Bombing Yugoslavia: A 'Humanitarian War' for an Imperialist Peace.

• Author: Hawkins, Howie

The US bombed Yugoslavia for the same imperialist reasons it bombed Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan this year as well as Bosnia in 1995, namely, to project global power and show the world who's the boss. The expressed concern for the rights of Albanian Kosovars was a pretext for advancing US economic and geopolitical interests. The bombing campaign did nothing to protect the Albanian Kosovars from Serb fascists; indeed, it gave them the cover for the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo that they had sought for years.

The US pushed the bombing campaign in order to reinforce the dominion of US-run NATO over Europe and to expand NATO's mission to "out of area" military interventions. Under the cover of humanitarian pretensions, NATO now becomes the global cop who enforces the conditions for corporate exploitation, just as nineteenth century imperialism pillaged the Third World while pretending a self sacrificing "white man's burden" of civilizing the "backward countries." In Yugoslavia itself, there was nothing of vital economic interest to the US. But there was a nice plum in its province of Kosovo. "The sprawling state-owned Trepca mining complex, the most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans, is worth at least $5 billion," wrote Chris Hedges for the New York Times. According to the mine's director, Novak Bjelic, speaking in mid-1998 during the civil war between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Yugoslavarmy, "The war in Kosovo is about the mines, nothing else. This is Serbia's Kuwait, the heart of Kosovo." The m ines contain huge veins of lead, zinc, cadmium, gold and silver, as well as 17 billion tons of coal reserves. [1]

Aside from the lucrative but not vital Trepca mining complex, the US wants in Yugoslavia the favorable conditions for corporate profit making that it wants everywhere: sweat-shop labor conditions, a deregulated market, privatized assets, a "stable" (i.e., repressive) government that maintains these conditions against any social insurgency. That the US has commercial as well as military interests in the Balkans was symbolized in the Boeing 737 crash in 1996 that killed Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. Perishing with Brown were top executives from Boeing, Bechtel, AT&T, Enron, Northwest Airlines, and several other corporations, all of them major Democratic Party donors and traveling with Brown to secure contracts from the $5.1 billion post Bosnian war reconstruction package. [2]

Bombing European Independence

The most important reason the US wanted war in Kosovo, and before that in Bosnia, had to do with concerns outside the Balkans. A primary US political/military goal has been to prevent the Western European powers from breaking free of their subordination to the US through NATO. Since the Cold War ended, the US has needed a rationale for preventing Europe from establishing itself as an independent political/military entity, especially in an alliance with Russia and its nuclear capacities. The wars in Yugoslavia have served this purpose well. The US aim has not been to settle the Balkan conflicts. To the contrary, the US has repeatedly, in Bosnia and Kosovo, blocked settlements, encouraged war by ultra-nationalist and fascistic forces in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Serbia itself, and sought out opportunities to bomb. The US aim has been to occupy the Balkans militarily, thus keeping Europe dependent on US military capacity. [3]

This US goal in the Balkans is linked to the overall US goal of nothing less than global domination as "the indispensable power" in Madeleine Albright's arrogant phrase. A 1992 Pentagon policy document redefined US political/military goals for the post Cold War world. Entitled "The Defense Planning Guide," it states, "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival [i.e., Europe]....We must...discourage [the advanced industrial nations] from challenging our leadership...It is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary instrument of Western defense and security as well as the channel for US influence and participation in European security affairs.... We must seek to prevent the emergence of Europeanonly security arrangements that would undermine NATO.. ..[We must maintain] the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the US... .The US should be postured to act independently when collective action [i.e., the UN] cannot be orchestrated." [4] It is in this context of th e US drive for global domination and European subordination that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s must be understood.

Caught Between Domestic Bureaucrats and Foreign Imperialists

But it is not just US machinations that account for the recent Balkan Wars. Internally, the Yugoslav state bureaucracy, led by the Yugoslav League of Communists, held power in the post World War II period through a one-party government and a state-owned market economy. Staking out a position of neutrality between East and West in the Cold War and introducing profit-oriented worker-managed firms (with workers' power strictly circumscribed by the League of Communists), the economy grew phenomenally in the 1950s and 1960s and old ethnic rivalries faded in the general prosperity. By the mid 1960s, however, as the...