I did not expect to agree with it, but this article is a big disappointment.
All capitalist governments are hypocritical. It is obligatory to challenge them on this every time. But it does not make the present war fundamentally an unjust war. Rather a progressive one because it marks a shift from a policy of unprincipled appeasement of social fascist tendencies (socialism in words fascism in deeds) to a more prinicipled one of confronting Serbian fascism.
Everyone can be accused of hypocrisy by those who think they do not examine obvious facts closely enough. Gunder Frank by his moral indignation at hypocrisy while opposing the support to the Kosovo Albanians is also vulnerable to charges about his own intellectual integrity.
> US/NATOS'S HYPOCRITIC OATH
> by
> Andre Gunder Frank
> [April 4, 1999]
>
>The US government wishes to invoke international law to protect
>3 American soldiers held by the Yugoslav government under the Geneva
>Convention regarding prisoners of war. Yet at the same time,
>
>The 19 states of NATO led by the United States are or have just been
>flagrantly violating international law - and without even any
>declaration of war -
>
> in wantonly bombing military and civilian targets
> in Yugoslavia, including two buildings in the very center of
> Belgrade on April 2
>
> deliberately blocking a major international waterway normally
> used for commercial shipping by non combatant and neutral
> countries, by bombing a culturally significant bridge over the
> Danube in Novi Sad and plunging it into the river
As Joao Monteiro's post notes, law is ultimately a question of what is enforceable and who is going to enforce it. There is no eternal supranational law that stands above classes and states. The law that will prevail in a united world is being shaped now, and will have to be fought for in the future. So long as one does not create illusions in eternal law, it is reasonable to use flagrant and hypocritical inconsistencies to challenge the ruling class.
But that can be played by both sides: the NATO spokesman read out headings from the Yugoslav constitution. One clause is against deportations. It is odd, is it not, that in order to defend the unity of Yugoslavia which the Serb nationalists still claim exists, they must in the name of Yugoslavia, suppress the right to self-determination of a region, and then deport its population, if deportations are explicitly against the constitution?
>
>The NATO states deliberately by-pass the entire United Nations
>organization and set aside the consultative procedures it, and especially
>its Security Council, offers for the discussion and settlement of
>international
>Disputes. These include in particular those that guarantee human rights
>and those that may threaten the peace. Thereby the NATO member states
>including the United States are blatantly abrogating - even more than
>violating - the mainstay of international law
Everyone knows that in the Security Council the big powers have a veto. Gunder Frank knows this too. There is always this complicated game about how much latitude the big powers have to take unilateral action and how much they want endorsement from the international community. Gunder Frank is part of that debate. But there is no evidence that World War III is going to start because the US has defied Russia. On the contrary Russia has been very much part of the communication loop and may play a role in negotiations.
>NATO and particularly the United States has been obstructing international
>criminal law by deliberately failing to arrest and remand to the War
>Crimes Court in The Hague persons indicted for genocide and other
>violations of human rights who are in the de facto and perhaps de jure
>jurisdiction of NATO forces in Bosnia, members of which provided for such
>arrest and remand as part of the settlement at Dayton, USA.
An odd argument when a) it required a process for the occupying authorities to be able to assert their authority and b) the NATO attack on Serbia is because of Serbia's violation of human rights in Kosovo for which Frank blames them for acting too decisively.
If he is suggesting that Croat and Muslim war criminals are not getting arrested in Bosnia, it would be better to say so explicitly.
>The very man, Milosevic, who at Dayton was selected and supported to
>guarantee and implement the Dayton agreement is now being demonized and
>used as the pretext for this illegal NATO bomb attack against an entire
>country. However, Milosevic abrogated Kosovo autonomy already ten years
>ago and began his autocratic rule fanning Serbian nationalism even more
>than ten years ago, when it was also Western generated causes of and then
>Western support for the breakup of Yugoslavia that gave Milosevic that
>opportunity. [Shades of the first US/Western support and then blame of
>Saddam Hussein, to whom Milosevic is only now being compared].
This is merely describing the shift from an imperialist policy of appeasement of fascism to an imperialist policy of confronting fascism. It is not an argument for opposing the more progressive of those two policies.
>NATO bombing has effectively emasculated the very Serbian opposition to
>Milosevic and his rule, which offered the best chance and mechanism for a
>democratic, peaceful political settlement and the furtherance of more
>humanitarian policies in Serbia, including Kosovo, and also in the
>Serbian populated regions of Bosnia. This domestic opposition to Milosevic
>was long led by the Serbian Peace, Womens and other Democratic movements.
>They became a world wide model of peaceful mobilization when they brought
>hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets during a months of
>winter nights and which thereby obliged Milosevic to revoke a number of
>undemocratic and illegal measures. If the NATO powers had had even the
>slightest interest in promoting democracy or human rights anywhere in
>Yugoslavia, including at the time in Bosnia and Croatia, they would have
>worked with rather then undercut the domestic democratic movements [Again
>exactly the same was and still is true in Iraq].
I agree that NATO should be challenged about how much it worked with the movements of civil society. This was not central to its strategy. But I do not accept the argument that confronting fascism, which at first obliges more progressive forces to duck, in the long run fails to support those forces.
Clearly things are risky for the forces of civil society in Montenegro at the moment, but I would have thought the position of the other parties is now stronger, as a result of the attacks on the Serb-led Yugoslav armed forces, not weaker.
>NATO bombing, as the CIA and Pentagon reportedly predicted, has
>immeasurably increased the deprivation of the Kosovo Albanians' life,
>property, home, and country.
But not so much as being ordered out of your house, and then it being set alight, while you are transported to the border and relieved of your money and identification papers?
>It is difficult to see how any measures could
>now or ever in the future restore even what little they had before NATO
>bombs and Serbian persecution drove them out into neighboring countries -
>where the humanitarian concern of NATO had not made the slightest
>preparation to care for them. And still at the time of this writing, the
>number of Albanian refugees FROM Serbia does not yet or is only just
>beginning to match the number of Serbian refugees TO Serbia, who were
>forced out
>Of Croatia by ethnic cleansing that was itself instigated and supported by
>NATO policy. So there is more than just hypocrisy in the comparison and
>relation of these two flows of refugees. It will be a macabre irony if the
>Croatian Serbs, who were displaced with NATO help and still have found no
>place to take root, end up in Serbian Kosovo after NATO also helps to
>chase the Albanians out!
It would indeed! and it is curious that this should have occurred to Gunder Frank had he not probably been fed the idea by some of the many Serbs in exile who are prepared to propagate their social chauvinism (socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds) to anti-imperialist middle class liberals.
This is the strategy then which he is propagating: an empty province is obviously useless. The whole project has been conceived with the aim of providing lebensraum for Serb nationalists.
It is typical of the insidious nature of this proganda that it is done by innuendo. Of course Gunder Frank is not actively advocating this. He is merely colluding uncritically in the analysis and advocating appeasement with those who have such a national socialist agenda.
>NATO member states have always denounced and combated all 'terrorist'
>military and para-military forces [except of course those that they
>themselves have trained, armed and financed around the world from
>Indochina, via Afghanistan and Angola to Columbia and Guatemala and
>Nicaragua]. Yet now the military wing of the Albanian movement in Kosovo
>have become 'freedom fighters', alas without hardly a leg to stand on any
>more in Kosovo after ten days of NATO bombing and Serb military offensive.
Alas? How sincere is this "alas"?
The fate of the KLA may however be less deserving of hypocritical sympathy than that of the Serbian troops who are going to have difficulty escaping from Kosovo over the coming weeks.
Here Frank subtly puts inverted commas around "freedom fighters" thereby stepping over whether the Kosovo Albanians have a just claim to self-determination up to and including independence. The hypocrisy of imperialist governments is no excuse for the hypocrisy of Frank, whose rhetoric allows him to slip over this little point.
>Ironically hypocritical also is the NATO support to and intended if not
>realized protection of the very Albanian organizations that the police
>forces of several of the same NATO member states have accused of large
>scale drug trafficking, in violation of course also of international law.
As this article goes on it gets worse. This is just a threading together of Serb fascist propaganda. It is like damning the Republican movement in Ireland for drug running.
>There is also at least a touch of hypocrisy in the discussion in the
>United States of now bringing up charges of genocide in Kosovo .
Of course. But no hypocrisy if genuine leftists bring it up and demand tht the US stops appeasing fascism but instead confronts it. And a victory here will make it easier to win a victory in the next case, such as Kurdistan.
Of course no court on the planet is going to punish the hegemonic world power but unless we choose to wallow in idealist cyncism we can help create a culture of accountability of state officials, whether they are Pinochet or Milosevic.
With his history of leaving Chile in 1973 does Frank think that Pinochet should not be put on trial because imperialism was really to blame? Of course imperialism was really to blame. But of course it will also be progressive for Pinochet to be put on trial.
>For its
>government delayed 40 years to sign the international genocide convention,
and is delaying support for the International Court of Human Rights in Rome
>and in the meantime instigated it in Guatemala [as President Clinton
>recently admitted there], done it through carpet bombing in Indochina
>[were the Vienamese, Laotians and Cambodians swept under the carpet?] and
>waited for those otherwise defamed Vietnamese to stop the genocide in
>Camodia. and also to supported it or looked the other way elsewhere,
>including turning a blind eye to NATO members Turkey's genocidal policy
>towards its own and neighboring Kurds. Indeed, the United States itself
>has been responsible for the death for many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
>men,women and children through bombing and the resulting damage and
>poisoning with depleted but still roadioactive uranium, and a soon decade
>long embargo, that cripples the Iraqi economy and social services - and
>what for? First and foremost to sustain the already low price of oil by
>keeping a maximum of Iraqi oil off the world market. And even still very
>recently in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, the United States and
>some of its same NATO partners first set up some 'safe havens' in
>Bosnia, and then 'helplessly' stood by to watch massive massacres and
>ethnic cleansing.
So does Frank want the US and Britain to stand by or not? Can we have some rigour from him if he wishes to expose imperialist hypocrisy?
>For 'safe' areas were taken over by Bosnian Serbs [with
>help from the same Yugoslav army] who massacared whole communities of
>Muslims in Srebrenica and elsewhere then of course to take over their
>properties. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs were themselves driven out by
>Croatians who similarly enriched themselves, only on a still larger scale.
>Maybe the Genocide convention was still too recently signed by the United
>States yet to intervene under its cover then.
>
>Shameful hypocrisy also has been the consistent failure, nay even refusal,
>of the major Western NATO powers first to avoid and then to remedy the
>breakup of Yugoslavia and its dreadful consequences that are allegedly of
>age old 'ethnic' origin. Far from it, for at each step of the way, it was
>the
>these same Western powers and their policy or lack thereof that provoked
>and condoned the domino-like set of events that are too long even to
>summarize.
Of course there was external imperialist pressure but this oft repeated Serb nationalist hard luck story fails to explain why Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union split up after the fall of the Soviet Bloc.
>Moreover, each time it was the Western powers who
>[deliberately?] refused to accept settlements to avoid bloodshed until it
>was much too late and the combination of countless deaths with their power
>politics resulted in what was essentially the self -same settlement that
>had been rejected years before, e.g. the Owens Plan and the Dayton
>Agreement.
>So again at Ramboulleit the Western powers held out for a 'settlement'
>that they knew MUST be unacceptable to Yugoslavia, while in Paris all
>major Yugoslav parties, including the Albanians, came to an agreement that
>the
>Western powers rejected.
This critique of Rambouillet lacks depth. What was imperialist in NATO's position was
a) they did not support the Albanians right to a referendum leading to the possibility of independence
b) they tried to manipulate and engineer a solution
c) they did not promote civil society
d) they encouraged illusions among the Albanians about how much they could be trusted to help them.
>So NATO started bombing because it wanted to
Frank is really presenting as a serious argument that the whole aim of Rambouillet was to find a casus belli. There were plenty of casi belli on the way.
He has the theoretical sloppiness to produce a potboiler like this, recycling seondary sources, at a time when the systematic ruthless terroristic deportation of the whole Albanian population of Kosovo by Serbian forces illustrates why NATO was insisting on a peace keeping force. Frank just calls this a condition which they just knew would be unacceptable to the Albanians.
>and
>not as it hypocritically alleges because all other options had run out.
> No sooner did NATO bombs start falling than the Russian Prime Minister
>flew to Belgrade and negotiated an agreement that would have stopped the
>persecution and exodus of Albanians in Kosovo and would have permitted
>an immediate cease fire.
Just an unargued assertion knitted together. With forced deportations mounting how could leaving armed force in the hands of the Serbs have "stopped their persecution"?
>But of course that was not acceptable to the
>major [although yes to some minor] NATO powers, for whom the plight of
>the Albanians is no more than a hypocritical excuse for the American NATO
>offensive in the Balkans.
Everyone knows that US and western European imperialism want to dominate and exploit everywhere. What is new? That was the cause of their appeasement of Serb fascism. When they *confront* Serb fasicm is Frank suggesting that that is when their imperialist motives only emerge?
>P.S. The First Lady of the first NATO power Hilrary Rodham Clinton ,
>speaking in Marocco a couple of days ago, lamented the human tragedy in
>Yugoslavia, but said she was even more distrubed by twisting the truth
>and falsifying history. Alas she found fault for this hypocrisy only in
>the President of Yugoslavia and not at all in her presumably ever faithful
>and truthful husband, the President of the United States.
>
>QED.
The partial manipulation of truth is the stock in trade of imperialist and bourgeois politicians. What is new about that? and what is new about having to challenge it?
What is remarkable however is that Frank, who should not have to operate like a politician is himelf being economical and certainly less than rigorous with the truth.
I started reading this article with seriousness and pleasure. First I visited his web-site. And was surprised to see the vast amount of work he credits to himself.
If his output is that voluminous no wonder he has to recycle secondary sources.
The ideological content of his article is moralist idealism, and it leads him to fall into hypocrisy himself.
This is an article for the appeasement of fascism carried out in the name of socialism.
Chris Burford
London