A Message to the movement against corporate power :
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT EVENTS IN YUGOSLAVIA
Popular Uprising or CIA-IMF Takeover
12 Oct 2000
The corporate-funded politicians all agree: The torching of Yugoslavia's parliament and the overthrow of President Slobodan Milosevic was a "triumph for democracy." That's what Bill Clinton says. So do George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Madeleine Albright, Al Gore and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. CNN, NBC, CBS and Time magazine say so too.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
In Seattle, Washington, Philadelphia and L.A., protesters were gassed, beaten, shot with rubber bullets and held for days in overcrowded cells. The media called us "rioters" and "vandals" and told us to get off the streets and "seek change through the ballot box." But in Yugoslavia the US State Department and the CIA urged the "opposition" to boycott elections, march in the streets and attack government offices, newspapers and radio and TV stations.
Here in the US, third parties get no corporate funds, are barred from debates and denied media coverage. It is a crime for any US political candidate to accept money from abroad. But Washington openly gave over $200 million to Vojislav Kostunica's "Democratic Opposition of Serbia" before the Sept. 24 elections. That would be like a US political candidate getting $30 billion! And a US aircraft carrier sat off the Yugoslav coast during the voting.
WAR BY OTHER MEANS
Last year the US and other NATO powers rained bombs and missiles on Yugoslavia for 78 days. They destroyed schools and hospitals. They killed and maimed thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children. Washington and the US media justified these war crimes with a hate campaign against all Serbs. Now they claim to champion the rights of the Serbian people. There is no inconsistency here. Washington’s intervention in the Yugoslav elections is war by other means.
MILOSEVIC SAID NO TO IMF
Slobodan Milosevic may not be a revolutionary in the mold of Fidel Castro or Che Guevara. But inWashington’s eyes he committed the same sin as the protesters in Seattle and Prague: He said no to the "new world order" and the International Monetary Fund. His government refused to join NATO or accept IMF-dictated "economic restructuring." It refused to sell off all state-owned industry and let Wall Street bankers run the country’s economy. For that reason—and that alone—Yugoslavia was the target of eight years of war and economic sanctions by the US and NATO and a nonstop campaign of lies by the biggest propaganda machine in history, the US corporate news media.
YUGOSLAVIA HAS FREE HEALTH CARE. THE IMF WANTS TO DESTROY IT
On Sept. 27, leaders of the US-funded "Democratic Opposition" met with representatives of the IMF and the World Bank in Sofia, Bulgaria. They agreed that if they came to power they would raise prices, privatize industry, lay off workers and dismantle Yugoslavia's free health care system. They want to do to Yugoslavia what the IMF has already done to Bulgaria, Romania, the former Soviet republics and countries throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. In East Europe today 50 million children go hungry. That’s how the bankers like it.
CHILE IN EAST EUROPEYugoslavia was a parliamentary democracy, and the Serbian Socialist Party had an elected majority. That’s why Kostunica’s CIA advisers told him not to take part in the second round of elections. Even if he won—a big “if”—the lawmakers would block the IMF's program. Washington wanted Kostunica to take power by force, to crush parliament and the Serbian Socialist Party, the country’s largest political force. Across Yugoslavia Socialist offices have been burned and party members beaten and arrested. But you won’t hear about that on CNN.
Washington wants to send a message to anyone in East Europe who would resist US corporate power. In 1993 the White House encouraged Boris Yeltsin to send tanks to shell Russia’s parliament when it refused to accept IMF “shock therapy.” Hundreds were massacred. Clinton called that a “triumph for democracy” too.
A CLASSIC CIA OPERATION
The Pentagon, State Department and CIA have decades of experience overthrowing independent governments. They've done it in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1961), Guyana (1962), Indonesia (1963), Ghana (1966), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976), Romania (1989), Bulgaria (1990), and Albania (1991).
The formula is usually the same. Cause great hardship to the people of the target country. Create a pro-US "opposition" and pump it full of dollars. Promise that if Washington gets its way, people may again live "normal" lives. But when Washington’s agents seize power, the terror begins. In Indonesia a CIA-backed military junta executed 1 million people in the name of “democracy.” The New York Times called that slaughter a “gleam of light in Asia.”
No doubt many in the mob that stormed parliament Oct.. 5 were ordinary people with genuine grievances. Others may have been misled by Kostunica’s nationalist rhetoric. But it was a carefully planned and organized operation led by forces beholden to the IMF and the CIA.
FIGHT THE POWER
Those in Washington who financed the Yugoslav coup also prop up the rightwing death squad regime in Colombia. They arm the racist Israeli army that guns down Palestinian children. They consider the death penalty, police brutality and the mass incarceration of Black and Latino youth in the United States to be “business as usual.”
The media call the coup in Yugoslavia an“endgame.” But the battle is not over. The new movement against global corporate power must stand with all those around the world who are fighting injustice—from Harlem to Colombia, from Zimbabwe to Palestine. That includes the left forces in Yugoslavia and those across East Europe who resist the tyranny of NATO and the International Monetary Fund.
International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
web: www.iacenter.org
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phone: 212 633-6646
fax: 212 633-2889
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