Milwaukee, WI – Over 20 people gathered at Zao MKE Church to attend the “No to NATO!” teach-in hosted by the Milwaukee Anti-War Committee on May 6. In response to the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Milwaukee Anti-war Committee (MAC) held this event to challenge the pro-NATO narrative pushed in the U.S. Presented by MAC member Stephanie Spalatin and her mother Mira Spalatin, attendees learned about some of the crimes NATO has committed both in the present in Ukraine and in the past in places like the former Yugoslavia, as well as a general framing of NATO as an offensive and not defensive apparatus of U.S. and European Union. imperialism.

Stephanie Spalatin kicked the event off with a presentation covering the history of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, from its inception to its role in the present day. She detailed how despite its initial formation as a U.S. response to the perceived threat of the Soviet Union, NATO remained and in fact expanded after the Soviet Union fell, bent on maintaining U.S. unipolarity.

NATO went on to invade countries such as Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and many others. Spalatin explained how the U.S. admitted to staging a coup in Ukraine in 2014, intensifying conflict in the area and emboldening nazi groups. Unfortunately, the threat of NATO and the U.S., and the insistence on integrating Ukraine into NATO, all but assured the inter imperialist war with Russia.

“Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was illegal by international law – as were the bombings of Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all the other countries over the last 30-plus years by NATO,” Stephanie said. “But an invasion was inevitable, as Russia was not going to sit back and allow NATO to assist in the genocide of the people of the Donbas.”

After hearing a summary of the history of NATO and the current events in Ukraine from Stephanie, her mother Mira Spalatin followed up by elaborating on the NATO campaign that destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which she was involved in resisting in Milwaukee as an American Serb. She described the effect that the campaign had on residents of Yugoslavia, where old ethnic and religious tensions were reignited, and Yugoslavia was split between the west, portrayed as modern and democratic and supported by NATO, and the east, portrayed as Byzantine, primitive and communist, supported by the Soviet Union.

She asserted that Yugoslavia did not need the U.S. and NATO coming in, and said of NATO’s meddling, “It’s like a formula” that never has the best interest of the people in mind. She strikingly remarked, “Democracy is not brought to you by someone else. You have to struggle for it, you have to die for it yourself. It is built through generations, and it is going to be your style, not American style or British style.”

Though the U.S. media propagates pro-NATO rhetoric daily, those residing in the U.S. do not have to go along with this story. It is imperative to study history, cut through the lies, and to resist propaganda that portrays NATO as harmless or a beneficial force in the world. As Stephanie Spalatin said in her concluding remarks, “These are not interventions. They are invasions.”

With many invasions in the past, the urgency of the present, and the likelihood of more invasions in the future as NATO and the U.S. try to maintain their hold, the Milwaukee Anti-war Committee is firmly stating, “No to NATO!”

#MilwaukeeWI #AntiwarMovement #Yugoslavia #NATO #Ukraine

Ljubljana, Slovenia – Although socialism ended in Yugoslavia over 25 years ago, the relics of its socialist past can be found across the former republics, in its cities, its architecture, its museum, and its people.

Until 1991, Yugoslavia consisted of six socialist republics, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro. It was led by Josip Broz Tito, who led the Yugoslavian people in the partisan struggle against fascist occupation and helped to build socialism in Yugoslavia from 1953 to 1980. While socialist Yugoslavia was considered by many communists at the time to be non-revolutionary or revisionist, it nonetheless has an interesting socialist past that can still be found in many places.

I visited Ljubjlana and was pleased to see that much of this socialist legacy is still fresh in the memory of its people. One of the most interesting things in Ljubljana was a museum about the socialist history of Yugoslavia. The museum had over 1500 pieces of art, newspaper articles, portraits of communist leaders, and other socialist memorabilia from the period of socialism.

The owner of the museum gave an uplifting talk about his experience living in a socialist society. He said, “During the socialist period, people had free health care, free universities of a high quality, a very high level of academic freedom unlike anything in capitalist countries, and society was geared to protect the interests of working people. Every worker received 14 days of vacation, and funding from the government to take a vacation; I frequently visited the beautiful Croatian Coast for free during my holiday.”

He went on to say, “Back then, we were all equal and referred to everyone as comrade, irrespective of their nationality, for Tito created a society that strongly promoted the equality of nationalities. It was only when capitalism was in the process of being restored that nationalism was re-ignited, which led to a horrible war in the 1990s that received considerable funding from NATO and the U.S.”

He reported that the death of President Tito was one of the saddest days of his life, and that he still celebrates Tito's birthday each year. The Slovene people still refer to the main street in Ljubljana as the Tito Street even though it is officially called the Slovene Street. One still frequently sees pictures of Tito in many places, from bars and restaurants to museums. There is also a gigantic statue of Boris Kidric, the first communist prime minister of Yugoslavia in the central square of Ljubljana, as well as a handful of monuments to the working people who built Yugoslavia. Indeed, in nearly every museum in Ljubljana, one can find statues of Lenin, socialist realist and constructivist painting, and exhibits highlighting the socialist past.

Ljubljana is a lovely city to visit if you want to learn about the history of the former socialist Yugoslavia. In addition to that, it has a thriving culture, extremely friendly people, and everything there from hotels to food are fairly inexpensive. If one wants to learn about the history of socialism in Yugoslavia, Ljubljana is a great place to start.

#LjubljanaSlovenia #Ljubljana #Yugoslavia #Socialism #Tito

On Feb. 15, the European Union voted to approve an illegal mission to Kosovo, where they will replace the United Nations presence there. The United States already operates the largest military base in all of Europe on Kosovo soil.

Since the US/NATO 1999 air war and the subsequent occupation of Kosovo by the United Nations, terrorists from the ethnic Albanian ‘Kosovo Liberation Army’ (KLA) have waged an ongoing war against the Serbian people. Not one terrorist has been convicted for any of these crimes.

Not only Serbs have been targeted by KLA terrorists. In addition to the destruction inflicted upon Serbia’s religious heritage, over 300,000 people of various nationalities have been driven out by terror and violence. These people include Serbs, Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Hungarians, Croats, Turks and the Albanians who do not support the KLA’s agenda.

The 1999 U.S/NATO war on Yugoslavia took place over the pretext of preventing ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Yugoslav government against Albanians living in Kosovo. It is still claimed by the western press that between 100,000 and 500,000 Albanians were killed by the Yugoslav government prior to the bombardment. Despite these claims, after UN and NATO investigators scoured Kosovo for months to find evidence of genocide, they found 2,108 corpses total. This number included NATO bomb victims and well as Serb civilians killed by the KLA.

Ironically, in the 1980s and early 1990s the same western press documented the terrorist activity of the KLA in Kosovo and considered them to be a terrorist organization as late as 1998. Almost overnight, the KLA turned from drug dealing criminals who openly bragged about cleansing Kosovo of non-Albanians to ‘freedom fighters’ who had to be helped by 77 days of continuous NATO bombing.

The western press repeatedly labeled the Yugoslav leadership ‘defiant’ despite their frequent attempts to negotiate. In actuality, the Yugoslav government agreed to withdraw completely from Kosovo but did not accept NATO’s terms of a permanent occupation of the territory by NATO troops. This condition no sovereign state would ever accept.

The real story is exactly the opposite of what the western press has been saying. The victims of ethnic cleansing were and are the Serbs and other nationalities. The criminals and those who have committed ethnic cleansing are the so-called ‘victims,’ the Kosovo Liberation Army. The current leadership of the Kosovo province that recently declared independence is comprised of war criminals and mobsters. These individuals are part of the UN protection force and have long-held relations with American and European intelligence agencies.

Agim Ceku has been commander of the UN-organized Kosovo Protection Corps. He was ‘prime minister’ of Kosovo from 2006 until 2008. This man was artillery commander in 1995 during Operation Storm, where the government of Croatia expelled hundreds of thousands of Serbs living in the Krajina region of Croatia. In the process they turned everything Serbs owned into rubble and murdered an untold number of civilians. This expulsion is the biggest single act of ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. In recent times, Ceku’s ‘protection corps’ has been criticized for murder and terrorism in a UN report issued to the Secretary-General. No action has been taken against him for any of his crimes.

The man who has since replaced Ceku as prime minister is Hashim Thaci. Thaci has been a leader in the KLA since 1993. Thaci has extensive connections with the Albanian mafia who specialize in smuggling arms, stolen cars and prostitution. This man has been repeatedly given an audience by the United Nations and Washington. This despite the fact that even western news sources such as Jane’s Information Group admit that Thaci’s political party’s major source of ‘funding’ is racketeering from criminal enterprises. Thaci was KLA commander of the Kosovo town of Klecka, where Yugoslav authorities accompanied by reporters of the western media found the bodies of ten Serb civilians – including three women, two small children and three young boys. KLA fighters captured in Klecka admitted that these crimes were connected directly to Thaci.

Aside from the independence leadership being ruled by terrorists and mobsters, this action of declaring independence is illegal even under western-concocted international law. The very first chapter of the United Nations Charter states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” The recognition of the independence of Kosovo is a flagrant violation of Serbia’s territorial integrity.

In addition, in June of 1999, resolution 1244 was passed by the UN Security Council which calls for, “A political process towards the establishment of an interim political framework agreement providing for substantial self-government for Kosovo, taking full account of the Rambouillet accords and the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other countries of the region, and the demilitarization of UCK (KLA).” The terms of this resolution can only be changed legally by a new UN Security Council resolution. No such resolution has been passed.

The ‘independence’ of Kosovo is illegal and rewards the aggressors while punishing the victims.

#UnitedStates #Yugoslavia #Opinion #NATO #Kosovo #Serbia #Europe

Minneapolis, MN – About 25 people rallied at the Federal Building, July 29, to protest the U.S.-led NATO occupation of Yugoslavia's Kosovo province.

Speakers at the rally denounced the murderous invasion and the occupation of the sovereign country. Signs and banners saying, “Clinton is a war criminal” and “Hands Off Yugoslavia” were seen by thousands of passers-by.

#MinneapolisMN #AntiwarMovement #News #Yugoslavia #NATO #Kosovo

“We have assembled here at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial to demand that the war against the people of Yugoslavia be ended, but also because we will be constructing a Yugoslav Veterans Memorial unless the Pentagon war machine is stopped,” said Sara Flounders, co-director of the International Action Center (IAC) which organized the march.

Protesters came from New York, Chicago, Detroit and across the country to march with signs saying, “Stop Bombing Yugoslavia,” “150 schools, 18 hospitals bombed by NATO,” “Clinton and Albright are the Real War Criminals,” and “We Demand Peace!”

Many of the Minnesota protesters, who included high school students, anti-war activists, and members of the Serbian-American community, braved a twenty-hour bus ride. Kat Gordon, a Bloomington high school student, said this after her first national anti-war protest, “I liked the bus ride. People were really open and all committed to the same cause. I think it was really important for us to go and get our point across.”

The demonstration at the Pentagon took place two days after the announcement that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had consented to the occupation of the Serbian province, Kosovo, by NATO ground troops. In spite of this agreement, NATO missiles and bombs continued to rain down on Yugoslavia during the protest.

According to IAC co-director Brian Becker, “This is not a settlement between two equal parties. No, this was nineteen NATO countries with a total population of 600 million carrying out 33,000 bombing attacks on Yugoslavia for more than seventy days. This so-called peace settlement is not about peace, but about the outright occupation by U.S./NATO troops of a sovereign country.” Becker and other speakers called for the right of the Yugoslav people to decide their own country's future.

Michael Bailey, with the Midwest Institute for Social Transformation, commented on the speech by radio journalist, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! “She made the connections concerning why the Western powers want to move into the Balkans since the end of communism, and how economics drives the U.S. choices about whether to intervene or not to intervene. This is not the humanitarian war the U.S. government claims it is.”

Speakers said the Pentagon shouldn't increase its budget while Congress plans to cut spending for education, housing, health care, and food stamps. They also said that the U.S. has no right to intervene in Yugoslavia over human rights, while within the U.S., police brutality and school violence are increasing every day.

Twin Cities On the Move

For Minnesotans, the march on Washington comes in the midst months of local organizing. The Coalition Against US/NATO War on Yugoslavia has brought together many Twin Cities peace groups to organize massive protests and public forums since the bombing began.

At a May 27 demonstration, 200 anti-war activists marched through downtown Minneapolis to Peavey Plaza, outside of WCCO television. The protest targeted the media for working hand-in-hand with the Pentagon in its one-sided reporting of the war.

WCCO-TV has refused to cover the growing anti-war movement and has used a refugee relief fundraising drive to create sympathy for the NATO campaign. After a theater piece with Pentagon generals writing the news reports, protesters delivered a banner with signatures calling on WCCO to do honest investigative reporting.

With the addition of ground troops the war on Yugoslavia is changing, but it has not yet ended. Anti-war activists and Serbian-Americans will continue educating people about the true nature of US/NATO ground troops and what the long term impact is of the bombing campaign.

Kristin Dooley, of the Emergency Committee Against U.S. Intervention in Yugoslavia, said, “The march in Washington showed how many people oppose what the U.S. has done in Yugoslavia, and they will continue to struggle against the occupation. Even if the media turns its back on the situation, the activists will not. We will continue to fight against this illegal and immoral occupation of Yugoslavia.”

#WashingtonDC #AntiwarMovement #News #Yugoslavia #CoalitionAgainstUSNATOWarOnYugoslavia

In the end, an unjust agreement was forced on the Yugoslav government. Kosovo is occupied by foreign troops. British commandos go door to door in Serb villages telling people, “We can't guarantee your survival,” and Yugoslav patriots who resist the occupation are being jailed and murdered.

The Anti-War movement

One response to this criminal war was the construction of a powerful anti-war movement. Tens of millions, in countries around the world said NO to this war. The capitols of Europe were rocked by protests. The U.S. embassy in China was trashed. Sailors in the Greek Navy refused to go into action against Yugoslavia. In Russia and the Ukraine, there were huge demonstrations, and thousands signed up to fight as anti-NATO volunteers.

In our country the anti-war movement can list a number of important accomplishments. By raising a banner of resistance to the war, it was possible to have a real debate about the nature and aims of the war. At the point when the air war ended, that movement was poised to become a more powerful force.

As a part of the international fight against the war, there can also be no doubt that the movement limited the actions of the Western powers. For example, they couldn't introduce ground troops into a “hostile environment” in Yugoslavia.

Serb Americans, who courageously added their numbers and knowledge to the movement, made a critical contribution to the peace movement.

Finally, despite the intense propaganda drive which attempted to give the war a “humanitarian” cover, many people who had not been active in the anti-intervention movement in the past, stepped forward and got involved.

Some Problems

Unfortunately, some people who should know better, were confused and tried to confuse others. As NATO bombs were raining down on factories and farms, they joined the anti-Yugoslavia chorus. Confusing the aggressor with the victims of aggression, these people said that all sides were to blame.

Rather than doing the work to build an anti-war movement, they sat on the sidelines and said silly things like the more we criticize Yugoslavia, the stronger the movement would be. Others showed up at protests calling for “independence for Kosovo,” which in practice means to carve up Yugoslavia and make Kosovo a NATO protectorate.

And the people who called for a “United Nations solution” to conflicts inside Yugoslavia are getting just what they asked for: the U.N. will appoint a government to work hand-in-hand with the occupying NATO troops in Kosovo.

Just as in Iraq, the U.N. solution is the U.S. solution.

More Wars Ahead

The Western powers are competing with each other to extend their political and economic domination over the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Soviet Union. The occupation of Kosovo will speed up their attempts at expansion, and sharpen the competition between them.

The outcome of this will be more wars of aggression by the Western powers. Right now the U.S. is engaged in an air campaign against Iraq. Ships and submarines have been sent to the Yellow Sea for the purpose of threatening people's Korea.

We have entered a period where we can expect more unjust wars. The rich and the powerful in the West are going all-out to seize the land, labor, and natural resources of others. We in the anti-war movement have our work cut out for us.

#UnitedStates #AntiwarMovement #Analysis #Yugoslavia #NATO #Europe

The US government has again launched a massive bombing campaign against a sovereign country. Today as we gather here, hundreds of bombs and missiles are raining down on the people of Yugoslavia.

The US government portrays this as a humanitarian gesture on behalf of the Albanian population of Kosovo. This is a lie that is used to justify this bombing campaign and which serves to conceal the real issues behind US intervention.

Yugoslavia, like Iraq, is in a region of strategic interest to the Pentagon and large corporations that want to dominate it. The US attack on Yugoslavia is motivated by the same lust for super profits that has driven Washington to war in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq and to carry out more than 200 other military interventions around the world.

Is it really possible that the Pentagon is motivated by humanitarian concerns? Wasn't it just three weeks ago that Clinton, when in Guatemala, had to admit that the US government was involved in the war against the Guatemalan people that killed over 200,000 people?

Now, just what interests are in Yugoslavia? First, it is rich in minerals and ore deposits, major oil companies are looking for oil. The big oil companies see it as a possible gateway for pipelines to transport oil from newly-discovered Caspian Sea oil fields into Europe for export. This is really what is being fought out today in Yugoslavia.

The big economic powers represented by NATO are competing with each other over who can control and dominate not just the resources of Yugoslavia and its key trade routes, but this is also a competition for influence through Eastern Europe and the other states once in the USSR.

Washington today is working hand in hand with the other powers in NATO, but at the same time these governments have competing interests. Clinton's mad dash to plant both feet in Yugoslavia before the other big powers can maneuver their way in, may explain why he has moved so fast with so little support.

The people of the Balkans must be free to decide their own destiny. In fact, 400 years of ethnic conflict in the Balkans is not what stands behind the current crisis, but rather the intervention of outside powers.

Beginning in the 1980s, the IMF and Western powers intervened in Yugoslavia in a way that maximized tensions within the federal republic system. By the mid 1980s Yugoslavia was burdened with enormous debt, and the IMF ordered austerity measures that lead each of the constituent parts of Yugoslavia to look for an independent way out of the morass.

The IMF ordered the Yugoslav central government to stop making transfer payments to the separate republics and pay money on the debt. The glue that held together the federation came apart.

Western countries then recognized the internal borders of Yugoslavia as so-called “international borders,” despite the fact that they represented internal gerrymandered borders to maintain internal political equilibrium, not historically separate borders. The fuse was lit.

It is the height of hypocrisy for the US today to feign horrified outrage over events in Kosovo, when in 1995, the US, as the New York Times reported recently, “looked the other way” when the Croatian government drove 200,000 Serbs living in the Krajina region of Croatia out of their homes. Why? Because the “ethnic cleansing” of those people fit into US strategic policy at the time.

US-led NATO intervention today intends to complete the destruction of Yugoslavia and complete the transformation of the region into a series of weak mini-states that are nothing more than protectorates and pieces on the chess board of big power politics.

None of this is in the interests of the vast majority of the people of the US or Yugoslavia or anywhere else in the world. The people of Yugoslavia must be left alone to determine their own future.

#MinneapolisMN #Yugoslavia #IMF #Statement #NATO #Europe

NATO is headquartered in Belgium.

The demonstration was called by the Anti-Imperialist League. A statement from the League noted, “While NATO claims to be defending 'democracy' by bombing the so-called dictator Milosevic, anyone raising their voice against war is confronted with a downright state of siege. There is more democracy in Belgrade than in Brussels at the present moment.”

#BrusselsBelgium #Brussels #AntiwarMovement #Yugoslavia #NATO #WorkersPartyOfBelgium #AntiImperialistLeague #Belgium #Europe

The statement read in part: “Over the past few days, the US government has been poised for yet another military intervention. This time the target is Yugoslavia. The war cry is human rights, but we all know that the Pentagon does not intervene in the interests of anyone but the large corporations.”

The statement concluded, “Modern wars and interventions by the big powers are carried out to determine control of resources, economic and political questions. The threat of intervention is not being carried out in the interests of any of the peoples of the Balkans, but in the interests of those who want to carve up the resources of the region for their own use.”

In a recent interview, Mick Kelly, of the Emergency Committee stated, “There is a growing danger of a US/NATO war against Yugoslavia. Washington is already waging an air war on Iraq, threatening North Korea, and the machinery has long been in place to strike the Balkans. We can not, and will not remain silent in the face of any new war moves. The anti-intervention movement can and will respond to any additional threats against Yugoslavia.”

#MinneapolisMN #AntiwarMovement #News #Yugoslavia #NATO #WorkersPartyOfBelgium #EmergencyCommitteeAgainstUSInterventionInYugoslavia

A statement from the Emergency Committee against U.S. Intervention in Yugoslavia stated, “What is being decided in Kosovo today is what Western power will control the resources and property of Yugoslavia.”

On October 9, demonstrators gathered at the Federal Building to protest U.S. intervention in response to a call from the Emergency Committee. Among the groups participating were Women Against Military Madness, Progressive Student Organization, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and CISPES.

#MinneapolisMN #AntiwarMovement #News #Yugoslavia #EmergencyCommitteeAgainstUSInterventionInYugoslavia

Minneapolis, MN – On August 19, some 60 people gathered at Todos Los Santos Church for “Women on the Frontlines: the First Causalities of War,” an Anti-War Committee forum on the human impact of U.S. policies towards Iraq, Colombia, and Yugoslavia.

After hearing speakers address the effects of war on women, activists called on the highest female government official, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, to take responsibility for her actions against women across the globe. Contrary to the view of liberal U.S.-based women's organizations, forum participants see Albright's role as anti-woman.

One audience member, Maraeka Hoover, commented, “The speakers were great and the forum was really informative. I really enjoyed Nina's [from Yugoslavia] speech. It was really inspirational because she spoke so honestly.”

Forum speakers say that the reality of war is covered up by mainstream media. And, they said, when US wars target civilians, women are the hardest hit.

Layla Asamurai, of Life for Relief and Development, said the US war of bombings and sanctions has been a massive setback for women in Iraq. Before the war, Iraqi women were well-educated and had equal employment opportunities to men.

Sanctions have destroyed most of the economy, and jobs are almost impossible for both men and women to find. Women have been the first to lose their jobs due to lay offs, the need for a family member to stay with a dying loved one, or because making ends meet has become a full-time job.

The health care crisis in Iraq has killed 1.7 million people, the vast majority are women and their children.

Another speaker said that the US has a quieter, but central role in the oppression of Colombian women.

“In January, Congress allocated 300 million dollars in military aid to Colombia. The amount keeps adding up, and Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, said Jennifer Molina, a student activist from the University of Minnesota. She said that U.S. military aid to the Colombian government fuels the civil war in her country.

According to Molina, “The burden of maintaining families ravaged by the warfare is left to women.” The U.S.-funded civil war has forced some 1.5 million people to flee their homes. Molina says, “Women refugees have no sources of employment, housing, food, clothing or health care, and their children receive no education.”

Nina Vukovith, who volunteers with a refugee assistance program at Saint Sava Serbian Eastern Orthodox Church, focused on the impact of US wars on women refugees from Yugoslavia.

The recent wars in Yugoslavia have left many widows with children. When these women are forced to immigrate, to the U.S. for example, Vukovith says they face the challenge of supporting their children in a culture that requires English, transportation, and a dual income.

She criticized Madeleine Albright, comparing her to garbage. Vukovith says she is sickened by Albright's role in U.S. foreign policy, as a diplomat and as a woman.

A banner reading, “Madeleine Albright you can't hide, we charge you with genocide in Iraq, Colombia and Yugoslavia,” was signed by all who attended and will be sent to the Secretary of State when it's full.

#MinneapolisMN #AntiwarMovement #News #Colombia #Iraq #Yugoslavia #WomensMovement #AntiWarCommittee