Cuba: Yugoslavia endangered World Peace? (Granma) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit source - jclancy@peg.apc.org from GRANMA YUGOSLAVIA Endangering world peace? BY ANTONIO PANEQUE BRIZUELAS (Granma International staff writer) * Since the alleged end of the cold war, global stability has never been so much at risk as it is now, with the current attacks on that Balkan country by the Western powers IS the cold war over? Have military tensions on the planet come to an end? Does the present unipolar system imply peace? Are we regressing to earlier times of nuclear risk among the world's major nuclear powers? The response to these and other questions can be found in Yugoslavia. Indeed, the current strikes on that European nation by the principal Western powers, employing state-of-the-art military technology, has turned Yugoslavia into the epicenter of an armed conflict, that is bringing into play not only the destiny of that nation, but also that of Europe and the rest of the world. The dispute, brought about by the interventionist plans of the United States and the other Western powers in the internal conflict in Kosovo, a territory of only 11,000 square kilometers and of little economic interest, and also a province of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia, has already assumed the dimensions of a problem whose origin is known but whose outcome is totally unclear. The news of the start of hostilities, a hot issue for close to a year, was announced after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's rejected the latest proposals of the Contact Group (United States, =46rance, Britain, Germany, Italy and Russia). These proposals were linked to initial plans to separate Kosovo from the Serb republic and the Yugoslav Federation, involving a foreign presence to "supervise" the dispute. As in similar interventions (Iraq, Haiti and Somalia), the pretext has the same "humanitarian" fa=E7ade, with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) arguing for an intervention directed at "solving" the inter-ethnic conflicts that arose in Kosovo in the 1980s, between the majority population of ethnic Albanians (90%) and the Serbs, due to the separatist aspirations of the first group, encouraged by their foreign partners. However, in the absence of any logic in terms of economic pretensions, with no whiff of oil, uranium or glittering diamonds and gold, the real intentions of the strikes point to geopolitical and strategic interests - in the classic style of Washington and its followers - to maintain and strengthen U.S. dominion, now unipolar, over the world. In regard to Yugoslavia, independently of its government's right to solve its internal affairs without foreign interference, the whole world is aware that the multinational federation has been breaking up in recent years, with the loss, in a similar manner and for similar motives, of the republics of Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia and Macedonia. In addition to those premises, which could strengthen national resistance to defend the country's unity, the people of Yugoslavia have a long tradition of struggle. Yugoslavia is a former colony of Austria and Turkey, and in 1878 two of its subsequent republics, Serbia and Montenegro, achieved their independence after a long and bloody armed confrontation. The 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Austro- Hungarian throne served as a pretext to unleash an interventionist attack on Serbia and, with that, World War I. Then, during the second global conflagration, the Yugoslavs victoriously confronted fascist German troops. Through all of this, the Yugoslav people and its armed forces - once the weaklings of the planet - have demonstrated their strength in the face of invasions. The situation during these few weeks of war against Yugoslavia, in which the military alliance has not relented in its undertaking to continue the war, and the Yugoslav government has persisted in its efforts to defend itself at any price, is steadily increasing the threat to world peace and, moreover, to humanity's very existence, among other reasons because of the awesome possibility of the employment of nuclear arms. =46rom the very first debates on the issue and subsequently during the air strikes, the Russian government has been totally opposed to intervention in Yugoslavia: it has expelled NATO experts from its country, broken off all links with NATO leaders in Brussels and announced the emplacement of nuclear warheads on its borders with Belarus. In recent days Moscow's response has become even clearer. It has sent a fleet of seven warships to the Mediterranean and has announced that additional ships will positioned in the Adriatic, both seas being adjacent to Yugoslavia. While Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeiev announced that it was a fact-finding mission and Washington admitted that it was not a good sign, General Anatoli Kvashnin, chief of staff of the armed forces of the Russian Federation, publicly stated: "If there were a life-and-death decision to be made for Russia, we would utilize all arms at the disposal of the armed forces, including nuclear weapons." According to reports from Moscow, at the same meeting in the Duma (the lower chamber) during which Kvashnin made that announcement, the parliamentary defense commission proposed a strategy envisaging an initial preventive strike by Russia, "if the enemy's conventional forces were stronger" than the Russian ones. To date, the U.S.-NATO operation has been based on rapid and heavy air strikes, in the form of cruise missiles launched from warships in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, fighter planes leaving from Italian bases and B-52 bombers from British territory. Nevertheless, nobody has dared to go into detail about the remaining phases and when and if land troops will be deployed within Yugoslav territory, technically inevitable in a war of occupation. Indeed, in spite of the huge difference in the two sides' military capacity, military sources - including U.S. ones - have admitted the effectiveness of the Yugoslav army's resistance, which has also destroyed various U.S. aircraft, among them one of that country's =46-117 Stealth bombers. Reactions have varied throughout the world. There have been demonstrations in front of U.S. embassies, which, in the case of Moscow, included automatic gunfire; statements from various governments condemning the strikes, among them Brazil, Cuba, China, the Vatican and even Greece, a NATO member, some of whose leaders fear that a war like those that took place in Viet Nam or Lebanon could develop, if a cease-fire is not achieved in time."JC (c) Copyright GRANMA INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL EDITION. La Havana. Cuba ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nyteeu-06.19.99-04:36:27-26539