{OTSKIKKO}Milosevic and imperialism{/OTSKIKKO}

On March 11, 2006, Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Yugoslavia and Serbia, was found dead, under 'mysterious' circumstances, in his cell in The Hague, where he was sequestrated by the infamous International Court established by imperialism and headed by a real monster of bourgeois 'humanitarianism', the Swiss Procurer Carla Del Ponte.

Until now six political prisoners from former Yugoslavia in the cells of the International Court were found dead either by "suicide" or by other mysterious "pathological reasons". For Milosevic, all kinds of rumors circulate, despite the fact that the Court rushed to publish a pathological report denying the possible case of an assassination. Milosevic himself had denounced in January 2006 his jailors to give him riphampicin- a drug against leprosy and tuberculosis- that neutralized his medication against high blood pressure. The Court rejected, in the last months, his urgent request, backed by his doctors as well as by the Russian State authorities, to go to Russia for adequate treatment. The rumors spread by Del Ponte's office about the possibility of a suicide have no base: one day before his death Milosevic spoke to the phone stressing that he will continue to fight until the end; and then, even if he wanted to commit suicide, how he could find the necessary drugs in a high security prison?

In Serbia the conviction is shared, not only by Milosevic's supporters, that the former Serb leader was murdered. He had become an embarrassment for an already discredited Court. In a trial, which continued for 5 years, Milosevic mounted a legal and political defense that undermined not only the slim evidence presented but the entire operation. The imperialists wanted these trials in The Hague not because they were preoccupied to "punish the Yugoslav wars criminals". On the bank of the accused, never were brought for example the UN Dutch officers that left the Muslim Bosnians of Srebrenica totally unprotected; and never was accused as a war criminal General William Clarke, the head of NATO forces in 1999 that launched 35.788 air attacks against the civilian population of 200 cities of Serbia, and bombarded schools, hospitals, trains, public markets etc. with 1.5 million bombs, half of them with depleted uranium.

The International Court was set to legitimize, after the tragedy, the barbaric actions of imperialism itself. This legitimacy is necessary for a reconstruction of social relations in the ruined Balkans along the lines of imperialist geo-strategic and economic interests.

But the last years, The Hague Court was completely de-legitimized by the U.S. imperialists themselves, when they declared that they will not accept the authority and the jurisdiction of any International Court to judge American citizens and soldiers accused for war crimes. After the war aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan, after Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, how the "humanitarians" in Washington could accept to be judged under their own "international law"?

Carla Del Ponte's Court, from any point of view, cannot have more "legitimacy" than the U.S. appointed court of Iraqi stooges in occupied Baghdad judging another ex- ally of US who was later demonized as well as Milosevic: Saddam Hussein.

From Milosevic to Hussein, from The Hague to Baghdad, the line of imperialist crimes following the end of the Cold War can be traced. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the wars in the Balkans was the first act of the permanent war drive by imperialism to re-shape the post-Cold war chaotic world as a way out from hits historic decline and crisis. The International Court wanted to institutionalize an imperialist fabricated mythology: that the Yugoslav tragedy was caused solely by the so-called atavistic ethnic hatreds in the Balkans, by some local nationalistic warlords and butchers but not at all by any imperialist interference.

The centrifugal forces that led to the end of the bureaucratically "self-managed socialism in a single Balkan country" were spread not only by bureaucratic mismanagement and corruption in an over-indebted relatively backward country but by the IMF itself that made abysmal the gap between the richer Northern ex Yugoslav republics and the poorest in the South of the federal state. Then, following the collapse of Stalinism and the implosion of the USSR are the European imperialists first that promoted the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, according to the agreement between French imperialism and the re-unified imperialist Germany sealed in the Maastricht Treaty in 1991. The drive to financial and political union of capitalist Europe, as a response to the end of the Cold War and the new stage of international inter-imperialist rivalry, was fuelled by the blood of the Yugoslav peoples brutally divided along ethnic-sectarian lines. In this process, the imperialists found willing collaborators in the existing nationalistic fragments of a bureaucracy that wanted to keep power and join the course to re-integration to the European and world capitalist market. The Federation built by the Yugoslav socialist revolution was destroyed by the ethnic strife led by the restorationist bureaucratic elites manipulated by imperialism.

Slobodan Milosevic himself has enormous political responsibilities for the tragedy. Initially, when the US imperialists were in favor for a "centralized road to capitalism" and on this basis to keep in life a capitalist Yugoslavia, Milosevic and his Serb nationalist supporters had the Anglo-Saxon support to their efforts to keep alive Yugoslavia as a centralized State under the supremacy of Serbian nationalism. After the pathetic failure of imperialist Europe, particularly after Bosnia, US imperialism under Clinton changed its line and promoted the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. In Bosnia, U.S. -NATO air forces started to attack the Serbian positions. Despite an initial resistance, the Serbian authorities under the leadership of Milosevic unashamedly capitulated in the Dayton Treaty, which transformed Bosnia into a protectorate of imperialism fragmented along ethnic lines into impotents Statelets-ghosts. On a greater scale, the same happened later with Kosovo and the talks in Rambouillet. But this time, despite the capitulationist tendencies of Milosevic, the US and European imperialists, including the social-imperialists like the mutant Stalinist D' Alema in Italy or the ex-leftist "Green" Yoschka Fischer in Germany, moved to their own "final solution of the Yugoslav problem": they launched the NATO aggression of 1999 that destroyed the remnants of Yugoslavia, with the help of Yeltsin's Russia. It was a question of time then to have the first "orange" overturn, the overthrow of Milosevic by imperialist sponsored forces, including the same NGO's that were active later in Georgia and Ukraine, and the establishment of a 100 per cent pro-imperialist stooge regime in Belgrade. It was this regime that following the orders of US and EU imperialist gave Milosevic to Carla Del Ponte's Court in The Hague -and, finally, to death.

The death of Slobodan Milosevic who was considered by the US envoy Richard Holbrook in 1995, as "an enlightened leader" and then, in 1999, as "the butcher of the Balkans" is much more than an epilogue of a tragedy, the echo of a now distant past. It is rather a prelude of a coming storm. The news cannot but stir the traumatized national feelings of the Serbian people ; they came on the eve of a referendum that is planned to destroy the last links between Serbia and Montenegro as well as just before the pre-announced by the imperialist themselves "independence" of Kosovo- an 'independence' which far from establishing the right of national self-determination of the Albanian population will try to eternalize the present status of Kosovo as a nationally impotent protectorate and a strategic bastion for imperialism in the region.

New clouds are gathering in the already devastated Balkans. But this time conditions have changed. The socially destitute local populations still striving to find the most elementary means for survival are focusing more and more on social problems and less to the declarations of nationalist demagogues. Despite the exhaustion of social energy, following a decade of massacres and wars, the first signs of a revival emerge, as for example with the wave of working class strikes and factory occupations that Serbia knew recently. The need to re-organize proletarian and popular forces for a socialist and internationalist perspective faces important obstacles but also new impulses. This is the task that the Balkan Socialist Centre "Christian Rakovsky" fights to fulfill.

--Savas Michael -Matsas