by Michael Parenti
The U.S. national security state--which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads--is now launching round-the- clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia out of humani-tarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo. Or so we are asked to believe. President Clinton has bombed four countries in recent months: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and now Yugoslavia massively.
The U.S. is also involved in proxy wars in Angola, Colombia, and various other places. U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with 300 major overseas support bases. All this in the name of peace, democracy, and humanitarianism; all to defend unspecified "U.S. national interests"abroad, all to keep the American people safe from would-be adversaries who supposedly are just waiting to pounce upon us.
If Clinton were so worried about oppressed minorities, as he pretends to be about the Albanians, perhaps he would consider bombing the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Romany people (gypsies), or Britain for opp-ressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the mass murder of a half million Tutsis in Riwanda--along with the French whowere complicit in that massacre. Instead he seems not to have noticed these wrongs.
The White House should consider launching "humanitarian bombings" against the Turkish people for what their leaders have done to the Kurds, or the Indonesian people because their generals killed over 200,000 East Timorese,or perhaps Clinton should pulverize Guatemala City for the Guatemalan military's systematic slaughter of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. In such cases, however, U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but were actively complicit with the perpetrators-- whose primary dedication has been to help Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.
Why then is the United States waging an un-restrainedly murderous assault upon Yugoslavia?
The Third Worldization of Yugoslavia
The dismemberment and mutilation of the Yugo-
slav federation is part of a concerted policy initiated by the United States and the other Western
powers in 1989. Yugoslavia was the one country in Eastern Europe that would not voluntarily overthrow what remained of its socialist system and install a free-market economic order. The U.S. goal has been to transform Yugoslavia into a cluster of weak right-wing principalities with the
following characteristics:
* incapable of charting an independent course of self- development;
* natural resources completely accessible to multinational corporate exploitation;
* an impoverished population forced to work at subsistence wages;
* dismantled petroleum, engineering, mining, and automobile industries that offer no competition with existing Western producers;
* a shattered economy wide open to transnational companies that could invest and rebuild on their own terms.
U.S. policymakers also want a Yugoslavia whose public sector services and social programs are abolished. Why so? For the same reason they want to abolish our public sector services and social programs. The goal is the privatization and Third Worldization of both Yugoslavia and the United States. Yugoslavia was built on an idea, as Ramsey Clark once noted, namely that the Southern Slavs would not remain weak and divided, falling out among themselves or easy prey to outside imperial interests. United they could form a substantial territory capable of its own economic development.
Indeed, after World War II, multi-ethnic, socialist Yugoslavia became a viable nation and something of an economic success. Between 1960 and 1980 it had one of the most vigorous growth rates: a decent standard of living, free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to a job, one month free vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and a life expectancy of 72 years. Yugoslavia also offered its multi-ethnic citizenry
affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, with a not-for-profit economy that was mostly publicly owned.
This was not the kind of country global capitalism would normally tolerate. Still, Yugoslavia was allowed to exist for 45 more years because it was seen as a nonaligned buffer to the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact nations.
Yugoslav leaders in the late 1960s and 1970s sought to expand the country's industrial base and increase consumer goods both at the same time. This was to be accomplished by borrowing from the West. But with IMF loans came an enormous debt, and then IMF demands for restructuring, a harsh austerity program that brought wage freezes, cutbacks in public spending, increased unemploy-ment, and the abolition of worker-managed enter-prises. Still, much of the economy remained in the not-for-profit public sector, including the rich reserves of minerals and other natural resources in Kosovo and other provinces.
Then came another blow. In November 1990, the Bush administration pressured Congress into passing the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Law, which provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence within six months would lose U.S. financial support. The law demanded separate elections in each of the six Yugoslav republics, and mandated U.S. State Department approval of both election procedures and results. It also required that aid go only to the separate republics, not to the Yugoslav government. In fact, aid went to those forces whom Washington defined as "democratic," meaning small right-wing, ultra-nationalist parties. Reactionary and fascist organizations not seen in 45 years suddenly reemerged with all sorts of money and arms at their command.
Part 2