THE WAR IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA is the result of a partition plan thought up by Serbian President Milosevic and Croatian President Tudjman before the war. These were taken up by the "peace plans", and carried out in Bosnia-Herzegovina by local Serb and Croat nationalist parties. Both Karadzic's Bosnian Serbian Democratic Party - SDS and its "Chetniks", and Mate Boban's Bosnian Croatian Democratic Community - HDZ with its Croatian Defense Council - HVO militias each built a 'state within the state' beginning in the spring of 1992. Each was backed by its "mother republic" and its armies.
The arrival in power of the three nationalist parties' in the Republic's first democratic elections in 1990, and the goals of re-Islamicizing the Muslims pursued by part of the SDA under Bosnian President Izetbegovic, weakened this multiethnic society from within. This was particularly true in the rural areas where communities are more juxtaposed than intermixed. These political circumstances exacerbated the polarisation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. On one side were those who remained committed to this state despite everything and committed to a mixed identity - particularly in the urban centres. On the other side were those Serbs and Croats who turned toward nationalist projects of 're-joining' their mother republics.
This war is both a foreign aggression against Bosnia-Herzegovina (by Belgrade and Zagreb) and a civil war. This second dimension has become steadily more important over time, because Milosevic and Tudjman are both primarily interested in consolidating power over their own republics. It will not be possible to save multiethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina without an agreement among all its communities - and without links with the neighboring republics. It will also be necessary to respond to the real fears which encourage people to fall back on exclusive communities - fear of unemployment, of loosing one's land, one's identity, or one's life if one does not find oneself inside the "right" frontiers. Confidence can only be rebuilt through the defence of individual and collective rights, independent of ethnic origin — i.e. defending the rights of minorities, and by the pursuit of war criminals (while opposing the condemnation of a whole people).
These are the main political stakes for any alternative to the plan for partitioning Bosnia. Realising these goals requires total independence and a critical attitude towards all the current governments, and towards all exclusive national currents, inside Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as in the neighboring republics.
There is a major asymmetry in this conflict, which the uneven balance of firepower has only deepened. Serb and Croat nationalism has always denied the existence of the ethnic-national community of Bosnian Muslims (who now call themselves Bosnijaci ("Bosniaks") to distinguish themselves more clearly from the Moslem religious community). Plans for the country's partition included the destruction of all traces of Muslim civilization. The equation "Muslim = fundamentalist" has been propagated through lies since the war began in order to make the West accept these policies. In fact, on the eve of the war the Muslims were the least religious of the three communities, because they had been urbanized and secularized for more than a century.
At the same time that we denounce this demonization of Muslims, we have no reason to condone fundamentalist tendencies wherever they manifest themselves. Top SDA leaders' speeches and articles against mixed marriages, and pressures from Muslim charitable organizations for head scarves and mosque attendance are realities that have to be fought, just as much as similar speeches and practices of fundamentalists on the other side. The existence of a project for Bosnia's Islamicization (put forward in a moderate fashion by Izetbegovic) is clear, as is the support that it seeks and gets from certain reactionary Arab regimes.
But this does not make the whole SDA (or the Bosnian army or government) fundamentalist. The recent public denunciation of the Islamicization of the Bosnian army's 7th Corps (around Zenica) by five members of the Bosnian presidency, and the public campaign carried on by army officers and Sarajevo's non-nationalist press on this issue, show that Islamicization is a struggle, not a finished process, still less a successfully completed Islamicization of the state.
While the political pluralism of the SDA dominated government elected in 1990 was largely formal, the SDA is today a minority within the collegiate presidency. The non-nationalist opposition (Socialist Party, Liberal Party, Social Democratic Union) participate in the Bosnian parliament, and fight for the rule of law - particularly in Tuzla, where they have majority support.
While the logic of Serb and Croat nationalism is to build states within the Bosnian state and win territorial expansion for their mother republics, the interest of the Muslim SDA's secular wing is to preserve Bosnia-Herzegovina. But it wants to establish its hegemony there as much as possible. The Bosnian ruling elite's attachment to their state expresses plans for power and privatization that are comparable to those of the other ex-bureaucratic elites, with all the methods of the old ruling single parties - the current nationalist parties. The Bosnian government's nature is illustrated by its orientation - relying essentially on foreign military intervention to defend Bosnia-Herzegovina's frontiers.
The military dynamic of part of the army, as long as it is controlled by the SDA, can also be above all a dynamic of territorial reconquest without any serious political project that would be attractive to all the communities - or still worse, re-conquest with the aim of exclusive control over reconquered territory.
Our role is to denounce that which favours and encourages fundamentalism -starting with the war in which the Moslems are the main victims, and with the plans for ethnic partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina. We should also support those "bad Moslems" (bad Catholics, bad Orthodox) who resist fundamentalism. Women especially.
But it would be naive and counterproductive to believe that we can resist fundamentalism (as many defenders of the Bosnian cause imagine) while keeping quiet about Islamicizing policies, particularly those of the SDA. It is still worse to dismiss every critical comment of these policies as "pro-Serb" or "Chetnik".
Whatever the chances of success, in the face of the combined offensive of reactionary forces from all sides, our defence of a multi-ethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina should strive to base itself on the tradition of living together. We should try to support, and build resistance to all the policies of ethnic purification, wherever they take place.
Denouncing the Great Powers' Policies
An atmosphere of zones of influence characterises ex-Yugoslavia and the Balkans, in an uncertain world. None of the great powers wants either a Balkan war or hostilities with Yeltsin's Russia. Russia for its part wants to play a role in world diplomacy again without opposing the West's basic choices. Of course each imperialist power has its privileged alliances (the US wants to look good in the eyes of the Muslim world; Germany supported Slovenian and Croatian independence and supports the anti-Serb dynamic of U.S. positions; France and Britain have wagered on a strong Serbian government, Milosevic's, in the hope that he will ally with Tudjman and break with the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs). But none of them wants to lose any troops in a quagmire where they see no vital strategic interest. This explains NATO's "gestures" and the simmering conflicts between those powers with forces on the ground (held hostage by the Chetnik militias) and the US (and Germany) who don't have troops on the ground - and who therefore would be willing to carry out more "vigorous" air strikes, just as long as the bombs were dropped from very high up.
Faced with the tragedy of civilian populations held hostage and appeals for military intervention coming from the war's main victims, NATO and the UN have fallen into disrepute. But what they are reproached with is not having joined in the war. We have to fight against any illusion that there is a way out of the Bosnian crisis through a foreign military intervention.
The manifest ineffectiveness of the defence of the cities under siege enables us more easily today to:
• Criticize the UN's and NATO's nature and functioning, point out what the so-called "international community" and the order that it defends really are, point out the contradictory aspects of UNPROFOR's presence and the hypocrisy of NATO ultimatums.
• Condemn UNPROFOR's threats to withdraw as just one more way of abandoning the local population in the hope of achieving the signature of the local parties for the 'peace plan'. We should stress the responsibility of governments for the inapplicable instructions UNPROFOR works under. Minority enclaves called
"security zones" are the rule, not the exception in an impossible partition of the republic into 'pure' ethnic cantons. These pockets can never be more than refugee camps - under constant threat of ethnic cleansing, but blocked from fleeing towards "fortress Europe".
• Emphasize the right of self-defense - while distinguishing armed resistance to ethnic cleansing from ethnic cleansing itself!. We should link this legitimate selfdefense to a political project that mobilizes the peoples involved so that they can take charge of their own future.
• The weakness inside Bosnia-Herzegovina of any left that might develop these standpoints and axes of struggle is the main cause of our own weakness The crisis of the so-called "socialist' countries has produced a dramatic collapse in political consciousness and anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist organisations. But this is no excuse for softening our criticism of our own failures, and the considerable failures of the workers' movement and the left in Western Europe with respect to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the crisis in ex-Yugoslavia. Nor must it stop us from developing solidarity "from below" (among trade unions, women's organizations, youth; against the war and ethnic cleansing, against racism, in support of pluralist media) that aims precisely at making the expression of alternative choices possible on the ground and at supporting organized resistance to reactionary policies.
We must support those such as Circle 99 in Sarajevo and the various Serb Consultative Councils of the Bosnian federation, who are fighting simultaneously against Karadzic's Chetniks and for turning the federation into a secular state, which would guarantee citizens rights, equal rights for all the peoples, and a development project ensuring dignity for all. These forces are under attack today from all the nationalist parties.
The Croat-Muslim Federation has noticeably widened the non-nationalist currents' chances for self-expression, and supplied an embryonic alternative to the plans for partitioning Bosnia. But it remains just as fragile as the alliance between Croat and Muslim nationalist parties. The test of its viability will be how the "cantons", the federation's basic units, function in practice. The federation will explode if the cantons are set up in reality on an exclusionary ethnic basis, as is the case in Mostar. From this point of view multi-cultural Tuzla remains a symbol to defend, a symbol which today is threatened. International Workers' Aid, the organisation which concentrates on building trade union solidarity with the workers of Tuzla should be one of our priority campaigns.
As for the negotiations, we should stress:
• The need to recognize and ensure for the peoples of Bosnia and the Balkans a real right to self-determination (i.e. the right to choose whether or not to live together, and if yes, how). It is essential that all currents being able to express themselves in the process of self-determination and not, as is the case in the negotiations, just the exclusionary nationalist forces and warlords.
• We have to fight the tendancy to assimilate exclusionary nationalism with the defense of national rights.
• There is no simple or universal recipe for applying the right to self-determination in a non-colonial context of multi-national countries with ethnically mixed territories.
•We are against the establishment of states which award citizenship on ethnic, rather than residential criteria.
•Everyone must be free to define his or her own identity.
•Self-determination of one group must not be at the expense of another.
•We have to judge the concrete sociopolitical and economic dynamic of each potential new state in the world as it is today. It is impossible to fight those currents which want to create ethnically pure states without defending atn the same time a state founded on individual rights for each citizen, and collective rights for the minority peoples and communities which make up the society.
We have to insist that:
• There will be no lasting peace unless it is fair to all the communities, unless it gives coherent and systematic responses to the crisis which cannot be resolved by rapid settlement procedures based simply on freezing the balance of military forces.
• Any "peace plan" based on ethnic partition of mixed areas is a dead end. Ethnic enclaves are the rule in such plans, not the exception as is the lasting tragedy of hundreds of thousands of refugees.
• Hypocritical politicians may denounce the war, while closing their countries' doors to deserters and refugees.
• The arms embargo compounds the inequality of firepower in the war and is aimed at imposing peace by crushing one community. At the same time, we are against any military campaign aimed at a national group as a whole, against all policies of revenge and military recuperation of territories which in fact are not aimed at enabling the people of Bosnia to live together. We are against any campaign for lifting the embargo which takes on an anti-Serb dynamic and not one of defeating exclusionary policies. We put the stress on the need for such a political defeat. But we should recognise that this will only be possible if the military resistance to the various exclusionary nationalist projects deprives the nationalists of their mass base, and is able to propose an alternative to the ethnic partition of the country, such that each national group finds its place.
Given the need for the widest possible solidarity with the populations that are the victims of this war, we must not allow the question of lifting the arms embargo against the Moslems to become a cause of division within the various solidarity and anti-war associations that have been set up.
Only a Balkan Union could really ensure peace in this region, if it granted a common citizenship and equal treatment to peoples who are divided among several of these states: in particular the Albanians, Serbs and Croats. This would be an essential condition for stabilizing the borders between these states - by opening the borders to the free passage of peoples. It would also allow all those who claim a mixed identity to find their place.
The military offensive threatened by the Croat nationalists against the Croatian and Bosnian territories controlled by rebel Serbs is not the best way to break the domination of extremist Serb nationalism, nor to facilitate the return of the estimated 300,000
Croat refugees. Better to fight against the fascistic definition of what it is to be a Croat, against the idea of the nation "being the rampart of the civilised West against the barbarians of the Balkans", and to defend the place and all the religious and linguistic rights of the Serbian community in Croatia. We should also encourage the demand of both Serb and Croat families separated by borders that had previously disappeared for decades to come and go as they please.
And the best way to avoid the Albanian question becoming a Balkan conflagration is to give the Albanian community in Macedonia all the national rights it justly demands - such as the right to schools and universities in their own language. Kosovo too should regain its former political autonomy, with guarantees for the Serb minority there. Kosovo should also be permitted to develop multiple links with the neighboring state of Albania.
Since a part of the Serb and Croatian sections of the Bosnian population see their security best guaranteed by the link to their "mother" republic, a pluralistic Bosnia-Herzegovina can only survive if it maintains links with the neighboring — also pluriethnic republics.
The European Union policy of developing a selective association of the richer republics and regions can only contribute to a dynamic of disintegration. But without security and socio-economic justice, without a development programme aimed at reducing the inequalities throughout this region, associated with a cooperative rather than free-market conception of Europe, the Balkans will remain explosive. Such an orientation implies a radical critique of the single-party system which utterly disfigured the goals of socialism and self-management.