SOCIALISM OR YOUR MONEY BACK

Former Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has said the Serb cause in the Bosnian war was "just and holy" as he began his defence at his genocide trial at The Hague. He insisted the Serbs were only acting in self-defence. Prosecutors say he orchestrated a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against Muslims and Croats in eastern Bosnia to create an ethnically pure Serbian state.

"I will defend that nation of ours and their cause that is just and holy," Mr Karadzic said "I stand here before you not to defend the mere mortal that I am, but to defend the greatness of a small nation in Bosnia-Hercegovina, which for 500 years has had to suffer and has demonstrated a great deal of modesty and perseverance to survive in freedom"

It would be useful to summarise what we in the Socialist Party were saying at the time

Our rulers have a long and inglorious tradition of lying to stay in power, and our only defence against this is to understand the basis of this lie machine, and to work to expose their lies as often as possible. They tell different lies in different circumstances, and set different agendas according to the intended audience. Our interest lies in exploiting the divisions between the divergent interests of different groups of capitalists, and showing the contradictions involved.

The first lie is the idea that the people of Bosnia were like mad dogs, driven by centuries of ethnic tension to hate and kill one another, and that it was only the suppressing force of the Titoist dictatorship that stopped this war from erupting sooner. How often were journalists despairing at the war, and wondering how people who used to be friends and neighbours could suddenly turn upon one another, and perpetrate such gross atrocities? How often have they glibly explained it away as part of ancient ethnic hatred, spreading back to the Middle Ages? But this hides the real cause of the war, and thus protects those truly guilty from facing the accusation of responsibility.

The second lie was that the only way to bring peace to the region was to send in a military force, and to enforce a deal upon the peoples there, a benevolent military intervention with the sole aim of bringing peace and rebuilding the devastated region; that "we" are only interested in helping the poor and afflicted of the region, and "our" military presence is a truly selfless act , their country needed us, and without us the mad dogs will be at one another's throats once again.

The Yugoslav war was a twentieth century tragedy. The tragic heroes , the ordinary people, denied a voice, left just to die in silence while a whole cast of villains marched around the stage. There can be no doubts about who and what is to blame for this war. Behind the masks of kindliness worn by the villains of the piece , such as Karadzic , lay the identical and twisted face of the god of Mammon, of capitalism. This war was a natural part of the continual war of capitalism, and its victims sacrifices to the cause of profit. The spate of nationalist secessions , some of which worked to the favour of Western capitalist interests, such as Germany, which hastened to recognise the breakaway Croatia, brought the local elites into open competition for the region's resources, and as is often in capitalism competition escalated to its ultimate expression, warfare. The so-called ethnic war in Bosnia was essentially a war over property - all nation states are just an expression of property.

It was the continuation of a process that started in 1991 when Slovenia declared its independence from Yugoslavia, in which the stake has been: who shall control the territories of the former Yugoslavia—Serbia or the West, in particular Germany ? A newly re-united Germany, with its historic enemy a Russia weakened and on its knees, was able to revive its ambitions in Eastern and Central Europe and it led the way in working for the break-up of Yugoslavia so that it, rather than Serbia, could dominate the area. First , Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia, then Macedonia broke away or rather were broken away finally Kosovo . We had the power games of our masters, their imperial spheres of influence. Each imperial nation or bloc has an area that the others recognise as its zone in which to operate, and traditionally Yugoslavia and eastern Europe has been the stomping ground of the USSR/Russia. Remember the way in which President Yeltsin warned against NATO military intervention? This was an area where his bunch of capitalists were supposed to be in charge. The US, however, have long had a policy of penetrating their influence into Eastern Europe, and since 1980, particularly Yugoslavia. In this respect the Western occupation of Yugoslavia is beneficial more to the US world political hegemony than it is to the inhabitants of that country.

This area occupied the supposed “fault line” between the (Christian) Habsburg Empire and the (Muslim and Orthodox) Ottoman Empire. But while the wars of Yugoslav succession were fought between and by people who happened to identify themselves as Orthodox or Catholic or Muslim or “Communist”, that is not why Yugoslavia broke up. This conflict had powerful economic motives and arose over the division of incomes and revenues between provinces having differing degrees of economic development.The chaos and potential danger of the Balkan war escalating and dragging other people in was too great. The potential for having even more refugees coming across the borders and flooding into Europe was too much for our masters to bear. As long as the region remained unstable and politically tense it was a threat to the local markets, and to our masters' sources of profits

Historically the proclaimed identities of the Balkan contestants were worked out by academics and intellectuals and in the main imposed on the populations by nationalists. These identities were subsequently manipulated by political elites when it suited their agendas. Bosnia fell victim to a land grab by two other Yugoslav provinces which prompted the intervention by NATO forces to “restore peace”. The Bosnian Serbs, and their "hard-line" leaders such as Karadzic, became the official enemy for daring to call the NATO force in Bosnia an occupation force. As far as the Socialist Party saw it, the Serb hard-liners were just as bad and exactly the same as their imperial rivals, except they've lost out. So we now see them vilified and facing war crime charges in the Hague .

Just because the SPGB didn't support NATO didn't mean that we therefore supported the pro-Serbian factions . We were against both sides, Serbian capitalism as well as NATO imperialism who were fighting over who should control the territories of the former Yugoslavia which was not worth the sacrifice of a single worker's life. We are in favour of the immediate stopping of all wars, i.e. of the killing of innocent workers on both sides.Capitalism is an abomination and a crime against humanity.The corrupt capitalist system should be on trial the International Criminal Tribune at the Hague .

For more than a century, the SPGB has been consistent in its opposition to all nationalism, that nationalism creates conflict amongst those with the least to gain and have the most to lose. Whatever cause and victory the misinformed defenders of nationhood believe they are fighting for, it pales into insignificance when compared to the real war that needs to be waged on the battlefield of ideas and against an elite who perpetuate the myth of nationhood for their own ends and always to our detriment.

We maintain that, regardless of the supposed 500 year old hatreds claimed by Karadzic the real problem is that the Balkans is a cockpit for the Great Powers and their local client states . Despite their cultural, historical and religious differences, there is more that unites Muslims and Christians, Bosnians and Serbs, than can ever divide them. Their real needs , needs people the world over identify with, can only ever be fulfilled in a world devoid of borders or frontiers. We can only hope it is not too long before the long-suffering people of the Balkans come to realise this.