially when the chronic problem faced today by western capitalism is one of overcapacity. Every agricultural base destroyed by western aerial attacks (as in Iraq) or by WTO "free trade" agreements (as in Mexico, India, Africa, and elsewhere) diminishes the potential competition and increases the market opportunities for multinational corporate agribusiness. To destroy publicly run Yugoslav factories that produced auto parts, appliances, or fertilizer—or publicly financed Sudanese or Yugoslav plants that produced pharmaceuticals at prices substantially below those of their Western competitors—is to enhance the investment value of Western automotive and pharmaceutical companies. And every television or radio station closed down by NATO troops or blown up by NATO bombs extends the ideological and communicational dominance of the Western media cartels. In a word, the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia's social capital served a rational class interest.

NATO's attacks revealed a consistent pattern that bespoke its underlying political agenda. The Confederation of Trade Unions of Serbia produced a list of 164 factories destroyed by the bombings—all of them state-owned. Not a single foreign-owned firm was targeted.¹ As I observed on a trip to Yugoslavia shortly after the war, the huge, state-run Hotel Yugoslavia was made uninhabitable by NATO missiles, while the corporate owned Hyatt Hotel, with its all-glass facade—as inviting a target as any mad bomber might want—suffered not a scratched windowpane. Buildings that displayed highly visible rooftop signs that advertised Panasonic, Coca-Cola, Diners Club International, and McDonald's, the latter replete with immense golden arches, survived perfectly intact.

Other political targets were hit. The Usce business center was struck by several missiles, rather precisely hitting the headquarters of Slobodan Miosevic's Socialist Party, along with the headquarters of JUL (Yugoslav United Left), a coalition of twenty-three communist and left parties, closely allied with the Socialist Party. Buildings used by the ministries of defense and the interior were also demolished. NATO destroyed or seriously damaged fuel storage facilities, oil refineries, chemical factories, roads, bridges, railway networks, airports, water supply systems, electrical power plants, and warehouses. This destruction paralyzed the production of consumer goods and added more than a million people to the ranks of the unemployed.

Kragujevac, an industrial city in Central Serbia, suffered immense damage. Its mammoth, efficiently state-run Zastava factory was demolished, causing huge amounts of toxic chemicals to spill from the factory's generators. Zastava had employed tens of thousands of workers who produced cars, trucks, and tractors sold domestically and abroad. NATO attacks left some 80 per cent of its workforce without a livelihood. Publicly owned Zastava factories exist all over Yugoslavia. The attackers knew their locations, and destroyed many of them. Those not bombed were out of production for want of crucial materials or a recipient for their products.²

It has been argued that the Yugo, the inexpensive state produced automobile, could never really compete with Western European or Japanese cars. But the Yugo was the most frequently used vehicle in Yugoslavia itself. It also sold some 180,000 in the United States in the 1980s, and many more in other countries. But by 2000 it was almost entirely out of production and gave no competition to overseas auto markets nor to whatever market remained in Yugoslavia.

In Nis, cruise missiles pulverized the tobacco and cigarette production plant, one of the most successful in Europe. Numerous state-run food-processing sites were leveled. A report by NBC has confirmed that NATO bombed the pharmaceutical complex of Galenika, the largest in Yugoslavia, located in Belgrade's suburbs. Our delegation was told that one worker-managed factory was contaminated with depleted uranium. The city of Aleksinac and additional socialist strongholds in southern Serbia were bombed especially heavily, resulting in many civilian deaths. Leaders from Aleksinac and several other cities in Serbia's "Red Belt" were convinced that they were pounded so mercilessly primarily because they were socialist, a suspicion reinforced by the fact that the region contained almost no heavy industry.

In Novi Sad, worker-managed factories that somehow had survived the pitiless years of sanctions were reduced to ruins, along with bus and train depots. Major bridges were knocked down, blocking all shipping on the Danube, contaminating the river's bottom with toxic chemicals and heavy metals, and severing most of Serbia from the rest of Europe. Because of its depth, the Danube was judged nearly impossible to clean.

Yugoslav electrical and construction firms used to be competitive with Western ones, winning contracts abroad on a regular basis. The NATO bombing eliminated that competition quite nicely. Heating plants and the entire oil-processing industry were badly crippled. Missiles that explode only after penetrating the earth's surface (being designed to destroy subterranean bomb shelters) were used to rip apart underground transmitter cables at an electrical power transformer station on the outskirts of Zemun. There was little hope of repairing these since international sanctions deprived the Yugoslays of the replace�ment parts made by Westinghouse.³

NATO attacks also were intended to terrorize and demoralize the civilian population. Libraries, theaters, hospitals, clinics, maternity wards, sanitariums, and geriatric homes were destroyed or badly damaged, with serious injury or loss of life to occupants. Schools attended by several hundred thousand students were destroyed or damaged. NATO bombed historic sites, cultural monuments, museums, and churches—something not even Hitler did.