Kosov@ / NATO: Economy of the War and of Communication
by Alain Kessi
When I listen to what people say about the war of NATO against Yugoslavia, and of the Yugoslav regime against the Albanian population of Kosov@[1], be it on various mailing lists or in personal conversations with people, it is striking how insecure many seem to feel. Apparently many activists are having difficulties to remain true to even the most elementary principles of long-standing leftist politics, in a time in which a war cannot any longer be interpreted simply as imperialist/antiimperialist - here the ugly imperialists, there the brave liberation fighters. It seems to me that it is not those principles that have to be given up. Just like ever before, people and the lives they live should come first, before big-time politics. The point remains to develop, in solidarity, resistance against the attacks on our autonomy, without making differences among us invisible in the process. The point is still to see through discursive maneuvers of distraction and to base our analysis on an understanding of economic and social mechanisms of power. It is rather the less conscious characteristics of leftist and autonomist political practice that need rethinking.
Against ethnicizing!
The reflex of some antiimperialist activists, when they perceive efforts towards independence as "liberation movements", to consider these efforts to be legitimate and worthy of support, seems to lead to a dead end in the case of Kosov at . Perhaps the wish to identify with the enemies of a cunning and reckless power player like Slobodan Milosevic has led some, for some time at least, to close their eyes on the racist tendencies of a KLA (Kosova Liberation Army, also UCK, "Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves"), or at least tendencies towards "ethnic" separation. Others have preferred to remain silent on this point, in the general uncertainty of the moment. The former, among them one part of the editors of the Info International program of Radio LoRa in Zurich, have at least had the merit to be involved with what was going on in Kosov@ and to launch discussions about it (making contact with KLA people in Zurich in the process), at a time at which other media barely paid any attention to the KLA. When the NATO attacks started and it became clearer how the KLA put itself unconditionally at the service of NATO strategies, some of the early advocates of a solidarity with the KLA used the opportunity to critically reassess their position. Others, even among those usually very critical of the state and media (I'm surprised, for instance, about the declaration of an anarchist friend on an Eastern European mailing list), have flirted with the line of argument about preventing a "humanitarian catastrophe". This means they have walked into the trap set up by NATO by creating facts on the ground and then feigning to offer solutions. I was outright shocked by the machist and aggressive statements of some European and US-American net activists (e.g., on the nettime mailing list) as a reaction to e-mail diaries reporting from a personal point of view on the bombings in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Kraljevo - although I do see how such personal accounts can be put to use for propagandist purposes. In any event, I would like to deal with this by trying to contextualize such accounts, and not by suppressing them. Maybe out of a feeling of insecurity for having to argue politically on unusually unfamiliar terrain, some of the net activists emphatically embrace an anti-Milosevic position that in its negligent way borders on anti-Serb racism. The fact that on the other hand a group with a more streamlined political stance, like the Revolution”rer Aufbau Schweiz (Revolutionary Build-Up Switzerland), manages to write a leaflet against the NATO war without mentioning even one word about the refugees fleeing from Milosevic's campaign, should probably not come as a surprise. This position is just as fatally based on a simplified understanding of imperialism (in the latter case, probably adopted for tactical reasons) - once again there is only one bad guy, even if this time it is not Milosevic but NATO, and implicitly the Kosov@ Albanians collaborating with NATO. It seems to me that all these positions are evidence of a weak point in our political praxis. A more in-depth inquiry into the political developments in Kosov@ that points out the complexity of economic and power strategic causes of a social conflict and the willfully forced ethnicizing of the conflict is something that I have seen bits and pieces of, but usually discussed in a limited circle of people.
The "facts on the ground" for which Slobodan Milosevic, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the KLA leadership (but also Ibrahim Rugova in his own more discreet ways) have, each for their own reasons, worked hard for years, are widely accepted. These "facts" consist in the perception that the conflict stems from age-old "ethnic" feuds and is so much ingrained in people that it is impossible to live together. In view of the crushing weight of "history", even from a leftist point of view the only thing to do then is to call for the "ethnic" separation - perceived as the only way to defuse the smoldering conflict - to be achieved by peaceful means through negotiations. This procedure has been demonstrated in the case of Bosnia in which the Dayton Agreement was reached under US sponsorship. But - it was not possible to implement the "ethnic" separation agreed upon there without violent relocations and massacres, since the people would not let themselves be moved without resistance. "Srebrenica" was in this sense a prerequisite for the implementation of Dayton - part of the plan, so to speak.
It seems vital to me to break out of the discourse about an "ethnic" conflict.
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