Left Behind

The man who set the Balkans aflame in the 90s died on Saturday. The autopsy reports that Slobodan Milosevic died of a heart attack but his cohorts maintain that it was poisoning. Whatever the truth is, the world probably won't mourn the passing of a horrid racist but will regret that his trial never came to a conclusion.

Milosevic's death has caused me to reflect on the SWP's disgraceful role in the Kosovan war of 1999, the conflict that led eventually to Milosevic's downfall. The SWP led (along with various Stalinists) the anti-war campaign in Britain at that time and pioneered the approach they use today of making excuses for and explaining away the crimes of various dictarors and reactionaries. Milosevic was described as "the Serbian equivalent of Norman Tebbit". Now, as horrible and reactionary as Tebbit is, he has (as a fellow AWL member said at the time) never tried to ethnicaly cleanse Wales, which would be the British equivalent of what Milosevic did in 1999. Even Noam Chomsky tried to smear the Kosovan resistance by playing up the Islamist element amongst them (something that he never does with the Palestinians).

Unfortunately, this sort of politics now dominate thinking on the left. It's roots are in Stalinism, which automaticaly branded as progressive anything that opposed US interests whilst smearing anything that stood against it's totalitarian juggernaut. If we don't want the ghost of Stalinist reperession to return to haunt us then we should completely abandon it's methods.