Why is NATO Decimating the Balkans and Trying to Force Milosevic to Surrender?

By Jared Israel and Nico Varkevisser, 29 August 2001

Recently the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM) received an email from some people in St. Petersburg. They were organizing a protest against globalization and The Hague (un)Tribunal, and in support of President Milosevic.

Many people in the West don't realize that there is passionate support for Milosevic across the political spectrum in the former Soviet Union. For example, the Russian Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic is led by Alexander Zinoviev, the distinguished author and former Soviet dissident. At the same time, the Committee is strongly supported by the communists. Virtually all Russian citizens demand Milosevic be freed. They understand that in NATO's attempt to destroy Yugoslavia, Macedonia, and then Bulgaria and Greece, the ultimate target is the former Soviet Union.

NATO needs to crush Milosevic, and to tarnish the legend of Milosevic, because he stands for resistance to NATO, to neo-colonialism, to Washington's Imperial rule—to the new slavery brought to us thanks to this latest would-be Rome.

The following article is based on a letter of greeting we sent the demonstrators in St. Petersburg.

During the past 14 years, Yugoslav loyalists and their leaders, especially the Serbian people and President Milosevic and his associates, have achieved the same thing the Serbs achieved in 1941.

It was in March of that year that the Serbs overthrew their pro-German government. In a rage, Hitler ordered the conquest of Yugoslavia. His troops got bogged down in the attempt. This delayed Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Because of the Serbs, the Nazi supermen were trapped in the fierce Russian winter.

In 1987, the forces around Milosevic defeated pro-NATO elements in the Serbian government, thus declaring their independence from Washington. From that time on, Milosevic and the Serbian and other Yugoslav loyalists have provided a roadblock obstructing NATO's Drive to the East and a beacon to the former Soviets, to resist.

A 56 Year-Old Strategy

The attack on Yugoslavia and the kidnapping of Milosevic are not random events. They constitute a new phase of the anti-Eastern strategy, which Washington has pursued for more than five decades.

That strategy had two parts: Part one was the break up of the Soviet Union, achieved in 1991.

Part Two is the reduction of the Republics of the former Soviet Union (SU) from nations to devastated territories, small protectorates under the domination of the U.S. and its junior partners.

Washington has openly pursued this strategy since the end of World War II, when it created the CIA, in large measure from General Gehlen's network of Nazi operatives, agents and contacts in Western, Eastern and Southern Europe.

Part One of the strategy went into high gear in 1979. At that time it was articulated by Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. It was the reason for the U.S. proxy war against Afghanistan, during which Washington and its allies created and nurtured the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism, which now plagues the former SU, the Balkans, Algeria, and the rest of the planet.

In the West, it is considered politically correct to ascribe the breakup of the Soviet Union to an inevitable 'revolution' brought about by internal decay.

Yet it is well known that most Soviet citizens (perhaps 70%) opposed the break-up of the Union. How can a 'revolution' that is opposed by most people be inevitable?

Alexander Zinoviev was a leading Soviet dissident. Here's what he says: The fall of communism has been transformed into the fall of Russia. The Russian catastrophe was deliberately planned in the West. I say this because I was once involved in these plans which, under the pretext of fighting an ideology, in fact prepared the death of Russia.

Contrary to a widely held view, communism did not collapse for internal reasons. Its collapse is the greatest possible victory of the West. This colossal victory has created a planetary power. The end of communism is also the end of democracy: our era is not only post-communist, it is also post-democratic ... This is because democracy means pluralism: that requires the existence of at least two more or less equal powers During the Cold War there was democracy at world level, a global pluralism within which capitalism and communism coexisted. Now we live in a world dominated by a single force, by a single ideology and by a single globalist party The Western countries are dominant but they are also dominated, because they are progressively losing their sovereignty to what I call ‘supra-society.’

This planetary supra-society consists of commercial enterprises and non-commercial organisms whose zones of influence are superior to those of nations. The Western countries are subjected, like other countries, to the control of these supranational structures. But the sovereignty of nations was a constituent part of pluralism and democracy at world level. The present dominating power is crushing sovereign states. The process of European integration which is taking place under our eyes is causing the disappearance of pluralism within this new conglomerate, to the benefit of a new supranational power. (Figaro, 24th July 1999)

Washington and Western Europe (NATO) contrived to exhaust the Soviets economically (e.g., the Afghan war and the arms race) bribed and otherwise seduced many of its officials, demeaned its ideology, and used other means to bring about the Soviets' so-called internal collapse.

In the 1980s, knowing that the destruction of the Soviet Union was near, the U.S. mobilized Germany and England and launched the attack on Yugoslavia, which went into high gear with the externally-engineered secession of Slovenia and Croatia in 1991, precisely when the Soviet Union was being destroyed.

Washington launched this attack because crushing Yugoslavia, and especially the passionately independent Serbs, is the key to pacifying the Balkans. And the Balkans is the strategic southern flank of the former Soviet Union.

Washington Goes for World Conquest

There were plenty of problems with the former Soviet Union, but these are grossly distorted by politicians and propagandists in the West. For example, a year ago, in an article called Living with Russia, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a strategist of U.S. Imperial rule, explained the existence of grave poverty in Russia as follows:

The painful reality is that the communist experiment has bequeathed to the Russian people a ruined agriculture, a retarded and in many places primitive social infrastructure, a backward economy increasingly facing the risk of progressive de-industrialization, a devastated environment, and a demographically threatened population.

We have seen the same argument made regarding Bulgaria and indeed all the former socialist countries. It amounts to heaping insult on injury. Since the 'fall' of communism, draconian policies, dictated by Washington through the International Monetary Fund, have methodically laid waste to the economies and social service-structures of these countries.

In the Soviet Union, apartments, childcare (available 24-hours a day), medical and dental care, public transportation and vacations were either free or subsidized so working people could afford them. Higher education was not just free; students were paid stipends if they maintained good grades. (This, one might note in passing, was a policy calculated to induce working class students to go to college and study. In much of the capitalist world today, measures are in effect which produce the opposite effect.)

The finest cultural achievements, such as the great Bolshoi Ballet, were enjoyed by ordinary people. For example, in the case of the Bolshoi, admission was a pittance and transportation was organized so that working people could attend.

In Soviet society, differences in wealth existed but they were nothing like those that exist in the West or that have come to exist in the former socialist countries.

Imperial Hypocrisy

It is under Western guidance that the Soviet Union's great social protections have been destroyed during the past decade. And now Mr. Brzezinski, one of the architects of that destruction, has the audacity to blame it on the system he helped eliminate and preaches the moral superiority of the system he and his ilk have put in its place, in which some live like kings while most others suffer without basic necessities, and the kings preach morality.

(Perhaps the greatest failing of the Soviet Union was its non-democratic character—non-democratic in the profound sense of not relying on the political thinking and action of ordinary people. Instead a highly centralized bureaucracy was the source of all political motion. Imperial strategists like Mr. Brzezinski recognized this flaw, saw that if they could penetrate and corrupt this structure they could bring down the Soviet Union before the people could be mobilized to resist. Which is basically what happened.)

The Soviet Union had a policy of supporting anti-colonial struggle. After World War II, partly inspired by the resistance of the Soviet bloc, colonial and semi-colonial states from Eastern Europe to China gained much freedom from Western domination. But now that the Soviet Union has been broken up, and with it the restraining force of Soviet power, Washington and its European allies are trying to force most of the world's people, that is those living outside North America and Western Europe, into neocolonial status, that is, into desperate poverty.

The Model is Kosovo

In the Balkans we see Washington's policy at its harshest. In a recent speech delivered to soldiers at the giant U.S. military base in Kosovo (called, with pompous arrogance, Bondsteel) George Bush Jr. described Kosovo as the U.S. model for progress in the Balkans.

This progress has meant rule by the gangster-fascists of the KLA; it has meant that politically unreliable people—ethnic Serbs, Gypsies, Slavic Muslims and anti-fascist Albanians—are demonized in the media even as they are driven from the province, while those who dare to remain in Kosovo live in constant terror, their homes reduced to prisons. This is all documented.

What Washington has done to the Serbian province of Kosovo it is now trying to do to Macedonia and the rest of Serbia. If Washington is successful in Kosovo-izing Serbia, Macedonia and other Balkans states, it will have created the stable southern flank it needs to escalate the low intensity wars (Washington's term) that it is already fighting on many fronts against the former Soviet Union.

Yugoslavia shows what Washington hopes to accomplish in the former Soviet Union, writ small.

First Yugoslavia was broken up, as the former SU had been broken up. In the process, Washington re-created precisely the same fascist power blocs that the Nazi's relied on during World War II, especially clerical-fascists in Croatia and fanatical Islamists in Bosnia.

Now NATO is using quisling governments installed in Belgrade and Skopje, and fascist-secessionists, mobilized behind the slogan Greater Albania, which Washington has encouraged for over a decade, to pulverize the remains, to neutralize the powerful Yugoslav Army, and to physically devastate those populations in Serbia, Macedonia and elsewhere which have historically resisted Imperial domination and whose hearts are drawn to the East.

If Washington succeeds in pacifying the Balkans in this fashion, it will try to duplicate the process throughout the former Soviet Union: reducing populations inclined to resist U.S. rule to terrorized slaves ruled by local fascists (conveniently labeled victims of oppression by the pro-NATO media) and all of it dominated by the U.S. and its allies, especially Germany and England.

Components of the anti-Russian onslaught are partly in place

The critical focus of Washington's attempt to recolonize the world lies in the Balkans.

If the new Empire consolidated its power in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union's southern flank, the attack on Russia would increase a hundred- fold. There would be direct NATO intervention from the south and from bases in the Baltic states, from certain former Warsaw pact countries, and increased attack from a few NATO-controlled former Soviet Republics.

This would be justified by an all-out Western media campaign, posing imperial conquest as an attempt to curb humanitarian abuses. At the same time, Washington would escalate various internal attacks, employing:

• Fifth Column forces already in place, organized by George Soros' boys and by U.S. and European agencies (e.g.;, the National Endowment for Democracy) throughout the former Soviet Union;
• Western-inspired attacks by fascist Islamists (it is notable that some of the Chechnya terrorists are now fighting as Albanian rebels in Macedonia);
• Traitorous betrayals by officials corrupted through the military and economic penetration of the former Soviet Union by Washington and its allies.

What would the Kosovo-izing of the former Soviet Union mean for the world? First, Washington and its allies could engage in the most extreme plunder of the vast resources of the former Soviet Union. And second, its position consolidated in the former SU, Washington could proceed full force against the great Asian nation-states, trying to break up China and India into numerous small protectorates. This would be Washington's dream.

Does this policy serve the interests of ordinary people in North America and Western Europe? Quite the contrary. Unchecked, it poses the gravest risk of worldwide nuclear war.

The resistance by Milosevic and the Serbian people to NATO's expansion into the Balkans, their attempt to awaken the great Russian bear, which was stunned by the breakup of the Soviet Union, is of the greatest importance to humanity, East and West.

By refusing to cooperate with NATO's Hague unTribunal, President Milosevic has, in one brave stroke, sent an electrifying call for resistance throughout the world. As a refugee from NATO's attack on Afghanistan wrote:

I just saw Milosevic [on TV]. He told this criminal Western kangaroo court that he doesn't recognize them. So I wish there was a lot more of those guys, like Milosevic.

The gentleman is correct. We do need tens of thousands of those people like Milosevic. That is why the unTribunal is doing everything it can to force Milosevic to drop his defiance and cooperate with their inquisition.

If the Russians and other people of the former Soviet Union can regroup, achieve unity and create popular movements with a Milosevic-type policy of national unity based on social justice—a policy that defends the nation by mobilizing the overwhelming majority of people for social justice—if the Russian and other Soviet people can do this, they will not only be protecting themselves, they will once again be protecting the world, including the people of the U.S.