Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions  £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50 London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd] 
No 0992 March 31st 1999                                                                                                                                  10p 

Imperialist spheres-of-influence posturing in the Balkans gets out of hand. Anyone's 'human rights' are the last thing being served. German-US imperialist rivalry, become antagonistic since the end of the Soviet anti-imperialist sphere of influence, — is the real enemy. The entire destructive warmongering culture of imperialism in crisis is what needs stopping and overthrowing, not just the bombing of Serbia. Fake-'left' all over the place, falling for warmongering imperialism's most grotesque 'human rights' stunts in favour of the most sordid separatist opportunism. 'Massacre' exposed as another Gulf of Tonkin incident. Serb nationalism is the least problem in the region. Imperialism's reactionary Balkanisation is the issue.

The nazi-style blitzkrieg on Serbia by the 'free world' plunges Europe right back into the worst imperialist barbarism that the 20th century has known.

The military might of the entire West, — all of its greatest industrial powers 600 million strong, — is pouring down on the tiny Serb nation 10 million strong without a hope of defending itself or retaliating.

Even the last great outbreak of imperialist warmongering in Europe when the 'fascist' imperialist powers led by German monopoly-capitalism blitzkrieged in all directions, witnessed no victimisation quite so cynical and brutal as the entire armed might of NATO, — USA, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc — launching a combined onslaught on tiny Serbia.

And no nazi warmongering propaganda by Goebbels and Hitler in justification of the German-led Axis powers aggression against any of their European victims ever quite reached the vicious extent of criminal distortions and lies against the Serbs now being spread worldwide by the 'freeworld' media, dominated by the CIA through its control of the US-owned international news agencies.

World opinion is being utterly stitched up and taken for a giant ride by the blanket censorship in the 'free world' press about the real explanations and reasons for this grotesque mass destructiveness being unleashed on Central Europe, relentless missile and bombing attacks on communications, transport, the public utilities like water and electricity, and on the roads and railways in order to totally cripple little Serbia.

The phoney 'explanations' need disposing of first, followed by a scientific analysis of the objective imperialist world crisis of economics and politics which is driving the imperialist powers into this monstrous depravity and humbug.

The NATO onslaught, it is pretended, is to prevent 'genocide' of the 2 million Kosovo Albanian population in southern Serbia, bordering on Albania proper.

An alleged 'massacre', staged for the world's press by the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) and by the American led 'monitors' of the civil war from OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, an odd body to be run in Kosovo by an American), is the 'proof' of this 'genocide'.

It was announced to the world over a weekend in January this year (to gain maximum coverage, with news always being slow at weekends and newsmen much less critical of their sources than usual).

This appalling 'horror story' flew around the world like lightning, as it was intended to do. At the village of Recak about 18 miles south of the Kosovo capital Pristina, Albanian men, women and children, 39 in all, had been 'butchered in cold blood by the Serbs'. There were 'massacre' pictures of the piled up bodies on every television screen on earth: Local Albanian nationalist narrative was internationally broadcast as fact. "She was shot when she tried to come to the aid of her brother", etc, etc, etc.

This was the 'Gulf of Tonkin' incident the imperialist warmongers had been waiting for, the totally fictitious supposed 'raid' on the US Far East Fleet by two North Vietnamese torpedo boats which 'enabled' American imperialism to openly unleash fullscale war against the Vietnamese revolution); this was the 'Gleiwitz Radio Station' attack by Poles on Germany's border in 1939 (which likewise never took place but was German imperialism's 'excuse' for invading Poland and starting World War II in Europe in earnest).

But only four days after this 'shock, horror' went round the world about Recak, — still the 'justification' today for the 'genocide' accusation which makes NATO's obliteration of Serbia "just and necessary", — the following, odd correction crept into the Western capitalist press, presumably by mistake:

THE VAST majority of the victims of Friday's mass killing of ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo village of Recak were hit by bullets at short range or cut to death but some bodies had been moved from the places where they died and one showed evidence of a bullet fired into it after death, according to the international monitoring team that examined 28 of the corpses the next day.

These detailed findings by the team from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe were released for the first time yesterday after two influential French newspapers cast doubt on the Albanian version of the killings and Serb officials insisted the bodies were those of people killed in artillery attacks or combat, then rearranged for propaganda purposes to look like a massacre.

The killings, the biggest one-day death toll in the year-long conflict in the Serbian province — where the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has been fighting for independence from Belgrade for the ethnic Albanian majority have led to Yugoslav demands for the departure of William Walker, the American head of the OSCE mission in the area. He had accused Serb security forces of a massacre.

While Yugoslav forensic specialists continued to examine 40 of the bodies in a Pristine hospital yesterday, the first Western press reports appeared querying Mr Walker's version.

Renaud Guard, Le Figaro's correspondent in the Kosovo capital, Pristina, watched video footage by two Serb cameramen working for Associated Press television. They had been invited to film the Serb attack on Recak where KLA fighters were based. "I trust them and asked to see the footage," Mr Guard said yesterday. "Something smelt in the original story. It was too perfect. You have the KLA showing you round the next morning."

The footage allegedly showed Serb forces moving in at around 8.30 in the morning. OSCE monitors were on a hill above the village, watching the fighting, which lasted until around 8pm, when the local Serb media centre in Pristina announced that 15 "terrorists" had been killed and that weaponry including machine guns and sniper rifles was captured. "The police appeared to have nothing to hide," Mr Guard said.

A reporter from Le Monde saw the police leave at 3.30pm and made two trips into Recak, at 4.30pm and at 6pm, when he saw international monitors taking two women and two elderly men off for medical treatment for light wounds. The monitors told him they had seen nothing special.

The Serb press alleges that all the dead were KLA, that people were stripped of KLA uniforms after dying in fighting and put into civilian clothes, and that the bodies of people who died in combat were dumped in a gully as though they had been shot together in that location.

On condition of strict anonymity, an OSCE source yesterday gave the first account of what the monitoring mission's investigators found on Saturday morning, when for several hours they went from body to body, taking photos.

In the gully — photographs of which were shown in the world's media on Sunday the experts looked at 15 bodies, all male. "Some of the 15 had been moved from different places. We could tell from the fact that parts of the brain were missing [at the gully site] although they had been shot in the head and two had total destruction of the cranium and there were powder traces. We don't know who moved them or why," the expert said.

Most had been shot in the face, head, throat or abdomen. The team found four other bodies nearby and two more further down the path. One had a large triangular hole in the forehead, but no exit wound. The team concluded a farm implement caused the death.

Another heavy blow to the head had killed an elderly man. "It's possible that the body had been moved, as there was not enough brain scattered nearby," the expert said.

David Brown, the monitoring team's medical co-ordinator, who has served in the British army and been in the Balkans before, backed up the findings.

Even more odd was it that this report appeared in the Guardian, which has done no follow-ups since, and which in the usual 'liberal' and 'left' tradition is now more belligerently in favour of imperialist war on Serbia than most of its more orthodoxly 'reactionary' rival capitalist newspapers.

These facts gave a completely different pictures from the weekend's cold-blooded massacres sensationalism. What had taken place at Recak was a full-scale civil-war battle between a fortified rebel village and Serbian police/army patrols which had come under fire. The engagement lasted 7 hours, and the OSCE monitors who had 'reported' a simple cold-blooded 'massacre' had in fact been witnesses to the entire battle. 

Undoubtedly there were 39 Albanian dead bodies at the end of this fight for Recak, and almost certainly some were killed at very close quarters as the gunfight ended with a brief police/army occupation of the village, before they moved on leaving the remaining Albanian KLA villagers in charge to welcome the OSCE monitors, finally arriving on the spot having come down from the hill above the village.

But a rearrangement of already-dead bodies by the beaten side to get propaganda revenge against their 'ruthless conquerors' has been a routine stunt for losers to stage throughout the ages. And despite unbelievable pressure from Washington and the entire West on tiny Finland (member of the European Union) to have its 'independent' forensic team chime in with the demonisation of the Serbs so as to keep whipping up the warmongering pressure, Dr Helena Rants and her colleagues refused to say any more than the obvious — that the death of 39 people in war was 'a crime against humanity'.

The Western press headlined that, of course, but the smaller print underneath also declared:

However, Dr Helena Rants, who headed the team appointed by the European Union, refused to call the killings a massacre or to blame Serbian security forces — as did William Walker, head of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) monitors, here in January. 

In the report, Dr Rants wrote: "Medico-legal investigations cannot give a conclusive answer to the question whether there was a battle or whether the victims died under some other circumstances."

As to claims the bodies had been moved, she told the press conference: "If you were a villager from Recak, wouldn't it be a natural thing to turn over a body to find out if it was somebody you knew or whether that person could still be alive?"

The team did conclude that there had been no post-killing mutilation of the bodies, and that any injuries suggesting so had been caused by dogs.

Now, of course, since the Western conspiracy to blitzkrieg Serbia has finally got under way thanks to the Recak 'genocide' nonsense, there is inevitably a flood of fresh 'atrocity' allegations, an anti-Serb propaganda cascade that it will be impossible to stem or sort through. 

Reprisals are almost bound to be in the mind of some Serbs in the light of the West's own earlier much publicised hesitancy about being seen to become the 'air force for the KLA', — the civil war terrorist gunmen who have been massacring Serbs to try to force the secession of Kosovo with its 90% Albanian population. The armed air might of NATO is now clearly seen as nothing more than the airforce for the KLA separatists, and in the rough injustices now rampant in war-ravaged Kosovo, the Serbs unsurprisingly tell the Albanians to take all their complains to NATO.

But even in this avalanche of bad publicity for Serbia, some of the truth still slips through the West's blanket propaganda censorship, masterminded by the CIA's control of the Western news agencies and of the war reports coming out of NATO which is commanded by US imperialism. 

The Sunday Times revealed the following scepticism this week, identifying for certain only economic migrants from Albanian village poverty, and finding clear 'refugees' only from NATO bombing!

AT THE Red Cross office near the Turkish bazaar in Tetovo, Kucu was struggling to get his story straight. The Serbian army had attacked Kotlina at 5am and driven all the young Albanian men out of the village, he said. They had watched in horror from the forest as the women and children were loaded into lorries and driven off towards Kacaniki 30 miles south of Pristina. Then the Serbs had burnt the village.

That was not quite the version that Kucu's friend, Enes, related to a different Red Cross worker a few minutes later. The Serbs had herded the older Albanian men into the woods Enes said. The younger men had run away. It was 5pm — not 5am — when the Serbs had burnt the village. Then the fugitive Albanians had walked through the night for 20 miles to the Macedonian border. They had crossed the Sar Planina mountains to register as refugees from the war that had destroyed their homes.

It sounded a sadly familiar tale of Serbian mayhem, but a Red Cross volunteer exchanged a glance with a Macedonian interpreter. "These men don't look as though they have walked 20 miles" she said staring pointedly at Kucu's spotless white tanning shoes. "They took as though they arrived by Mercedes."

The unusually dapper would be refugees were not the only sign last week that all is not what it seems in the latest western attempt to impose order on Balkan chaos. A conflict promoted in Washington, London and elsewhere as a crusade against a despot looks a lot more complicated to those who live within earshot of exploding Tomahawk missiles.

To be sure, many of the refugees arriving from Kosovo had sinister stories to tell.

However, not everyone reaching Macedonia had encountered a genocidal Serb. Many had been scared from their homes not by Milosevic's marauding troops, but by the threat of Nato attacks. Others, like the well dressed Albanians, had motives that were hard to fathom through the centuries old fog of Balkan intrigue and deceit.

In Tetovo, there was speculation that the Kotlina Albanians had fallen foul of their own side. Reports reaching Skopje have suggested that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the underdog resistance unit of Albanian separatist guerrillas, is not always as heroic as it is sometimes portrayed.

The KLA has been accused in the past of forcibly conscripting Kosovo Albanian men into its ranks. Serbian officials have accused it of attacking its own villages if local men refuse to join up.

There were so many discrepancies in the stories of Kucu and his friends last week that Red Cross officials declared it impossible to know the truth about the supposed burning of Kotlina. The men might have been victims of Serbian aggression; they might have skipped town to avoid being drummed into KLA uniforms. These are the kind of Balkan conundrums that are rarely solved by B52 bombers.

Nor was there much fodder for Nato propagandists among the 200 or so refugees waiting to register at a Skopje district police station early on Friday. Mirvei, a tall Albanian woman clutching her four-month-old baby, looked bewildered when asked if Serbian troops had driven her out. "There were no Serbs," she said. "We were frightened of the bombs."

Hunched uncomfortably together on a kerb, an exhausted pair of elderly Albanian Kosovars puffed wearily on Turkish cigarettes as their Macedonian niece launched into a tirade — not against vicious Serbian oppression, but against the "cowardly" immigration policies of the West.

Her 86-year-old uncle, Ajredien, and his wife, Ceiebija, 78, had a son and grandchildren living in America and other children in Holland, Switzerland and France. All four countries had refused the elderly couple visas. Resigned to their plight in Kosovo, they had abandoned their home in Gnjilane only when Nato bombs began to fall.

Red Cross officials say many of the most recent arrivals intend to return to Kosovo as soon as the Nato bombardment stops.

The West's anti-Serb demonisation was even further dented from a most unlikely source when that most reactionary Conservative toff Alan Clark (Thatcher's former Defence Minister) and demented anti-communist who would be as full of scornful hatred for the remnants of workers-state socialism in present-day Serbia as any Tory alive) denounced the entire NATO warmongering posture as nothing but a stunt for US imperialism's sinister real interests:

THE ASSERTION that human rights within the boundaries of a sovereign nation are best defended by a sustained bombardment of its own civilian population is, to put it most kindly, Orwellian.

The notion that because a war is 'just' (by the aggressor's definition) it can be prosecuted immediately, and without deference to international opinion is highly dangerous. It is to prevent exactly this that the UN's Security Council mechanism came into being. 

Nato was conceived as a defensive alliance, its terms of engagement narrowly drawn; not as a 'policeman'  surrogate for the UN; never as an apparatus for intervention in civil war.

What amazes me about the Yugoslav crisis is the credulity of the Left, and of progressive thinkers, who seem to get a vicarious thrill from seeing B52s taking off from Fairford.

I address them: How have you swallowed whole the CIA funded propaganda that demonises the Serbs? Are you not familiar with the duplicity and intimidation of United States foreign policy? That Ambassador Walker, in charge of monitoring forces in Bosnia, was financing the Contras? Have you no recall of that 'Free World' crap that embraced Battista, Noriega, Syngman Rhee, Bao Dai. Lee Van Thleu and Sukarno?

If you read Michael Rose's Despatch you will see that the Bosnians mortared their own bread queue for a horror shot. If you talked to British soldiers you would learn that the KLA are gangsters indistinguishable (my analogy) from any warlord in Mogadishu.

In Yugoslavia there is a civil war.

This is a US-driven operation...and the US never intervenes objectively. It may be that the pressures of domestic politics oblige the President, as a distraction, to order the obliteration of a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. Or it may be that considerations of oil brokerage, the 'Seven Sisters' and projected pipeline routes, prevent attention being paid to, or even mention made, of the genocidal Turkish campaign against the PPK.

Obviously, there is an element of Old Tory anti-American bile in this, but his public citing of big power provocations as a routine 'excuse' for self-interested aggression is unchallengeable.

Questioning Washington's real motives for this blitzkrieg is one thing, however. Establishing what imperialist aggression is actually trying to achieve with this warmongering is more complex.

The need for 'spheres of influence' has always been of crucial concern to the major industrial and economic powers, even after the enforced overthrow of the direct colonial empires post-1945. And monopoly capitalism's imperialist requirements only grow even more intense as their mighty market forces get ever closer to the catastrophes of crash and collapse followed by long deep slump, now threatening more relentlessly than ever in history.

Shallow brained fake-'lefts' (who think return to all-out imperialist blitzkrieg in Europe by the world's greatest exploiting powers has anything at all to do with the supposedly 'infringed human rights' of a tiny bunch of Albanian separatist gunmen in Kosovo) pretend that a 'pattern of Serb repression' since the break-up of Yugoslavia's workers state in 1989 justifies the West's demonisation of Milosevic and Serbia.

They miss the point entirely. What this period most significantly records in terms of motivating forces for getting the international imperialist heavyweights on the warmongering trail once again in Europe (they have never stopped throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America for virtually the whole of this century and particularly intensely since 1945), has been the re-emergence as an active imperialist player by German monopoly capitalism.

The astonishing self-liquidation of the Soviet workers state's unique anti-imperialist 'sphere of influence' (following the Soviet Revisionist bureaucracy's incredible choice to self-destruct and dismantle the workers state), was the signal for a renewed imperialist spheres-of-influence free-for-all in Europe. It could now only be purely antagonistic (as opposed to the superficially 'cooperative' influence peddling when the imperialist powers were loosely 'united' in jointly struggling to undermine the Soviet workers-state's anti-imperialist influence in East Europe).

German imperialism instantly made the running to speed up the disintegration of Yugoslavia in this new anti-workers-state atmosphere, linking in particular with potential bourgeois interests in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia where it had established local stooge nazi statelets during its World War II military occupation against communist and largely Serbian influences.

But the rapid success of this German initiative to get the Yugoslav workers state quickly broken up in chaos only spurred Washington's wish to demonstrate that its overall sphere of influence was still pre-eminent everywhere and was still the decisive factor in all major developments in international diplomacy and regional restructuring.

It is this subtle and murky inter-imperialist power struggle which governs 99% of the importance for the rest of the world of what is happening in the Balkans, — not the exploitation and provocation of endless 'local ethnic and national rights' which all the imperialist powers are simply manipulating for their own ends.

Since when has the imperialist system been truly interested in anyone's minority rights, or even majority rights in many cases??? And least of all why would there be such an overwhelming display of imperialist force over the now quite complex 'autonomy' rights (see below) of ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo province of Serbia which were only established by communists in the first place as something meaningful within the Yugoslav workers state, now deliberately destroyed by the West???????

"Those poor refugees. This is intolerable. Repression; infringement of democratic human rights; ethnic cleansing; genocide", etc, etc, the sick western hypocrisy churns out.

There are nearly 4 million Palestinian refugees stuck PERMANENTLY in camps outside their homeland, effectively rotting away for more than 40 years in most cases, and routinely blitzed anew by Zionist imperialist air power the moment that any Palestinians anywhere try to raise their heads and strike back at the Zionist colonisation of their country, a truly monstrous ethnic cleansing not just tolerated by the west but fully set up by the West in the first place and totally financed, armed, and maintained by the West ever since.

There are 25 million Kurds without a homeland, — deliberately excluded from statehood by western imperialist diktat more than 80 years ago in order to suit the interests of monopoly capitalist oil exploitation and political domination in the region of the Middle East. And millions of those Kurds suffering under Turkish tyranny, for example, have suffered genocidal repression for decades, going on ferociously at this very minute, for having dared to struggle for self-determination. What does the West do? Keep the Turks armed to the teeth permanently with the very latest weaponry, and turn a blind eye to the Kurdish suffering and periodic massacres and ethnic cleansing at Turkey's hands. There are dozens more examples worldwide of this utter imperialist system contempt for 'human rights'.

The barmiest argument of all came from some prominent British media posturer who pompously proclaimed: "Let us just drop the argument by analogy. Let everyone simply rejoice that at least the Kosovo Albanians are getting some justice from the West at last, if it is claimed no one ever has before".

Pigs will be flying next. Surely it is the indisputable actual historical record of non-stop international injustice under imperialist rule, everywhere in the world, which should more provoke the response: "Justice for the Albanian minority? Whatever next? What dirty tricks has imperialism really got up its sleeve??"

Some anti-communist 'lefts' were so determined to champion 'individual human rights' in their relentless hostility to all that the workers states stood for, and wishing to turn a blind eye to imperialism's anti-communist intrigues and manipulation, — — that they talked up the KLA as being the real anti-imperialists, and worked it out (Weekly Worker, Jan 28) that NATO was far more likely to bomb the Albanians in Kosovo than to bomb the Serbs:

If it decides to intervene, Nato will police an anti-democratic settlement designed to stifle the will of the Kosovar masses.

Imperialism wants to see the KLA disarmed, not driving out the occupying army. A spokesperson for Downing Street was explicit: "We are not going to act as the KLA's air force."

In other words, one of the main policy aims of imperialism is how to prevent the KLA from winning independence. Nato air strikes could just as easily be directed against the KLA as against the Serbian forces.

For the imperialists the guiding 'principle' is the sovereignty of existing states —  ie, lines on a map.

At the weekend, Robin Cook warned the KLA that its "uncompromising" position would lead to its "marginalisation" and that it "is not going to throw the Yugoslav army out of Kosova".

Officials have become increasingly irritated by the KLA's intransigence — its leadership has so far refused to negotiate directly with Belgrade.

The Guardian summed it up in this way: "But no one in or outside Nato is prepared to support the KLA's secessionist goal for fear of destabilising the entire Balkan region and sending the dangerous message to any other disgruntled ethnic minority that war will bring them independence and foreign recognition... In Kosovo, Serbs are fighting KLA guerrillas who any Nato intervention would have to tame" (January 22). A British diplomat put it even more bluntly: "Political or military pressure on Milosevic to back off simply encourages the KLA to proclaim their ambitions for independence."

The Trot fake-'lefts' (from many Guardian journalists to the Weekly Worker) live in a fantasy world of their own making, entirely subjective, where the only principle is the petty-bourgeois survival mantra "parliamentary democracy good (and stuff what Marx and Lenin said), workers' state bad (ditto); dictatorship of the bourgeoisie tolerable (because concealed and therefore does not have to be acknowledged), dictatorship of the proletariat intolerable, in fact the worst thing that could ever happen to talented and free-thinking individuals like us", — etc.

And the pompous self-righteousness of the anti-Marxist philistinism of these 'middle class revolutionaries' would indeed be laughable if its perpetual consequences were not so tragic.

The epoch-making danger of Balkanising imperialist manipulation of this explosive nationalist region (which in its entire history has only ever known reasonably peaceful and civilised relations in the 45 years rule of the Yugoslav workers state), has been obvious to even the blindest observer since German imperialist influence instantly started carving out its sphere of hegemony after 1989 (building, like all the other imperialists on pre-prepared soft manoeuvre positions prior to the Moscow Revisionist bureaucracy's astonishing liquidation of the Soviet workers state and its sphere of anti-imperialist protection from direct Western exploitation).

For so-called anti-imperialists (Trots, etc) to start falling for Western-inspired 'human rights' stunts in this new atmosphere of direct monopoly capitalist intervention was the equivalent of throwing a lighted match into the powderkeg room.

Only by the monstrous demonisation of Serb nationalism above all others (as opposed to the far more reactionary record of Croat nationalism, for example, or Bosnian Muslim nationalism likewise), which was deliberately singled out by world imperialist circles for vilification because of its historically outstandingly defiant anti-imperialist credentials, — could any 'sense' at all be made of this regressive nationalist clamour now breaking up the Yugoslav workers state under the direct impetus of German divide-and-rule meddling, which the other imperialists would quickly want to get in on.

It is not part of the Marxist Leninist scientific understanding of the fraught nationalist problems of this area to exalt Serbian nationalist claims (strong though they are) against rival nationalist claims (which have always been tainted in modern times with a strong flavour of imperialist stoogery). The point is to expose imperialist meddling above all else as the burning issue (literally, now), — engulfing all other considerations.

That might have meant an abstentionist policy of letting the rival nationalist forces get on with sorting each other out but minus any outside interference. But from the Marxist point of view of imperialist warmongering (now unleashed) as the overwhelmingly worst-case future threat to ALL nationalisms everywhere, — this would still have been justified. As it happens, tens of thousands were killed anyway in the rival nationalist strife following Yugoslavia's breakup, even with imperialist intervention and fake-'left' cheerleading for competing 'self-determination rights'. Without such misguided interference, who knows. 

But to set the record straight a little, the Serbs have if anything always got the worst of nationalist rivalry in the imperialist epoch, thanks to always being singled out for demonisation. And even under the Yugoslav workers state, which was dominated by a Croat, Marshal Tito, the Serbs were the least interested in playing the national-rivalry game, putting their weight much more solidly behind Yugoslavia itself, the socialist federation of six formerly endlessly squabbling small nations.

The Serbs now complain that under the workers state as it happens, the Albanian minority deliberately congregated in the Kosovo province of Serbia, reducing the Serb community there from nearly 50% of the population to less than 20% today, continuing an Albanian nationalist concentration which began earlier this century when the Serb community was much more than 50% of the population there.

These considerations make this point: That the Serbs went all out to build the Yugoslav workers state, constructing socialism for the longer term benefit of everyone and the solution of all petty nationalist rivalry for all time.

In the imperialist breakup of Yugoslavia, the more calculating and conservative national minorities ended up threatening Serbs with further losses to their narrower Serb national interests which had only (properly) been neglected for the sake of building up Yugoslavia for everyone's benefit.

The West, the other nationalities, and the Trot anti-communists all claimed, of course, that the Serbs had only been building up Yugoslavia in their own national interests anyway because they were the biggest and most powerful nationality.

A Marxist view on these complex questions could be that the Serbs were genuinely building the possible objective future in Yugoslavia, in spite of all the faults with all of the workers states, Yugoslavia no less than others. And it might then follow that if any nationalism had any better claim than any other in the sordid break-up of Yugoslavia, it should be the Serbs because of their stronger anti-imperialist traditions and capabilities. And that is certainly how it is working out now. The very best justification for Serb national interests is the frenzied way in which the whole might of imperialism is determined to crush Belgrade's resistance to open-house western monopoly imperialist meddling in the region's affairs.

Much is made of the Serb cancellation of some Albanian Kosovan autonomy after 1989; but Serbia's fears of separatist secession of its most ancient province are well justified now and were almost certainly well justified then. Imperialism was out for total Balkanisation of the former Yugoslav workers state and in particular to destroy and limit Serbian nationalist influence in the region for all time. German imperialism has still not forgotten the indigestible resistance of the Yugoslav communist partisan forces, with their Serb backbone, which stuck in the throat of the Wehrmacht throughout World War II's Nazi occupation of the Balkans. 

Up to 1989, there is no record of any Serb sabotage of Kosovo Albanian rights. And although Serbian statehood was firmly re-established over the Kosovo territory after 1989, Serb repression of Albanian separatist resistance fell a million miles short of any 'massacre' culture, and even further from any 'genocide' implications. That hysterical anti-Serb propaganda has only blown up since the KLA launched separatist war which demanded Serbian state clamping-down. 

In Serb eyes, this Albanian sectarian violence and hatred was only what they themselves had been forced to suffer inside Kosovo during the last few break-up years of Yugoslavia when socialist brotherhood was fast disappearing, and the Albanian KLA in Kosovo were already planning separatism, probably already under subversive imperialist influence.

And no amount of relentless Western demonisation of Serbian nationalism will ever match the horror with which Serb eyes regard their local rival nations for good historical reasons, — as the Western press has itself quietly admitted in the past when not deliberately whipping up war hatred against Belgrade. 

Only last month Fleet Street published the following revelations about the neo-fascist atmosphere currently in Croatia following the extradition from Argentina of Dinko Sakic, who was the Croat nazi commandant of the Jasenovac death camp in German imperialism's wartime stooge local 'state':

In a country that has yet to come to terms with its fascist past, it has not been easy for people to come forward and testify against Sakic about atrocities that some Croatian officials would prefer remained ignored. Several witnesses have even been intimidated into staying away.

"You should be ashamed to speak out against a fellow Croat," one policeman told Klaic. 

"I am not stupid," said a Jewish survivor who says he saw Sakic oversee 'the execution of Jewish women and children. "I live near a police station. I have seen the police give the fascist salute and heard them sing old Ustashe songs."

Croatia today is a fledgling democracy. But many Croatian nationalists — Franjo Tudjman, the president, among them — have sought to present the Ustashe, the Nazi puppet government that ran the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during the second world war, as a legitimate forerunner to their contemporary nation. They have downplayed its brutality. 

Although international law allows Sakic to be charged with genocide, it is a political can of worms that the Croatian authorities dare not open. "If you condemn Sakic for genocide, then you have to speak about the NDH — whose first aim was to achieve a clean ethnic state," said Cedo Prodanovic, a former Zagreb prosecutor who will represent the family of one of Sakic's victims at the trial.

"The NDH pronounced racial laws which were very firm and perhaps more successful than those in Nazi Germany. But a lot of people from that time, and their followers, are nowadays very close to the authorities. Some of them are even members of parliament."

Tudjman himself almost certainly never wanted Sakic's extradition. Sakic says the president shook his hand warmly during a visit to Argentina — a claim Tudjman denies. But with Croatia striving to integrate itself into modern Europe, there was no choice but to bow to international pressure.

Tudjman evolved into a staunch Croatian nationalist after Tito's death. He now believes that while the Ustashe ran a fascist state, they were pursuing the 1,000-year dream of Croatian independence — a dream that he has finally secured.

To avoid any political embarrassment to the contemporary Croatian state, the Zagreb prosecutor will seek to avoid full historical disclosure of the Ustashe regime.

In just four years as many as 120,000 perished at Jasenovac, 70 miles southeast of Zagreb on the banks of the Sava River. The gates were a portal of death for Serbs, Jews, gypsies and dissidents alike. Nobody knows the precise toll. Jasenovac did not operate as a streamlined death camp like those run by the Nazis in Poland. Croatian fascists lacked the Nazi zeal for documenting their deeds and the camp was destroyed at the end of the war along with many of its records.

It did function as a slaughterhouse, though. Prisoners were stabbed, clubbed, shot, beheaded, trampled and burnt in the reconstructed oven of a tile factory. When the war was over, only about 100 survivors tottered to freedom.

It will be a tricky course to follow, however. Since Croatia declared its independence in 1991 — the event that triggered the breakup of Yugoslavia — this part of the Balkans has suffered the worst atrocities Europe has sees since 1945.

The human rights violations committed until the war between them ended in 1995 were in part fuelled by the passions aroused by Ustashe brutality at Jasenovac. When Hitler ordered his "final solution" of the Jewish "problem" in 1942, Jasenovac was the region's main extermination camp.

Tudjman has infuriated Serbs and Jews by glossing over the slaughter in recent years. He has suggested that the number of deaths could be as low as 20,000. A few years ago he provoked an outcry by proposing to turn Jasenovac into a memorial for all the victims of the war so that the largely Serbian and Jewish victims would be commemorated along with their Ustashe killers.

After the recent war, few Serbs remain in Croatia and those who do have not dared complain. Some 200,000 Serbs were forced to flee when Tudjman's forces put an end to a four-year Serbian insurrection in Krajina in 1995. At least 900 elderly Serbs who stayed behind were murdered.

It is perverse but in a sense the past has caught up with the present. This is why Klaic and other camp survivors are so disillusioned and believe the political atmosphere is such that true justice cannot be done.

Croatia today is clearly not the Ustashe state. But Tudjman does boast that he has solved the "Serbian problem". Their numbers are down to a few per cent of the population. They can never represent a source of insecurity again, he says. Modern Croatia is very much the ethnically clean state that Sakic and his wartime henchmen set out to achieve 50 years ago.

Sakic has never shown remorse. "I regret that we had not done all that is imputed to us. For had we done that, then Croatia would not have problems today," he told a Zagreb magazine.

"There would not have been people to write lies. I am proud of all I did. If I were offered the same duty today, I would accept it."

Blaming the Serbs or Milosevic for the nationalist hatred in former Yugoslavia is just obscene nonsense. Playing along with nationalist provocations against legitimate Serbian interests is just falling right into imperialism's warmongering trap.

And while it can be universally agreed that the retreat into Serb nationalism from the high ideals and great achievements of the Yugoslav workers state is a grave historical setback temporarily, the anti-Serb demonisation by the fake-'left' and other anti-communists is just wilfully closing its eyes to some ready admissions in the Western press of just what a truly unsavoury bunch Serbia's opponents are, past (see above) and present:

An investigation by The Times has established that police forces in three Western European countries, together with Europol, the European police authority, are separately investigating growing evidence that drug money is funding the KLA's leap from obscurity to power.

The financing of the Kosovo guerrilla war poses critical questions and it sorely tests claims to an "ethical" foreign policy. Should the West back a guerrilla army that appears to be partly financed by organised crime? Could the KLA's need for funds be fuelling the heroin trade across Europe?

As well as diverting charitable donations from exiled Kosovans some of the KLA money is thought to come from drug dealing. 

Sweden is investigating suspicions of a KLA drug connection. "We have intelligence leading us to believe that there could be a connection between drug money and the Kosovo Liberation Army," said Walter Kege, head of the drug enforcement unit in the Swedish police intelligence service.

Supporting intelligence has come from other states. "We have yet to find direct evidence, but our experience tells us that the channels for trading hard drugs are also used for weapons," said one Swiss police commander.

An official in the Bavarian Interior Ministry also told The Times of a recent fundraising meeting involving some 200 Kosovans in southern Germany. "At the end of the session they raised DM100,000 [about E40.000)."

This represents a huge sum for ordinary Kosovans and fuels speculation that apparently legitimate fundraising activities are used to launder dirty money.

One Western intelligence report quoted by Berliner Zeitung says that DM900 million has reached Kosovo since the guerrillas began operations and half the sum is said to be illegal drug money.

In particular, European countries are investigating the Albanian connection: whether Kosovan Albanians living primarily in Germany and Switzerland are creaming off the profits from inner-city heroin dealing and sending the cash to the KLA.

Albania — which plays a key role in channelling money to the Kosovans — is at the hub of Europe's drug trade. An intelligence report which was prepared by Germany's Federal Criminal Agency concluded: "Ethnic Albanians are now the most prominent group in the distribution of heroin in Western consumer countries."

Europol, which is based in The Hague, is preparing a report for European interior and justice ministers on a connection between the KLA and Albanian drug gangs.

Police in the Czech Republic recently tracked down a Kosovo Albanian drug dealer named Doboshi who had escaped from a Norwegian prison where he was serving 12 years for heroin trading. A raid on Doboshi's apartment turned up documents linking him with arms purchases for the KLA.

Police sources in Germany have made plain their suspicions: the sudden ascendancy of Kosovan Albanians in the heroin trade in Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia coincides with the sudden growth of the KLA from a ragamuffin peasants' army two years ago to a 30,000-strong force equipped with grenade launchers, anti-tank weapons and AK47s.

That Times report was taken further by the Sunday Times to reveal the KLA's drug-running NATO connection – via Turkey, a NATO member (and fellow pro-imperialist Muslim reactionary) which is currently assisting in the aerial blitzkrieg against Serbia, fresh from its military slaughter of Turkey's own genuine self-determination civil war embarrassment from its Kurdish rebels:

This weekend it emerged that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which is being backed by Nato forces in its rebel war against the Serbs, is raising cash from drug trafficking and protection rackets in Britain. Customs officers say that Kosovan couriers are helping to smuggle heroin into the country on behalf of Turkish-based gangs.

Chris Harrison, a customs official with the National Investigation Service, said he believed that some of the drug money was funding the rebels.

Western intelligence reports last week said that up to £300m had reached Kosovo since the guerrillas had begun operations. Half was said to have been cash from drugs.

Nevertheless, a purely academic case could still be made out for some 'absolute right to self-determination' for the Kosovo Albanians, – but only at the expense of all reason and at the expense of any serious anti-imperialist political struggle. What is going on in the former Yugoslav worker-state territory is a major historical imperialist thrust to impose new warmongering aggression culture on mankind's affairs. The West and the monopoly capitalist system is ENTIRELY responsible for all that is going on there. Falling for nationalist stunts at such a juncture is a real crime against humanity. Like hundreds of similar ethnic divide-and-rule stunts which imperialism is currently unleashing as its crisis deepens (in particular, all over Indonesia, for example, as the corrupt bourgeois state establishment pursues any and every means to avoid being overthrown by mass proletarian revolt against the insoluble slump-crisis), – many local Balkans national aspirations or grievances may have to be overlooked for now in the interests of a more universal conscious anti-imperialist struggle to head off spheres-of-influence inter-imperialist warmongering which threatens everyone's future.

Taking sides over local nationalist grievances "because they are going to happen anyway, and are going to have an outcome anyway, one way or another" misses the point calamitously. In this epoch of accelerating imperialist crisis which can only lead to international warmongering, there are no rational circumstances remaining within which a painstaking search for reason on national questions can any longer take place. Aligning with the Kosovo Albanians now can only mean aligning with imperialism's whole domineering and warmongering crisis turmoil.

Only all-out anti-imperialist campaigning for world socialist revolution now makes sense. This assumes nothing about the sincerity or persistency of Belgrade's anti-imperialism. The stand required is not to support Milosevic at all but merely to totally oppose the NATO warmongering adventure and to wish on it the most complete and humiliating DEFEAT. 

To the extent that Serb nationalist resistance is instrumental for that, it will inevitably draw the sympathy of some serious anti-imperialists worldwide, but that is an unavoidable incidental factor only, and not the aim of an anti-imperialist struggle. If beyond the defeat of world imperialist warmongering and slump-crisis, Serb nationalism or any other should remain a regressive problem, it will be time enough to deal with it then.

Current Serb retaliation inside Kosovo is not the issue either, tragic as it is. It is simply another extension of the civil war which was already barbaric, on both sides like all wars, from the moment it started. The KLA has now in effect brought in its airforce to escalate Albanian destructiveness ten thousandfold, – massive bombing destruction pouring down on every Serb town. The wonder is not the increased Serb roughhandedness in Kosovo but that Belgrade has so far refrained from any policy change towards autonomy for Kosovo in a new peace agreement, and has not decided to impose serious official 'ethnic cleansing', i.e. recapture and re-population of Serbian Kosovo. 

The grotesque Western propaganda exaggerations about non-existent 'genocide' pose the only real danger of such a response. If the Serbs are to be relentlessly forever bombed to pieces over non-existent 'ethnic cleansing', then some Serbs might suggest at least doing the land-grabbing if they are to be punished for it anyway.

Imperialism's 'spheres of influence' war is going badly, which is crucial for the anti-imperialist crusade which this warmongering insanity demands. No military defeat by Serbia is remotely in sight yet, which would be the very best outcome imaginable; but the cynical adventure of domineering brutality in order to out-imperialist each other has overlooked the basic detail that the ostensible 'reason' for the blitzkrieg, the defence of Kosovo Albanian 'human rights' is the very last thing that could be protected by such an irrational and savage military onslaught. An Italian capitalist newspaper, Corriere della Sera, crudely expressed the initial imperialist exuberance for the warmongering phase of big power rivalry, before the doubts set in:

If a European foreign and, above all, military policy is coming into being, if the Union starts to face up to the issue of having a presence in these areas too, Italy could play the key card it has always had up its sleeve in the form of its extraordinary geographical position and thus increase in no small measure its role [in the world]."

Whoopee, more domination and exploitation!! But it is beginning to turn sour very quickly. 

The onslaught is becoming a public relations disaster, not to mention hell-on-earth for living people. Serious splits in the NATO gangster alliance can be anticipated. It is warmongering itself which is now so completely out-of-date, with the West more desperate than ever to hide the fact that it is precisely war's crude destructiveness which makes it so necessary and attractive to monopoly-imperialism in insoluble crisis of 'over-production'.

This difficulty is made a million times worse when the supposed 'humanitarian reason' for the bombing turns out to be the very thing most clearly jeopardised by it, – the supposed 'security' of the Kosovo Albanian population.

New Labour is frozen into a ludicrous spin-doctor paralysis by its brief to 'be authoritative'. Barmy Clare Short came over like a cloned Frankenstein monster as she insisted that NATO had no responsibility whatever for thinking about and preparing for the refugee crisis its blitzkrieg would obviously create but which appears to have been not thought about at all. The wily opportunists of the petty bourgeois SNP nationalists may have made a very shrewd gamble in distancing themselves from this NATO insanity.

The 1990s are not the 1930s when imperialism last deliberately if 'reluctantly' reintroduced warmongering culture as the 'only solution' to crisis. Modern society sophistication has moved on three further generations since then. Mass public opinion can still be cruelly fooled, but only by means of non-stop propaganda now. And as soon as things go wrong, – as the Vietnam war has already proved, – sentiment can rapidly turn sour. German imperialism's re-involvement in warmongering has been successfully got going again, but could Germany, for example, take an aggressive lead in expanded warmongering as it did in the 1930s if this is called for at the end of the 1990s?

Imperialism will go to war again, as it is already doing. But the price of mess and failure will now be astronomically high. Some more Serb defeats for NATO would be handy, – see how scalded US imperialism was at losing just one plane so far, but the one aircraft it did not want to lose when engaged in 'friendly' warmongering rivalry with potential imperialist competitors like Germany and France, — the supposedly 'super advanced technology' of the Stealth bomber. Washington will have been far more irked by German sniggers than by Serb crowing. But the splits in the imperialist mutual support for blitzkrieg could occur anyway.
		
Last EPSR quoted Lenin's science on workers-party building via complete exposures of imperialist society total crisis, not via crude slogans or dumbed-down party loyalty. Denouncing the bombing is good, but a serious workers party leadership must be able to educate the whole working class and the whole country immediately in the entire warmongering crisis of imperialist society, as the Marxist Leninist Review has always done every week, and is going to be attempting now and in every week to come. Without revolutionary theory, there can be no serious anti-imperialist struggle in the long run worldwide, which is what is now needed. Build Leninism. Roy Bull

World Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles)

ROSEMARY NELSON — WHY SHE WAS SILENCED 

BY LAURA FRIEL

JOHN STALKER, the British policemen tasked with investigating the RUC's shoot-to-kill policy in the 1980s, recounts an incident at Crumlin Road Court House when he was reprimanded by an RUC officer who objected to Stalker exchanging words with Pat Finucane, a solicitor representing the survivor of the Hayshed stakeout.

"The solicitor is an IRA man, any man who represents IRA men is worse than an IRA man," said the RUC sergeant. 

The parallels between the killing of Pat Finucane, gunned down in 1989, and last week's murder of Rosemary Nelson are so obvious that they hardly need to be drawn; the sophistication of both killings and the context within which they took place has fuelled allegations of collusion.

In the ten years that have followed, the tenacity and determination of the Finucane family and their supporters has ensured that the significance has never been lost. The murder of a civil rights lawyer and the notoriety of the RUC is now known within political and legal circles throughout the world. 

In truth Pat Finucane became more dangerous in death, than ever he was in life. Yet despite this someone somewhere decided last week that Rosemary Nelson was more dangerous alive than dead.

So what was it about this slightly-built woman, (shy enough to turn away from cameras to conceal a minor facial blemish) which had so terrified her killers? As the media images flashed across our television screens of Rosemary Nelson's car with it's doors flung open and the mangled front seat where she had so brutally suffered before dying some hours later, a confidential file was being placed on the desk of the Director of Public Prosecutions. 

The file was the culmination of a two-year investigation into allegations of harassment, including assault and death threats by the RUC against Rosemary Nelson. The DPP will decide if any action is to be taken against the RUC.

In the summer of 1997 Rosemary Nelson had lodged complaints of RUC harassment with the Independent Commission for Police Complaints. An RUC investigation began under the supervision of ICPC member Geralyn McNally. The history of the ICPC is one of being an apologist for the RUC rather than a public watchdog.

A year into the investigation and the ICPC decided to pull the plug, after McNally expressed "serious concerns" about the conduct of the RUC to Mo Mowlam. The investigation was scrapped and the RUC team replaced by officers from the London Metropolitan police. 

Earlier this week, just days after Rosemary Nelson's death, the ICPC released to her family details of the "serious concerns" which had underpinned the decision to remove the RUC from the investigation arising out of Rosemary's complaints; it is telling reading. Criticism by the ICPC included: 

• General hostility, evasiveness and disinterest of RUC officers involved in the investigation.

• Disguised hostility to Rosemary Nelson from some RUC officers whose mindset could be viewed as bordering on the obstructive.

• One RUC officer arrived 45 minutes late for an interview smelling of drink.

• The apparent prompting of some RUC officers to prepare statements in advance of interviews. One officer told the ICPC he had prepared his statement at the request of a chief inspector.

• An RUC chief inspector involved in the investigation made a number of claims which constitute judgement on the moral character of Rosemary Nelson.

•	Another senior RUC officer deemed evidence given by Rosemary Nelson "no better" than evidence given by criminal suspects,

• A chief inspector dismissed the allegations as propaganda.

In short the ICPC found the RUC hostile, evasive, dismissive and abusive.

But Rosemary Nelson's role as defence lawyer in a number of high-profile cases was not the only reason she became a target for harassment by the RUC. Six months ago Rosemary travelled to Washington to give evidence before the US Congress subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights. She told the US hearing that the behaviour of the RUC towards her had worsened over the last three years, particularly "since I began to represent the residents of the Garvaghy Road area of Portadown". 

Rosemary Nelson had a gift for internationalising issues previously obscured in the political confines of the Six Counties. Less than a week before her death Rosemary had presided over yet another breakthrough. In April 1997, a 25-year-old Catholic Robert Hamill was fatally attacked by a loyalist mob in Portadown. The attack took place in full view of an RUC patrol who did nothing to prevent the sectarian murder. Rosemary Nelson was the Hamill family's solicitor. Two weeks ago it was announced that the families of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence and the Hamill family would be "forging firmer links".

Perhaps then Rosemary Nelson was murdered less for what she has done and more for what she was about to do.

Last Autumn Rosemary Nelson gave evidence to a congressional committee investigating the UN report by Param Cumaraswamy. Her evidence of RUC threats against her was damning and convincing according to congress members who heard her testimony. Next month Rosemary was scheduled to present evidence before another congressional hearing bringing further damaging details of RUC direct involvement in killings and bombing over 20 years out into the international arena.

In 1991 Sean McPhilemy produced The Committee a documentary for British television which revealed a conspiracy involving prominent members of the unionist community who actively colluded with loyalist death squads in a campaign of terror against the nationalist community. The making of the programme was followed by the rigorous pursuit of the film-makers by the RUC through the British courts.

As McPhilemy's solicitor, Rosemary Nelson had extensive documentation on collusion. In a conversation with a close friend, just hours before her death, Rosemary commented on an article which appeared in a Dublin newspaper which named a former head of the RUC Special Branch, Assistant Chief Constable Brian Fitzsimmons, as involved in coordinating attacks by the RUC and loyalist death squads. Rosemary confirmed that the story was true.

Brian Fitzsimmons was killed in a helicopter crash in the Mull of Kintyre in 1994. After his death Ronnie Flanagan took his place as head of the RUC Special Branch.