The sanctions against Serbia are
lifted as the politicians of the
western powers scatted the doves of
peace in the aftermath of the dawn of
the Balkan peace deal. A peace
proclaimed in umpteen parliamentaIy
assemblies and newspaper headlines
throughout the western world. A
bright-faced Bill Clinton was able to
show himself in the Rose Garden as
the harbinger of peace in the Balkans
before going off to rev-up his
re-election plans for the coming
presidential campaign.
Bosnia has been partitioned! In the
end one suspects it will be carved up
between the Serbs and Croats, but for
the time being the Moslems will be
stuck in a 'federation' with the Croats
in which the Moslems will be the
junior partner. The Moslems have
been ditched by their US supporters,
like Clinton, in favour of the Croats.
The Moslems of the Bosnian
government never lo@ked like
win@ers! The US government was
never going to back a losing team like
that of President Izethegovic of
Bosnia, but the Americans had to
placate their Moslem allies in the
Middle East, like Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt and so on, who are
angIy about developments in former
Yugoslavia. Clinton at first called for
a lifting of the arms embargo, which
cost nothing to the United States and
gave the appearance of doing
something to the Middle Eastern
allies.
Later this year real politics took over
and Mr Clinton started supporting
the Croats. This summer a US trained
and backed Croatian army got the
go-ahead from NATO and the
Americans to take Krajina and drive
the Serb population out. Krajina has
been a Serbian region of Croatia for
generations. As Michael Ignatieff
says, Croatia's President l@djman
may be a bastard, but the Americans
concluded that he's ourbastard. This
means that Croatian ethnic cleansing
will have the stamp of American
approval. FYnally this US support for
the Croatian side, together with the
economic sanctions against Serbia,
forced the Bosnian Serbs to do a deal
in Dayton, Ohio.
Civilise@ warfare
NATO will now take over where the United
Nations failed. The new world order will
be imposed, as its generals and politicians
stamp on this ethnic theatre of eastern
Europe. But war weariness apart, there
are @o many @oose ends in this lat@st deal.
As Simon Jenk@ns in The l@nes dec@ares:
"NATO is going to war in an inappropriate
theatre, with no clear military ob@ective
beyond holding two sides apart until it
leaves again, as soon and as tnumphantly
as can be stage-managed."
British troops in Bosnia will henceforth
march to NATO's tune! In the Dayton deal
our troops will be going into Bosnia as
part of the biggest army that NATO has
assembled. A NATO command will mean
they are going to be played with as the
puppets of US domestic politics.
Before the British troops were in the
Balkans as part of the United Nation's
force to protect the delivery of
humanitarian relief. From now on they
will be part of a buffer force in any
rough-house between the warring parties.
They will be the frontline in the battle for
the reputations of men like Mr Clinton
and Mr Rifkin.
Some will argue, like Michael Ignatieff,
that the Western powers and E;urope in
particular must defend the status of its
'moral universals'. He says these ideals -
human rights, international
humanitarian law and the law of war -
belong to the tradition of European 'moral
universals'. These rules of war were not
respected in the Balkan wars.
Mr Ignatieff claims: "Civilised warfare is
not a contradiction in terms - the idea of
civilising warfare has been at the heart of
the European natural law tradition since
Grotius". Tolstoy, and I think many other
anarchists, would take the view that a
notion of 'ci@rilised warfare' played out like
a game of cricket is an obscene concept.
ln the Bosnian conflict some in the
anarcho-syndicalist Solidarity Federation
and the Syndicalist Bulletin faction in the
UK have called for libertarian support for
the Moslems or the Bosnian Federation
against the Serbs. While one can
understand their sympathies for the
underdogs in this conflict, it must strike
us as a politically naive and ideologically
inconsistent approach.
It may even be that the Croatians are
becoming the dominant force in the
Balkans, now they have US suppor@ There
have even been hints from President
@d@man that he may turn on his Moslem
allies. The international recognition of an
independent Croatia was the incident
that triggered the conflict in Bosnia.
EU diplomotic duffers
The Communists under Tito tried to set
up Yugoslavia as a geographical nation
state like those in the west. Anthony D.
Smith, the sociologist, in his book 7he
Eb@ Or@s of Nal@ons has said: "Though
they recognised the ethnic distinctiveness
of Yugoslavia's s@ nations, and institution-
alised it, the Communists also tried to
bind them together in a territorially defined
'@llyrian' homeland, with its common
division of labour, common citizenship
ights and common laws - and even a
;hadowy common culture of @ugosla iism'
with its non-alignment, self-management
qnd confederalism."
That kind of western geographical nation
@tate has now collapsed to be replaced by
more authentic eastem ethnic nationalism.
The Tito regime looks like an anomaly
today. A pleasant and peaceful pause ln
rhe Reason of Unreason" (@uixote) of a
restless people.
But are the monsters of war really in
retreat? Mr Clinton seems to think so, as
do many others (but not all) among the
commentators. Four years ago the BBC's
reporter Misha Glenny cornered Gianni
de Michelis, the Italian diplomat sent by
the European Community as part of a
@eam of foreign ministers to resolve the
conflict between Croatian and the then
'ugoslav state. Mr Glenny records:
Michelis ... told me triumphantly that the
l@oika [European diplomatic teaml had
;orted out the entire problem and flghting
@rould stop the very same day". Two days
later Mr Glenny recalls the fighting had
intensified. Senor Michelis came to realise
that theoretical understanding is little
lse in a country where the political
currency is barefaced deceit.
Today the European powers are
@enerally recognised to be duffers with no
_dequate foreign policy in former
~'ugoslavia. In some respects, by
recognising a sovereign Croatia they
broughtthe destruction of Bosnia. Clearly
the European Union has failed in Bosnia
and may have made matters worse.
US as benevolent bully?
UVill things fare better now the Americans
.lave taken over? Or will the dove of peace
again be strangled at birth? Anarchists
must have grave doubts about the future@
But the former MaIxist historian, Eric
Hobsbawm, had remarked on the Dayton
'peace deal': "It will be a triumph for the
US government which virtually
3i@gle-handed took over the task of peace-
making, and in the end virtually
imprisoned the Balkan negotiators ... for
weeks in the depths of middle America,
until they signed."
Mr Hobsbawm proclaiming 'PAX
AMER@CANA' - extraordinary for a former
Stalinist. But perhaps not so odd. Ihe
belief in the bully runs very deep in a
certain kind of intellectual. After the fall
of the Soviet Union Hobsbawm said the
'police state' had had a bad press and the
police state had the positive effect of
maintaining stability in some societies.
Some people said the same about F'ranco
in Spain.
With the demise of the Soviet Union
there is only one global bully left - PAX
A@RICANA. Inevitably Mr Hobsbawm,
overcome by power worship, is
transferring his admiration to the one and
only realistic world policeman, the United
States. He asks: @What does the only great
power in the world do?" And Mr
Hobsbawm answers: "In short there is
no@oay else who has America's high
capacity to bribe or subsidise and to
threaten and blackmail, especially
relatively small or weak states." The
former communist Hobsbawm seems
hardly able to contain himself when he
says: 4The Bosnian peace is the first
successful experiment in maintaining the
pax Arnerlcana in the world today".
The rest of us must hold our breath and
wait and see what this outbreak of 'New
World Order' has in store for humanity.
FREEDOM PRESS
http://www.lglobal.com/TAO/Freedom