Stakes are high in Yugoslav civil war
1991Gerry Foley 1991-11Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 20 →
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The conflict in Yugoslavia continues to escalate and to cast an ever-growing shadow over the entire region, to say nothing of possible ramifications of the great power intrigues for which it has offered openings.
Both the capitalist press and the Stalinists try to present it as simply a descent into tribalism, or "Balkanism," and all the parties are equally guilty. However, there is a clear right and wrong in this conflict, and the international workers' and socialist movement has a stake in it, as well as a responsibility to the victims of the neo-Stalinist Milosevic government of Serbia, the largest of the six republics in the Yugoslav federation.
In order to save its dictatorship, the Serbian bureaucracy, like its Stalinist big brother in the Soviet Union, turned to chauvinism. It drove the other peoples in the federation to revolt. And now it is prepared to tear the federation apart in order to try to get a grip over the largest possible part of it, to trade a confederation of the Yugoslav peoples for a neo-Stalinist Greater Serbia. The result is an escalating series of conflicts, more and more exacerbated by the ruthlessness and arrogance of the Serbian leadership.
The antipopular, terroristic nature of the Yugo-Serbian army's assault on Croatia has been highlighted most recently by the attack on Dubrovnik, the historic refuge and center of Croatian culture, now mainly a tourist area.
"For every military objective attacked or taken, a point vital for Croatia will be attacked." This was the (continued on page 16, in “International Viewpoint”) no one on the left other than Socialist Action noted. (The left, generally, was distracted by reactionary ideological expressions from looking at the actual process of the reorganization of the Romanian working class.)
The Romanian workers still lack any political leadership of their own, any political party that represents their interests, but the conditions are clearly more and more favorable to a deepening of political discussion among the workers and youth and to the emergence of political groups that have drawn the necessary conclusions from the workers' rejection of the market reforms. It is important for revolutionists and working class militants outside Romania to be alert to this process and try to learn from it and aid it. •