By Heiko Khoo
October 5, 2000
So in the end the "Iron Dictator of the Balkans" fell in a matter of hours. NATO bombs which threw back the country by decades failed to acheive what a few hours of mass protests and above all, tipping the balance, a small section of the industrial working class joined the students and oppositionists and brought the regime down from the streets.
The feared police forces and the army that the combined might of NATO was unable to defeat collapsed like a pack of cards.
The observer sees that revolution achieves in minutes what all the opposition talk and positioning failed to achieve in ten years.
But here we have revolution pregnant with counter revolution, western money poured into the opposition campaign, even though Vojislav Kostunica the new president proclaimed himself against NATO, and like the majority of the opposition has the most reactionary Nationalist ideas.
The electoral manipulation by Milosevic sparked this revolt, now the main aim of the opposition will be to ride the tiger of revolt and re-establish control. A feat which they are more than likely to achieve, at least for now. The students and and other predominantly petty bourgeois forces leading the revolution almost accidently slipped into "revolutionary ways". Compelled to do so by the impasse created by the delusions of invincibility that the wily Milosevic has filled his bureaucratic-gangsta mind with.
Where did these delusions come from? NATO bombs did not move him...Opposition protests in 1987 did not move him...those in 1991 did not move him... and he was always able to neutralise the crazed petty bourgeois opposition leaders by now including them and now intimidating them.
Above all he had the aquiesence of the proletariat, who looking around could see no proof the the wonders of the market in the Balkan vicinity. Of course the devastation of NATO bombs undermined everything. After the war even the most minimal remnants of Stalinist plan appeared meagre offerings, overwhelmed as they are by life under mafia gangs associated with "Slobo's regime.
To stabilise Yugoslavia the West must, and will pour in some hundreds of millions, loans of course, but money none the less. This money will pacify the bourgeois and petty bourgeois, who will seize Slobo's private empire and that of his closest allies. Their avowed aim will be to establish their Utopian dream a "free market democracy" on the Danube.. But of course the to quote Tolstoy on the Crimean War (cited by Trotsky),
"easily written on paper but the gullies forgotten and we had to walk in them"
The path to democratic bourgeois Serbia will be a bloody and hellish nightmare for the people of the region. Though if the Western Bourgeois have the sense we must credit them with, they will invest enough to make it look like the market works...at least for the middle and upper layers... at least for a short while.
The workers will soon discover they will gain nothing. As the honeymoon ends the spectres of the past will revive...War is endemic in the Balkan region today. Nothing short of the revolutionary reunification of Yugoslavia will solve the crisis of the Balkans. It was for the memories of Yugoslavia that the workers there were reluctant to abandon the devil they knew for the opposition's fast track to capitalism.
Only the independent organisation of the workers and the best of the youth could halt the opposition leaders from dragging the country further into the abiss.
We can hope that the revolution holds its own... refuses to hand power to the bourgeois and creates independent organisation of the workers and youth. Electing committees of control or salvation. Such committees should draw up concrete plans to rebuilding Yugoslavia, under workers control and management... reaching out to their brothers and sisters of the whole Balkan region and beyond...
We can hope and comrades in Yugoslavia can act and do so before the lynch mobs of bourgeois reaction and mafia gangs, turn on the "reds" and hunt them down as "Slobo supporters" when it is they who will try to grab his empire for themselves...
The storming of heaven has again proven the ONLY effective path to transformation...but only the workers acting with their own methods and their own democratic force can prevent the storming of heaven from opening the gates of hell.