Articles from _The_Socialist_ no. 274 March 1993 Clinton's Balkans wardrive PRESIDENT Bill Clinton's decision to commit US troops to Bosnia is seen by many as a way to stop the bloodshed. The US has thrown its weight behind the Vance-Owen "peace plan" to divide the country into ten areas. Vance and Owen told the United Nations Security Council that a force of around 20,000 troops would be needed to enforce the plan. But a senior Pentagon official said recently that: "If there is a genuine peace agreement...we (the US alone) might get away with less than 100,000. "But that's dreaming. If we have to clear roads, and go from peace-keeping to peace-making, figure a force anywhere from 100,000 to 400,000." Peace-making is military doublespeak for war. In other words, far from ending the fighting, the US is close to committing itself to an invasion on the scale of the Gulf War operation Desert Storm. In Iraq, "peacekeeping" has cost 200,000 lives. Thousands more continue to die from preventable diseases because of sanctions on medicines. The Vance-Owens plan will resolve nothing. The cantonisation of Bosnia-Herzegovina into 10 regions simply reflects the current balance of forces in the war. Initially the US dismissed the plan on the grounds that it legitimised ethnic cleansing, and made noises about it being unfair to Bosnian Muslims. Now, like George Bush before him, Clinton wants to use war to show he's "doing something" and to take attention away from economic problems at home. A US invasion would undoubtedly be directed against Serbia. But Croatia has its own expansionist aspirations. It recently launched an attack on Krajina, a part of Croatia predominantly inhabited by Serbs. The Croatian and Serb leaders, Tudjman and Milosevic, agreed to partition Bosnia before Sarajevo was besieged. While Serbia's attacks on Sarajevo have been the focus of world media attention, Croatian forces have continued to chew into west Herzegovina. There can be no side-taking in this war. Both Tudjman and Milosevic are warmongers and have to go. But western intervention makes this task harder. The presence of UN troops in the region has galvanised nationalist support for the leaders. Despite mass Serb opposition to the war, Milosevic won recent elections. The great powers have been playing Balkan nationalities off against each other for a century. The US and its allies cannot be part of any solution. **************** The road to unity from below MANY would argue that the barbarism engulfing the former Yugoslavia cannot be stopped. The fact that Serb aspirations in neighbouring Kosovo and Macedonia could bring Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Albania into the fray adds to the dismay. But until early 1991 the economic crisis which led to Yugoslavia's collapse had quite a different impact. In response to a fall in living standards to 1930s levels, workers launched a wave of strikes across the country, uniting Serbs, Croatians, Slovenes, Muslims and Albanians. Even when Serb leader Milosevic began stirring up nationalist fervour against Albanians in Serb-dominated Kosovo, these strikes continued. It took a determined effort by the leaders of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia to divert workers' anger into nationalist hatred. Even now the damage can be undone. Massive anti-war demonstrations last June through the Serb capital of Belgrade showed many Serbs oppose Milosevic's chauvinism and are desperate for peace. The hundreds of thousands who flocked to rallies at the end of the year echoed this sentiment. So, too, do the estimated 100,000 Serbs who have dodged the draft. This resistance points the way out of the mess. Peace cannot be imposed from the outside by the UN or the US. Nationalism can work only for so long. The war, far from resolving the economic crisis, has deepened it. The consequences of the war are so dire that those rulers who one day appear to have a stranglehold on people's consciousness can the next day be the targets of their anger. United action from below then becomes a distinct possibility. Some might think this scenario utopian. But you need think only of how seemingly unbeatable nationalism during World War One gave way to a wave of working class revolt from 1917 to 1921. *************************************************************** 2000 strikers ground Cathay Pacific A THREE-WEEK mass strike by Cathay Pacific flight attendants has shattered myths about supposedly passive Asian workers. It brought the Hong Kong-based airline to a halt, costing it $30 million in profits. Thousands of workers went out when three had their positions downgraded as part of a cost-cutting program that included job cuts. The downgrading incident became the focus for the workers' anger. The strikers' stand was magnificent. The airline had to cancel all flights as more than 2000 attendants stood firm. Mass pickets were held 24 hours a day outside Government House. When dispersed by police, pickets regrouped in the central government compound, staying there for days more. Thousands of attendants and their supporters marched through the centre of Hong Kong, chanting slogans and waving banners. The strike broke down the usual ideas about who goes on strike. Not only were the workers Asian, but they included ten nationalities. Indian workers led the union, but hundreds of Chinese attendants fought alongside them. The strike was run and fought almost entirely by women workers. So militant were their actions that media commentators called for them to behave responsibly like Australian unionists! Although the strikers were forced back with a bad deal, their fight became a focus for all the discontent stored up during years of repressive British rule. It was so popular even liberal groups came to back it. In Hong Kong, strikes are rare enough that the government doesn't keep records of them. But this one showed the level of anger beneath the surface and the immense willingness to fight if given a lead. *********************************************************** Metal strike a blow against Libs LESS THAN two weeks before the elections, metalworkers around the country are going on strike. Disregarding the argument that industrial action should stop to help Labor win the election, the metal trades unions are combining strike action for a 6 per cent cost-of-living pay rise (with no productivity trade-offs) with the general hatred workers feel for the Liberals. Monday, 1 March, the day of the metalworkers' strike, will link their wage claim with the strike action of hundreds of thousands of Victorian workers against Premier Jeff Kennett. Shop stewards meetings in early February showed the connection. At Auburn RSL in Sydney, 150 stewards listened to reports not just about the rejection of their claim by the metal industry bosses, but about the scale and depth of Kennett's attacks, John Hewson's backflip over the GST on food, and Labor's election loss in Western Australia. Many metal industry employers have swung behind Hewson and are refusing to deal with the unions in the hope that a Liberal victory will let them go for the workers' jugular. The bosses want piece-rates introduced (with payment for how much you produce rather than an hourly rate for the job), so workers have to compete against each other to reach production targets. They want a "merit-based" system of worker evaluation (so that the bosses' favourites can get ahead). They want to get rid of penalty rates. When an official from the Electrical Trades Union opposed the idea of a national strike because his members were conservative and because it would damage Labor's re-election chances, delegate after delegate spoke against him on the need for united strong action. A metalworkers' steward from Email in Orange spoke of how they had just refused a productivity-based wage increase which would have resulted in a severe cut in working conditions. He argued that ETU members were just as angry about these attacks and would respond to a call to go out on 1 March. Tracy Austin, a retrenched metalworker, argued that whether Labor or Liberals were in power, it took industrial action to get the money out of the bosses. She was backed by the metalworkers' steward from Hoover. The argument that came from the floor was that the most important thing was for workers to show they don't want a bar of the Hewson-Kennett agenda--and that to do it there needs to be action now. March 1 will be the second national strike that the metal industry unions have called over their pay claim. Significantly, the last strike was on 30 November, the ACTU's National Day of Action against Kennett. Hatred of the Liberals was a powerful force in motivating workers to strike over wages. After years of telling members the way to get pay increases was through top-level negotiations like the Accord, or trading off conditions in enterprise bargaining, left-wing unions like the Metalworkers now have to respond to the bitterness such deals have created among their members. But members' activity can't be turned on and off like a tap. One of the consequences of previous arguments about the importance of workers making Australian industry internationally competitive was to undermine workers' confidence in their own action against the bosses. Damage has been done. But tapping into the generalised political hostility to the Liberals can start to overcome this. Metalworkers' experience after the 30 November strike shows the potential. Bosses at about ten plants accepted the unions' demands. The media, rather than celebrating this as an example of an enterprise agreement, went hysterical. Twice, the Sydney Telegraph-Mirror ran editorials slamming the idea of enterprise agreements made on the back of strong industrial action. This potential to beat the bosses makes the ACTU's negotiation of yet another Accord deal with Labor even more of a joke. _______________________________________________________________________________ The Socialist is the newspaper of the International Socialist Organisation (Australia) Subscriptions Au$50 for a year air mail GPO Box 1473N Melbourne VIC 3001 Australia