Comment by Doug Lorimer
"The Kosovan Albanians have the right to national self-determination, just like all the other peoples of the Balkans. But that does not mean that socialists should support the KLA [Kosova Liberation Army]. Nationalist movements which allow themselves to become subordinated to the designs of the Great Powers cease to be independent political forces. All the signs are that the KLA is becoming an instrument of NATO."
These comments were made by Alex Callinicos, a leader of the British Socialist Workers Party, in an article printed in the April 30 issue of Socialist Worker, the fortnightly paper of the International Socialist Organisation, the SWP's Australian offshoot.
Callinicos acknowledged that the KLA "enjoys considerable support among the Kosovan Albanians", but he argued that it would be wrong for socialists to politically support the KLA's struggle for Kosova's independence from Serbian rule because of the KLA's tactics.
"The Serb security forces", Callinicos wrote, "were not responsible for all the atrocities during the small-scale counter-insurgency war going on in Kosovo before NATO's bombing campaign. Journalists sympathetic to the Kosovan Albanians such as the London Guardian newspaper's Jonathan Steele, reported that the KLA was targeting members of the Serb minority."
By gad, chaps, that's just not cricket!
Since late 1997 the KLA has been waging an armed resistance struggle against ferocious repression directed against the Albanian majority in Kosova by the Serbian army, the Serbian police and Serb paramilitaries. Who does Callinicos expect the KLA to target in this war if not members of Serbian security forces and their civilian collaborators?
Callinicos criticises the KLA for not "allying itself with the powerful democratic opposition to Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia". He is presumably referring to the mass protest movement in Serbia in 1996-97.
This movement voiced no opposition to the Milosevic regime's abolition in 1990 of Kosova's status as an autonomous province within Serbia, its subsequent sacking of all Albanians from factories, mines, schools, hospitals and other government jobs, or its suppression of Albanian-language newspapers, radio and television broadcasts in Kosova.
Moreover, the movement's most prominent political leaders, such as Vuk Draskovic, head of the Serbian Renewal Movement, were outspoken supporters of Milosevic's repression of the Kosova Albanian demand for restoration of Kosova's autonomous status and later joined Milosevic's government. It is therefore understandable that the KLA did not ally itself with this "democratic" movement.
In any case, during 1997 the KLA did seek support within the Serbian opposition to Milosevic, participating in a wide-ranging "Serbian-Albanian" dialogue held under the auspices of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia.
NATO support
A further criticism of the KLA raised by Callinicos is that it "trained on land belonging to Sali Berisha, who was dictator of Albania until he was brought down by a popular uprising two years ago".
This claim is called into question by the fact that the cravenly pro-US Berisha regime vigorously enforced the Western arms blockade against all of the rump Yugoslavia and closed Albania's border with Kosova. But even if it were true, it does not justify socialists' refusing to politically support the KLA's struggle against Serbian national oppression.
The implication of Callinicos' argument is the KLA should have trained its guerrilla fighters only on land controlled by a government of which Callinicos politically approves — which in practice means it should not have trained any fighters at all.
According to Callinicos, the main reason that socialists should not give any political support to the KLA's struggle for Kosovan independence is that the KLA is now looking for material assistance from the NATO powers.
"In all likelihood", Callinicos claims, "the US and its allies have already begun to arm and train the KLA, just as they did the Croat and Bosnian Muslim forces in the mid-1990s, even though they continue to regard Kosovo as legally part of Serbia".
Even if Callinicos' conjecture were true, it would not be a legitimate reason for socialists to refuse political support to the KLA's armed struggle against Serbian rule.
Marxists have never made their support for national liberation struggles conditional upon the organisations waging these struggles refusing material assistance from imperialist powers. Moreover, the fact that they accept such assistance does not by itself, as Callinicos implies, transform any national liberation movement into an "instrument" of imperialism.
During World War II, for example, the Vietnam Liberation Army received arms from the US Office of Overseas Services (the forerunner of the CIA). The OSS supplied some 5000 weapons to the VLA, and VLA leader Ho Chi Minh was even appointed an OSS agent (no. 19, codename Lucius). This did not transform the VLA and the political organisation that controlled it, the Viet Minh (Vietnamese Revolutionary League) into an instrument of US imperialism.
In their struggle to overthrow the Russian imperial state, the Bolsheviks had no principled objection to accepting material assistance from rival imperialist powers. They accepted material assistance from German imperialism, in the form of transportation for Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders to return to Russia in 1917 from their exile in Switzerland.
In any case, Callinicos' surmise that NATO is providing arms and training to the KLA is contradicted by an extensive report on the KLA written on April 22 from Albania by Washington Post correspondents Peter Finn and R. Jeffrey Smith. According to their report, "NATO is seeking to maintain its distance from the KLA, declining to supply the rebels with weapons or endorse their goal of an independent Kosovo".
Finn and Smith report: "Although the KLA had attempted since last [northern] autumn to stockpile supplies and ammunition for a spring fighting season, many of its stores were depleted in skirmishing that began in December and intensified in January and February. Top KLA officials have complained in recent weeks of being chronically short of ammunition ...
"Widespread revulsion in Albania at the forced expulsions of Kosovo Albanians has prompted the [Albanian] government to assist the guerrillas much more directly than in the past, turning over trucks and ammunition to the rebels."
They also report that "KLA officials have denied receiving any significant assistance from NATO countries or from undercover Western special forces teams believed to be operating in Kosovo".
Indeed, the Washington Post's correspondents reported that the KLA's arsenal remains restricted to AK-47 assault rifles and shoulder-fired, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and that "the KLA professes bewilderment at the West's disdain and frustration at NATO's strategy, which has not provided the kind of maneuvering room the KLA had hoped it could exploit".
Attempting to explain this to their readers, Finn and Smith wrote, "The KLA remains an object of suspicion in the West. There is concern about the group's role in a post-conflict Kosovo, especially its alleged designs on unifying Albanians in Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia in a greater Albanian state."
Regional stability
The SWP/ISO shares the imperialist powers' concern that the KLA's struggle could destabilise the existing frontiers of the capitalist states in the Balkans. An article by Richard Bailey in the April 30 Socialist Worker argued that any drive by the Albanian people (who form the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of south-eastern Montenegro and north-western Macedonia) "for a 'Greater Albania', with Albania linking up with parts of Macedonia and Montenegro as well as Kosovo" would "tear the region apart and could spark wars involving 'ethnic cleansing' on a huge scale".
Instead of advocating the Marxist policy of the "establishment of full democracy in all spheres, including the delineation of state frontiers in accordance with the sympathies of the population" (Lenin, 1916), the SWP/ISO proclaims its support for the right of national self-determination for "all the peoples of the Balkans" — but opposes any change in the frontiers of the existing Balkan states.
How are the oppressed nationalities of the Balkans to exercise their right to self-determination, to political secession, without changing any state frontiers?
The SWP/ISO's affirmation of "support" for the right to national self-determination of the Kosova Albanians and "all the other peoples of the peoples of the Balkans" is hedged with so many conditions that in practice it is reduced to a platitude.
As is so often the case with the leaders of the British SWP and its Australian branch office, their commitment to Marxist politics does not extend beyond radical phrase-mongering and is intended only to enable them to posture as "revolutionaries", having no practical application to any real struggles waged by the masses of oppressed people.