[R-G] Ten Years On: NATO's 78-Day Bombing of Yugoslavia

[Anthony Fenton]

http://counterpunch.org/balkans03242009.html

March 24, 2009
Ten Years On
NATO's 78-Day Bombing of Yugoslavia

By GLOBAL BALKANS

On March 24, 1999, NATO began an aerial bombing campaign against what  
was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. For 78 days, bombs rained  
down on military targets and civilian infrastructure under the guise  
of ‘humanitarian intervention.' Operation Allied Force precipitated  
the displacement of over one million people and directly resulted in  
the deaths of over 2000 civilians of a range nationalities (a number  
that gets much larger if we include indirect deaths as a result of the  
intervention and post-intervention period, as well as those killed in  
the resulting escalation of the military conflict between the Yugoslav  
army and the KLA). Ten years later, Kosovo's ‘independence' has  
resulted in a quasi-colonial entity of ‘ethnic' enclaves and an all- 
pervasive security apparatus, a new client state for the Western  
powers that led the bombing campaign. Meanwhile, Serbia and Montenegro  
remain stalled on a ‘transition' to neo-liberal democracy marked by a  
brutal mass privatization, increasing poverty, and the rapid  
dispossession and continued marginalization of workers, students,  
refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs), Roma communities, and  
others casualties of economic restructuring.

Global Balkans is a small network of anti-authoritarian, anti- 
capitalist activists of diverse backgrounds in the ex-Yugoslav  
diaspora and allies. Many of us have witnessed and experienced first- 
hand the devastation that continues to be felt as a result of the  
events and ripple effects emanating from the NATO intervention of  
1999. We have talked to and continue to dialogue with people from many  
communities throughout the former Yugoslav Balkan region whose lives  
have been deeply and permanently turned upside down by the upheaval of  
the NATO bombing, the wars of the 1990s, and the neoliberal transition  
of Yugoslavia's various successor states.

Whether they be...

    1. workers massively laid off from factories that were first  
bombed and then later sold off at fire sale prices or questionable  
privatization deals to local tycoons or foreign investors;
    2. refugees and displaced people caught between the prospect of no  
return and a lack of resources and political and social will for local  
integration;
    3. the families and loved ones of the missing, those who  
disappeared and were never accounted for during and after the violent  
chaos of 1999;
    4. minorities trapped in enclaves in Kosovo who go to sleep every  
night in fear of attack and who have not seen the main town or city 10  
km away for over 10 years;
    5. internally displaced people living in the shipping containers,  
makeshift shelters, and run down collective housing provided to them  
by international aid agencies ten years ago as a "temporary solution",  
for whom aid was cut off in 2004 and who live in them year round  
whether it is -15 or + 40°C;
    6. those communities facing strange illnesses or high cancer rates  
who are unable to get proper medical care or answers as to their  
causes in a system that seems bent on hushing up any talk of depleted  
uranium or the health effects of the bombing that would displease NATO  
countries;
    7. displaced people who are among the more than 100,000 who have  
been or are under threat of deportation back to Serbia from EU  
countries, many of them, particularly Roma, born abroad and unable to  
speak the language of the country they are dumped back into;
    8. the erased of Slovenia, non-Slovenian minorities from the ex- 
Yugoslav region who woke up one day to find that their citizenship had  
been erased by the state, and who have been fighting for status under  
extremely precarious conditions ever since;
    9. women, Roma, ethnic and sexual minorities who have been  
disproportionately affected by mass layoffs, particularly in the  
former self-managing social property sector of the economy (where the  
majority were employed) that was the first to be privatized, and who  
face disproportionate violence in the toxic transitional climate of  
militarism and deprivation that produces social scape-goating;
   10. our own families, friends, and loved ones who bear many of the  
hidden and not so hidden marks and scars of those times;

...we have been inspired by their struggles and persistence against  
difficult odds in difficult conditions. They are the erased, the  
ignored, the missing and the forgotten of the NATO military campaign,  
the post-Yugoslav transition, and the intervention of the  
international community, and we name their situations and think of  
them today, and invite those who read this to join us in doing so.

Ten years later, we remember those ordinary people of all  
nationalities who lost their lives in the wars of the ‘90s, the NATO  
bombing, and the neoliberal transition. We reject the nationalist  
lenses through which these conflicts have been portrayed in the  
Western media as well as in the region, ones that only recognize or  
canonize the victims of a preferred side and refuse to see those whose  
lives have been destroyed on the "other" enemy side. We also reject  
the cynical pro-imperialist lens that legitimizes military  
intervention by NATO as a "humanitarian" necessity borne of goodwill  
and the need for benevolent imperial oversight. As if the millions of  
dollars in bombs (79,000 tons), cruise missiles (10,000 launched),  
radiation, and cluster bombs (35,000 bomblets) costing $30 billion USD  
in damage to the local economy and raining down death and ecological  
devastation on hospitals, schools, factories, bridges, and refineries  
are the same as teddy bears, food supplies, or medical aid. We stand  
in solidarity with all the victims of the many layers of violence that  
have and continue to be enacted in the region, the kind that the  
mainstream media are unable and unwilling to depict or recognize. We  
ask our comrades and allies to aim for a more informed perspective on  
the legacy of those times than that which much of the Western left has  
seemingly adopted from the simplistic scenarios of the mainstream media.

Ten years later, we are working to support and actively extend our  
solidarity to the former Yugoslav region's slowly (re)emerging social  
movements fighting struggles of survival, persistence, and liberation  
and to our activist comrades who are tirelessly fighting to make these  
fragile and beleaguered, yet resolute and courageous  movements still  
stronger, more visible, and even more effective. They are an  
inspiration. We also encourage the North American/Western left and  
other progressives to overcome the common cycle of momentary and  
opportunistic interest based on partial understandings followed by  
long periods of indifference to the conditions, constraints, and  
complexities faced by ordinary people and social movements in the  
region.

Ten years on, the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia  
has been eclipsed on the global stage by a series of intensifying  
imperialist military interventions, most notably in Afghanistan and  
Iraq. We see each of these military adventures and the mass  
devastation they have wrought as of a piece, as part of a troubling  
and dangerous progression, one that will not be resolved by a  
Democratic president or a kinder, gentler imperialism. We understand  
and underline the extent to which the NATO bombing in 1999 set many  
dangerous precedents for these later imperialist wars, and ask those  
in anti-war movements to remember, talk about, and make those often  
neglected links. We also see the 1999 NATO intervention as inscribed  
in a lineage of earlier destructive political measures taken by the  
"international community", starting with the economic ‘shock therapy'  
program imposed on the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1990.

It remains to be seen how much of the world and the media will  
remember or mark this 10th anniversary of the NATO intervention. We  
expect there to be little recognition of this date that does not  
recapitulate the standard nationalist, pro-neoliberal and pro-NATO  
perspectives we reject. We remember. We refuse to let it be ignored,  
glossed over or forgotten, and we stand strong with all those who are  
still daily living the effects and devastation of those 78 days in  
1999 and their aftermath - living, struggling, persisting, fighting  
back and moving forward towards a different Balkans and a different  
world as well, one where none of this will be possible or even  
fathomable.

Global Balkans is an activist research, media, and organizing network  
that works both locally and in solidarity with Balkan social movements  
to investigate, publicize and impact political, social and economic  
struggles in the former Yugoslav and wider Balkan region. We are  
working to build a transnational, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist,  
and anti-authoritarian network with a pan-Balkan and internationalist  
outlook (currently based in San Francisco, Toronto, and Montreal).  
They can be reached at globalbalkans at yahoo.ca and globalbalkans at gmail.com 
.