NATO’s crimes from Kabul to Belgrade

Over the course of the last 20 years NATO has been revealed as the top criminal conspiracy of the world. It’s the mob boss of all mobsters. NATO, an imperialist military alliance led by the U.S., terrorizes whole continents. From Kabul to Tripoli, NATO is raining death from the skies.

The actual bombings, deaths and destruction are, of course, more of a problem for humanity than the hypocrisy and lies NATO tells. The hypocrisy simply adds insult to injury. Thus NATO not only bombed and killed 11 imams in Libya, but it murdered these religious leaders — who were trying to negotiate an end to the civil war — in the name of “protecting civilians.”

Now that there is no Soviet counterforce to hold their arrogance in check, the leaders of the imperialist powers — and NATO is their weapon of choice — have no shame. They no longer need to even think about a serious military opposition, although that doesn’t stop them from squeezing taxes out of the workers here, so the military-industrial complex can charge cost overruns for more doomsday weapons.

Yet despite their overwhelming military might, NATO has won no wars nor stabilized any conquests lately. Their arrogance leads them to underestimate their enemy: the world’s people, who resist being recolonized. The imperialist armies have spent 10 years in Afghanistan and sent 150,000 troops there, but they still can’t get control of that country. The U.S. invaded Iraq and still has less control there than the ruling class bargained for. And although Libya has only 6 million people, the NATO big shots project it will take months of bombing to achieve their objectives.

On top of all this, the swelled NATO heads may be underestimating another people. After decades as an anti-Soviet alliance, NATO’s first actual war was against Yugoslavia. In 1999, NATO celebrated 50 years of its existence with a 78-day bombing run against Serbia, doing much damage to Belgrade, Novi Sad and some industrial areas of the former Yugoslavia and killing thousands of people. The Pentagon still has an enormous military base, Camp Bondsteel, in the Kosovo province the imperialists want to wrench from Serbia.

Do the NATO tops think the people of Serbia have forgotten all this? They have chosen Belgrade, the capital of Serbia — and once of all Yugoslavia — as the site of NATO’s June 13-15 Strategic Military Partner Conference. This is the part of NATO aimed at integrating countries that used to be socialist into the military alliance. Now the unemployed youth of what have become capitalist countries can be cannon fodder for imperialist adventures in Africa and Asia or be used to surround Russia.

There are already plans for a protest — in the form of a concert — during the NATO meeting. Opponents of NATO’s war against Yugoslavia and the overturn in Serbia are leading a campaign against the conference. It was at open-air concerts in 1999 that Belgrade’s people defied the NATO bombers. Now the organizers are promoting a petition that demands canceling the conference and expelling all the “advisers” from NATO countries now running ministries and institutions in Serbia. See http://goo.gl/WK6bW.

Workers World offers our solidarity to the people of the former Yugoslavia who are resisting NATO. We hope this is another example where the imperialists have underestimated the people. We want NATO and U.S. troops and bombs out of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, just as we want them out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Libya. We must stop the superrich from plundering our budget here just so they can better plunder the rest of the world.

Besides our solidarity, we should remember that the next NATO summit will be held in 2012 in the United States. They haven’t announced a date or venue yet, so let’s keep an eye on it.