Tony Benn is the Labour M.P. for Chesterfield, and a former cabinet minister. He has been a leading voice of the British left for many decades. He spoke to Spectre about NATO aggression in the Balkans and the campaign against it.

What, in your view, are the real objectives of a war which seems to be aimed at the total destruction of Yugoslavia’s vital infrastructure?
I don’t think it’s in the interests of the Kosovan refugees. If you look at the world, you can see that the people of East Timor are being oppressed by the Indonesian government, and the Indonesian government is getting arms from Britain. The Kurds have no home, the Palestinians have no state, the Israelis have bombed the south of Lebanon forty-four times this year, the Turks are allowed to remain in Northern Cyprus – so I think you can dismiss that argument. I think it is part of a strategy, first for the destruction of Yugoslavia, which began way back, and then for the domination of the Balkans by NATO and the us, and the replacement of the United Nations by NATO. The Americans don’t pay their contributions to the un, they won’t put issues forward there in case there’s a veto, though they have used the veto themselves on 27Êoccasions to defend Israel. The destruction of Yugoslavia began when they began to make economic changes, which exposed them to the imf. The imf put such pressure on them that some of the richer republics broke away. The us recognised Croatia. German Foreign Minister Genscher said that this was ‘my greatest achievement’. Then you had Bosnia, and now Kosovo. The intention is to extinguish Yugoslavia. But to get that across is quite difficult because the media coverage presents it all in terms of the refugees. Of course, these people are having a terrible time– some ethnically cleansed, others running away from the war, Serbs running away from the kla. War produces that kind of exodus. But people are slowly waking up to the fact that the objectives that were set are unrealistic by bombing alone, and that they’re changing every day. Now the aim is to get rid of Milosevic: a sort of schoolboy politics in which if someone shot Milosevic, or Saddam Hussein, the world would suddenly become a peaceful place. No knowledge of history, no attempt to understand the complexities, just a desire to dominate.

In a recent faxed reply to a question sent to them by Labour Euro-MP Alex Falconer, a World Bank official admitted that the Bank had estimated in September 1990 that 810,000 workers in socially-owned enterprises, about 30 percent of the workforce, were, in their words, ‘surplus to the needs of the enterprises;’ that between 1990 and 1993 the gdp of the Former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia declined by 50 percent; and that the output of the remaining Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) declined by a similar amount during the same period, when un sanctions were in effect. Given that such effects – not only of sanctions but of imf-imposed Structural Adjustment programmes and the like - are not confined to the area currently affected by the war, or indeed to this part of the world, do you think we are possibly witnessing the first example of a process which could become almost commonplace: restructuring, reaction, social disintegration, violent conflict, and then ‘police action’ by NATO, or perhaps the projected EU common military force?
Yes, I think that’s right. But although there’s no consensus for a socially responsible, democratic socialist, internationalist society, the type of society I believe in, there is a tremendous audience for critiques of what we’ve got now. People have seen that in Russia, for example, life expectancy has dropped from 73 to 58, millions of workers aren’t paid, 60 percent of the banks are owned by the mafia, the military machine is still there, ageing and dangerous, and many socialists have become nationalists. When you lose the capacity to perceive an international solution, you fall back on your tribal loyalties. Capitalism creates nationalism. Globalisation is the domination of the world by a handful of multinationals and banks and a reaction to that is nationalism and tribalism which, combined with nuclear weapons, is a recipe for an absolute catastrophe in the next century. Moreover, we enter this century with democracy weaker than it’s been for a long time. Democracy is being squeezed out of the system by a ‘world government’ of the IMF, the WTO and GATT, and by NATO taking over, by the growth of repressive forces in so-called democratic societies, and the transfer of power from elected to unelected people – such as the European Central Bank (ecb) and European Commission. With the end of communism, capitalist countries no longer had to make any concessions to democracy. I was never a supporter of Stalin’s ‘democratic centralism’ but, while there was an anticapitalist superpower, the west had to respond. It had to give up its colonies for fear that they would all go communist, and it had to concede the welfare state for fear that we went socialist. Now that is no longer the case, the welfare state is being deliberately and systematically dismantled, as are such democratic institutions as we had. This is going to lead to some kind of bust-up. I don’t know precisely what form it will take, but you can be sure that it will be preceded by a tightening of repression. The media are part of this, as are the police, the institutions of the law, anti-trade union legislation, the European Union. That’s what’s happening and that’s why socialists have to start at the bottom by rebuilding those institutions that brought democracy about in the first place.

Do you think the straightforward commercial interests of arms manufacturers play a significant role in provoking wars, greater than in the past?
The people in favour of this war are Clinton, Blair, NATO, the KLA – and the arms manufacturers. The arms trade is a war criminal institution, and it will do very well out of this war. I wouldn’t say they actually demanded the war, but they’ll sit and watch the profits roll in. The last thing that the countries which have recently joined NATO need, with all their economic problems, are weapons. We’ll lend them money to buy weapons, then we’ll squeeze them, force them to destroy such social services as they have. I can see this process leading people to want to go back to something like the old system. I wouldn’t want to see it come back in the same form, but people will be asking themselves, ‘what have we lost and what have we gained?’

Article 2 of the UN Charter, which permits the use of force against a sovereign independent state only if it has committed aggression against another state, was invoked to justify the Gulf war. On this occasion, however, it has been flagrantly violated. Does this mean that the New World Order has arrived, making the Charter, as well as NATO’s own Charter, which permits the use of force only if a NATO member is attacked – worthless?
That’s exactly what’s happening. This is, of course, why they want to change NATO’s Constitution.
Will NATO now move to flatten any country which, for whatever reason, resists its agenda?
A search-and-destroy mission of those states which haven’t fallen into line– North Korea, Libya, Yugoslavia, Cuba – is part of what it’s about. And although it’s ‘a shadow no bigger than a man’s hand’, the banana sanctions by the us – one NATO country imposing sanctions on others in the middle of a war in which they are allies– is an indication that globalisation means the domination of the biggest companies under the protection of the greatest superpower. Even with allies, they’re not prepared to put up with anything that runs counter to the global interests of those companies.

What do you say to the argument that Hitler should have been dealt with earlier, and that Milosevic and Saddam are potential Hitlers who can be nipped in the bud?
There was no ‘appeasement’ of Hitler before the Second World War. The Tory Party didn’t appease him, they supported him. The British establishment would have preferred to have fought with the Germans against the Russians, but the Germans made this impossible. So the parallel is false. And of course that war was not fought for humanitarian reasons, it was not fought to save the Jews, it was about power. All wars are about power. In every war since 1945 in which Britain has been involved, the enemy has been compared to Hitler. Nasser was. Galtieri was.
On the other hand, NATO’s arguments look remarkably like Hitler’s when he sent his forces into Czechoslovakia in gallant defence of the persecuted ethnic German minority.
And Mussolini went into Abyssinia to end slavery!

We do have a problem, though, don’t we, as you said yourself earlier, in getting the message across to people. At the time of the first air attacks, an estimated 2,000 people on all sides had died from violence and 250,000 had been displaced, almost all of the latter ethnic Albanians. The threat of NATO attack, and the intensity of the bombing when it came, has brought about incomparably greater loss of life and a far greater flight. Yet the mass exodus is routinely blamed on the Serbs. Am I being impressionistic, are the polls lying, or is this upside-down view widely accepted in most countries? If people will believe what seems such a transparently manipulated version of events, what on earth can be done about it?
The first polls on the day the bombing began showed a large majority against, at least here in Britain. Then there was a gap, and things changed. I’d like to see what question they put, precisely. I’m very sceptical. My letters are running at about six against to one for, although I accept you tend to write to people with whom you agree. The attack on the convoy also had an impact. The thing is, you can’t have a war in which such things don’t happen. The whole idea of high-tech precision bombing is an illusion. If ground troops are sent in, things will change. An invasion will crack NATO. They keep saying the credibility of NATO is at stake – well, credibility is no reason for killing people.
There’s a widespread opinion that the real danger is going to come when Germany and the us fall out, that one thing will lead to another and before we know where we are we’ll be back in August, 1914.
You have to be careful not to be too apocapalyptic. On the other hand you can’t rule it out. There’s no stomach for world war, but you can drift into it. Of course, war is useful in distracting people from domestic problems. Democracy would be absolutely repressed.

The left has been able to work together, and with others, despite the existence of wide differences, for instance in attitudes to the Yugoslav government. Where do you stand on this?
My own position is very straightforward. The bombing must stop. The un could have done something, for instance when the Serb Parliament on April 8th passed a resolution saying that it would accept a un force. The future of Kosovo is a difficult question. There is an Albanian majority, though this has been true only for a few decades. Do we really want to reorganise the world on ethnic lines? An independent Kosovo would probably want to join Albania. Then the Macedonian Albanians would want to join. But Britain and the us are opposed to a ‘Greater Albania’. The kla was described by the us government as recently as September 1998 as a terrorist organisation.

As you suggested at the beginning of this interview, it’s depressingly easy to list acts of inhumanity committed in fairly recent times that exceed even the worst that Yugoslavia is accused of: Biafra, where perhaps a million Ibos died between 1967 and 1970; Pol Pot’s regime; Rwanda; Turkish Kurdestan. When you point this out to people, however, they often say well, quite, something should have been done then that wasn’t, but this time the western powers got it right. Some will even admit that the us is motivated by much of what we would accuse it of, but go on to say that the Americans may be acting for the wrong reasons but they’re nevertheless doing the right thing. This logic can take you a long way, even to accepting everything we say about the recognition of Croatia and so on, but still supporting the bombardment. How would you answer this?
Surely we have to move towards some structure of international law, but that isn’t what we are seeing here at all. On the contrary. The trouble is that the existing world ‘government’ is run by capital, it’s undemocratic and imposes the continuing injustice of widening inequality between rich and poor. Terrorism and chemical weapons place enormous power in the hands of the otherwise weak, of small states for example, and the us and other major powers are much more vulnerable than they seem to realise. Now clearly NATO, which is one of the institutions of this ‘world government’, is not motivated by concern for oppressed people, or in this case by concern for the Kosovars. That isn’t at all what it’s about.

Are there any circumstances in which you would support armed intervention against tyranny?
Yes, but it would have to be through the UN. What would the reaction be if Russia decided to go to war to defend the Palestinians? The us has used NATO simply to sidestep Russia’s veto in the un Security Council.
One quite shocking feature of the response to the war has been the support for it of most Green Parties. There are honourable exceptions in the uk, Ireland and Sweden, and no doubt elsewhere. But everywhere that they are either involved in government, or have a serious chance of joining a coalition in the foreseeable future, they have joined the warmongers.

Given their pacifist roots, and the environmental catastrophes inevitably attendant on this kind of war, what on earth has made these generally progressive parties react in this way?
Well, power corrupts. It subjects you to pressure. In any case not all greens are progressive to start with. Some in fact are about as reactionary as you can get. You can get to socialism through many routes, including a concern for the environment. But in the end this does have to lead to an alternative analysis. It’s just a starting point.

Finally, the fact that such a war can come about, and the apparent ease with which it has won popular support – or at the very least acquiescence – has been a profoundly depressing experience for many of us. Your optimism has kept a lot of socialists, in Britain and beyond, going during what has been a very difficult twenty or so years. Is that optimism still intact?
I’m a diarist. I started keeping a diary in earnest in 1942. Looking through them, if you have an understanding and a perspective, you can see where hope comes from. Progress occurs – I could cite the end of apartheid, the advance of women’s rights, the growth in influence of the environmental movement– and that keeps me going. But of course in a diary you can confess things to yourself that you wouldn’t confess to other people. It’s full of anxieties and doubts. All the questions you’ve put to me I’ve put to myself. Nevertheless, I think that hope is the fuel of social progress, and fear is a cage in which you imprison yourself. In every country in every period of history there have been two flames burning: the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope that we can build a better world. Both of these flames have to be kept alive.

Tony Benn was talking to Spectre editor Steve McGiffen. The interview was conducted on 20th April, a few weeks into the Balkan War.

Summer 1999