Comrades

         It is hard to characterise the Milosevic regime accurately, mainly
because the bourgeois press has demonised it so, and unfortunately for
communists living in capitalist states, that is where we have to get our
main source of information. It has been labelled "fascist", guilty of
"genocide"; and Milosevic has been compared to Hitler.

 Then there are those on the Left who idolise the Milosevic regime. They
hail it as the modern day incarnation of Tito, as partisans; or give it
uncritical support based on the fact Yugoslavia was attacked by imperialism.

 Both of these views are profoundly mistaken. The first seeks to demonise
Milosevic to the extent working class people will feel nothing but hatred
for him, and on this basis give their support to the imperialist war. The
second is nothing more than a leftist cover for a regime of ex-Stalinist
bureaucrats who led the capitalist counter-revolution in Yugoslavia.

 Jared is very firmly on the latter side. He has had a very confused, almost
disturbing reaction to the imperialist war against Yugoslavia. Because the
pretext for the war was the oppression of Albanians, Jared places a sort of
national guilt against them verging on hatred, and then devotes his time to
finding evidence to support a conclusion he already has - to prove that the
oppression of Albanians was non-existent. This is not historical method.
Don't get me wrong: a lot of his work has been excellent; it has indeed
proved that the accounts of genocide were invented by the imperialists
carrying out the war to justify it, because so far only 2000 bodies have
been found. Yet his reaction to the war is not one of a principled
socialist, but identical to that of a Serb chauvinist.

 He denies the Serbian government is Chetnik. True. But it does contain
Chetniks, being a coalition government - I would say the correct
characterisation of the Serbian Radical Party is 'fascist'. The character of
the government is not fascist, and Milosevic is no fascist; but then the
Weimar government when it contained Nazis in a coalition government did not
have a fascist character. The character of the Yugoslav regime I believe is
best described as counter-revolutionary.

 There is no doubt that Milosevic and his crew of bureaucrats carried out
capitalist counter-revolution. They privatised about half the economy,
crushed the Titoist "workers' self-management", and carried out all sorts of
reactionary policies including banning abortion. The richest man in Serbia
today is the Minister of Privatisation. Milosevic and other bureaucrats have
made millions out of the restoration of capitalism, as have their
counterparts in the rest of Eastern Europe and the former-USSR. They were
all motivated by the same desire, whether they be Milosevic or Yeltsin;
though the Stalinist system provided its bureaucrats with privileges, they
had no direct ownership over property. Only by restoring capitalism could
they have property rights, and the people who became the new bourgeoisie
were those bureaucrats who only fifteen years ago would pledge a cynical
allegiance to Marxism and Leninism.

 This is clearly not going to sell to the Yugoslav masses. The regimes of
Milosevic and Tudjman gained mass support through nationalism, as well as
the regime in Slovenia, as did most other Stalinist regimes (especially in
the USSR). They would gain the mass support they needed by propagating the
oppression of the Serbs or Croats or Slovenians. Gaining this base, they
could carry out the counter-revolution with mass support.

 However, if they had been the Nazis the West loves to paint them as, that
does not explain why Serbia continues to be one of the most multiethnic
states in Europe, with 100,000 Albanians living in Belgrade alone. With the
exception of the crackdown in Kosovo that resulted in an attempted expulsion
of Kosovar Albanians from Kosovo, there has been no action against the
various nationalities of Serbia. As it is, Milosevic does not believe in
anything; none of these ex-bureaucrats do. As long as their privileges are
maintained, they will speak nationalist, socialist, or even Islamic
fundamentalist if such a view were popular.

 There is nothing "partisan" about Milosevic. This former stooge of Western
imperialism has not fought for anything progressive to make him a partisan,
unless we start including reactionaries as partisans, and this would make
the Afghan Islamic fundamentalists partisans against the Soviet Union.

 Is he a brave soldier against imperialism? Actually, he was until recently
a darling of imperialism and Western capital; industries such as
communications have been sold off to the Italian and Greek bourgeoisie; and
his regime overthrew the [deformed] workers' state which would have any
bourgeois happy. At the Dayton agreement he was described as the man we [the
West] could do business with, as people like Holbrooke drank the night away
with him.

 The reason he refused to sign the Rambouillet accords was because the
imperialists added an amendment which allowed for the occupation of all
Yugoslavia. No leader of any country would allow that; it is an invasion. Of
course NATO knew he wasn't going to accept, he would have had to have been
insane. On this matter, I would like to draw your minds back to 1914. After
the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary
demanded that Serbia allows its troops in to search for the so-called
terrorist groups responded. Historians now generally accept A-H knew Serbia
would not accept being invaded, and merely wanted an excuse, a pretext.

 And so history repeats itself for Serbia.

 I will agree with comrades who believe Kosovar Serbs were oppressed by the
autonomous administration within Kosovo. I would say the troubles really
began in 1981; a student demonstration demanding better food in university
cafeterias suddenly became a full-scale uprising demanding Kosovo become a
republic; there were, however, proxy Hoxha groups demanding Kosovar
independence (carrying slogans like "We Are Hoxha's Soldiers"). There was a
security crackdown then, and all the various interviews I have seen from
people of the time, Serb or Albanian, said this was the turning point.
Children said that afterwards they could no longer play with people of a
different race; and that before race was not an issue but afterwards there
was mutual suspicion. Mixed marriage couples had to flee to Belgrade.

 I would like to share with you my Serb friend Maja's comments on the issue
here:

"Yes, it is completely true. They had no rights, they [Serbs] were
systematically
raped, killed and expelled from their houses for years. From the WW II,
Tito gave a great autonomy to Albanians in Kosovo, in fact they had their
own kind of republic. He did that just to keep peace there, and to calm
them. So in the late 80's Serbs started to demonstrate and ask for equal
rights, they haven't been Milosevic's supporters. But he was clever
enough to use their unsatisfaction and to manipulate with those
demonstrations. Leaders of those protests are his greatest enemies now,
they are aware they have been manipulated. He came as a savior of Serbs
>from Kosovo, he promised that noone would torture them anymore and that
everybody would be equal in that province. A lot of people believed in
his words and they needed years to understand what he was doing. Just
using that situation to stay in power and to strengthen his position.
Well, I suppose some things from that book are true, but there are always
nuances which are very important to understand that complicated situation
between Serbs and Albanians in this century, and after manipulation
Milosevic used to take advantage from it."

 Milosevic used the whole issue of the oppression of Kosovar Serbs to gain
mass support to gain legitimacy to carry out counter-revolution. This is
what I draw from Maja's comments.

 The KLA began as a force that killed Albanian socialists and dissidents.
The best man at Maja's wedding was a Kosovar Albanian; he had to flee Kosovo
for Slovenia after facing repeated intimidation from the KLA, and finally
had to escape when he married a Serb woman. Its black uniform and salute are
modelled on the Kosovar fascist collaborators during World War II. It did
have a Hoxhaite wing, but the Thaci faction purged it violently (the Kosovar
Albanian hero Demaci, was known as the Kosovar "Mandela", was killed by the
KLA leadership, as well as several other Kosovar Albanians during the war,
deaths originally blamed on the Belgrade regime). It became nothing more
than a proxy of imperialism, being ordered to provoke Yugoslav forces at the
beginning of 1998 to gain more of a pretext for NATO to attack. During the
war the bourgeois media supportively called it NATO's land army. They did
not defend the Kosovar Albanian population, which would have been a criteria
to support them; indeed, they continued to engage in fighting for villages
and allowing the Albanians to suffer to gain political capital, as well as
continuing to kill Albanian dissidents. Their financial backers include
gangsters from Northern Albania who have in return for their support been
given power in Kosovo, and now kidnap women off the street for prostitution,
for instance. The worst crime of the KLA, of course, is their ethnic
cleansing of all non-Albanians and of Albanian dissidents from Kosovo, which
NATO is allowing.

 Another thing about Jared; his repeated use of the word "secessionists".
This definitely paints him as a chauvinist, not a leftist. It is not for
Marxists to go round denouncing groups as "secessionist". On this same
matter, he denounces the Chechen rebels as "fascists". Perhaps we should
start denouncing the PKK, IRA, ETA and various other groups as
"secessionists". Clearly, if we did, we would be siding, respectively, with
the Turkish, British and Spanish States.

 He implies Kosovo is somehow the property of Serbia: but as Marxists we
support unequivocally the right of self-determination. If the democratic
will of the masses is to independence, then we support their right to s-d.
The Bolsheviks could have called the Finnish and the Polish secessionist and
terrorist, but instead they accepted their right to s-d and granted them
independence. For, as Engels said approximately, no people that oppresses
another is free. No nation has a "right" to control another, whether it be
for some historical pretext like a battle against a foreign occupier taking
place there. That is why we support the re-unification of Ireland, and
self-determination for Kurdistan, for example.

(...)

 Comradely,

           Owen