This article was first published in the 'NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR' DISCUSSION BULLETIN which can be found at http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/guest/radical/ESKOSOVO.HTM
Introduction
The sudden appearance of working class resistance to the war effort in central Serbia in late May should be an inspiration to proletarians in all the war-affected countries. In the immediate term it probably won’t be, but we owe it to our class brothers and sisters in this region to spread the spirit of their struggle as best we can. The conscript soldiers who deserted, their relatives and other proletarians who have physically attacked the media and local government (and even the occasional general!) showed an admirable lack of patriotism, a real spirit of defeatism - they showed that they literally didn’t care if “their” country was invaded by foreign troops. They didn't merely quibble about the rate of killings but stated loudly and clearly that they wanted the war to end and for all conscripts to return from the front.
The following chronology takes its information from two main sources. The first is the Montenegrin daily newspaper Vijesti (“News”). This is the original source of almost all the news stories which have appeared in the Western press. Like most newspapers these days it has a web site: http://www.vijesti.cg.yu which contains all the main stories. It’s only in Serbo-Croat. The second is the web site “Free Serbia - other voices from Serbia” (http://www.xs4all.nl/cfreeserb/eyewitness/e-30031999.html) which is produced by Serbian democratic oppositionists. They claim to have a Krusevac correspondent. Their accounts seem to tally pretty well with the accounts in Vijesti. The articles are available in Serbo-Croat and English. Bits of information have also been gleaned from Serbian newspapers which have web sites, notably Vreme (the well-known oppositionist weekly magazine from Belgrade) and Nezavisna Svetlost from Kragujevac. The media record of this movement seems to cease on 25 May. Does this mean it was completely crushed by state repression? Possibly
If anyone has any further information, please let us know. At the moment there is only information about the repression following the movement. Three reservists have been sentenced to four years in jail by a military tribunal in Nis. A further 24 are under investigation.
The movement seemed to be centred on two towns in central Serbia: Krusevac and the much smaller Aleksandrovac, which are only about 20km apart. To a lesser extent it seems to have spread over a much wider region. The other towns definitely affected were: Raska, Prokuplje, Kraljevo, Baljevac, Vranje, Vrnjacka Banja. We can be sure there were others. It is hard to say if it had much of an impact on the working class in the rest of Serbia. Naturally, the official national Serbian media said very little about the main events of the movement, but could not avoid mentioning that desertion and anti-war demos had happened. The main political parties even made press statements about it. It’s certain that some people in Belgrade heard about it directly - from telephone calls from relatives and, more importantly, from soldiers returning from leave - but they were only a small minority of the population.
It must not be forgotten that when the cycle of war began in Yugoslavia in 1991 central Serbia was a region where there were many collective revolts by conscript soldiers. The biggest, which involved 7000 reservists refusing to move from their army base, was in Kragujevac which is about 50km North West of Krusevac. It is also a region where there have been numerous strikes by industrial workers against the conditions of austerity brought about by war, including in munitions factories and other sectors of industry directly involved in war production.
Throughout the almost continuous state of war which has existed in Serbia since 1991 there has always been a high level of draft-dodging and insubordination on the part of conscripts. This partly explains why Milosevic has had to make so much use of mercenaries, local nationalist militias and gangster warlords (such as Arkan) for his military adventures, rather than the regular Yugoslav Army (VJ). It is also a major reason for the "neutral" position taken by the Montenegrin government during the NATO assault - according to a parliamentary resolution of June 1998, the Montenegrin state is obliged to prevent the use of Montenegrin territory by the VJ in the event of "military actions by the international community". The level of draft dodging in Montenegro has been even higher than in Serbia. In Niksic in February 1999 around 600 men were called up over a few days , only 5 or 6 responded! Opposition to the VJ has often taken a very public form. In February 1999 the family of a soldier killed in Kosovo placed an announcement in Montenegro's largest circulation daily newspaper Pobjeda denouncing "failed politics" as "the reason that the Lazarevic household is paying a bloody tax for the third time since 1991". It has to be said, though, that the neutrality policy of the Montenegrin state has been largely successful in neutralising opposition to the army - creating a situation where demonstrations against the VJ are simultaneously demonstrations in support of the Montenegrin government and its police.
In Serbia too there was widespread opposition to conscription during the build-up to the start of NATO bombing. In interviews with opposition newspapers and radio stations many parents of reservists expressed their disgust for the mobilisation which was taking place. A parent from Kragujevac said: "Don't let Vuk Draskovic, Vojislav Seselj and the others incite war, we've had enough war, we are orphans. I call on all parents to revolt" (Radio B92, 18.3.99). In Leskovac (30km south of Nis) there was even some kind of protest by around 100 reservists refusing to go to war. Discontent was far more intense in central and southern Serbia for the simple reason that the military authorities knew that it was hard to conscript people in Belgrade and so weren't really trying.
It is not possible to say if (or how much) draft-dodging declined when the NATO bombing started. There are conflicting reports and rumours, but it is clear that a significant percentage of the male population had no intention of answering the call-up. There was certainly desertion on an individual level. In an interview with Western journalists, a reservist described how he deserted from the Yugoslav Army in late April by swimming across a river into Bosnia. He said that when he was called up “I was surprised to learn that there were no more than two or three people in my unit who thought we should be fighting” (Guardian, 3.6.99). Despite the high level of resistance to the army over the last eight years it has mostly taken the form of a lifestyle choice rather than an organised movement and recent resistance seems to have been carried on in much the same way. The sustained collective refusals of conscripted soldiers and their families in central Serbia, however, express a real qualitative advance on this.
At this point it is important to make a distinction between the proletarians who have taken direct action against the war effort and the attempt by some fraction of the bourgeoisie (Local? National? International? We can’t say for sure ) to recuperate the struggle by rallying the liberal petty bourgeoisie into the so-called Citizen’s Parliament created in Cacak (where there doesn’t seem to have been any real mobilisation against the war). Some of the Western Press (notably the Independent in the UK) have given a relatively large amount of space to coverage of this group. It is quite possible that if Serbia continues to be at war in some form and an anti-war movement develops again, or there is some kind of insurrectionary movement against the regime, groups like the Citizen’s Parliament will be presented as the semi-official leadership of the movement who express what it's really about. In this way the Western media, the Serbian liberal opposition, and the forces of the bourgeoisie in general, will try to divert this movement from its real proletarian terrain of direct action onto the bourgeois political path of demands for more democracy, less corruption, Draskovic instead of Milosevic etc. According to Vijesti, none of the opposition political parties were involved in the protests in Krusevac. Certainly none of them officially backed the movement. The nearest that the main opposition party, the SPO (Serbian Movement of Renewal), came to supporting it was a statement by their district committee in Krusevac that "Citizens of Krusevac are not protesting because their sons are defending Serbia but against the local politicians and profiteers". Just to make things clearer their leader Vuk Draskovic later said: "We are not in opposition to Serbia; we are fighting for Serbia. Today we are fighters against NATO. Tomorrow we will be fighting against Milosevic". Similarly, the liberal magazine Vreme, which everybody normally expects to take a very anti-Milosevic line, condemned the Krusevac protesters for undermining national defence. But this doesn’t mean that the movement was inherently too radical to be recuperated. Even the most subversive actions of the proletariat, even armed insurrection and the mass slaughter of policemen (like in Hungary in 1956 or Iraq in 1991), can be claimed by the bourgeoisie as their own.
We have to be clear that the kind of liberal democratic politics put forward by the Citizen’s Parliament has nothing in common with the proletarian direct action which has taken place in Krusevac and Aleksandrovac and, as always, is just as much its enemy as the air forces of Clinton and Blair and the military police of Milosevic. While the respectable middle class citizens of the Citizen’s Parliament were writing a letter to Milosevic calling on him to “save the lives of all citizens of Yugoslavia”, proletarians were saving their own lives by deserting from the front! The Citizen’s Parliament was created by the mayor of Cacak, while in Aleksandrovac the mayor was hospitalised by angry proletarians! Most of the conscripts and reservists from Cacak are serving in Montenegro and the Citizen’s Parliament called on them to obey military law. This has a double meaning: one the one hand, don’t get involved in an illegal coup on behalf of Milosevic; on the other, don’t desert!