3-16-06, 9:44 am

Slobodan Milosevic died recently in his prison cell in the Hague, tried for war crimes by those NATO states that killed his nation, Yugoslavia, when they intervened in the 1990s in a civil war inspired by the imperialist powers and rightwing Croatian separatists during and after the Soviet Union's destruction.

As part of the propaganda campaign used to justify NATO's massive military intervention, the term 'ethnic cleansing' was repeated endlessly to portray Milosevic and those Serbians who fought to save Yugoslavia as comparable to the Nazis during WWII. Jewish people in the U.S. were particularly targeted by this campaign, even though those knowledgeable about the region knew both of the bonds of friendship between the Jewish people of the Balkans and the non-Jewish people of Serbia, as opposed to the thinly veiled anti-Semitism of rightist elements in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

Rarely mentioned here was the fact that the separatists and nationalists in Croatia, Bosnia and the Serbian province of Kosovo often identified with and glorified World War II local fascists who worked with the Nazis to carry out genocide against the Serbian people, the Roma people (gypsies), and Jewish people of Yugoslav nationality.
NATO had been established after WWII essentially to fight WWIII against the Soviet Union in Europe and also to bring a number of states, France and Italy particularly, with powerful Communist parties at the time, into an anti-Communist, anti-Soviet alliance. With the Soviet Union gone, NATO intervened in 1999 in a civil war in a country still led by Communists, which had declared and sustained its neutrality at the beginning the cold war period. Then the Yugoslavia led by Joseph Tito was the only Communist-led nation not wholly demonized in capitalist media, because Tito had broken on a variety of issues with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet leadership

After 1991, the imperialist powers saw Yugoslavia as another Communist country to be destroyed, regardless of the heroism of its people in fighting fascists during WWII and the remarkable achievements that socialist Yugoslavia made for its own people and within the movement of non-aligned nations.

Years ago, when Yugoslavia was fighting for its existence, I said in an address to a peace group that if Milosevic had simply acquiesced in the dismemberment of his country and/or aided and abetted it as Mikhail Gorbachev did in the USSR, he would have been a hero to the capitalist media---'our kind of Communist'--- meeting regularly with Clinton and the two Bush presidents until he was ousted by some Yeltsin figure. But he sought to rally the people of Serbia to fight back, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia, and finally in Kosovo. Had the foreign powers not intervened, I believe that Yugoslavia would have survived, but they did and it didn't.

Civil wars are traditionally among the most bloody, and there were great atrocities committed on all sides in the Yugoslav civil war, just as there were atrocities committed by both sides in the American civil war, particularly on the Union side by Sherman's armies in Georgia and the Carolinas. There were also horrible massacres against native peoples carried out by the Union side.

However, the Union side was the right side, fighting against both the slaveholder confederacy and powerful empires, Britain and France, who generally favored the confederacy in order to dismember the American Republic so that they could gain economic power over it and re-establish, in the case of the French, colonies in the Western hemisphere. Had England and France intervened on the Confederate side, as many feared they would, and the Confederates won, certainly Sherman and others, had they been captured, might have been tried for 'war crimes.' Lincoln especially, had he lived, might have been tried. Although it was defeated, the Yugoslav side, which Slobodan Milosevic led, deserves to be seen by anti-imperialists as the right side in the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s.

The trial of Milosevic was in effect a continuation of the cold war 'totalitarian' ideology that equates Communists with fascists out of all historical contexts, a whitewashing of the history of Yugoslavia and the imperialist nature of the NATO intervention. Unlike the Nuremberg Trials, this was not an indictment of a state that built a military machine for the purpose of launching a world war and committed before and during the war unprecedented crimes against humanity.

Rather it was the use of the classic guilt by association tactic, in this case with the Serbian-Yugoslav role in civil war atrocities and with statements like Milosevic's famous 1989 Kosovo speech denouncing Albanians for their violence against the region's Serbian minority, to illogically blame Milosevic, his government, and the people of Serbia for both provoking the civil war and fighting it to achieve racist 'ethnic cleansing.'

Unlike the Nuremberg trials where Hermann Goering, the leading Nazi on trial, took poison to escape the gallows that he justly deserved, President Milosevic maintained his innocence and for years condemned the tribunal for both its failure to provide him with necessary medical care and its lack of any real standing to try him, his government, or the people of Yugoslavia. The statements attributed to Dutch physicians in the capitalist press that Milosevic brought on his own death by manipulating prescription drugs given him for political reasons are, in my opinion, an example of blaming the victim.

President Milosevic's family, in exile in Russia and other places, have denounced his treatment and death, as have Russian doctors whom he wished to receive treatment from. In the U.S. and other countries, Communist party leaders often sought treatment for serious illnesses in the Soviet Union because they could not trust treatment in their own countries. In one famous case, Henry Winston, a Smith Act political prisoner and later Chair of the CPUSA, lost his eyesight because U.S. federal prison authorities failed to provide him with the necessary medical care.

In the 'investigations' of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Smith Act Trials in the United States, statements by Communist leaders were often taken out of context, and, through guilt by association, Communist leaders were made to appear responsible for all real, imagined, and exaggerated crimes committed in the name of the Communist movement.

This is the legacy of the trial and death of Slobodan Milosevic---a HUAC-style trial by those who dismembered Yugoslavia as a socialist country, creating a Balkan map today that is more similar to Hitler's 'New Order' of 1941 than the Europe of 1945. It was a trial in which the fascist genocide of WWII, which the world calls the Holocaust, was relativized and trivialized by a propaganda campaign to justify imperialist conquest and the 'transformation' of NATO into a military force that can theoretically now be sent anywhere on earth to intervene in civil wars, siding with whomever it chooses.

The 18th century French philosopher Voltaire wrote that history is a 'pack of tricks' played on the dead. The history of ruling classes and victorious nations is often that. For Slobodan Milosevic, the propaganda tricks were first played while he and Yugoslavia fought for life. Now, all of us who are against imperialism must fight to set the historical record straight if the people are not to be misled by those who cloak imperialist domination and conquest in slogans about the advance of 'democracy' and the protection of 'human rights.'

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