Please pass a copy of the Kessi piece along to me.
Greatly appreciative, Chris Doss
>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Subject: Kessi against ethnicization
>Date: Mon, 27 Dec 1999 12:44:18 -0500
>
>[This just appeared on nettime. It's 45k, so too long to post here. Here's
>the beginning; I'll send the full text to anyone who wants it.]
>
>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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