NATO yesterday confirmed that it will maintain its troop contingent in Kosovo to deter the violence that will follow the expected collapse of talks on the Serbian province’s future on December 10.
Nato foreign ministers also gave the alliance’s 16,000 troops in Kosovo more leeway to tackle possible unrest.
Already, right wing EU leaders such as the Tory leader David Cameron have called for NATO to send more troops into Kosovo and Bosnia because the collapse of the Kosovo talks may well lead to another round of war in the Balkans.
What is causing the ‘unrest’ is that Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanians population – which cleansed the Serbian province of the majority of the provinces’ Serbian, Roma, Bosnian and other minorities as soon as Kosovo came under NATO control – are now demanding independence from Serbia, and declaring that they are not willing to wait any longer for it.
The Serbian government, and the 100,000 plus Serbs who remain in Kosovo not only oppose this demand but insist that the Serbian state has got the right to use all means necessary to maintain Serbia’s territorial integrity.
The US, NATO and the EU have long had the tearing away of Kosovo from Serbia as the number one item on their agenda for the Balkans ever since the year 2000.
Their statesmen and leaders have openly stated that this will complete the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.
This dismemberment began after Gorbachev withdrew the Red Army from Eastern Europe, and the EU organised the secession of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and then Montenegro from Yugoslavia, through a series of Balkan wars, as part of its and NATO’s expansion eastwards towards the western borders of Russia.
The US and the EU have set a 10 December deadline for the international talks to deliver an agreement for an independent Kosovo – but the talks have already ended without a deal.
Not only does Serbia not agree, but Russia also is opposed to an independent Kosovo.
Both stress that the formation of two Albanian states, Albania and Kosovo can only further the drive to establish a greater Albania made up of Albania, Kosovo, and parts of Macedonia, and Bulgaria where there are Albanian minorities.
There is also the prospect of the entry of Serbian troops into Kosovo to defend Serbian communities that come under attack from Albanian mobs.
Nato Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said on Friday that Nato would ‘act resolutely against anyone who seeks to resort to violence’.
The EU’s mediator on Kosovo on Thursday criticised comments by Aleksandar Simic, an aide to Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, who said war could be a ‘legal tool’ to resolve the Kosovo issue if other methods failed.
Meanwhile Russia is said to be willing to give Serbia economic and military aid to strengthen its position.
The central issue however, is that after the end of the Second World War with the victory of the Yugoslav revolution in the Balkans, the region enjoyed nearly 50 years of peace and fraternal cooperation between the nations that made up the federation.
It was the decision of the western powers to break up the Yugoslav federation that led to the Croatian, and Bosnian wars and then the massive NATO air bombardment of Yugoslavia, and the occupation of Kosovo.
The way forward for the working class of the Balkans is through the revolutionary reconstitution of the Yugoslav workers state through driving imperialism and its agencies out of Yugoslavia, just as the Nazis were driven out of Yugoslavia by the successful struggle of the partizans led by the Yugoslav Communist Party.
The British workers will not support a new imperialist war in the Balkans. The British trade unions must demand that no more British troops are sent to Bosnia or Kosovo, and that the entire British garrison in the Balkans must be withdrawn at once.
