Re: More Delightful Insight from Jared

["Owen Jones" <owen.jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Reply to comrade Louis

> 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?

 I could say this about Serbia. Where were the radical/Marxist voices in
Serbia? Where were the petitions and marches protesting the national
oppression of the Kosovar Albanians and the attempt to forcibly expel them
all? Where are the national mobilisations against the fascist component of
the Belgrade regime, when there was such struggle in the streets of Vienna
when relatively moderate far-Right Tories were included in government? Where
were the progressives in Serbia when the Belgrade regime was involved in a
reactionary war in Bosnia than included supporting fascist militia who went
on the rampage brutally purging non-Serbs to build an ethnically pure Serb
statelet?

 The progressives in Kosovo have been terrorised for several years by the
KLA, who recently purged their Hoxhaite wing and have murdered and expelled
several progressives. That makes your remarks rather tasteless.

 The 1981 demonstrations in Kosovo were an expression of frustration amongst
the masses at bureaucratic rule and the oppression of Kosovo (though the
Kosovar Albanian bureaucracy oppressed non-Albanians internally later on
during the 80s, Kosovo itself was an oppressed province). It started as a
student protest against the lack of food in the university refectories. It
then escalated into something far greater.

 Kosovo was the poorest and least developed province of Yugoslavia, with
average wealth at a third of the national average in 1981. Albanians
nationally were by far the poorest ethnic group; throughout Yugoslavia, they
were at 38.1% of the average per capita income of Yugoslavia, the next
poorest national group, Muslims, having almost twice that at 67.3%, whilst
Serbs averaged 95.1% (the richest group were Hungarian). In 1980, Albanians
constituted 64.9% of the total employed population in Kosovo, a full 12.6
percentage points lower than their share of the population [77.5%], whilst
Serbs constituted 25.6% of those employed which was 12.4% higher than their
population share. In 1981, Kosovar Albanians gained 28,443 dinars on average
per capita, whilst Kosovar Serbs on average gained 35,250 and Montenegrins
got 36,495.

 Sorry for bombarding you with statistics, but I find it more than useful in
an argument such as this. From 1953 to 1988, Kosovo's share of the national
economy did not increase. In 1953, GMP per capita as a percentage of the
Yugoslav average in Kosovo was 43, but that declined massively down to 27 in
88. Average annual percentage growth of GMP per capita declined by nearly a
half in the period 1953 - 1988, from 5.1% to 2.6%. Most constituent areas in
Yugoslavia declined by this criteria in this period, but none came even
slightly close to that of Kosovo - the second lowest after Kosovo was Bosnia
which went from 4.6% to 3.3%.

 Then there is the matter of unemployment... In 1970, Albanians constituted
76.0% of those unemployed, which increased to 76.1% in 1980, and then after
the demonstrations in 1981, to 77.6%. In the same period for Serbs, it began
at 17.6% of the total in 1970, dropped to 17% in 1980, and then after the
1981 demonstrations to 15.1%. In the same period, Montenegrins went from
2.4% of the total to 1.8%.

 Then political prisoners...the actual majority of them were Kosovar
Albanians.

 In 1981, Kosovo had the rather bizarre privilege in Yugoslavia of having
both the highest national proportion of students as well as the highest
illiteracy. One in ten adults in Pristina were students. These would lead
the protests that were the biggest outbreak of violence in Yugoslavia since
WWII.

 Yet the protests were triggered by the obvious oppression of Albanians
within Yugoslavia by the national bureaucracy. Here are some slogans from
the demos:

 "Kosovo Republic"
 "Stop the Exploitation of Trepca"
 "Protect the Rights of Albanians Outside Kosovo"
 "Improve Living Conditions for Students and Workers"
 "Stop Repression, Free Political Prisoners"
 "Down with the Greater-Serb Chauvinism"

 The slogans obviously from infiltration from Albania as well as Hoxhaite
groups included:

 "We Are Enver Hoxha's Soldiers"
 "Down with Revisionism, Long Live Marxism-Leninism"
 "We Are Albanians, Not Yugoslavs"
 "We Want United Albania!"

 However, this slogans were very rare and all the interviews from Kosovar
protestors I have seen indicate the majority did not support such views.
There were obvious reasons behind this protests, not the racist hatred of
Serbs which is always how the national oppressor sees the nationalism of the
oppressed.

> 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.

 "Marxist-Leninist" is typically what Stalinists and their offshoots like
Maoists call themselves. I put them in square quotes because I don't believe
such people to be particularly Marxist or Leninist, yet this what such
groups label themselves so I call them such in quotes.

 Hoxhaism was merely Albanian Stalinism. Its relative backwardness - indeed,
"uncultured Stalinism" if you so wish - was merely the reflection of the
cultural and economic backwardness of Albania on to its ruling bureaucracy.
The construction of a deformed workers' state in Albania was certainly a
great progressive step forward from capitalism and in particular Fascist
occupation, and in this sense it liberated Albania, but its bureaucratic
dictatorship was nothing new and no more racist than other ruling
bureaucracies. Under the Stalinism of the USSR, Greater Russian chauvinism
was reflected in the ruling bureaucracy which conducted national oppression
against republics like the Ukraine. You point out a single Italian
individual imprisoned by the Albanian regime simply because he was Italian;
I could recount to you the deportation of the entire Chechen and Ingue
nation on the grounds they were Nazi collaborators under Soviet Stalinism.

> 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?

 Albanian nationalism might have had a reactionary streak, but this merely
reflected the particular cultural backwardness of Albania and Kosovo. It was
still the nationalism of the oppressed, whilst that of Serbia was oppressor
nationalism. Hindu nationalism in India against British imperial rule was
hardly the most progressive of creeds either. Several struggles against
European colonial rule took reactionary slants, but we hardly side with the
oppressors on these grounds.

 I should also point out that the Irish Republican movement courted the
Nazis in the 1940s, but that's hardly grounds for supporting British
occupation of the North of Ireland. Kosovo itself was incorporated into
Yugoslavia by Tito's regime for a good reason - it feared losing support of
the Serbian people because of their nationalist claim of the territory.

> Or
> like Nelson Mandela, whom Rugova is often likened to.

 No he isn't. Mandela was no pacifist, unlike the rather naive Rugova.
Demaci, who quit the KLA before the war, is the one likened to the Kosovar
Mandela, especially when he was in jail for 20 years or so.

> 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.

 He also thanked President Suharto of Indonesia and gave him a present.

> 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?

 Kosovo and Albania are culturally backward, but this is not something they
chose. They are then conditioned by their culture which a child lacks
consciousness to resist. This cultural backwardness is reflected on to their
nationalism and all of their movements. Serbia is relatively less culturally
backward but still quite so, and this is reflected onto their oppressor
nationalism; such as harking back to lost battles in 14th Century as the
justification to maintain occupation of Kosovo, killing non-Serbs and
burning down their houses and expelling them from the country, and demanding
a Greater Serbian nation encompassing Macedonia ("Southern Serbia"),
Montenegro, and parts of Croatia and Bosnia. Arkan's fascist guerrillas were
hardly the NLF either, hmm?

> 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."

 Again, this is information I have used in previous arguments against the
KLA, to whom I fundamentally opposed to, and I hold that their leadership is
fascist or at least semi-fascist.

> 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:

 Actually this was not a victory for the nationalist struggle. The purpose
of the struggle was for independence or possibly unification with Albania.
All the KLA achieved was imperialist occupation which is actually
suppressing Kosovar self-determination, and the wholesale forcible removal
of all non-Albanians (or shall I claim that these non-Albanians are
segregating and ethnically cleansing themselves for a bit of sympathy from
Western journalists?)

 I am quite mystified at your deep passion against the pogrom being
committed against non-Albanians when the fascist component of the Milosevic
regime succeeded in its long-stated aim of attempting a pogrom against the
entire 1.8 million Kosovar Albanian population, which was half completed.
Though people like you write a blank check for Serbian oppressor nationalism
and a regime that has a fascist component. That is pretty scary.

> (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."

 This is a disgusting crime by a reactionary guerrilla force whose
leadership is worthy of nothing but bullets. The same goes for the entire
Milosevic regime and the head of the Yugoslav Army, and the entire former
Croatian regime, and the leaders of American and German imperialism. These
bastards caused the biggest catastrophe in Yugoslavia since World War II.
But what occurred in Yugoslavia was simply the bloodiest capitalist
counter-revolution in Eastern Europe, a crime of imperialism and former
ruling Stalinist bureaucracies.

 Owen