Kosovo: A Nato Base For Military Operations in Eastern Europe (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 04:12:40 -0700 (PDT)
From: Eric Sommer <eric@stewards.net>
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: Kosovo: A Nato Base For Military Operations in Eastern Europe

>From Stewards movement of poor and working people www.stewards.net
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KOSOVO: A NATO BASE FOR MILITARY OPERATIONS IN EASTERN EUROPE.

Hi there,

There has been much speculation as to the motives of the U.S., and of Nato
generally, for providing its `humanitarian bombs' to the former Yugoslavia,
while sparing other equally `worthy' targets such as Turkey (mass murder of
Kurds) or Mexico (mass murder of Mayan Indigenous people), where equal or
greater human rights violations take place. 

A very simple, and very frightenting possibility, suggested to me by a
friend, is that the U.S. is seeking a `forward base of operations' for
future military action and/or military pressure tactics against any
attempted return to full-bore socialism in Eastern Europe and Russia.  

It cannot be lost on U.S. policy makers that: the communist party is
currently the dominant political force in Russia's parliament; that
Yeltsin's popularity is around 5%; that Russia's economy is in ruins with
industrial production at only 50% of the last stable communist year (1989);
and that Russia's government is arguably drawing back from a global free
market model to a more protected - and possibly a socialist - economy.  In
conjunction with the general disgruntlement in Eastern Europe with the
social and economic chaos, and with the tremendous social misery and
suffering, deliverd there by `free markets' and business corporations,
conditions in Russia and East Europe point to the possible emergence of a
new socialist block.  

During the civil war following the emergence of the Soviet Union as the
world's first socialist state in 1917, something like 17 foreign nations,
including the U.S., Canada, Britain, and France, sent troops to support the
internal right-wing military forces which tried to overthrow the new
socialist society.   Invading the Soviet Union, and  stationed on its soil
as violent adjuncts to the anti-socialist internal military forces, these
foreign troops only withdrew after the newly-formed Soviet Red Army,
composed largely of civilian peasents and workers, had succeeded in
defeating the anti-government military insurection.  

Current U.S. and Nato actions in Serbia and Kosovo may pressage a return to
such violent military interventionist policies by western capitalist
governments in relation to non-compliant, or emergent socialist, societies
in Eastern Europe.

The Serb government's ethnic cleansing policies in Kosovo, and the Nato
policy of air bombardment of Serbia and Kosovo, are producing terrible
suffering.  But a still greater danger may be that the U.S. and Nato are
preparing to *militarily resist* any turn to cooperative economic systems in
Eastern Europe.  Such a policy could, indeed, set the stage for world war
III, and must be resisted at all costs.  A report which may chillingly
forshadow such a possibility has emerged in recent days.  In the final
period of negotiation before Nato began bombing, U.S. Secretary of State
Albrecht insisted that only the acceptance by Serbia of the stationing of
Nato troops in Kosovo, and *not* the `mere' stationing of UN troops, would
satisfy the U.S. and Nato's conditions for a non-violent settlement in
Kosovo.  This requirement the Serbian government would not accept.

In short, Nato bombed Serbia when Serbia refused to furnish Nato with a
forward military base in the Balkins.

In soldiarity,
Eric Sommer

Stewards movement of poor and working people,
www.stewards.net


"The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands
what will sell. " - Confucious.