Editors’ Note: The accompanying article by Ralph Schoenman was posted to the Internet on May 20. It presents a powerful argument against the illusions in the United Nations expressed by many opponents of the U.S./NATO air war, including trade unionists, who seem to think that UN intervention might more fully reflect the views of the whole “world community,” whereas NATO represents only the rich Western nations. Schoenman effectively reviews the numerous cases in which the U.S. and other wealthy Western capitalist governments manipulated the UN to serve their own purposes, as in the Korean war, in Palestine, in the war against Iraq, and in the intervention against the independence movement in the Congo (resulting in the assassination of independence leader Patrice Lumumba), and so on.

Schoenman is wrong, however, in our opinion, to interpret Elaine Bernard’s article as favoring the outlook of “liberalism.” Bernard is a former leader of the labor party in British Columbia, Canada, who has helped build the Labor Party in the United States. Unlike the liberals, Bernard has been a consistent advocate of the need for labor’s political independence. In her article, printed before this one, she simply reports the pro-UN views of various labor organizations, not necessarily advocating those views herself, but arguing for a discussion of the war within labor’s ranks.

Schoenman berates Bernard for not mentioning the San Francisco Labor Council’s excellent statement against the war, which we were glad to see was free of both pro-UN and pro-Milosevic illusions. It doesn’t seem to occur to Schoenman, however, that Bernard might simply not have seen the San Francisco document when she wrote her article. We, for example, did not become aware of the San Francisco statement until May 10. Bernard’s article, though posted on May 14, was probably written some time before that — in other words, before the San Francisco statement became generally known.

— the Editors

Some of those advancing these views propose that a United Nations force should be joined to that of NATO governments; others include U.S. troops. The common thread of their advocacy is to use their opposition to a brutal imperialist war as a lever with which to approve the occupation of Kosovo and the larger region under “respectable” auspices.

Such politics rest upon the false claim that the UN and the supra-national security apparatus of the European Union somehow transcend the class forces which define governments throughout the world.

This advocacy empties opposition to the war against the people of the Balkans of support for the principle of self determination. This is what it means to promote a UN-sanctioned protectorate in the Balkans under the fig leaf of “international law.”

A “Reasonable Solution”?

A full-page ad placed in the New York Times (May 13) by the California Peace Action Education Fund advocates “the immediate deployment of non-military peacekeepers through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe or the United Nations.”

Its adherents include Global Exchange, the American Friends Service Committee, Americans for Democratic Action, Peace Resource Center, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Committees of Correspondence, East Bay Peace Action, Greater Los Angeles Peace Action, and San Mateo Peace Action.

Noam Chomsky articulated the same theme in two interviews with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (April 8) and in his article “The Current Bombings: Behind the Rhetoric,” published in Z magazine (May 16).

Arguing that the U.S. pre-empted a reasonable “solution,” Chomsky said: “When there was a question last September of sending unarmed NATO monitors into Kosovo, every NATO country (with the possible exception of Britain) wanted the operation authorized by the UN Security Council, as is required by treaty obligation. But the U.S. flatly refused. It would not allow the use of the word ‘authorize.’ It insisted that the UN has no right to authorize U.S. action. When the issue moved on to negotiations and the use of force, the U.S. and Britain…were eager to use force and abandon negotiations.”

Chomsky continues: “The U.S. flatly refused to allow the institutions of international order to be involved, so no UN…This act is another blow against a rather fragile system of world order…The Serbian parliament passed a resolution (and) proposed that there…should be an international force…Pursuing that offer, through the mechanisms of world order such as the UN Security Council or neutral countries like India or others, would certainly have been better…

“We should hand over diplomacy and negotiations to some credible source, so hand it over to the Security Council, neutral countries, maybe India, South Africa, Scandinavian countries.”

A similar call has been put forward by Ramsey Clark, Howard Zinn, and Edward Said. The theme has been amplified by other political currents, many of them associated historically with the U.S. Communist Party.

Labor and “Democratizing” the UN

Within organized labor, reflecting a similar political perspective, the General Executive Board of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) declared on April 30: “The UN remains the best vehicle to bring a just peace to Kosovo. A UN-led effort could involve Serbia’s traditional ally Russia…Russian participation in a UN peacekeeping force would be a powerful deterrent to Serbian hostilities.”

Elaine Bernard of Harvard University, in an article titled “Organized Labor and the War in Kosovo” (ZNet, May 14) promotes the Canadian Labour Congress’s “carefully worded statement [which] avoids an outright call for an end to the bombing [but whose] central thrust…is to seek a negotiated peace settlement and demand a meeting of the United Nations to develop a plan to send ground troops into the region as a peacekeeping force.”

Citing these positions as examples of “organized labor giving strong moral leadership in this crisis,” Bernard includes the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union’s “call on the United Nations to launch a major diplomatic effort,…to seek multilateral regional negotiations, and to commit U.S. troops to participation with troops from UN member nations in a peacekeeping force led by the United Nations.”

Bernard makes no reference to the declarations by the San Francisco Labor Council and by the San Francisco chapter of LCLAA, which condemned the U.S./NATO attacks and denounced the larger assault upon working people everywhere.

The Black Radical Congress’s “Statement Opposing the Bombing of Yugoslavia” was adopted by both its National Council and its International Committee on April 18. While criticizing Kofi Annan and advocating the “democratization of the United Nations,” the BRC declares: “The strengthening of the United Nations is one of the most urgent questions of this period. The U.S. has weakened the role of the UN as a genuine force for peace…Yet the UN is the only basis for ensuring world peace and stopping the slow but inescapable path to massive war in the Balkans and beyond.”

The Declaration of the BRC arrogates to the UN the right to occupy, administer, and arbitrate conflicts which “undermine peace” and proposes the inclusion in the Security Council of “Japan, Nigeria, India, Germany, and Brazil.”

Black Democrats are summoned to add their support: “The BRC is calling for the convening of the Security Council to tackle the issue of Kosovo and is calling on all representatives of the Congressional Black Caucus to oppose the rush to war.”

Limits of Liberalism

These positions, notwithstanding the various banners under which they fly, express nothing so much as the limits of liberalism.

The member states of the United Nations are represented by governments which reflect class interests and class forces no different than those that exist in the United States and among its NATO junior partners.

Appearances and myths notwithstanding, the United Nations since its inception has been a central vehicle for the subjugation of dependent peoples and for legitimizing the most murderous imperialist plans.

The division of Palestine was imposed through the United Nations. It created in Palestine a colonial-settler state which martyred the Palestinian people, wiping off the map 385 Palestinian towns and villages in a paradigm of ethnic cleansing.

The relegation of the Palestinian survivors to the status of besieged and pauperized refugees was administered and enforced by UNRWAA [a UN agency].

The Korean war was enacted under the aegis of the United Nations and led to the total destruction of the [economy of the] peninsula and the death of millions.

The independence movement of the Congo was targeted by the CIA and dismantled by the United Nations, as it provided the cover and the means for the exe cution of Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the movement for independence and the Congo’s first prime minister.

The mass murder in Rwanda and Burundi, orchestrated from afar, proceeded with the collusion of the United Nations, which kept people trapped in camps controlled by their persecutors.

In Lebanon, the Israeli invasion and occupation passed through all the areas administered by the United Nations, which provided logistical support on the ground. The massacre of the Palestinians in their camps unfolded.

Secretary-General Butros Butros Ghali oversaw the pillaging by the UN of the population in Somalia. The famine created through the search and destroy attacks by U.S.-led forces became the pretext for the invasion and further devastation of that country by the United States [forces] — with total United Nations support.

Even as these peace advocates promote an occupying role for the United Nations in Kosovo, the United Nations continues to support the embargo against Iraq, which has claimed the lives of 1.5 million people. Under the cover of destroying “weapons of mass destruction,” the United Nations has sanctioned the use of radioactive depleted uranium and of biological agents by the U.S. against the Iraqi people.

Nor has a word emerged from the United Nations about the use of these weapons in the U.S./NATO attacks upon the peoples of Yugoslavia. The bombing and dismemberment of Iraq continues under the cover of the United Nations.

In Yugoslavia itself, the UN — under the Dayton Accords — has overseen the dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the creation of ethnic cantons without the sovereign right to make an administrative decree. The UN sanctified the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the wholesale privatization of the economy. (See the article “Background on the War in Kosovo.”)

Prior to the Dayton Accords, the United Nations imposed sanctions against Serbia, which negatively impacted millions of working people but had little effect on Milosevic and his regime, at that time U.S. allies.

Defend Democratic Rights!

There are no “good” UN occupations. There are no “good” or “humanitarian” wars, waged with U.S. weapons and UN blue helmets.

There is no meaning to democracy when states are required to cede their right and responsibility for health, education, housing, and the social needs of their citizens to private organizations in the service of global capital.

Those in the antiwar movement who provide “humanitarian” and “left” cover to the United Nations in the Balkans are part of the problem confronting the exploited and oppressed, not part of the solution. As we have seen over the span of a half century — from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and now in Yugoslavia — the United Nations provides the model for institutionalizing imperialist intervention after the mass murder has subsided for a fleeting moment.

As in Iraq, so in Yugoslavia, the United Nations will perpetuate the suffering of the people and lay the inexorable groundwork for further destruction. Theirs is a recipe for yet further wars of dismemberment, for there is no country in which ethnic, national, and religious communities do not cohabit with majority and minority others.

In Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania, and Turkey can be found every element of social composition that has existed in Yugoslavia. Peoples are intermixed in their towns and villages, organized as such in their workplaces and their trade unions. The orchestration of [ethnic] division and internecine slaughter required vast social destruction and bloodletting engineered from without.

That was the role of the IMF and World Bank in Yugoslavia. The antiwar advocates who call upon the people of the Balkans to surrender their sovereign will to the UN satraps of a global imperial order do them no service.

They embrace as well a profoundly patronizing and antidemocratic ethos which presumes to maintain that the workers and villagers of Serbia, Kosovo, and the Balkans lack the will and the right to determine their own affairs.

Opposition to wars of subjugation and devastation can only proceed on the basis of the unyielding defense of the democratic rights of people in every society.

Trade unionists, worker activists, and representatives of every ethnic community [need] to unite their efforts in resisting the attack upon them all by the captains of global capital.

Only through the efforts of the people themselves to overcome war and exploitation will an enduring and liberating framework for the population of the Balkans emerge.