The crisis in Kosovo is threatening to ignite smoldering tensions throughout the region, with tragic consequences for all the peoples of the Balkans. With the US playing both cop and robber, the threat of wider conflict has now brought the imperial powers of Europe and North America closer to direct military intervention.

While the war in Kosovo may seem a repetition of the earlier wars in Croatia and Bosnia, the situation is really quite different.

According to Serb nationalists, Kosovo is the cradle of Serb civilization. The first Serbian state and the Serbian Orthodox Church were founded there. The greatest military confrontation in Serb history occurred there, as the Serbs fought the battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Empire in 1389. The Serbs were routed.

During the 400-year rule by the Ottomans following that defeat, ethnic Dardanians, as they were known then, began to repopulate the region of Kosovo. Pushed into Albania by the Serbs in previous centuries, the Dardanians had converted to Islam. They were ethnically different from most of the population in the southern Balkans in that they were not Slavs. There is no cultural or historical connection, other than a vaguely religious one, between the Albanians of Kosovo and the Muslims of Bosnia.

Serb nationalists attempt to disappear this history. They view Kosovo much the way Zionists view Israel: through myths, half-truths, isolated facts, and historical revision. But this view became increasingly important to Slobodan Milosevic in his rise to power in the latter 1980s. As Stalinism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall fell, Milosevic fashioned an image for himself and his government as defenders of the Serb nation in a hostile and dangerous world.

Post-World War II Yugoslavia

To do this meant to destroy post-World War II Yugoslavia, which had been a genuine attempt to come to an equitable solution to the bitter and violent history of the Balkans. Tito's Yugoslavia was distorted and deformed from the beginning by the rule of a Stalinist bureaucracy. Its "socialism" was determined by the interests of this bureaucracy, not the working class. Despite this, Yugoslavia made tremendous gains in living standards and brought peace to the southern Balkan peoples.

Yugoslavia was not the "prison house of nations" the Soviet Union became under Stalin. For 45 years Serbs, Croats, Albanians, and the other nationalities developed a common identity as Yugoslavs. The 1945 Constitution granted national rights to the people of Kosovo, including Albanian-language schools and the right to practice Islam. The government transferred resources from the relatively wealthy north to

develop the relatively poor south. In 1974 Kosovo was granted formal autonomy, including its own regional government and international representatives.

All this began unraveling in the 1980s, after Tito died and the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe began sliding into their terminal crisis. Bureaucratic rivalries flared. Yugoslavia had borrowed heavily in the 1970s and early 1980s to maintain its subsidized industries, employment and living standards, despite two deep recessions in the world economy. As the foreign credit was exhausted and the debt became due, the bureaucracies of each of the national republics tried to shift the burden elsewhere. IMF-dictated policies of "market reform" exacerbated the inequalities between north and south, urban and rural.

The demands by Yugoslavia's creditors that it open its economy brought foreign investors to buy up the most profitable state enterprises. It also brought right-wing exiles, religious zealots, and imperialist intriguers. By the mid-1980s Yugoslavia was headed toward a catastrophe.

Milosevic promoted Serb nationalism as the vehicle of his rise to power. In 1989, on the 500th anniversary of the Serb defeat in the battle of Kosovo, he proclaimed "Kosovo for the Serbs" and stripped the province of its autonomous status. Schools and universities teaching in Albanian were shut, local councils were disbanded, and the ethnic Albanian police were replaced by a strictly Serbian force. This in a region that is 90 percent ethnic Albanian to 8 percent Serbian.

There were strikes and demonstrations by workers and students, but Fighting did not break out. The repression was too savage, and Kosovo had no foreign patrons.

The wars in Croatia and Bosnia

Slovenia and Croatia, unlike Kosovo, had outside support, particularly from German imperialism. Their economies were much more advanced than Kosovo's, and they could be stepping-off points for investment and influence for the whole region. They were allies of Germany in the last war and were Catholic and "European."

Slovenia seceded with little bloodshed, mainly because it was ethnically homogeneous. Croatia seceded only after intense fighting. Croats and Serbs had lived together for a thousand years in the border region between Croatia and Serbia. The government of Franjo Tudjman promoted Croatian nationalism with the same fervor as Milosevic promoted Serbian nationalism. This alarmed the Serbs living in Croatia, who remembered all too well the Ustasha regime of Croatian fascists which killed upward of 600,000 Serbs, Jews, and others during World War II.

The Croatian Serbs revolted when Croatia declared independence in 1992. Aided by the Yugoslav army, they captured much of the border region and drove out their Croatian neighbors. Three years later the Croatian army swept through Western Slavonia and the Krajina and drove out the Serbs, creating the greatest refugee wave of the ex-Yugoslavia wars. Now the Croatian government is about to take over Eastern Slavonia, causing the Serbs there to flee. The result will be an "ethnically cleansed" Croatia.

War came to Bosnia and Herzegovina soon after it came to Croatia. Bosnia was the Yugoslav republic that most personified the Yugoslavia of the partisans. Its capital Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics and symbolized how far Yugoslavia had come from the inferno of war and genocide forty years earlier. Mosques, synagogues, Orthodox churches, and Catholic churches could be found in the same neighborhoods and on the same streets.

As Milosevic pumped up Serbian nationalism and Slovenia and Croatia seceded, the Bosnian government decided that its situation in the rump Yugoslavia was untenable. They held a referendum on independence. Most Bosnians (identified in the Western press as "Muslims") voted for independence, meaning an independent Bosnia. Most Bosnian Croats voted for independence, meaning unification with Croatia. And most Serbs boycotted the referendum, meaning they wanted to stay with Serbia in Yugoslavia.

Bosnia declared independence, and again the Serbs revolted. The war quickly became a trilateral, as the Croatian nationalists refused to recognize the authority of the Bosnian government. The war was lasted three years, devastating the country. All sides committed atrocities and outrages. The Serbs committed the worst, mainly because they had the most firepower.

The Serbs were singled out by the Western press and politicians as a genocidal race, bent on "ethnically cleansing" all the Balkans for a Greater Serbia. In fact, all three sides in the war were bent on "ethnically cleansing" a homeland for themselves. Early in the war, Bosnian leaders talked of preserving a multiethnic state, but when the Bosnian Serbs and Croats didn't want to be part of that state, they tried to enforce multiethnicity at the point of a gun. Soon they began building their own exclusive state and expelled Serbs and Croats from territory they controlled.

The imperialists intervened with economic sanctions against Serbia and NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs. They forced an unworkable settlement on the peoples of Bosnia, the 1995 Dayton Accords, and then tried to enforce it with tens of thousands of imperialist troops. Now Bosnia is a hopelessly divided, ruined country. The fighting has stopped for the moment only because all sides are too exhausted to continue.

The imperialists inflamed nationalist passions in Eastern Europe to try to undermine the Soviet bloc. In Yugoslavia, their monster got out of control. Responsibility for the bloodletting in the Balkans lies squarely at the feet of German, US, French and British imperialism. Not for "standing idly by," as the liberal imperialists would have us think. But for actively fomenting nationalism and the breakup of the federation, without regard to the desires of its peoples.

As in other countries of Eastern Europe, the imperialists in reintroducing capitalism have destroyed the social fabric that held these states together.

The war in Kosovo

The Serbian assault on Kosovo is different from the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. The Serb percentage of the population of Kosovo is about 8 percent, many times less than that of the Serb areas of Croatia or Bosnia before the wars. Clearly, the Serbian assault is an attempt to maintain Serb domination of a non-Serb area. It is an attempt to thwart the will of the overwhelming majority of the people of Kosovo, not to

protect the Serb minority against actual or perceived danger.

Albanian nationalists in Kosovo have been looking for a chance to rebel. They got their chance when a popular uprising overthrew the government of Sali Berisha last year. Berisha's government had been implicated in pyramid investment schemes that had defrauded much of the population of their savings. The government collapsed, popular committees were established in much of the south, and the armories were emptied and the guns distributed to the people.

Berisha was forced to hold new elections, which were won by the Socialist Party of Fatos Nano. Berisha resigned. The new Albanian government restored order with promises of repaying the lost savings and assistance from an Italian-led European military force. But the people kept the guns.

With an abundant supply of arms just across the border, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began its insurrection. Thousands of fighters returned from exile and emigrant communities in Germany, Italy, and even the US.

The KLA doesn't offer a vision that can meet the aspirations of the people of Kosovo. It is tied to the most reactionary forces in Albania and the Albanian Diaspora, including Berisha and anti-Communist cold war emigrants. The struggle by KLA against Serbian military and paramilitary forces is legitimate. But its attacks on the local Serbian minority are indefensible. They serve the interests of reaction and do nothing to advance the struggle of the Kosovo people.

Some KLA leaders openly call for NATO intervention, an intervention whose aim would be to quell the fighting before it destabilizes the rest of the region. A NATO intervention would not win self-determination for Kosovo. It would seek to "punish" the Serbs but also to seal the Yugoslav border with Albania, deprive the KLA of weapons and recruits, and force Kosovo to remain in Yugoslavia.

Some KLA leaders also call for Albanian military intervention. But Albanian military intervention would be folly. It would mean spreading the war and further devastating Albania and Serbia, if not also

Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. Kosovons should have the right to secede from Yugoslavia and join Albania, if they wish. But there is little Albania can do to help without making the situation worse.

The Trotskyist League (TL) and the International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO) stand for the rights of all the peoples of ex-Yugoslavia to self-determination. We give no support to any of the reactionary nationalist, procapitalist regimes of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, or any of the other states in the region. We oppose all US, NATO or UN intervention. We defend the Serbs and all others against imperialist aggression.

While we support the right of self-determination for Kosovo, we know this wouldn't solve the problems of Kosovo or the region. We call for a Socialist Federation of the Balkans. A Socialist Federation would mean that the resources of the Balkans would be put at the disposal of the people and used for their betterment. The workers and farmers could then begin to construct a society whose aim is to unite and advance, not to divide and destroy.