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﻿<title﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, NATO’s War and the Future - Editorial﻿</title>﻿

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﻿<b﻿>﻿NATO’s War and the Future

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﻿<i﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, July - August 1999﻿</i>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

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As this issue of NEW SOCIALIST went to press, a deal to end the bombing of Yugoslavia has been finalized. The United Nations will pass a resolution authorizing a NATO-led military force including Russian troops to occupy Kosova and enforce the agreement negotiated between NATO and SerbiaÕs rulers in early June.

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NATO’ plans are not designed to help the people of Kosova in whose name the Alliance says it has killed more than 5000 Yugoslav troops and wounded over 10 000. (An independent assessment of military and civilian casualties will indicate larger numbers died in a war from the air that has caused great social and ecological damage.) Although an overwhelming majority of Kosovars want independence, NATO’s goal is only some kind of autonomy for Kosova within the Serbia-dominated remnants of the Yugoslav state. Denied the right to self-determination, Kosova will become an occupied territory subject to an "economic reconstruction" plan designed by the likes of the International Monetary Fund. The Kosova Liberation Army will be stripped of most of its weapons by the NATO-led force. This is neo-colonialism, 21st century style. In Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic’s repressive regime will likely be able to continue the policies of national chauvinism with which it has justified the repression of democratic opposition since NATO launched its attack

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NATO’s victory will have another effect too: it will make military interventions by the worldÕs top states more likely. The target may be a government that "gets out of line" in the eyes of those who had been doing business with it for years (as Serbia’s did, and Iraq’s did in 1990), an anti- imperialist movement or a social revolution. Whatever the case, working-class and oppressed people everywhere lose when our rulers gain confidence to interfere anywhere. NATO’s victory has strengthened the most dangerous force in the world today: the capitalist ruling classes of North America, Western Europe and Japan that head up the imperialist global order. This is what NATOÕs war has achieved, and it is why New Socialist Group activists and like-minded socialists in other countries did what we could to begin to build a movement that demanded an end to the war and an end to NATO.

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Unfortunately, anti-war activists in the Canadian state failed to build a small mass movement against the war. It is worth thinking about why. We faced the difficulty of opposing a war that many people believed was regrettable but necessary in order to defend the Kosovar Albanians from Serbian atrocities - a message reinforced daily by corporate TV, radio and newspapers. The New Democratic Party, the traditional party of the Left, was no help to anti-war activists. The NDP initially supported NATO’s war (like its counterparts in Western Europe) and eventually stumbled into calling for a pause in the bombing. At no time did the NDP (or social democratic parties elsewhere) campaign against the war. Nor did the Canadian Labour Congress. At the CLC Convention in early May, delegates were split over the anti-war resolution, which was presented and then withdrawn by the leadership to avoid a public defeat. So although some union and NDP activists got involved, the mass organizations of the Left did not. Where progressive anti-war organizing did get going in English Canada it often made the mistake of treating this war as virtually a rerun of Vietnam or Iraq. Anti-war coalitions also generally refused to champion the right of Kosova to self-determination (some activists opposed it, others feared alienating Serbian-Canadians and some thought that a movement could best be built with a single-issue focus on "stop the bombing"). For these reasons, anti-war activism failed to break out of the margins.

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What conclusions should we draw? The war confirmed how deeply conservative and remote from the real struggles in the world the leaders of the Official Left are. The mass organizations they head are neither interested in nor effective at mobilizing and educating people. As a result, militants need to organize independently within and outside them to build movements of resistance. And, faced with rulers committed to cutbacks at home and war abroad, we need to build a new Left that learns from the past, frees itself from inherited dogmas and offers a radical opposition and alternative to 21st century capitalism.

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