Re: More Delightful Insight from Jared

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Owen Jones:
> Yes, Serbs and Montenegrins were attacked in the demonstrations - this was
>a very scary and dangerous time for them. Yet the same could be said about
>the ethnic Chinese in the Indonesian revolution of 1998, but we do not
>denounce the entire revolution as an attempted pogrom.

The Indonesian revolution is rooted in a powerful desire to achieve
democracy and social justice. Out of the blue, I receive email from
Indonesian Marxists requesting information. When attacks took place against
the Chinese, the Indonesian left defended the right of the Chinese to live
in peace. The real enemy was capitalism, they said.

Who are the radical or Marxist voices in Kosovo? Where are the petitions
and marches demanding that the ex-KLA stop brutalizing Romas or Serbs? Owen
describes an Albanian nationalist movement, whose left wing he describes as
Hoxhaite or "Marxist-Leninist". I am not sure he is using square quotes to
describe them as Marxist-Leninists or if he is really serious about their
left-wing credentials. If he is not joking, then we are dealing obviously
with a failure to communicate. Hoxhaism is not progressive. Period.
Furthermore, it is racist. I recommend that comrades rent "L'America" which
is an Italian movie about the horrors of life in post-Hoxha Albania. One of
the central figures is an antifascist Italian worker who was locked up in a
prison work camp just because he was Italian. Hoxha treated them the way
the Japanese-Americans were treated by FDR.

Progressive nationalist movements produce the kinds of people who would
feel at home on this list, like the Irishmen James Connolly or the Cuban
José Marti. Who are the Kosovar nationalists who have reached out to the
rest of the progressive forces worldwide like Subcommandante Marcos? Or
like Nelson Mandela, whom Rugova is often likened to. Whatever problems
exist in South Africa today in terms of broken promises, Mandela will
always be remembered as somebody who had the guts to tell his friends in
Washington or London that he was thankful for the role of the Cuban people
in stopping apartheid.

Progressive political movements emerge out of a social movement that is
moving in a progressive direction, like the American civil rights movement
of the 1950s. Miranda Vickers, who is a strong defender of the Kosovo
secessionist movement, described life in a typical Albanian household in
the period when the movement was taking shape:

"In the early 1980s an Albanian scholar noted that the Kosovar way of life
was still governed by traditional mores and outdated customs and badly
needed to be transformed. He wrote that this needed to be social no less
than economic, and to address first the still patriarchal family system:

"'The position of a woman is that of a human being deprived of fundamental
rights. Women were still kept secluded at home when they did not work in
the fields, they received minimal education, and were totally subordinate
to male authority. The emancipation of women is the first and foremost task
for the Kosovars as a people in order to achieve full emancipation. A
community denying half of its members access to a full education can never
be a civilised community.'

"Gradually women participated more in public life. Only ten years earlier
they hardly ever left home. All the same, women still had servile domestic
tasks. Hartmut Albert, a guest in an Albanian home in Pec in 1979, reported
as follows:

"'During our meal, between the tales, the patriarchal order in the
household was evident once again. Only the men (including the 14-year-old
son) gathered around the sofra (low table). Our host's wife approached only
to serve our food and clear the table. Then she waited silently at the door
with water and a hand towel until we wanted to wash our hands.'"

With this kind of social backdrop, this movement that Owen himself
describes as being bordered on the right by fascists and on the left by
Hoxhaites, is it any surprise that the armed movement it eventually spawned
would bear scant resemblance to revolutionary armed groups like the NLF in
Vietnam?

Chris Hedges reported in the March 28, 1999 NY Times that:

"The KLA splits down a bizarre ideological divide, with hints of fascism on
one side and whiffs of communism on the other. The former faction is led by
the sons and grandsons of rightist Albanian fighters -- either the heirs of
those who fought in the World War II fascist militias and the Skanderbeg
volunteer SS division raised by the Nazis, or the descendants of the
rightist Albanian rebels who rose up against the Serbs 80 years ago.

"Although never much of a fighting force, the Skanderbeg division took part
in the shameful roundup and deportation of the province's few hundred Jews
during the Holocaust. The division's remnants fought Tito's Partisans at
the end of the war, leaving thousands of ethnic Albanians dead.

"The decision by KLA commanders to dress their police in black fatigues and
order their fighters to salute with a clenched fist to the forehead led
many to worry about these fascist antecedents. Following such criticism,
the salute has been changed to the traditional open-palm salute common in
the U.S. Army."

Considering all this, is it any surprise that pogroms are being unleashed
against non-Albanians today? Owen has the gall to cite a Tawana Brawley
type incident in Kosovo 1985, when a Serb falsely accused Albanians of
attacking him. This, in his words, is "a good demonstration of what Kosovo
was like." Why go back 15 years to figure out what Kosovo is or was like.
We have the benefit of the daily bourgeois press which is filled with
outrageous accounts such as these, the fruit of the victory of a
reactionary nationalist struggle that so many Trotskyists wrote a blank
check for:

(Washington Post, March 3, 2000)
Paul Polansky, an American author of several books on Gypsy communities in
Europe, has completed a survey on what has happened to that population in
Kosovo after last spring's war. It raises disturbing questions about how
they are being deprived of relief and medical aid and how they live in fear
of being kidnapped if they leave their ghettos.

In an interview last week, Polansky said he visited and researched 29
districts in Kosovo from August to November last year. He was on loan to
the U.N. refugee commissioner from Czech television because of his Roma
language skills. He said the Gypsy communities get no food, supplies or
clothing and always seem to be out of water. In one camp where there were
no telephones or cars, unarmed U.N. police officers refused to take sick
children to a hospital at night, he said. Five children have died in those
camps, and one woman who was about to give birth also was denied when she
asked to be taken to a medical facility.

"In the eyes of relief agencies, Albanians take priority. They do not seem
to feel sorry for the minorities suffering under the Albanians," he said.

Polansky said more than 14,000 Gypsy homes have been burned down. "These
people had homes with lovely furnishings, television sets, cars, normal
jobs, and many had Yugoslav passports," he said. "There has been a
systematic cleansing of Gypsy neighborhoods and only about 30,000 remain
from an original population of 151,000 that lived in Kosovo before the war."

Louis Proyect

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