THE death of Slobodan Milosevic in his cell at The Hague, four years into his trial by the imperialist powers for genocide, has left those who really fomented the break up of Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars in a rage, since their wish was to frame Milosevic for their crimes.
In fact, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and the retreat of the Red Army from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, the next target of the imperialist powers in their push eastwards was the workers’ state of Yugoslavia.
This had been created by the victory of the working class over the German and Italian fascists led by the Yugoslav Communist Party and Marshal Tito.
No sooner was the new state established than it had to fight attempts by Stalin to dominate it and take it over, since Stalin objected to the independent attitude of the Yugoslavs and did not want to see a rival centre established in Belgrade.
For a time the Tito regime turned to the left, but finally turned right, and decided to follow Stalin’s example by seeking to build socialism in a single country, this time Yugoslavia, making a close relationship in the process with western banks and western companies, becoming very heavily in their debt.
After the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany under the Kohl regime, the German ruling class, in particular, made it very clear that it regarded Slovenia and Croatia as part of its orbit.
From the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall the peoples of Yugoslavia had lived in peace with one another.
After 1989, with tensions and divisions being stirred up from abroad all that changed. Part of this saw Milosevic removing the autonomy of Kosovo within Serbia, imposing direct Serbian government rule.
In 1991, Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia and this was more or less accepted reluctantly by the Yugoslav leadership.
However, when Croatia followed the Slovenian example, there was a crisis. There was a substantial Serb minority in Croatia, and during the period of the Second World War it had suffered enormously at the hands of the Ustasha regime that had established itself in Croatia as an ally of Hitler.
Croatian Serbs did not want to quit Yugoslavia and neither did the Serbian minority in Bosnia, so the Yugoslav civil war began in earnest.
The situation of the Croatian Serbs was resolved in 1995 when Germany and the US supplied and trained the Croatian forces to launch Operation Storm. Using tanks from the former East German army, the Croatian forces drove over 300,000 Serbs out of Croatia into Serbia.
In Bosnia the efficiency of the Bosnian Serb army defied the imperialist powers, and it took a NATO invasion in 1995 to break their front, setting up the Dayton Talks to decide on the future of Bosnia. The hero of the hour for the US government at the Dayton talks was Slobodan Milosevic. He agreed to the division of Bosnia into three entities and guaranteed the settlement.
Peace was established in Bosnia through Milosevic.
This gave the imperialists time to prepare their intervention into Serbia. As the champion of the Albanian majority in Kosovo, the CIA formed and armed the Kosovo Liberation Army.
At Rambouillet in 1999 the US offered the Serbs a deal that gave NATO forces the right to intervene in Serbia. When Milosevic refused the offer the 80-day Nato air attack on Serbia began.
Milosevic looked to the Russian Stalinists to assist Yugoslavia but they refused. NATO breathed a sigh of relief when Milosevic gave way and allowed NATO troops into Kosovo, because they could not fight their way in. The Yugoslav army was never tested never mind defeated in Kosovo. Milosevic was then overthrown by the right wing in Serbia.
Milosevic’s death does not signal any victory for imperialism. Bosnia, with its three entities, under EU rule has become Europe’s centre for trading women and drugs, while Kosovo wants independence, which Serbia will not give.
Imperialism cannot bring peace to the Balkans. New wars are beckoning. The only way forward in the Balkans is through uniting the working class of the region to go forward to reform Yugoslavia as part of a federation of Balkan socialist states.