The history of the Bosnian crisis is littered with failed imperialist peace plans. Each of them involved a recognition by imperialism of territorial gains made over the slit throats and raped bodies of tens of thousands of civilians. These plans drawn up by retired senior politicians and diplomats—Vance-Owen (Mark I and II), Owen-Stoltenberg, the Contact Group and now Clinton— have all put multi-ethnic Bosnia on the dissecting table.
Each plan has awarded greater and greater gains to the ethnic cleansers. At the same time an unholy alliance of the liberal media and the most hawkish and reactionary imperialist politicians has denounced the UN, the US and the EU for standing back whilst these horrors have gone on unchecked. They have called for a full scale military intervention.
Revolutionaries do not criticise imperialism’s failure as a lack of nerve or will. It is the imperialist system that has failed Bosnia—as we predicted from the beginning.
We said then, and repeat now, that any imperialist intervention in the region—military, “peacekeeping” and political—could only lead to a reactionary outcome.
Turning points
1995 has seen three major turning points, each a striking confmirmation of this judgement:
The fall of Srebrenica and Zepa to Serb militias in eastern Bosnia, the ensuing mass murder of their inhabitants by fascist-led groups, and the abandonment of Gorazde by its UN “defenders”.
This laid the ground for a ?nal settlement on the basis of the remaining territorial ambitions of the Bosnian Serbs. A geographically contiguous, ethnically cleansed area which could federate or fuse with Serbia proper was now almost complete.
The US-backed Croatian offensive in Krajina, and the resulting mass exodus of 160,000 Krajina Serbs.
This served two purposes for the imperialists. It resolved all Croatia’s grievances except for the occupation of eastern Slavonia. It massively weakened and divided the Bosnian Serb leadership and at the same time strengthened Slobodan Milosevic within the pan-Serb alliance.
The imperialist air offensive against selected Bosnian Serb military targets.
This ended their self-imposed ban on offensive military action. The air strikes had the aim of forcing Pale to the negotiating table, in order to ?nalise the ethnic division of BiH.
Genocide in Srebrenica and Zepa
Genocidal attacks on the Bosnian Muslims and the multi-ethnic towns and cities have been repeated in every year since 1991. 1995 has seen no let up in the large scale atrocities too, most notably in the enclaves of Eastern Bosnia. The Bosnian government’s offensive in central Bosnia and in Bihac in late 1994 and 1995 led to Ratko Mladic launching a counter-offensive against “soft targets”, the so-called UN safe havens of Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde.
It also led to the renewal of the bombardment of Sarajevo and eventually, in combination with the Krajina Serbs, to an attempt to wipe out the Bihac enclave altogether.
All of these targets were UN designated “safe havens”, where the UN had put in small garrisons of lightly armed “peacekeepers”.
The Bosnian government (BiH) forces defending these enclaves were pitifully ill-equipped. Some had been actually disarmed by the peacekeepers on Serb insistence.
The “peacekeepers” in fact never struck a single blow in defence of their charges. They hid in their bunkers as the Serbs moved in.
Then after slivovitz and cigarettes with the conquerors—including a videoed friendly drink with Mladic—they boarded their armoured vehicles and drove off into the sunset.
The result was the brutal ethnic cleansing of Srebrenica. 25,000 were bussed to BiH lines with UN complicity whilst 2,500 prisoners of war were reportedly massacred by the Serb militias. Why did ethnic cleansing on such a scale not provoke UN retribution? Because the imperialists were already working on a plan which conceded these “indefensible “ areas to the Serbs.
Mladic’s tightening stranglehold on Sarajevo however could not be ignored. A Bosnian government offensive to relieve the city failed due to the massive mine?elds the Serb militias had laid. Without armour, heavy artillery and air cover it proved impossible to break the siege.
However Mladic’s seizure of UN military observers as hostages, whilst it provided a temporary spectacle of the imperialists’ impotence, merely opened the road to a more decisive US intervention. The British and French were alienated and responded by sending in the Rapid Reaction Force. The imperialist powers were momentarily less divided than at any time since the war began.
The Serbs, they could all agree, had to be taught a lesson:
• for the sake of the New World Order elsewhere
• to make them realise that this latest attempt to consolidate a Greater Serbia was bound to fail, that there was a limit to their expansionism.
In addition the onslaught on Bihac in concert with the Krajina Serbs was the last straw for Tudjman’s Croatia. If it had succeeded it would have made the recovery of Krajina dif?cult if not impossible. Tudjman saw the opportunity afforded by imperialism’s’ impatience with the Serbs and launched his deadly onslaught in the Krajina.
The Croatian Offensive
Three months after the swift re-occupation of Western Slavonia in May, Tudjman launched Operation Storm, occupying the entire Serb Republic of Krajina (RSK). 160,00 refugees ?ed to Serb-held northern Bosnia and to Serbia itself.
Tudjman struck at a moment when the RSK was at its most isolated and vulnerable. Its chauvinist leadership engaged in joint actions with the Bosnian Serb Republic and the criminal adventurer Fikret Abdic to wipe out the enclave of Bihac.
Thus the plight of the Serb refugees aroused little international sympathy or protest beyond the habitual backers of Serb expansionism. In the aftermath of the Croat victory, UN and EU observers stood by while the Croat army butchered the remaining elderly Serb inhabitants.
This monstrous act of ethnic cleansing must be condemned and actively opposed by all working class internationalists.
The mass of the population of Krajina have had no say in their leadership’s criminal actions, let alone control over them.
Of course the political leadership of the RSK under Milan Martic, are no innocent victims. In 1990-1, with the aid of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and the Yugoslav National Army, they drove over 400,000 Croats out of the Krajina and Slavonia. By bombarding the coastal roads and ports, and blockading the road and rail system linking Croatia proper to the Dalmatian coastal regions, they brought Croatia to the verge of disintegration as a state.
They pushed forward and occupied territory inhabited by only a minority of Serbs before 1990. They joined in the assault on the hard-pressed Bosnian Muslims. Their leadership’s objective was to create a Greater Serbia, no matter what the cost in terms of displacing the Croat and Muslim population. No socialist can support such war aims.
We supported solely and exclusively the self defence of the regions of Krajina that were majority Serb areas before the forced population movements which began in 1990.
We supported the right to self-determination only of these areas, including their right to secede from Croatia. But we never advocated such secession.
The geographical, economic and ethnic composition of both the RSK and Croatia make complete separation a reactionary utopia. It was the attempt to make this goal a reality which led Martic and co. to involve themselves to the hilt in the Bosnian con?ict and the project of a Great Serb state whose territory would stretch from Serbia proper through northern Bosnia to the Krajina.
Only a renewed federal system, based on the freely given consent of the various nationalities and ethnic groups, or on a genuine and full autonomy for all minorities, combined with the restoration of full economic links, can solve this terrible con?ict.
Tudjman’s aims are equally reactionary. He was determined to clear Krajina of its Serb population, people who have lived there for at least three centuries.
Tudjman wants to create a Greater Croatia by incorporating a substantial part of Bosnia, under the cover of a phoney federation.
Socialists must totally oppose the Croatian occupation of the Serb majority areas of the Krajina. During the war between the RSK forces and the Croat state workers should have refused to take sides, ?ghting alongside RSK forces only where tactically necessary for the legitimate defence of populations faced with ethnic cleansing.
NATO strikes – to divide Bosnia
In August 1995 the major imperialist powers grouped in NATO began the use of large scale air attacks against the Bosnian Serbs. Despite the scale and duration of their attacks, they do not as yet constitute a fundamental shift of position by the imperialists from overall neutrality to decisively siding with the BiH forces
There has been no all out attack either on the military personnel or the urban population of the Bosnian Serb Republic. Military targets were initially restricted to the radar and surface-to-air missiles of the Bosnian Serb Republic and to the artillery batteries which have wreaked havoc on the multi-ethnic cities and enclaves of the Bosnian Republic. No more than 10% of the latter were knocked out in the ?rst two weeks of action.
The imperialist intervention, using the pretext of yet another horri?c Serb mortar attack on the Sarajevo market district, was no act of justi?ed retribution, but a coldly calculated manoeuvre to force both Pale and Sarajevo to accept a new US peace plan.
NATO proclaimed that its objective was not to takes sides in the con?ict but only to break the three year long siege of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serb Army. They promised to eliminate its capacity to bombard Bosnia’s towns and cities repeatedly and at will.
To the unwary this might seem a laudable objective after the atrocities in Tuzla and Sarajevo, which has seen 10,000 civilians killed in the siege. Taken on their own these objectives would be progressive ones, just as the BSA’s siege of the cities is reactionary.
But they cannot be taken on their own. The progressive or reactionary content of wars, and of even limited military actions, can not be judged by isolated actions alone. They are indeed the “continuation of politics by other (violent) means”. The question must be asked: what are the objectives of the combatants?
The political aims of the imperialists, since their intervention in the break up of Yugoslavia, are reactionary. They are to create a stable framework for completing the restoration of capitalism and establishing one or two of the Yugoslav successor states as gendarmes for imperialism in the Balkans. To this aim they have subordinated the national rights of Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs. Their peace plans are reactionary and must be opposed in every one of their manifestations.
No worker, no consistent supporter of multi-ethnic Bosnia, can support the NATO military action. It must be condemned.
Having used the arms embargo for four years to prevent the Bosnians from defending themselves, having kept the population on a drip feed of minimal “humanitarian aid”, the air strikes were designed:
• to bring the Serbs to accepting the terms on offer from Holbrooke
• to “prove” to the Bosnians that only imperialism can guarantee their survival in a tiny statelet, and to force them to give up their goal of a multi-ethnic Bosnia.
Both the NATO air strikes and the new peace initiative are a continuation of a policy adopted over a year ago. Faced with a con?dent Serb nationalism, unwilling to compromise, the USA set about ?nding an enforcer on the ground. It turned to Tudjman’s Croatia.
The USA ?rst of all promoted the formation of a Croat-Muslim federation in Bosnia itself and then brokered a military alliance between Sarajevo and Zagreb. It publicly tolerated and privately encouraged Croat offensives to recover the western Slavonian enclave and then the Krajina.
But they have tried hard to avoid creating a force which could go onto the offensive in Bosnia and recover the ethnically cleansed lands. After the Croats’ reactionary ethnic cleansing of Krajina they immediately ordered them to desist from any joint offensive with the BiH army in central Bosnia.
They thus revealed that their true purpose was not justice for the displaced and cruelly oppressed Bosnian people but the stabilisation of the situation via a deal between Zagreb and Belgrade.
In seeking an agreement to withdraw the heavy weapons, and a cease-fire, the imperialists are not seeking to alter the long term military balance between the BiH and the RS. If the balance has now shifted against the Serb forces it is a result of the Croatia army’s extension of the Krajina offensive into Western Bosnia.
The reason for the self-imposed limits on the NATO “war” aims has been stressed by the LRCI since the beginning of the conflict. The imperialist powers, despite their differences over tactics, have a common aim: the containment of Serbia, not its defeat and subjugation.
US and EU imperialism are seeking to defuse the possibility of a Serb-Croat all out war that could drag the neighbouring states into a real Balkan War, and thus avoid the enormous damage this could wreak on NATO, the EU, and their relations with Yeltsin’s Russia.
Three vital concessions have been handed to the warring parties: the Bosnian enclaves surrendered to the Serbs, Krajina “cleansed” by the Croats and the siege of Sarajevo lifted by US bombing. Each has been paid for with the blood of innocent civilians and conscript soldiers.
Now US imperialism has taken the lead in sponsoring a peace deal. Its principal victims will be the multi-ethnic cities and towns of BiH and their working class and student movements.
The ethnic-Muslim population will be pressured into a pseudo-national existence which they never sought, and moreover as an oppressed nation. An inevitable future national liberation struggle by the Bosnian Muslims, analogous to that of the Palestinians, is being prepared.
The imperialist peace deal if it goes through will be a peace to end all peace in the Balkans in the decades ahead.
The beleaguered population of Sarajevo greeted the NATO bombings by dancing in the street. But these celebrations will soon turn to mass protests and even despair as the plans for partition become clear.
The hopes and illusions in imperialist peace, fostered by Alia Izetbegovic, Haris Siladjic and Mohammed Sacirbey since 1991, are going to be shattered in the cruellest fashion.
Like the Vance-Owen, Owen-Stoltenberg, and Contact Group plans before, the current peace plan, unveiled in Geneva on 8 September 1995, represents a further concession to Milosevic and Tudjman’s chauvinism and expansionism. It is a recognition and reward for three years of ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide.
The Geneva Accord is a deceitful basis for the dismemberment of Bosnia into two statelets which will initially be spheres of influence for Milosevic and Tudjman but which will probably rapidly evolve into little more than regions of their republics.
Whilst it solemnly proclaims the continued statehood of BiH “within its present borders with continued international recognition”, it immediately outlines its division into two state entities; the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska). Both will have “parallel special relationships” with Croatia and Yugoslavia (Serbia-Montenegro) respectively.
The “right of return” of refugees is being systematically denied in the current peace plan. Tudjman is busily enacting a law to prevent the return of the Krajina Serbs and to confiscate their property.
The Geneva peace plan now includes, on the insistence of the Bosnian Serbs, “compensation” as an alternative to return.
Of course, say the imperialist peace brokers, the refugees of all ethnic groups will still be “free to return” to life under the guns of those who expelled them and killed their relatives.
They know that few will avail themselves of that right.
The plan threatens also to include the division of Sarajevo, by exchanging territory, into compact ethnic zones. The Pale regime’s concession of 21% of the territory they presently hold is not so remarkable when the nature of the terrain (sparsely inhabited mountains) is considered.
Professor Koljevic, deputy to Radovan Karadzic, remarked:
“I’m quite sure we can do the swaps—exchanging quantity for quality, especially land in the Brcko corridor.” (Independent on Sunday 10 September 1995)
Behind closed doors in Paris and Geneva, the USA, its European allies and the major players, Belgrade and Zagreb, have prepared a deal to impose on Pale and Sarajevo.
The coming weeks and months will see all the stops pulled out to overcome the reactionary resistance to this deal from sections of the RSK leadership and the progressive resistance to it from sections of the Bosnian population and armed forces.
Should Socialists Take Sides in Bosnia?
Since the Autumn of 1992, when the Bosnians found themselves the target of a genocidal onslaught by both Serb and Croat nationalists, the LRCI has stood for the defence of multi-ethnic Bosnia and urged workers to take sides with the BiH forces.
Despite the reactionary nationalist politics of the leadership of the BiH government, the Bosnians were waging a just war of self-defence against genocide. Despite the NATO air attacks on the Serb forces, this remains the case today.
The Serb and Croat nationalists’ project of creating “Greater” states for themselves at the expense of the Bosnians are reactionary through and through.
The very existence of both the Muslim ethnic group and the multi-ethnic cities and towns of Bosnia was an obstacle to that project. Hence the mass ethnic cleansing and expulsions carried out by the Bosnian Serbs and their fascist allies in the Summer and Autumn of 1992 and by the Herzegovina Croats in early 1993. The Bosnian Muslims were faced with genocide.
Despite their reactionary nationalist leadership it was necessary for the world working class to support their right to self defence against that genocide.
Throughout we have warned of the reactionary consequences of the policy of Izetbegovic and co, in particular their slavish reliance on imperialism and their repeated, if largely unsuccessful, efforts to embroil it on their side in war with the Serbs. The LRCI warned repeatedly that if they were successful in achieving this then the Bosnians themselves would soon rue the consequences.
The large scale bombing of Serb targets by imperialist warplanes naturally provokes the question: should socialists take sides with the Bosnian Serbs against imperialism?
Aren’t the Serbs objectively anti-imperialist? Is it not the case that imperialism is always “the main enemy” and therefore whoever is fighting it becomes a “lesser evil” and objectively anti-imperialist?
Marxists never take positions in a war on the basis of abstractly counterposed definitions of the combatant states: imperialism, degenerate workers state, semi-colony etc.
Vital as these categories are, they cannot be used to replace a concrete analysis of whether the parties in a given war are progressive.
They cannot be used in isolation from the fundamental objectives the warring sides are pursuing. A war to defend a workers’ state or a semi-colony against conquest and exploitation by an imperialist state is a progressive war.
A war by a section of the fragmenting chauvinist bureaucracy and nascent bourgeoisie of a moribund workers state, to commit genocide against a section of its population is a reactionary war.
A limited, tactical, military intervention by imperialism against the reactionary side in such a national war does not in and of itself change the character of that war and render the Bosnian Serbs “progressive”.
An all out imperialist intervention which subordinated the BiH forces to its reactionary aims would be a different matter (see below).
Thus in Bosnia we have to look at the concrete aims of NATO and the Bosnian Serbs in their present limited conflict. We maintain that they are both thoroughly reactionary.
Whoever sides with the Serbs—if they are serious—must wish to see their victory in the given conflict. They must not only desire to see NATO warplanes downed by the Serbs but the continuation of the siege of Sarajevo and Tuzla.
The Serbs are not trying to drive the UN or NATO forces out of Bosnia.
They are continuing their four-year campaign to drive the Bosnians out of Bosnia.
Do the NATO air attacks make this objective any less reactionary? No! What the Bosnian Serbs are actually “fighting imperialism” over is the “right” to continue to besiege and bombard Sarajevo. Thus the limited conflict of the Bosnian Serbs with imperialism is not a progressive struggle. It is not in, the Leninist sense of the word, either objectively or subjectively “anti-imperialist” at all.
The imperialist powers have been drawn into this conflict, not in order directly to annex the Balkans to the EU nor immediately to restore capitalism, but to prevent a reactionary nationalist war de-stabilising the World Order.
Above all the imperialist powers sought to prevent multi-ethnic Bosnia from acquiring the means to defend itself (the arms embargo) and indeed liberate the ethnically cleansed majority Bosnian areas.
Without an airforce, without tanks and heavy artillery, all attempts to do that are doomed to failure.
As imperialism revealed its true reactionary role, greater and greater numbers of the BiH working class have come to realise that imperialism can do nothing progressive in the region.
Thus the British “defenders” of Gorazde had to retreat amid the gunfire of the local BiH militia who were justifiably trying to seize their arms and ammunition, the better to prepare the real defence of Gorazde.
The danger today is that the confidence of the Bosnian masses in the warplanes of the USA will be restored, and not directed where it should be: the power of their own militias and the solidarity of the world working class.
If so, that confidence will be dangerously misplaced. In the coming months it will be terribly disabused in the peace negotiations that will emerge from the present round of secret diplomacy.
The working class of Bosnia desperately needs to forge its own independent answer to the crisis.
This needs to start with the realisation that NATO, the UN and the European Union are Bosnia’s worst enemies. Whatever tactical advantages the air/artillery bombardment presents to the BiH militia on the ground, overall, strategically, it is reactionary, leading to an end to the struggle for liberation.
Indeed the Pentagon has ordered Izetbegovic’s troops not to take local advantage of the onslaught, lest this upset the plan to secure a reactionary peace in Paris.
During the Rapid Reaction Force bombardment on 29 August UN sources revealed that the BiH forces “had also opened fire with artillery but stopped when the UN threatened to attack them” (Independent 1.9.95).
The mid-September victories of the Croat-BiH forces in north-western Bosnia. whilst they can return thousands of Muslim refugees to their former homes, could simply become part of Tudjman’s drive to make his map a reality.
The BiH working class and militias should denounce the NATO/UN actions and demand their immediate end.
They should demand the breaking of the political alliance with Croatia, place strict limits on military collaboration with Croat forces, denounce the Croatian army’s ethnic cleansing and strive to prevent its repetition in central Bosnia.
Clearly there are already major divisions amongst the Bosnian multi-ethnic population and these are reflected within its government and its leading force the Party of Democratic Action (SDA).
Izetbegovic is inclined to go furthest towards it. As an ethnic-Muslim nationalist he is most likely to concede to the idea of an ethnic partition with only a façade of multi-ethnic Bosnian unity.
His problem is that many ethnic Muslims, especially the soldiers who make up the 7th Brigade, are composed of survivors of the ethnic cleansing of northern and eastern Bosnia. They are ?ghting to recover their homes and will not easily accept a partition which assigns these regions wholly and exclusively to their former torturers.
On the other hand the most multi-ethnic populations—in Sarajevo and Tuzla will resist the principle of ethnic partition.
At the moment they look to premier Siladjic as an opponent of such a partition. But Siladjic is a bourgeois politician unable to give the lead that the Bosnian workers opposed to the US deal need.
It is vital that the working class, especially in Sarajevo and Tuzla, establishes its political class independence, distinguishes itself from all forms of nationalism.
It must denounce the NATO intervention and the US peace plan. It must struggle against the SDA government and as soon as is possible overthrow it both in defence of its own class interests and gains and in the interests of preserving a multi-ethnic Bosnia.
It must address to the war-weary Serb and Croat Bosnians, and indeed to the workers of Serbia and Croatia proper, a call for a mass working class movement to drive from power the opportunists and criminals who have wreaked havoc over the last five years.
A clarion call must be made to the workers of Zagreb and Belgrade for a peace based on strict national equality, the return to their homes of the refugees of every national or ethnic group, of the right to self-determination within the framework of a federation based on the power of the working class of the cities and the working peasants in the countryside.
The working class alone can bring a progressive conclusion —a real peace to this dreadful war. It is the only alternative to either a reactionary peace or a further spiral into barbarism.
Danger of escalating war
During the NATO air bombardment of early September 1995 the LRCI summed up its slogans
NATO has chosen a “high risk strategy” to bring about its peace deal, one that could still lead to the embroilment of its air and ground forces in a full scale war with the Bosnian Serbs, thus even drawing in Belgrade’s regular forces and leading to a diplomatic face off with Russia.
The Vietnam syndrome means that the US military has to intervene with massive technical and numerical force as to assure minimum allied casualties. This tendency to “overkill” runs the danger of escalating the conflict rather than settling it.
The Vietnam syndrome also demands that operational control is given to the US generals, not the politicians. Thus a “contingency plan” to blitz the economic infrastructure of the RSK has been drawn up as a matter of course and casually made public by the generals—even though it is politically unthinkable to the British and French politicians at present.
The longer NATO’s involvement goes on the more it will strengthen the hand of those US politicians who have advocated the all out military alliance with a BiH/Croat federation.
Therefore it is possible, if at the moment not the most likely outcome, that the present actions will escalate into one where imperialism decisively sides with an unleashed Croatian-BiH military alliance and changes its war aims accordingly.
But this would tearing up Clinton’s present plan, and a radical break with Belgrade. It would alienate Russia and China, as well as Greece within NATO and the EU.
It would put an end to using the cover of the UN because of the Russian/Chinese vetoes. Similarly, Greece could prevent the use of the EU mandate.
What is more Britain and France would be at best unwilling allies in such a development. They have threatened to withdraw their forces altogether.
Revolutionaries would be obliged to alter their strategy in the event of a decisive imperialist intervention on the side of the BiH forces, such that it subordinates the latter’s war aims both to those of their imperialist masters and their reactionary Croatian allies.
It would entirely alter the character of the war.
In such circumstances the defence of Bosnia would become subordinate to the defeat of imperialism.
Despite the horrendous crimes of the Bosnian Serb leadership revolutionaries would have no option but to see their victory over an imperialist occupation force as preferable to the imposition of a new imperialist order by imperialist military force.
But that situation has not yet come about.
The Bosnian Serb Republic is under direct attack by imperialist warplanes, cruise missiles and the British and French ground troops of the Rapid Reaction Force.
Whilst we recognise the right of the Bosnian Serbs to defend their traditional majority areas against attack by these forces, it cannot make us in the present conditions defencist with regard to the Bosnian Serb Republic.
Thus in the present limited military conflict between NATO and the Bosnian Serbs, revolutionaries must take a revolutionary defeatist position on both sides.
We condemn the NATO intervention, demand an end to it. We demand the immediate withdrawal of all imperialist troops from Bosnia.
At the same time, we continue to support, critically, the BiH forces in their war of self defence and liberation.
We likewise demand an immediate end to the Bosnian Serb siege of Sarajevo and the surrender of all territory seized as a result of ethnic cleansing since 1991.
Immediately workers throughout the world should demand:
• Stop the air strikes, stop the artillery bombardments, UN/NATO out of the Balkans!
• Down with the reactionary Geneva peace plan! Down with secret Diplomacy!
• Defend multi-ethnic Bosnia. No to imperialist peace plans which carve up Bosnia on ethnic lines
• Once the ethnic cleansers are defeated any settlement must include the right of self determination to all nationalities in Bosnia, including to separation.
• Victory to the forces of BiH in their struggle to regain the lands stolen by the ethnic cleansers! No reliance on imperialism. No holding back on imperialism’s instructions!
• For the right of all refugees, all victims of ethnic cleansing, including the Krajina Serbs to return to their homes. For multi-ethnic militias in all intermixed areas to protect all nationalities.
• End the Arms Embargo! Send heavy artillery, tanks and plans to the BiH army with no conditions!
• End the Economic Blockade of Serbia!
• Restore the devastated economies of all the former Yugoslav states with a workers’ plan which defends the working class against restored capitalist exploitation!
• For a multi-ethnic Workers state of Bosnia as part of a Socialist Federation of the Balkans!
• Massive working class protest action across the world against the reactionary peace deal, for multi-ethnic Bosnia and for the immediate withdrawal of NATO/UN troops.