Statement of IAC to Belgrade Forum
By John Catalinotto and Sara Flounders
We from the International Action Center in the U.S. greet the meeting of the Belgrade Forum with the following questions: What is the current situation in the world? What are the prospects for peace and the dangers of war? Our answer in brief would be this: the threat of imperialist war is ever greater, but the failure of the New World Order to solve the problems of humanity has reawakened a movement of resistance.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 an enormous counterrevolution shook our world. Big capital from Bonn to New York to Tokyo was overjoyed and optimistic. They told us it was the end of history. They told us the new capitalist world order would usher in a period of continual economic growth and political democracy worldwide. Some few might grow very rich, they said, there might be some ups and downs, but everyone would flourish under the market-driven economy, and peace and order would replace the mutual terror of the Cold War. Ten years later we look back and see that only one thing they said was true: a few people grew very rich. We would say they grew obscenely rich.
According to the United Nations Human Development Report for 1999, the world's 200 richest people more than doubled their wealth in the four years prior to 1998 to more than a trillion dollars.
The other side of this enormous accumulation of wealth is mass poverty. Some 1.3 billion people live on a dollar a day or less. This is what the World Bank defines as the poverty level.
Since modern records have been kept, there has not been such a rapid decline in economic existence as has resulted from the devastation of the changeover from socialism to capitalism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. With African peoples no longer backed by the socialist camp, imperialist exploitation—now called globalization—has plunged much of Africa into misery. It is wracked not only with malnutrition and the old diseases but some 25 million of the 36 million people with AIDS worldwide are Africans. And what have the “market-driven” pharmaceutical companies provided? Less than 1 percent of the Africans with AIDS can afford AIDS medicines, which can cost from $10,000 to $15,000 a year.
An Indian company recently offered to sell retroviral medications to Africa at $350 per year per person. But the multinational drug companies refuse to lower their prices. And they are demanding that countries that buy such drugs be punished for infringing on their patent rights. Since the 1997 crisis, the Asian economies that were growing rapidly—the “Tigers”--have been stopped in their tracks, with millions of workers thrown on the garbage heap. Imperialist Japan is in a ten-year slump. Even within a wealthy country like the United States that up to now had avoided a major recession, the gap between rich and poor is widening. Only by putting 2 million people in prison—the greatest number in the world—has the U.S. government kept a lid on the growing tensions. And now the U.S. stock markets, and perhaps the economy itself, are plunging.
This criminal gap between the rich and the poor is being produced, maintained and widened by the big transnational corporations, banks and stock markets, that function according to the one and only principle of maximizing profits.
Then there is the question of war and peace. The Cold War is supposed to be over, but the new Bush administration in Washington is making new threats against the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. Bush wants to build a missile shield and put the U.S. in a position to threaten a nuclear first-strike against China and even Russia.
Washington threatens new military intervention in threatens new military intervention in South America with “Plan Colombia.” And Bush Jr. has continued to bomb Iraq. And what has happened even where Washington said it was bringing peace?
Clinton imposed the Oslo accords on the Palestinians. But what has come from it? There is no agreement. The Israelis keep expanding control of the West Bank and Gaza. Clinton thought the military and economic weight of the United States would allow him to set the terms for peace, for a compromise that was to the disadvantage of the Palestinian people. But the U.S., for all its power, cannot control events.
Then there are the Balkans. Clinton led a war against Yugoslavia. The people at this Belgrade Forum are all too aware of the forces that brought about this horrible war of U.S-NATO aggression and of the unjust punishment it inflicted on the population of Yugoslavia. We in the International Action Center, whose president is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, working with allies in countries all over the world, held popular tribunals that exposed the lies of Clinton, Blair, Schroeder and company that this was a humanitarian war. Now we can turn on the television to the ARD network in Germany and see some of the truth revealed before everyone. These are the same facts that we worked so hard to bring before whatever audience we could gather at our tribunal hearings through 1999 and 2000.
We showed that the war was not clean but dirty with depleted uranium shells and environmental disaster at Pancevo. We showed that there was no genocide by the Serb forces. We showed that most bombing targets were civilian targets and were chosen on purpose. And now they admit it themselves.
The September 28 election in Yugoslavia, to paraphrase the Prussian General von Clausewitz, “was the continuation of war by other means.” Just as we in the International Action Center opposed NATO’s war against Yugoslavia, we also opposed the U.S. and European Union’s manipulation of the electoral process.
There was no authentic popular uprising. Instead Washington and its European allies subsidized this movement’s leadership with huge sums of money, bolstered them with enormous political support, exhausted the Yugoslav population with war threats and sanctions, demonized [Slobodan] Milosevic by spreading lies and false charges, and goaded the opposition to Milosevic to risk civil war. On December 11, 2000, the Washington Post ran a story. It had all the details of how U.S. agencies carried out the electoral coup in Yugoslavia. It reported how they held strategy meetings in Budapest with opposition parties. It told how they trained the student group Otpor. Even how they paid people to be poll watchers. Here’s one short quote from the article:
“In the 12 months following the strategy session, U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan ‘He's Finished.’...” Washington hopes the election coup is the final act of this particular “Human rights imperialist” intervention. That it will not be reversed.
We see, however, that despite the pressure to arrest Milosevic and other SPS leaders, the movement has not surrendered, but is continuing to struggle against the takeover of this beautiful country by Western imperialism and the attempt to turn it into a colony.
With all their lies, their bombing, their troops occupying Kosovo, have the NATO powers brought peace to the Balkans? Not at all. Now there may be war in Macedonia. And in Presevo in Serbia. The KLA (UCK), nurtured by Berlin and Washington, now threatens to bring another war to the region.
Rivalries between the NATO imperialist powers grows daily. It emerges as criticism of U.S. relations with the KLA or U.S. use of depleted uranium weapons.
Washington started the 1999 war to whip the other NATO powers into line behind its lead, knowing that U.S. military supremacy gave it the final veto. Now this is again an area of conflict.
The U.S., NATO, the capitalist market, have brought oppression to Eastern Europe without bringing peace.
With this unhappy picture we’ve painted, you might wonder how we in the International Action Center can be optimistic about the future. But in a special way we are optimistic. A decade ago, the U.S. appeared invincible. Now we can see that Washington can’t manage the world. It can’t bring order to the Balkans or to the Middle East. Can it even manage the capitalist economy? Can it control the capitalist stock market?
That is the first point.
It has also become clear to the world that the New World Order has brought not peace, order and development but poverty, chaos and war. People have been left with no choice but to resist.
As underdogs, outgunned, the Palestinians have chosen to resist.
The FARC in Colombia, even without the support of a Soviet Union that no longer exists, have chosen to fight for socialism.
And even in the imperialist centers young people from Seattle to Washington to Prague to Davos – people who grew up when there was no Soviet Union – have shown their disgust with savage capitalism. They have begun to search for another road.
That is the second point.
The latest developments bring no joy. But the promise of resistance gives us hope.
Here in Belgrade the organizers of the Forum have has brought together political scientists from both the NATO countries, from the former socialist countries in the East, and from all over the world to protest the criminal aggression against Yugoslavia. We have all fought against NATO and have been in solidarity with the heroic people of Yugoslavia who resisted NATO for 78 days in 1999. For our part, we in the International Action Center pledge that the main target of our U.S.-based anti-war movement will remain the Pentagon, the U.S. government, NATO, and the powers that rule the United States. We know the U.S. rulers are the major source of war. We will combat them with whatever forces we can organize, whether they make that war in Colombia, Korea, Africa, the Persian Gulf or Europe. And we will be in solidarity with the people in all those regions who fight against our common enemy in Washington. We greet those here from the other NATO countries. They are fighting not only against the U.S. war makers, but also against those who rule their own countries who have been equally guilty of bringing war and oppression to the Balkans. We are confident you will mobilize to stop NATO and to stop the so-called rapid reaction force—Western Europe’s own imperialist army.
We greet those here from the once socialist countries. These comrades have had to overcome the disappointment of a world-historic setback and decide to go on fighting. World imperialism has given no choice to the people of Eastern Europe. There is no “Swedish” alternative. There is no independent capitalist development. Either they resist or they will be turned into colonies of the West. And those who are here have chosen to resist.
We salute the Socialist Party of Serbia and wish it success in defending its leadership, in mobilizing the population of Yugoslavia to fight for its rights so they can defend this multi-national and multi-cultural nation from oppression and exploitation.
Long live the solidarity of those who fight U.S.-NATO aggression! Long live our common struggle for peace! Long live Yugoslavia!
Flounders and Catalinotto were organizers of the popular Tribunals within the U.S. that charged U.S. and NATO leaders with war crimes for the 1999 aggression against Yugoslavia. International Action Center (Ramsey Clark, President), 39 West 14 Street, Suite 206, New York, N.Y. 10011, USA tele: 212-633-6646, fax: 212-644-2889 email: iacenter@iacenter.org web: www.iacenter.org
DIGNITY VS. BARBARISM
Declaration of the Belgrade Forum International Conference
- Two Years On: The Truth about NATO Aggression
24 March 1999 - 24 March 2001
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