The plan was for a convoy of material aid to workers in Kosovo. They would attempt to cross the Montenegrin border. If stopped there, which seemed likely, they would distribute the aid to refugees there.
She stressed that this was not just a humanitarian gesture. As the name of the organisation implied, they wanted to show ordinary working people wished to support similar people in Kosovo, and to respect their rights, including their right to independence.
However small this group may be, it seems to me to be progressive in giving some answer that attempts to be in the name of workers, and to include support for human rights of workers.
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Since I have been accused of being an apologist for the imperialist governments of Britain and the USA let me go on to clarify my support for some sort of military intervention.
This is a war for the self-determination of Kosovo. It is a just war. But the imperialists pursue it with imperialist means. It is better than an imperialist policy of appeasement of social fascism, but NATO strategy relies on massive air power, and shows self-interest in not being willing to commit ground troops. The issue is similar to imperialist reluctance to open a Second Front in the second world war. If what the Serbian nationalists have done is a major war crime, then armies are there for a purpose unless you are a pacifist, and in hopefully rare circumstances, it may be right to use them.
IMO what is proportionate is to use them only to neutralise the military superiority of the Serbian nationalists, by occupying strategic high ground on the border between Kosovo and Serbia, and using this to cut communications and supplied from Serbia to its occupation troops. Such postions could be supported by air. The use of air power in the rest of Yugoslavia should be restricted to achieving air domination. The campaign that is starting against wider economic targets is not just and proportionate.
The war in Kosovo should not be condescendingly conducted by NATO on behalf of the Albanians. The Albanians should receive military aid, provided they respect human rights, but their democratic rights should not be controlled and manipulated by NATO. Aid should be given also for all human rights organisations including organisations like Workers Aid to Kosovo. Humanitarian aid should not concentrate on depopulating Kosovo by rehousing refugees in distant countries but on enabling people to claim their rights again to their own land and houses.
Such a programme is proportionate, just, and democratic.
It would be consistent with a campaign "for a just peace in the Balkans".
NATO seems poised on the edge of a massive war against Serbia as a whole including the economic infrastructure. That would only be just if it had a chance of persuading the Serbian government to call its armed forces out of Kosovo immediately. That is not just as a substitute for sending in ground troops.
Offensive NATO ground troops, I suggest must not be USA troops. Some peace making measures are necessary inb the world but I suggest we should move to a view that they should be regional. After all it is the other countries of a region that have to respond to massive displacements of refugees. The populist isolationist movements in the USA are therefore progressive when they emphasises that they do not want their boys killed in far off wars. The net result of this though, is an imperialist strategy in which NATO relies heavily on the supposed terror of massive US air power. It is more progressive if it is recognised that ground troops may sometimes be necessary in an offensive capacity, but they come from the region. Europe should take responsibility for its own problems. This will also serve to weaken US hegemony world-wide.
Thus it was right that the USA got out of Somalia, and right, whatever the difficulties, that peace making in Liberia is the responsibility of west African troops.
Military action by one's own imperialist bourgeoisie in defence of the right of small nations, is a scenario highly likely to produce imperialist excesses. It is true it could become an imperialist war. No doubt. But the gravity of the ethnic oppression in Kosovo is intolerable in any Europe of the future. In combating it we must be critical of the imperialist excesses of our own governments, and guard against the progressive enlargement of the European superstate, on the basis of the oppression of any other national group or community, such as the Serbs, as a result.
Imperialism, as the interests of finance capital, can only be a temporary and unreliable ally of such a just project. That is why now, apparently small efforts like Workers Aid to Kosovo and other progressive organisations of civil society, must be the basis of justice and peace in Kosovo and the wider Balkans.
Chris Burford
London