[Marxism] Katanga yesterday, Kosovo today, and it’s always money!

[Walter Lippmann]

JUVENTUD REBELDE
March 1, 2008
Katanga yesterday, Kosovo today, and it’s always money!
By: Jorge Luis Herrera del Campo 
email: internac at jrebelde.cip.cu
March 1, 2008 00:24:52 GMT

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs1807.html
A CubaNews translation by Ana Portela.
Edited by Walter Lippmann. Original:
http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/internacionales/2008-03-01/katanga-ayer-kosovo
-hoy-y-el-dinero-siempre/ 

The Balkan world is complicated. Its thousand years of history must be known
to understand the causes of current circumstances and about the manipulation
of the forces that have played an influence on this part of the world, a
peninsula that is a religious, ethnic, geographic and cultural frontier. End
and road of two worlds. Immense natural resources. Good and hard-working
people. Thousand year presence of its inhabitants that goes back 40,000
years of history. Conquistadors have stepped on a space for those who want
hegemonic control in Europe.  

Winston Churchill said that the Balkans had more history than he could
digest. Others have imposed the terrible cliché “European powder keg” but
they never mention who places the powder, the wick and the match and those
who, in the end, supplies the blood and tears.

We live in a very complex world which steps, gradually, away from that
bipolar world which appeared after the Second World War and which was
intended to avoid repeating the nightmare of 50 million dead. But the
current unipolar world daily and with premeditation whittles away at the
principles which are the basis and guarantees of international institutions
and of peaceful coexistence among peoples. Principles established as
expression of an international will to prevent those horrors.

The Bush era, which began with Reagan, is considered by some experts to have
really begun with Roosevelt and his state of security. It is a typical
example of how societies are robbed of their civil rights and Keynesian
principles internally in developed countries. The neo-liberal era of the
Democrat Clinton is not exempt from sin. And the anesthetic is, then, the
fight against terrorism.

The sovereignty and self-determination of states over their national
territory, their right to resources found in their soil, the
non-interference in internal affairs and self-determination are pebbles in
the neoliberal capitalist shoe which bother those who want to take over all
of humanity.

Kosovo's self-proclamation of independence, boosted by the US with the
support of the main powers of the European Union is, among other things, an
evident action of depriving rights of international institutions.

Establishing the precedence of imposing on the international community a new
state by splitting up the territory of a recognized state, a member of the
UN and other multilateral institutions, justifying the ethnic criteria and
attacking a government (that of Slobodan Milosevic) which, also, is no
longer in government, dangerously attacks the bases of the national states
which arose as a result of the Second World War. It places many countries at
the mercy specious interpretations, outside the acknowledged international
framework.

Thus, the independence of Kosovo is an act of force based on a
reinterpretation of an agreement of the Security Council. It was done,
nonetheless disregarding Security Council, generating actions against what
has been established and not modified by the Council itself.

For a greater mockery, the actors declare that they are doing it on the
basis of what had been agreed upon previously by the UN. So precedence is
established that a group of states, or only one, with sufficient military
machinery to back it up, can re-interpret a resolution of an international
institution and act against what had been established previously.

This exercise of power is not new. We should recall how “civilized” Europe
launched its mercenaries and economic power against the Congo of Patrice
Lumumba, that promising African leader who trusted the UN. He was
assassinated and, thanks to manipulation of western powers, the puppet state
of Katanga was created, as a means to take over the mining wealth of the
region.

The forces that have imposed the independence of Kosovo are the same global
interests that destroyed Yugoslavia. They are those who fear that the EU
assume the international political role allowed by its world economic
strength. They are those who do not want a climate of friendship with
Russia. Those who, with this move, court the Islamic world in order to
attack later, against less resistance, those Muslims who do not accept their
rules.

So you see, the transnationals do not have a homeland and they are disturbed
by their existence, above all if they are defended. They want their hands
free. 

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     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Los Angeles, California
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"
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