By Nick Beams
Financial Express, April 28, 1999--In all the
acres of print and millions of hours of television programming devoted to the
Balkan crisis, beginning with the dismemberment of the Yugoslav federation in
1991, there has been virtually no coverage, much less analysis, of its
underlying causes.
The reasons for this silence are not hard to
find, for such an analysis reveals that behind the propaganda smokescreen of
"humanitarian" concerns for the fate of refugees and the victims of
"ethnic cleansing," powerful economic processes are driving the
escalating military intervention.
In her 1995 study of the Balkan crisis, Susan
Woodward took issue with the Washington scenario, according to which "rogue
states" had emerged in the post-cold war world "headed by `new
Hitlers' such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Slobodan Milosevic, who defied all
norms of civilised behavior and had to be punished to protect those norms and to
protect innocent people."
Neither was the break-up of Yugoslavia, she
insisted, the result of the springing to life of ethnictensions and conflicts
that had been held in a kind of "deep freeze" during the previous 40
years. Rather, the real origins of the breakdown of civil and political order
lay in the economic decline caused largely by the debt repayment program imposed
by the International Monetary Fund and other international financial
institutions.
"More than a decade of austerity and
declining living standards corroded the social fabric and the rights and
securities that individuals and families had come to rely on. Normal political
conflicts over economic resources between central and regional governments and
over the economic and political reforms of the debt-repayment package became
constitutional conflicts and then a crisis of the state itself among politicians
who were unwilling to compromise."
