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With Kosovo under NATO regency, the crusade against Yugoslavia continued unabated. Like Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, and a number of other countries before it, Yugoslavia was expected to heel with enough battering. “A major sticking point for Western politicians in the past has been Serbia's failure to enter into the right kind of business deals.”1 So US policy remained the same: find fresh opportunities to meddle in the internal affairs of Serbia and Montenegro, destabilize and subvert what remained of the Yugoslav socialist system, and—under the banner of “reform”—foster the kind of rapacious capitalist restoration found in Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Georgia, and elsewhere.
In pursuit of that objective, US leaders and the corporate-owned media operate with a kind of ideological fiat that makes argument and evidence superfluous. As noted earlier, political parties that win fair elections but pursue socialist or other economically egalitarian policies, even if only in limited form, are stigmatized as “hard-line,” “dictatorial,” and “oppressive.” The free-market pro-West parties that lose, despite the generous sums funneled to them from Western intelligence agencies, are championed as the independent “democratic opposition.”2
The United States Congress prohibits foreigners from contributing to US political campaigns so to preserve the integrity of our (corporate-funded) electoral system. Yet this same Congress continued to vote large sums to support Radio Free Europe broadcasts and “independent” media in Yugoslavia, and still larger sums to bolster “pro-Western,” “pro-reform” (read, pro-capitalist) political groups in Serbia and Montenegro.3 Private groups like the Soros Foundation and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—many of which have direct or indirect access to covert funding—have given large sums to opposition groups. The Soros Foundation claims noninvolvement in Eastern European politics, but one of its directors, Bega Rucha, admitted to Barry Lituchy that the foundation provides over $50 million a year to opposition media and political groups in Serbia alone.4 The Soros Foundation and other NGOs have funded over fifty publications in Yugoslavia, along with the much vaunted Radio B92 station. Well financed free-market political parties have enjoyed some support among entrepreneurial and professional class elements who anticipate prospering under capitalism. But they have made much less headway among the vast majority of working-class Serbs.5
Other attempts have been made to manipulate Yugoslavia's political life. With its refineries and electric power stations destroyed, the FRY was in desperate need of fuel in the winter of 1999-2000. Seizing the opportunity, the European Union sent shipments of heating fuel to Serbia—but only to towns that were controlled by the political opposition. The message was clear: those who voted the way the Western capitalists wanted would get humanitarian assistance; the others would be left to freeze under the sanctions. When Yugoslav customs officials held up the first shipment—because the weight of the trucks exceeded the allowable maximum and other such problems—Michael Graham, head of the European Commission's delegation in Belgrade, waxed indignant: “I can only express surprise and disappointment. I see no reason why anybody should wish to delay heating fuel for the citizens of Nis and Pirot.”6 He conveniently ignored the fact that the EU itself was denying fuel to all the many Serbian communities that had voted in politically incorrect ways. The Yugoslav government eventually let the shipments go through.
In late 1999, the US government forbade dealings by US citizens with all properties and entities of the FRY (Serbia and Montenegro) and their representatives, both within the country and abroad. The proscribed list included about one thousand businesses, banks, and accounts relating to transportation, scientific laboratories, shipping, and industries of all sorts, along with various government leaders.7
Meanwhile, US policy makers were giving every encouragement to Montenegrin secessionism. An independent Montenegro would cut Serbia off from an outlet to the sea. In mid-September 1999, the investigative journalist Diana Johnstone reported that former US ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith—who had backed Tudjman’s ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of Serbian farming families in the Krajina region four years earlier—visited Montenegro to chide opposition politicians for their reluctance to plunge Yugoslavia into more civil war. Such a war would be brief, he assured them, and would “solve all your problems.”8
Montenegro, Serbia’s only remaining partner in the FRY, remained at loggerheads with Belgrade since pro-Western Milo Djukanovic became president in 1997. The Montenegrin leadership threatened to declare independence if Milosevic did not grant still greater autonomy within their joint federation.9 The Montenegrin republic passed a law claiming ownership over airports in Podgorica and Tivat, normally Yugoslav federal property. The move might be compared to New York State claiming ownership of JFK airport, or the province of Ontario declaring the Toronto airport its own rather than Canada’s. In response, Yugoslav military moved in and retook control of at least one of the airports.10
Will Montenegro host the next Balkan war? US News and World Report learned that in October 1999 NATO’s top general Wesley Clark asked his bosses at the Pentagon for approval to start planning for possible NATO military action in Yugoslavia’s junior republic. Clark was concerned that President Milosevic, alarmed at the growing prospect of independence for Montenegro, would order a military crackdown.11 If the FRY actually did dare to defend its shrunken sovereignty and resist NATO’s campaign of destabilization and dismemberment, then the NATO batterers would once more escalate their efforts.
Whatever new wars were in the offing, old ones had not been put to rest. In February and March 2000, ethnic Albanian fighters, some identified as KLA, began crossing over from Kosovo into southern Serbia. They wore uniforms looking much like the officially disbanded KLA, except that their shoulder patches read “Liberation Army of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medveda,” referring to three towns just east of the Kosovo border in Serbia whose populations were about 80 per cent Albanian. The FRY feared that these places wanted to break away and join Kosovo. “Western officials and ethnic Albanians agree that Belgrade's anxieties are not imaginary,” reported the Washington Post. “Smugglers began bringing significant quantities of arms into the three towns from Kosovo six months ago, they say, and fighters have been trickling in ever since.”12
Developments on the border appeared to be a replay of the Kosovo conflict itself. Rebels bombed police stations and public buildings in Presevo, Bujanovac, and Medveda. Police were killed or wounded in shootouts. Yugoslav police and special forces units conducted aggressive searches for Albanian rebels. There were reports of Serbian mistreatment of suspects. And Western forces began anticipating the time when they might feel “obliged” to intervene. The Washington Post quoted a “Western diplomat”: “[I]f reports of abuses mount, US and allied troops stationed in Kosovo could be pressured to intervene.”13
An additional strategy under consideration is to turn over the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina to Hungary. Vojvodina has a rich agricultural base and is considered the breadbasket of Serbia. It also has numerous nationalities including several hundred thousand persons of Hungarian descent most of whom show no sign of wanting to secede, and who are better treated than the larger Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia.14 Still, the Hungarian press referred to “oppressions” endured by ethnic Hungarians in Vojvodina. As early as July 1991, while the crisis was brewing in Slovenia and Croatia, the Hungarian prime minister revealed his irredentist appetite, declaring that the international treaties designating Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, particularly Vojvodina in 1920, were made only with Yugoslavia. “We gave Vojvodina to Yugoslavia. If there is no more Yugoslavia, then we should get it back.”15
A tested method of destabilization is political assassination. On February 7 2000, Yugoslav Defense Minister Pavle Bulatovic was gunned down in a Belgrade restaurant. Bulatovic was a leader of the Montenegro Socialist People’s Party, which wants Montenegro to remain part of Yugoslavia. The assassination sent a threatening message to all anti-secessionist Montenegrins. Between 1997 and early 2000, at least a dozen Yugoslav officials were assassinated—mostly members of the Yugoslav United Left or the Serbian Socialist Party—in what resembled a concerted covert action to subvert the Yugoslav government. Four months before Bulatovic’s murder, Yugoslav Information Minister Goran Matic had warned that “subversive and terrorist actions are being planned abroad in order to destabilize the country's political and economic system,” and that Washington's policy would “increasingly rely on destructive and illegal activities” working through “an existing network of secret agents.”16
US news media never once entertained the possibility that the assassinations in Yugoslavia were being orchestrated from the West. Instead, they suggested that the victims were involved in criminal activity, or that the Milosevic government itself had suddenly taken to murdering its own loyal supporters.
The Bulatovic assassination coincided with more obvious bellicose moves by the US toward Eastern Europe and the former USSR. A pro-NATO coup was perpetrated against Ukraine's democratically elected leftish parliament, in order to install what amounted to a pro-capitalist presidential dictatorship in that country. Meanwhile, the State Department openly reaffirmed its support for anti-government forces in the unreconstructed former Soviet republic of Belarus. The Pentagon (a) continued its bombings of Iraq every few days, (b) revived its “Star Wars” outer-space ballistic missile program, and (c) announced plans for NATO military exercises in Ukraine, Bulgaria and Estonia.17
One troubling fact for the NATO nations has been that the Serbs continue to refuse to roll over. For all the outside funding they receive, and all their demonstrations against the government, the cluster of “democratic opposition” parties, the Zajedno (“Together") coalition was able to muster only 22 out of 138 seats in the Yugoslav parliamentary elections of 1996 compared to the clear majority of 84 seats won by Milosevic's Socialist-led coalition. Pro-government demonstrations are usually two to three times larger than the ones orchestrated by Zajedno. Even the Wall Street Journal admitted that polls showed Milosevic to be more popular than all opposition candidates combined.18
“Most observers agree,” writes Lituchy, “that the leaders of Zajedno possess neither the political support, credibility or even ability to ever form a government. They are capable of plunging the country into chaos, however, and that now appears to be their main goal.”19 One Zajedno leader is quoted in the New York Times as admitting that “power cannot be won by elections but only by uprisings, strikes [and] violence,” and the real purpose of protest demonstrations was “to reform the economy and push Yugoslavia into Western Europe.”20
As of late winter 2000, the Yugoslavs were doing their best to survive despite every hardship. Electricity was rationed with rotating brownouts. Bridges were being rebuilt (but not across the Danube) and one auto factory was actually back in production. There was more fuel on the market, and bread and electricity prices remained stable.21 It was clear that the Milosevic government was not handing the country over to the tender mercies of the free market but was rationing supplies and mobilizing scarce resources in an equitable manner, and doing a fair job of managing the crisis. Diana Johnstone reported from Belgrade that “there are fewer beggars on the streets of Belgrade than in any other city in Europe.”22
Whether or not conditions improve, US leaders will continue to treat the democratically elected FRY government as a dictatorship because it does not promote the free-market government that US leaders demand. So the campaign to sabotage, assassinate, destabilize, and attack will continue—unless popular forces in the United States and abroad can mobilize and make such aggressions politically too costly.
On rare occasions capitalist states have helped the populations of other states, specifically when the welfare of those populations are a key consideration in the struggle against another powerful enemy. So in the early post-war era, US policy makers put forth a Marshall plan and grudgingly accepted reforms that benefited the working classes in Western Europe. They did this because of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and the strong showing of Communist parties in Western European countries.23 But today there is no competing lure; hence, the well-being of the Yugoslav people is not a consideration except as something to be negated.
David North points to what he sees as “an obvious and undeniable connection between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the arrogance and brutality with which the United States has pursued its international agenda throughout the 1990s.” Many members of the US ruling elite “have convinced themselves that the absence of any substantial international opponent capable of resisting the United States offers an historically unprecedented opportunity to establish, through the use of military power, an unchallengeable position of global dominance.” Earlier dreams of a US global hegemony, an “American century,” were frustrated by the constraints imposed by a competing superpower. But today, policy makers in Washington and in academic think tanks all over the country are arguing that overwhelming and unanswerable military superiority will establish US global domination, and “remove all barriers to the reorganization of the world economy on the basis of market principles, as interpreted and dominated by American transnational corporations.”24
I departed from Yugoslavia in August 1999 on a van that traveled all night to Budapest. Riding with me was a Serbian yuppie: a young broker who worked via computer with the New York Stock Exchange. He was of the opinion that Milosevic was not a war criminal but still should hand himself over to the International Criminal Tribunal, just so the rest of the country might get some peace (as if having Milosevic's head would cause Western leaders to leave Yugoslavia in peace). He went on to tell me what a wonderful place Belgrade was to live in, with its remarkable abundance of beautiful women and its low prices. The ample income he made went twice as far in the economically depressed city. His comments reminded me that hard times are not hard for everyone, especially not for people with money.
The van made an additional stop in Belgrade to pick up an attractive but unhappy-looking young woman who, once seated, began crying as she told us that she was going to Spain for a long and indefinite period, leaving home and family because things were so difficult in Yugoslavia. War victimizes all sorts of people who are never included in the final toll. It was not long before the stockbroker, displaying a most sympathetic demeanor, was making his moves on the young lady, as if encircling a prey. Again, I was reminded that hard times for the many bring new opportunities for the privileged few.