An Open Letter from The Greens/Green Party USA to Joschka Fischer and Our Sisters and Brothers in Alliance 90/The Greens, April 9, 1999.

As American Greens, we have often looked to the German Greens for leadership and inspiration. Your electoral achievements in 1983 brought international attention to Green politics and inspired the beginning of Green Party organizing in the US and many other countries. Your current participation in Germany's Red-Green governing coalition has given us hope that progress toward new models of just and ecological economics and peace politics would be made by Germany and give renewed impetus to Green organizing in the US and around the world.

But now, we have grave concerns about the support that the Red-Green coalition, Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, and the majority of Green members of the Bundestag have given to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The very credibility of Green politics around the world may become a casualty of NATO's war if the German Greens continue to participate in it.

We agree that the repression, violence, and ethnic cleansing of the Milosevic regime against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo is horrific and must be opposed. But NATO's bombing campaign has only made the situation worse. The Serb-led Yugoslav army and paramilitaries are acting with impunity in Kosovo since the OSCE monitors and independent press left Kosovo when NATO began bombing. Now hundreds of thousands of Albanians are fleeing the violence in Kosovo, as the Pentagon and CIA predicted. The US, at least, apparently knew that NATO bombing would be a disaster for the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

When the bombing campaign began, the US leadership told us its purpose was to save the Kosovo Albanians. Now, having utterly failed to meet that objective, we are told that we are at war "to save US and NATO credibility" and "to punish Milosevic." But the NATO bombing has only rallied Serbs behind Milosevic and crushed the political space for an anti-nationalist democratic alternative. While NATO bombing strengthens Milosevic, it hurts all Yugoslav people and creates resentments that will make a just political resolution of all issues in the Balkans all the more difficult.

That German Green leaders would support a US-led NATO military offensive in a non-NATO country is inexplicable to us because it encourages the US to act as a "rogue superpower" and to pursue its objective of extending NATO into the future indefinitely as its military enforcer throughout Europe and the Middle East. Now the US and NATO are using the Yugoslav war to transform NATO from a supposedly defensive alliance into an explicitly interventionist force.

The ramifications of this change in NATO's role are a threat to peace everywhere. The ABM and START treaties and nuclear disarmament negotiations between the US and Russia are...