Syndicate: (1) Ethnicizing and Natosevic - the war and the left

[Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>]

From: "Arthur Bueno" <abueno@v2.nl>
To: "syndicate" <syndicate@aec.at>
Subject: Ethnicizing and Natosevic - the war and the left
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 17:57:37 +0100
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>Date: Mon, 27 Dec 1999 16:32:42 +0200
>From: Alain Kessi <kessi@bitex.com>
>Subject: Ethnicizing and Natosevic - the war and the left





>I meant to send this earlier, but when I finished the translation a few
>months ago I was temporarily unsubscribed from nettime and syndicate
>because I was travelling.
>
>Alain
>
>-------- Original Message --------
>
>[sorry for cross-posting to people who are on several lists i felt the
>article might be relevant for. a word version is available for nice
>print-out if you like.]
>
>i've finally (after a few months) managed to find the time to translate
>the article on "the left and the war" that i wrote for com.une.farce in
>may. i hope that some discussions may come out of the english
>translation as well, especially among balkan-based activists. if
>anything seems offensive to people who have lived through the war from
>within, be assured that this is not intentional, and is due to the
>limitations of my understanding. even if i have lived in sofia for two
>years now, it may be that some points are perceived as fatally imbued
>with western-european misunderstandings. nevertheless i hope that some
>points may encourage discussions on how we could deal with situations in
>which complicated loyalties, fears and hopes are at play.
>
>best,
>
>alain
>
>-------------
>
>Translated by the author in September 1999. The notes added at
>translation time are marked as such. The article was first published on
>1 June 1999 in com.une.farce number 2 (99), which can be found at
><http://www.copyriot.com/unefarce>, or directly at
><http://www.copyriot.com/unefarce/no2/kosovo.html>. It was then
>reprinted in part in Diskus (Frankfurt), Schwarzer Faden (Grafenau) and
>Alaska (Bremen), all three with Germany-wide circulation. If you wish to
>reprint it, please mention the original source including the URL, and
>let the author know: <kessi@bitex.com>.
>
>
>Kosov@ / NATO: Economy of the War and of Communication
>
>by Alain Kessi
>
>When I listen to what people say about the war of NATO against
>Yugoslavia, and of the Yugoslav regime against the Albanian population
>of Kosov@[1], be it on various mailing lists or in personal
>conversations with people, it is striking how insecure many seem to
>feel. Apparently many activists are having difficulties to remain true
>to even the most elementary principles of long-standing leftist
>politics, in a time in which a war cannot any longer be interpreted
>simply as imperialist/antiimperialist - here the ugly imperialists,
>there the brave liberation fighters. It seems to me that it is not those
>principles that have to be given up. Just like ever before, people and
>the lives they live should come first, before big-time politics. The
>point remains to develop, in solidarity, resistance against the attacks
>on our autonomy, without making differences among us invisible in the
>process. The point is still to see through discursive maneuvers of
>distraction and to base our analysis on an understanding of economic and
>social mechanisms of power. It is rather the less conscious
>characteristics of leftist and autonomist political practice that need
>rethinking.
>
>Against ethnicizing!
>
>The reflex of some antiimperialist activists, when they perceive efforts
>towards independence as "liberation movements", to consider these
>efforts to be legitimate and worthy of support, seems to lead to a dead
>end in the case of Kosov@. Perhaps the wish to identify with the enemies
>of a cunning and reckless power player like Slobodan Milosevic has led
>some, for some time at least, to close their eyes on the racist
>tendencies of a KLA (Kosova Liberation Army, also UCK, "Ushtria
>Clirimtare e Kosoves"), or at least tendencies towards "ethnic"
>separation. Others have preferred to remain silent on this point, in the
>general uncertainty of the moment. The former, among them one part of
>the editors of the Info International program of Radio LoRa in Zurich,
>have at least had the merit to be involved with what was going on in
>Kosov@ and to launch discussions about it (making contact with KLA
>people in Zurich in the process), at a time at which other media barely
>paid any attention to the KLA. When the NATO attacks started and it
>became clearer how the KLA put itself unconditionally at the service of
>NATO strategies, some of the early advocates of a solidarity with the
>KLA used the opportunity to critically reassess their position. Others,
>even among those usually very critical of the state and media (I'm
>surprised, for instance, about the declaration of an anarchist friend on
>an Eastern European mailing list), have flirted with the line of
>argument about preventing a "humanitarian catastrophe". This means they
>have walked into the trap set up by NATO by creating facts on the ground
>and then feigning to offer solutions. I was outright shocked by the
>machist and aggressive statements of some European and US-American net
>activists (e.g., on the nettime mailing list) as a reaction to e-mail
>diaries reporting from a personal point of view on the bombings in
>Belgrade, Novi Sad and Kraljevo - although I do see how such personal
>accounts can be put to use for propagandist purposes. In any event, I
>would like to deal with this by trying to contextualize such accounts,
>and not by suppressing them. Maybe out of a feeling of insecurity for
>having to argue politically on unusually unfamiliar terrain, some of the
>net activists emphatically embrace an anti-Milosevic position that in
>its negligent way borders on anti-Serb racism. The fact that on the
>other hand a group with a more streamlined political stance, like the
>Revolutionärer Aufbau Schweiz (Revolutionary Build-Up Switzerland),
>manages to write a leaflet against the NATO war without mentioning even
>one word about the refugees fleeing from Milosevic's campaign, should
>probably not come as a surprise. This position is just as fatally based
>on a simplified understanding of imperialism (in the latter case,
>probably adopted for tactical reasons) - once again there is only one
>bad guy, even if this time it is not Milosevic but NATO, and implicitly
>the Kosov@ Albanians collaborating with NATO. It seems to me that all
>these positions are evidence of a weak point in our political praxis. A
>more in-depth inquiry into the political developments in Kosov@ that
>points out the complexity of economic and power strategic causes of a
>social conflict and the willfully forced ethnicizing of the conflict is
>something that I have seen bits and pieces of, but usually discussed in
>a limited circle of people.
>
>The "facts on the ground" for which Slobodan Milosevic, Hans-Dietrich
>Genscher, the KLA leadership (but also Ibrahim Rugova in his own more
>discreet ways) have, each for their own reasons, worked hard for years,
>are widely accepted. These "facts" consist in the perception that the
>conflict stems from age-old "ethnic" feuds and is so much ingrained in
>people that it is impossible to live together. In view of the crushing
>weight of "history", even from a leftist point of view the only thing to
>do then is to call for the "ethnic" separation - perceived as the only
>way to defuse the smoldering conflict - to be achieved by peaceful means
>through negotiations. This procedure has been demonstrated in the case
>of Bosnia in which the Dayton Agreement was reached under US
>sponsorship. But - it was not possible to implement the "ethnic"
>separation agreed upon there without violent relocations and massacres,
>since the people would not let themselves be moved without resistance.
>"Srebrenica" was in this sense a prerequisite for the implementation of
>Dayton - part of the plan, so to speak.
>
>It seems vital to me to break out of the discourse about an "ethnic"
>conflict. To achieve this, we must concentrate our efforts on the one
>hand on laying bare the (economic and power-strategic) causes of the
>conflict. A central aspect herein is the high indebtedness of Yugoslavia
>and especially Serbia after decades of preferential access to
>international credit lines, due to the privileged position of Yugoslavia
>during the "Cold War". The International Monetary Fund's (IMF) policy of
>debt collection thereby leads to an intensification of the strategies of
>exploitation of the Yugoslav government, which in its turn gives rise to
>social struggles against this exploitation. The second part of our
>efforts must concentrate on exposing the mechanisms of ethnicizing, and
>thus the strategies for diverting the attention from those causes. Of
>course this is easier done in a (Western European) context in which the
>people have a certain distance to the events, than in the circle of
>those who are already exposed to an attack defined in "ethnic", i.e.,
>racist terms and immediately need to react to it and develop strategies
>of survival against this attack. But even in Yugoslavia, in the context
>of war, some people manage to consistently speak of the conflict in such
>a way as to expose the absurdity of the logic of war. In (Ex-)
>Yugoslavia there is a long tradition of resistance against "ethnic"
>dividing lines imposed by the governments. From the â??Women in Black" and
>conscientious objectors' initiatives, e-mail lists like the anarchist
>ex-yu-a-lista and attack[2] all the way to various feminist groups. This
>is whom we must refer to when we want to build up solidarity with people
>in Yugoslavia. Such solidarity is possible and does not require taking a
>stand for one or the other parties to the war. In the case of Kosov@ it
>is slightly more difficult than in Bosnia to refer to existing projects
>and contacts, since the networking between Kosov@ Albanians and other
>people in Yugoslavia is less developed. For instance, there does not
>seem, in Kosov@, to be an anarchist movement visible to the outside -
>and the anarchist movement is an important pillar of anti-national
>politics in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. There are nevertheless contacts,
>be it in feminist circles, in the peace movement or in other contexts.
>Together with the people from these contexts I see the possibility to
>develop a common anti-national, "leftist" position.
>
>It would be especially interesting to develop, in a common process, an
>understanding of how the attractiveness of various nationalist
>discourses, myths and loyalties is constructed for people in
>Switzerland, in Germany and in Yugoslavia. How can existing certainties
>that currently contribute to the front-building and legitimization for
>NATO, the KLA and/or Milosevic, be undermined? Some ideas in this
>direction can be gleaned from the "Materialien für einen neuen
>Antiimperialismus"[3] Nr. 6 (Materials for a New Antiimperialism). This
>is a discussion I would like to have with people from Yugoslavia, and in
>the process I want to take the fears and hopes of those people
>seriously. I think it is easy to point to the danger of various
>legitimizing constructions, but it is much harder to debate those
>questions with people who have appropriated these legitimizing
>constructions (often in incomplete and fragmentary ways) under the
>pressure of bombs and/or massacres. Since these legitimizing
>constructions are part of a strategy of survival, we must also try, in a
>collective process among radical/emancipatory activists, to develop new
>strategies of survival or point out existing alternatives. This process
>not only applies to Yugoslavia and the front-building there. In mixed
>(East-West) e-mail fora like nettime or syndicate, we also find a
>dynamic of front-building that we need to understand and undermine.
>
>How we speak about the war
>
>In attempting to delegitimize the war to all sides, it seems to me that
>in a first step it is not so much "historical reality" that counts and
>should be researched in full detail in order to oppose "facts" to the
>"propaganda". Maybe it is more important, for now, to look at the
>tactical question of assessing the effect of a given discourse. The
>reason I say this is not that I find a historical understanding useless
>or unimportant, but because in my view propaganda can be pursued with
>quite correct and confirmed "facts" - for instance, a war can be
>legitimized using massacres that have actually taken place. It would
>seem dangerous to me, for instance, to put much emphasis on the
>probability that a massacre like the one in Racak was a fake. A
>discussion on this may be interesting only in the context of
>investigating the requirements of a media war. A discussion that could
>probably lay bare the motives for inventing a massacre. It seems
>difficult to avoid, however, that the emphatic denial of this or other
>massacres contribute to the discourse of those who generally deny the
>very existence of massacres and in this way attempt to paint one of the
>parties to the war as the "Good" or at least the "Innocent".
>
>Many of the arguments that can be given against the war turn out not to
>be unproblematic in one way or other. A widely used line of argument
>compares the Yugoslav policies towards Kosov@ Albanians to the attacks
>by the Turkish state on the life and identity of Kurds that have been
>going on for many years. It asks why NATO is not bombing Turkey, if it
>considers Human Rights so important. In its outrage about different sets
>of standards being applied to Turkey and Yugoslavia, this comparison
>takes the humanimilitarist legitimizing construction of NATO seriously.
>By pointing out that Turkey is not being bombed, the alleged motive of a
>humanitarian intervention is at once questioned and reaffirmed.
>Nevertheless I think that Kurdistan can be brought into the discussion
>in a different context, without legitimizing the motives given for the
>NATO attacks. We can do this by emphasizing the interests of Turkey as a
>NATO state to be perceived by the world public as being on the side of
>the "Good Guys" - on the side of those who enforce Human Rights. Among
>other things, the news coverage of the NATO bombings diverts the
>attention of the public from the gigantic campaign of repression the
>Turkish state is currently waging against Kurds with increased
>intensity.
>
>Similarly, claiming that NATO, through its "autonomous decision" to
>attack Yugoslavia, has booted out the UN and OSCE - the "legitimate
>actors" of the search for a "peaceful solution" - and thus broken
>international law, bears some danger. I do not only speak of the fact
>that it may sound strange if from an autonomist, radical leftist
>position one speaks in defense of structures that belong to the realm of
>big politics. Pragmatically, maybe one could take it that these
>institutions act as an opposite pole to NATO, and aim to strengthen them
>against powerful NATO. It is, however, only true to a limited extent
>that the UN/OSCE are an opposite pole to NATO. This became clear, among
>other things, from the espionage work done by the OSCE observers in
>preparation for the NATO attacks.[4] On the one hand, the UN elite's
>interests give rise to a strategy of "survival", of retaining its power
>in view of the NATO attacks started without regard to UN competence in
>the matter. Thus in a first phase Kofi Annan condemned the single-handed
>approach of NATO. But while the NATO leadership aims at making
>Yugoslavia (with or without Milosevic in power) submit to its will, at
>the same time it follows a strategy of first showing the UN managers who
>is the master and reducing their options, before courting them with
>offers for a renewed participation in the process - at NATO's
>conditions. Kofi Annan at least seems to be playing along already. In
>this way the transnational institutions legitimize one another - despite
>power games among each other. They are reminiscent of the good old
>interplay between the good-cop-bad-cop duo of police interrogations,
>inspiring confidence and fear all at once. In the new NATO strategic
>concept that has recently been presented to the public, a possible
>future relation between UN and NATO is formulated - the UN should once
>and for all give the go-ahead for NATO interventions outside NATO
>territory.
>
>Also, speaking of the incompetence of the decision-makers or referring
>to the sexual life of one of them contributes to legitimizing the war by
>depoliticizing the events, turning them into a spectacle and ignoring
>the existing interests. It is probable that a strategy of escalation
>might not remain under the full control even of the escalating
>strategists over the complete course of events, and some of the
>consequences of the NATO attacks may be unwanted and maybe even
>unexpected. But one thing is certain - it is not the failure of
>diplomacy that has led to NATO attacks, but the success of the
>escalation diplomacy. The now famous Annex B of the Kosovo Interim
>Agreement[5] of Rambouillet, signed by the Kosov@ Albanian leadership
>under the pressure and propaganda efforts of the US diplomacy, was meant
>to turn all of Rest-Yugoslavia into a NATO protectorate. It was
>definitely not out of diplomatic incompetence that it was conceived such
>that the Yugoslav leadership would under no circumstances be able to
>sign it.
>
>I rather like the tactical move of those who claim there is a secret
>agreement between Milosevic and NATO representatives. There is no need
>for this to be real, and the claim is not all that serious. The real
>importance of it is to point out that Milosevic is one of the main
>beneficiaries of the NATO attacks, and that NATO, the KLA and Milosevic
>need each other for legitimizing each other's war strategies, and that
>all three parties are united in a patriarchal-lifedestroying showdown
>against the Serbian and Albanian population. Sprayers in Belgrade said
>it in a nutshell. "Slobo, du Clinton!"[6], Boris Buden of Bastard/Arkzin
>quotes a Belgrade graffito. Beyond the general interest in imposing the
>logic of war, a common interest between the Yugoslav leadership and the
>transnational power structures, symbolized by William Clinton, can be
>traced to their division of labor in pressing added value out of the
>majority of the Yugoslav population - with the aim of collecting the
>debt.
>
>The interests involved in this war
>
>Quite possibly it may be a fundamentally unsatisfactory endeavor to
>inquire into the motives of "big politics" behind the escalation of the
>conflict in Kosov@. None of the personalities involved is likely to
>share their innermost thoughts with us. What then could be the aim of
>juggling with assumptions and circumstantial evidence? Any
>interpretation of events carries with it traces of its intention. Mine
>is to explore a discourse that does not refer to "ethnic" criteria but
>considers ethnicizing as a power strategy, as a vehicle for more
>material interests. The criminological search for a motive may bear the
>danger of ending in conspiracy theories. I think that I can (maybe)
>elude this by considering the interests (motives) of the various parties
>of "big politics" involved as heterogeneous and, for instance, seeing
>NATO not as a block but exploring the dynamic and the interaction
>between the politics of the USA, Germany and others.

[continued in mail no. 2]
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