"Attack, pull apart, systematically and progressively degrade Yugoslavia" until "the president Milosevic meets and honours international community demands". NATO chief, Javier Solana’s call to his troops sounds as remotely humanitarian as the `altruistic’ concern of his boss in the White House. I’m also sure that Solana understands `international community demands’ as a triumph of Washington’s `humanitarianism’ over Serbian `barbarism’.

But as we complete a month of Washington’s war of humanitarianism, like some horrendous computer war game played from across the Atlantic, it is abundantly clear that Washington’s ‘humanitarianism’ has proved more barbarous than what they allege of the Serbs. And its original stated aim to go to war — to help the Kosovan Albanians — has only succeeded in throwing up a stream of refugees, including ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo. Yet this obvious fact has been covered up as ‘collateral damage’ by Washington’s propagandists who now squarely put all the blame on the Yugoslavian government in order to justify even more devastating bombing raids.

The Balkan War is in many ways a repeat performance of the Gulf War, of course, with the essential difference that unlike this time, the immediate reasons for imperialist intervention in the Gulf was Iraq’s aggression against a sovereign state, Kuwait. The build up to the present bombing of Yugoslavia is similar to the sequence of events leading to the attack on Iraq.

The pattern of assault in Yugoslavia is also similar to those in the Gulf War in 1991: Carpet and DU (depleted uranium) bombing by A10 "warthog" planes. The same Warthogs, used as the anti-tank weapon of choice, pounded Iraq with 9,40,000 rounds of DU shells and the uranium residue is responsible for a large increase in stillbirths, children born with defects, and childhood leukemia and other cancers in the area of southern Iraq near Basra, where heavy shelling took place. In smaller number, DU weapons were already used by NATO troops during the bombing of Serbian areas of Bosnia in 1995. The present DU shelling threatens to make a nuclear wasteland of Kosovo and is laying waste to the very people — along with their children — the Americans claim to be saving. Despite all these horrendous war crimes its a wonder that global nuclear peaceniks still believe that Washington is dismantling its nuclear armoury for good.

There were no waves of refugees until the beginning of the NATO bombing on March 24. The U.S. government used similar arguments of defending civilians and stopping massacres to justify massive bombing campaigns during the Gulf War. Again and again it was the massive bombing that created refugee crises.

Milosevic has been demonised much the same way Saddam Hussein was before the two wars against Iraq. MNC controlled international media has also contributed largely to this process of demonisation. A US State Department official in fact admitted: "The demonisation of Milosevic is necessary to maintain the air attacks." However, after the NATO raids, Yugoslavians consider Milosevic interchangeable with Serb pride itself.

Fomenting war is now an American ritual quite unconnected with whatever ‘threats’ the attacked countries might pose. In other words: To go to war is a periodic American need to assert its imperialist might and the justification for the attacks could be provided thereof. It isn’t surprising then that within the last six months, United States military has already attacked four countries — Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. The threatening pattern behind all these attacks has been the unprovoked use of force by the US. The US bypassed all international norms of mediation and negotiations and fabricated a situation of crisis to justify the attacks.

America’s recent wars have revived the days of good business for the western arms manufacturers after profits flattened in the years following the Cold War. Here in the Balkans, the battlefield is virtually an `arms fair’ to demonstrate their wares to the world and all this in real live action. No computer simulations and the targets -- historic bridges of Belgrade and civilians, Serbs and Albnanians alike -- are all for free. Arms manufacturers, like Raytheon, manufacturer of the Patriot missile, has emailed out photos of Yugoslav planes blazing in mid air! This war is another threatening reminder to the world that not a nut or bolt will be dismantled from the western military-industrial complex.

Fearing a rebuff by the General Assembly, US and its Western allies set aside the consultative procedures UN offers for the discussion and settlement of international disputes. Russian and Chinese calls for a cease-fire at the UN Security Council were blocked by America, Britain, France and their allies. NATO has blown to the winds the values that it proclaims: law, negotiation, international disarmament - the apparatus of the new World Order that was meant to replace Cold War confrontation. Perhaps for the imperialists, legal consistency — something that they keep preaching the Third World — is another outdated legal concept.

Earlier, at the Rambouillet conference in February on Kosovo, the US had served Milosevic with an ultimatum that had three points: 1) Kosovo must be granted autonomy; 2) NATO must be allowed to station 30,000 ground troops in Yugoslavia to ensure this autonomy; and 3) A NATO-conducted referendum for Kosovo’s independence from Yugoslavia would take place within three years. The Yugoslav government agreed to the first condition, and rejected the second and third, saying they were a gross violation of their sovereignty and the independence of their country. The one breaking point that Yugoslavia refused to negotiate is that they will not allow a foreign occupying army. The only constant U.S. demand was that NATO troops must be based in Yugoslav territory.

The plan to build a NATO protectorate in Kosovo holds no independence for it, rather, it would make Kosovo a neo-colony governed from Washington and Brussels (NATO headquarters). Yugoslavia defiantly refused to bow to this ultimatum and NATO fighter planes made the first air raids on 24 March and triggered the first war in Europe for almost half a century. Even after the bombing started, Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic told the Russians that he was ready to reduce the number of troops in Kosovo in return for an end to the NATO air raids, the evacuation of the NATO force in Macedonia and the end of NATO support to the Kosovan rebels led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). "We are ready to defend our country to the very end," Milosevic warned. "It is not the first time Yugoslavia has had to defend itself and its right to sovereignty, territorial integrity and national pride".

US has pursued a policy of aggression against Yugoslavia right from 1991. It has been trying to break Yugoslavia into ever-smaller pieces and bomb its people into submission. The U.S. has established, in only five years, military domination of the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia, as well as Hungary and Albania. The only hold-out has been Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia is the only country in Europe to refuse US military bases. Yugoslavia has become the target in the Balkans, much the same way Iraq became the target in the Gulf region. More seriously, Milosevic was seen as challenging the ‘stability of the region’, the kind of stability essential for an imperialist power to establish its unipolar supremacy. To the Americans, what mattered, above all, was that Yugoslavia did not slip beyond Western - that is, American - control. Some analysts have also pointed to the strong American interests to secure an ‘oil protectorate’ all the way from the Gulf to the Caspian Sea, thus controlling most of the world’s principal energy reserves. Both Iraq and Yugoslavia are strategically placed in this ‘oil protectorate’.

The Kosovo crisis is a sovereign matter of Yugoslavia and NATO has no right to intervene in its internal matter under the pretext of human rights, self-determination of minorities, etc. "Humanitarian intervention" is a guise for military adventurism and imperialism. But, while Yugoslavia is denied its sovereign right to protect its province, the US can trigger a war in its bid to convert an entire continent into its backyard.

There is widespread international opposition to NATO’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the Balkans. China urged NATO to immediately cease its military action against Kosovo and called for a political settlement as soon as possible. In a statement Li Peng opposed the hegemonism and power politics, including the acts of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries
under whatever pretext or in whatever form.

Russian protests were dismissed by the West. Russian premier, Yevgeny Primakov, was given the brush-off in Bonn when he tabled Yugoslav peace feelers to the German leadership and the rest of the Atlantic Alliance. The Russian military establishment gravely views the expansion of NATO. The Defence Ministry in Moscow has formulated plans to deploy new tactical nuclear weapons near Russia’s western border. It has also ordered part of its Black Sea fleet back into the Eastern Mediterranean. The National Security Council in Moscow also intends to drop Moscow’s longstanding doctrine of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons. Yeltsin even warned of a third world war. However, Russia is precariously hinged on Western economic aid and this might prove a strong countervailing point.

Fear of a widening regional war is stretching the loyalty of some of NATO’s other allies. Italy’s communist bloc in parliament is threatening to withdraw support from the Democratic-Left coalition unless the government makes moves to try and stop the bombing. NATO member, Greece, has even questioned NATO for violating its own charter which claims that NATO is a defensive organisation and is only committed to force if one of its members is attacked. Greece has claimed that Yugoslavia is a sovereign state which has not threatened any other country, not even a NATO country. A month into the war, Yugoslavia shows no sign of buckling under what is truly a one-sided aggression. Even NATO generals now admit that they’ve failed to smash the Yugoslav defences with their air raids. Western politicians now talk of the need for a ground invasion.

NATO’s war has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. Washington’s claims for humanitarianism only stinks of arrogance and hypocrisy. This humanism is also strange, as in the present case, with a microscope focused on Yugoslavia and blindness in the US. For instance, there is an International Criminal Court established to try war crimes. But the U.S. does not support it. Nor has the U.S. any remote interest in trying one-time Chilean dictator Pinochet. Washington talks about trying Milosevic’s associates who made his alleged war crimes possible; they do not talk about trials for Pinochet’s associates in the US establishment. But if their humanitarianism is the sort that needs to start in the Balkans instead of at home, where is the concern for the mass displacement of Serbs?

The self-appointed global policemen have also become militant ‘anti-fascists’. Milosevic is made into a fascist and American media’s simple justification of the air raids becomes: "they’re fascists so we have to kill them." This is the latest brand concept of US’ global policing that creates situations of war because it needs these wars time and again to assert its supremacy in a unipolar world, and justifies these wars by demonising ‘villains’ like Saddam, Milosevic, Bin Laden etc.

Washington’s takes for granted the fundamental right to believe that the rest of the world must accept as true whatever Washington felt strongly in a particular situation. It has doggedly aggressed against any little country that thrived under anything remotely like Communism. After the collapse of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe, anything was preferable to the US than a socialism that worked - even Balkanisation and genocide. It has turned a blind eye to NATO member Turkey’s genocidal policy towards its own Kurds. Indeed, the United States itself has been responsible for the death hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis through bombing and the resulting damage with depleted radioactive uranium. It has enforced a decade-long embargo that has crippled the Iraqi economy and social services. And what for? First and foremost to sustain the already low price of oil by keeping a maximum of Iraqi oil off the world market.

NATO was founded as a launch pad for the Cold War. The Soviet collapse and the fall of its socialist allies in Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, along with the evolving union of Europe, had deemed redundant the very existence of NATO. Hence, after 1989, a new narrative has continuously been sought for NATO.

The post-Cold War dream of unchallenged US-led unipolarity with its Western allies in tow has been short-lived. The Gulf War of 1991 was the first and the last instance where American imperialism could cobble up a grand alliance of all imperialist forces. However, in all later adventures of American imperialism — Operation Desert Fox in 1996, hunting for Bin Laden in Afghanistan — fault lines in this grand alliance showed up sooner than the attacks started.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO has expanded rapidly into Eastern Europe, right up to the borders of Russia. This expansionism has not been all too palatable for the dominant NATO partners like Germany and France. Initially, the two had mooted the idea of converting the much contested territory of Central and Eastern Europe into a European security protectorate, thus undermining the US efforts to convert a whole continent into its backyard. However, US forced through with NATO’s expansion achieved mainly through ‘bribing’ economically devastated East European countries with hefty aid packages. In much the same way, the slaughter in the Gulf war in 1991 was legitimised by the UN after US Secretary of State James Baker travelled the world offering the biggest ‘bribes’ in history to potential military allies. In Cairo, for example, Baker offered Egypt $14 billion, which wiped out a third of the country’s foreign debt.

However, the emergence of an economically united Europe has been the latest thorn in the paw for the US. This friction of economic interests with the US has further exacerbated the German and French aspiration to create their own security umbrella for Europe. Hence, once again there was a need for the US to hunt for a narrative to legitimise the existence of NATO and consolidate the unity between America and Europe. In this scheme, the war in Yugoslavia, has come in handy for the Americans. US special envoy to the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke, admitted that the real reason for the bombing is ‘the credibility of NATO’ - in other words, the credibility of American power.

Since 1990, Washington has pushed for NATO to be used ‘out of area’ and to act without UN approval: in other words, to usurp the role of the UN as the world’s ‘peacekeeper’. In fact, the UN, which was the favoured vehicle for imperialist bullying in the years immediately following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, has been pushed aside — NATO is now the main means of big power aggression and war. NATO is to be the new policeman of the American imperialism, and we can expect to see more NATO violence in support of this newly charted imperial hegemony. The present bombing of Yugoslavia is too ‘good’ an opportunity to demonstrate to the world what NATO is really for, in the same way that the 1991 Gulf ‘war’ was as much a demonstration of American power.

It is hardly surprising then that in this scheme the Clinton administration decided to payroll the biggest war budget since Ronald Reagan. To the delight of the US defence industry, the Congress has proposed to spend $6.6 billion developing a national missile defence ‘shield’ by 2000 — an advanced version of Reagan’s infamous ‘Star Wars’.

However, the strengthening of the alliance with the war in the Balkans and the apparent peace forged between the US and its allies across the Atlantic has a short life. The strong undercurrents of economic tensions between the imperialist powers can never provide permanency to this peaceful alliance. Imperialist peace alliances can never resolve the threat of war. This will only lead to another round of sharp military conflict and multi-polarity with Europe as a possible pole. In any case, this irrational Western order is out of sync with the times. Conditions for a China-Russia pole have also been steadily maturing with enhanced strategic cooperation between the two.

The post-Cold War world, the American strategic thinkers informed us, was a dangerous place. The big enemy — the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union — had gone, but a host of smaller ones, bandits (international terrorists, ‘rogues’, fascists, human right violators et al) from beyond the cultural boundaries of consumer capitalism, threatened the Western paradise. NATO, we were told, needed ‘intervention’ capabilities into sovereign matters of these bandit states belonging to ‘other’ civilisations threatening the dominance of the Western civilisation. Thus the Gulf war was described as the war of ‘good’ against ‘evil’, of the nations of the ‘light’ against the forces of darkness, an affirmation of civilisation against barbarism – an Armageddon to defend the western civilisation. American think tanks are now cloaking NATO with this narrative to make it a bulwark against these civilisational threats. Though this narrative concedes the multi-polar nature of post-Cold War geopolitical divisions, but it does so to mitigate the internal differences between Europe and US and forge stronger unity between them and ultimately to make the European allies step down in the dominance hierarchy.

The chartered role for NATO to intervene wherever it chooses in separatist struggles by taking military action against sovereign states on behalf of minorities seeking to break away, has grave consequences for the South Asian region. Manifest with nationality and ethnic struggles, the region will always be prone to the aggressive US-Western conspiracy to aggravate ethnic tensions and disrupt peace and stability. Though the Indian ruling classes enjoy relative independence vis-à-vis imperialist coercion but in all occasions that this independence has been exercised, it was to bargain for greater sops from their imperialist bosses. Through the 90s India has also abandoned its steering role in the Third World camp. Apart from the symbolic act of condemning the air attacks, the BJP government didn’t even attempt to rally other Third World nations in opposing the NATO raids on Yugoslavia.

Our rulers tell the world how terribly proud they are of having a Pokhran or a Prithvi. But facing an imperialist aggression would require much more than that – probably a Milosevic or a Saddam to stand up and show the big brother that it can do it alone. But that seems remote with our rulers incessantly sucking-off a superpower and mindlessly training their guns across the Siachen.