Statement on the 10th Anniversary
of the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia
by Global Balkans Network
www.zcommunications.org/, March
24, 2009
On March 24, 1999, NATO began an aerial bombing campaign against
what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. For 78 days,
bombs rained down on military targets and civilian infrastructure
under the guise of 'humanitarian intervention.' Operation Allied
Force precipitated the displacement of over one million people
and directly resulted in the deaths of over 2000 civilians of
a range nationalities (a number that gets much larger if we include
indirect deaths as a result of the intervention and post-intervention
period, as well as those killed in the resulting escalation of
the military conflict between the Yugoslav army and the KLA).
Ten years later, Kosovo's 'independence' has resulted in a quasi-colonial
entity of 'ethnic' enclaves and an all-pervasive security apparatus,
a new client state for the Western powers that led the bombing
campaign. Meanwhile, Serbia and Montenegro remain stalled on a
'transition' to neo-liberal democracy marked by a brutal mass
privatization, increasing poverty, and the rapid dispossession
and continued marginalization of workers, students, refugees and
internally displaced people (IDPs), Roma communities, and others
casualties of economic restructuring.
Global Balkans is a small network of anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist
activists of diverse backgrounds in the ex-Yugoslav diaspora and
allies. Many of us have witnessed and experienced first-hand the
devastation that continues to be felt as a result of the events
and ripple effects emanating from the NATO intervention of 1999.
We have talked to and continue to dialogue with everyday people
from many communities throughout the former Yugoslav Balkan region
whose lives have been deeply and permanently turned upside down
by the upheaval of the NATO bombing, the wars of the 1990s, and
the neoliberal transition of Yugoslavia's various successor states.
Whether they be...
workers massively laid off from factories that were first bombed
and then later sold off at fire sale prices or questionable privatization
deals to local tycoons or foreign investors;
refugees and displaced people caught between the prospect of
no return and a lack of resources and political and social will
for local integration;
the families and loved ones of the missing, those who disappeared
and were never accounted for during and after the violent chaos
of 1999;
minorities trapped in enclaves in Kosovo who go to sleep every
night in fear of attack and who have not seen the main town or
city 10 km away for over 10 years;
internally displaced people living in the shipping containers,
makeshift shelters, and run down collective housing provided to
them by international aid agencies ten years ago as a "temporary
solution", for whom aid was cut off in 2004 and who live
in them year round whether it is -15 or + 40°C;
those communities facing strange illnesses or high cancer rates
who are unable to get proper medical care or answers as to their
causes in a system that seems bent on hushing up any talk of depleted
uranium or the health effects of the bombing that would displease
NATO countries;
displaced people who are among the more than 100,000 who have
been or are under threat of deportation back to Serbia from EU
countries, many of them, particularly Roma, born abroad and unable
to speak the language of the country they are dumped back into;
the erased of Slovenia, non-Slovenian minorities from the ex-Yugoslav
region who woke up one day to find that their citizenship had
been erased by the state, and who have been fighting for status
under extreme precarity ever since;
women, Roma, ethnic and sexual minorities who have been disproportionately
affected by mass layoffs, particularly in the former self-managing
social property sector of the economy (where the majority were
employed) that was the first to be privatized, and who face disproportionate
violence in the toxic transitional climate of militarism and deprivation
that produces social scape-goating;
our own families, friends, and loved ones who bear many of the
hidden and not so hidden marks and scars of those times;
...we have been inspired by their struggles and persistence against
difficult odds in difficult conditions. They are the erased, the
ignored, the missing and the forgotten of the NATO military campaign,
the post-Yugoslav transition, and the intervention of the international
community, and we name their situations and think of them today,
and invite those who read this to join us in doing so.
Ten years later, we remember those ordinary people of all nationalities
who senselessly lost their lives in the wars of the '90s, the
NATO bombing, and the neoliberal transition. We refuse to reinscribe
the nationalist lens through which these conflicts have been portrayed
in the Western media as well as in the region, ones that only
recognize or canonize the victims of a preferred side and refuse
to see those whose lives have been destroyed on the "other"
enemy side. We also reject the cynical pro-imperialist lens that
legitimizes military intervention by NATO as a "humanitarian"
necessity borne of goodwill and the need for benevolent imperial
oversight. As if the millions of dollars in bombs (79,000 tons),
cruise missiles (10,000 launched), radiation, and cluster bombs
(35,000 bomblets) costing $30 billion USD in damage to the local
economy and raining down death and ecological devastation on hospitals,
schools, factories, bridges, and refineries are the same as teddy
bears, food supplies, or medical aid. We stand in solidarity with
all the victims of the many layers of violence that have and continue
to be enacted in their complex and not so easily reducible manifestations
in the region, the kind that the mainstream media is unable and
unwilling to depict or recognize. We ask our companero/as and
allies to aim for a more informed and complex perspective on the
legacy of those times than that which much of the Western left
has seemingly adopted from the simplistic reductions and easy
victims/villains scenarios of the mainstream media.
Ten years later, we are working to support and actively extend
our solidarity to the former Yugoslav region's slowly (re)emerging
social movements fighting struggles of survival, persistence,
and liberation and to our activist comrades who are tirelessly
fighting to make these fragile and beleaguered, yet resolute and
courageous movements still stronger, more visible, and even more
effective. They are an inspiration. We also encourage the North
American/Western left and other progressives to overcome the common
cycle of momentary and opportunistic interest based on partial
understandings followed by long periods of indifference to the
conditions, constraints, and complexities faced by ordinary people
and social movements in the region.
Ten years later, the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
has been eclipsed on the global stage by a series of intensifying
imperialist military interventions, most notably in Afghanistan
and Iraq. We see each of these military adventures and the mass
devastation they have wrought as of a piece, as part of a troubling
and dangerous progression, one that will not be resolved by a
Democratic president or a kinder, gentler imperialism. We understand
and underline the extent to which the NATO bombing in 1999 set
many dangerous precedents for these later imperialist wars, and
ask those in anti-war movements to remember, talk about, and make
those often neglected links. We also see the 1999 NATO intervention
as inscribed in a lineage of earlier destructive political measures
taken by the "international community", starting with
the economic 'shock therapy' program imposed on the Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1990.
It remains to be seen how much of the world and the media will
remember or mark this 10th anniversary of the NATO intervention.
We expect there to be little recognition of this date that does
not recapitulate the standard nationalist, pro-neoliberal and
pro-NATO lenses we reject. We remember. We refuse to let it be
ignored, glossed over or forgotten, and we stand strong with all
those who are still daily living the effects and devastation of
those 78 days in 1999 and their aftermath - living, struggling,
persisting, fighting back and moving forward towards a different
Balkans and a different world as well, one where none of this
will be possible or even fathomable.
Global Balkans
March 24, 2009
Global Balkans is an activist research,
media, and organizing network that works both locally and in solidarity
with Balkan social movements to investigate, publicize and impact
political, social and economic struggles in the former Yugoslav
and wider Balkan region. We are working to build a transnational,
anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian network
with a pan-Balkan and internationalist outlook (currently based
in San Francisco, Toronto, and Montreal). They can be reached
at globalbalkans[at]gmail[dot]com.
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