Bob Myers of Workers’ Aid, an organisation which, in its own words ‘seeks to work with and give practical support to all those people across ex-Yugoslavia who have stood up against ethnic violence...working closely with the miners’ union in Bosnia and Kosova.’

Noam Chomsky, writing on the New World Order and NATO (Spectre No.7) ridicules Blair’s and Clinton’s justifications for bombing Serbia and points out their ability to discover a humanitarian crisis where intervention suits them and to ignore equally terrible situations where it doesn’t. He says everything one could say on this matter, but concludes, ‘Where does that leave the question of what to do in Kosovo? It leaves it unanswered.’

We in Workers Aid have been trying to answer precisely this question, but have found ourselves at odds with those who, by trying to define opposition to NATO in two-dimensional terms (i.e. whatever NATO is for we must be against) end up with anti-Albanian sentiments which only mirror the anti-Serb rhetoric of the warmongers. In particular there is a ‘debate’ over the number of deaths which, in its efforts to disprove NATO claims, uses Albanian body counts with scant regard for the fact that these were actual people who walked, loved and suffered.
Chomsky does acknowledges the existence of the Kosova Albanians as victims, deserving of sympathy, but can’t contemplate them as participants in the struggle for a Balkans free from imperialism. In their active, political side he sees them only as pro-imperialist, but surely these are the people who must be at the centre of a struggle for a region free from national oppression.
Last year’s campaign against NATO actions was, for most of the participants, the first organised protest over events in ex-Yugoslavia, despite six years of brutal attack on working people throughout the region. The movement reacted only when NATO started bombing and this made the clash between NATO and Milosevic appear as one of absolutes. In fact no sense can be made of the break up of Yugoslavia and even the recent war, outside of the overall common ground between the Serbian regime and NATO politicians and banks.
Putting the NATO/Milosevic clash at the centre leads to all kind of misconceptions. One is that that NATO’s attack was somehow aimed against the legacy of the Partisans, or more bizarrely that NATO attacked because Serbia was ‘non capitalist’. The Red Star on Serbian troops’ caps were long ago replaced by the White Eagle and as for privatisation, Milosevic has no other perspective.
The labour movement’s failure to protest against the destruction of Vukovar, Sarajevo or Srebrenica meant that the anti-NATO campaign had almost no contact with people who have tried to stand up against ethnic division. On the contrary, many ‘Stop the Bombing’ demonstrations had speakers with close contacts to the very Serbian regime which has been the main driving force for ethnic division and privatisation.
Making history fit into an ‘imperialism versus defiant Serbia’ scenario leads to all sort of mistakes - above all in seeing the Kosova Albanians only as ‘supporters’ of imperialism, which renders the whole dynamics of the Yugoslav break up a nonsense.

Serbian socialist, Dragomir Olujic, speaking in London last year, outlined how the protests of the Kosova Albanian miners in 1989-90 were the last efforts of the Yugoslav working class to defend Yugoslavia. Their underground hunger strikes tried to defend Tito’s 1974 constitution which had given the Kosova Albanians the same status as other nationalities. Their demonstrations, crushed by Milosevic’s tanks, were the last time workers marched chanting ‘Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia’.
Olujic’s account fits with another from British miner, Dave Temple, in Durham NUM’s magazine ‘Bands and Banners’ (Feb 1999). He tells of a Kosova miner’s delegation that visited Durham in 1990 after thousands of Albanian miners had been thrown out of their mines at gun point. The miners told Durham NUM that if the working class did not stop Milosevic then Yugoslavia would explode in war. They saw that a federation of different national groups could not survive Milosevic’s campaign of discrimination.
Sadly the working class did not respond to the miners’ warnings. Kosova vanished from the political horizon as war engulfed Croatia and Bosnia. Miners in Bosnia did resist Milosevic and defended the Tuzla mining region and its multi-ethnic society, but unlike the Kosova miners the Bosnians no longer talked of defending Yugoslavia - it was gone, destroyed by Milosevic’s violence.
This is where our organisation, Workers’ Aid, began. From 1993 we organised food convoys to reach the besieged Bosnian miners. Surely their simple demand for the right of all people to be free to live and work together had to be supported? We campaigned for the workers’ movement to follow our example, knowing that our efforts were totally inadequate, but apart from a few small initiatives the European workers’ movement could not respond.
However, our solidarity efforts allowed us to make contact with good, honest people. We were no longer observing from afar, passing meaningless resolutions on ‘uniting the working class’ - meaningless because the ‘working class’ of these resolutions remained abstract, not made up of real men and women with actual problems, but only imaginary people that could somehow ‘unite’ without having to deal with these problems.
New friends in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Kosova helped us to see through the great myth that Milosevic was somehow defending ‘Yugoslavia’ while Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosova were all encouraged by the West to break away. Croatian and Bosnian independence were not the cause of the break up of the Federation but a result of it. While in 1991 the Federation might have still existed in name, in terms of the political institution created by the Partisans nothing was left. The Serbian regime had already destroyed it by its efforts to turn the Federal Parliamant, with its equal representation from the six republics and two autonomous regions, into a Serbian controlled institution.
Our first delegation went to Kosova in 1996. The apartheid conditions, the regime of fear and terrible poverty we observed were a not a creation of Blair or Clinton’s propaganda. Also real was the fight back against these conditions - something which is central to answering Chomsky’s search for a future. Today people can only see the activities of the KLA or the Albanian mafia but throughout the days of Milosevic’s brutal rule there existed a dynamic social movement with deep grass roots self-organisation, led by trade unionists and socialists. The teachers’ union established an entire education system for 400,000 pupils. Health workers set up their own clinics. The miners’ union organised communal solidarity to keep alive the thousands of miners’ families during ten years of lockout.
Everywhere we went we met with this democratic and thoughtful social mobilisation. Its perspectives were clear - self determination for all Kosovars - Serb and Albanian - since events had proved it was impossible to lead a human existence under Belgrade. They had tried to defend Yugoslavia, but Yugoslavia no longer existed. The trade unionists we spoke with explained that their unions were open to all but Serbs had withdrawn under direct threat from the authorities.
Of course subsequent events have changed this movement - but not fundamentally. Milosevic’s and NATO’s actions have, temporarily, given the upper hand to the Albanian nationalists and mafia but the other movement has not vanished. Anti-imperialists, instead of echoing the Serbian regime’s anti-Albanian rhetoric, should hold out a hand of solidarity to this Albanian movement.
It is almost impossible to find a way out of the Balkan ‘impasse’ without intimate connection with the social movements there. Only close-up can one find an opposite to the ‘bitter ethnic rivalries’, people who cherish human co-operation as the only way to counter the new ‘colonialism’. After six years of onslaught, these voices are small and their political clout apparently nil but if there is to be an alternative future it can only come from them.
Within weeks of the bombing stopping we were able to organise a joint speaking tour by a Serbian and Albanian trade unionist. We are helping a similar delegation go to the USA. The Albanian was a Trepca miner with his real problem - the UN/NATO refusal to allow the miners to take back control of their mines. The Serb was part of the tiny principled opposition which is having to deal with the atomisation of the Serbian working class by the destruction of all industry. Their small movement speaks out against the regime, for example in their campaign for dialogue with the Albanians and amnesty for the thousands of Serbs who refused to go and fight in Kosova and who are now destitute in Hungary and elsewhere.

As real people, fighting to change the present, these Serbs and Albanians come together on the basis of mutual respect of each other rights and their struggle to find a way forward. This is not yet a plan for the future but it is a movement of people, seeking to control their own lives, and it is this movement alone which can oppose the barbarism of Milosevic, Blair and Clinton.

The author, Bob Myers of Workers Aid, can be reached by email at work2@workersaid.org.

We received the following comment on this article, which appeared early in 2000 - the reply appeared in May, 2000:
From Mr Andrew Coates, Ipswich, England

Bob Myers’ article on Kosovo (Spectre No.9) deserves some immediate comments. It is not just a commentary on the situation in the Balkans, but a call to the European left. As an activist in local campaigns against NATO’s intervention, I would like to comment.
Myers’ article is the product of concrete experience by Workers’ Aid and is sometimes very convincing and sensitively written. However, there are three major areas where he appears very ambiguous.
Firstly, no explanation is given of why, if there was ‘overall common ground between the Serbian regime and NATO politicians and banks’, the attack on Yugoslavia took place at all! Peter Gowan’s Making Sense of NATO’s War in Yugoslavia (Socialist Register 2000), suggests that there are some fairly fundamental conflicts at work. These include NATO’s eastern push and the prospect, as Noam Chomsky has also argued, of bringing the region under Western hegemony without any stroppy nationalist regime getting in the way.
Those who closely follow such events could see from the start of the break-up of Yugoslavia what was in store for the region: Western protectorates. This is why we stood aside from the so-called solidarity movements with the various anti-Serbian groups: not that we lack sympathy and solidarity in the face of massacres (not just carried out by Serbs by the way, as Myers seems to think), but because it was blindingly obvious what was really at stake.
And we have hardly been proved wrong.
Secondly, the description of Albanian resistance to Serbian oppression is no doubt borne out by first-hand knowledge. However, from the outside, and a fair experience of nationalist movements, the Albanian ‘civil society’ could hardly have given birth to the gangster activities of the KLA and others without equally deep roots in that community. In the past I have read many Workers’ Aid references to Serbian nationalism. there is a lesser standard of proof applied to denouncing the Christian Slavic ethnic racists than to their equally racist Muslim and Albanian counterparts.
Thirdly, it is admirable that Workers’ Aid can promote dialogue between these groups, even only amongst a tiny minority. As socialists we should never try to divide people on ethnic grounds. However, the issues that now arise are of a different, though perhaps related, order.
How do we start to change the international set-up that allowed NATO to intervene? How do we end the chronic economic instability that is, despite claims about nationalism and Milosevic, the root cause of the entire Balkan conflict? How do we create an informed anti-militarist public opinion? That’s what we should begin to work together on.