In March 1999 the German population finds itself confronted with a new situation: the German military, several thousand highly armed troops for air and ground war, together with other NATO countries, is in full deployment for attack against a state on the Balkans.

This state has not committed any aggression against Germany or any other NATO country. Whatever mistreatment and deprivation of rights against the Albanian minority the Serbian regime must be reproached of, it won't do that just NATO constructs a self-justification for military intervention from that.

The leading NATO country, the USA, and other important NATO members like Turkey for many decades have been daring to commit deprivations of rights, expulsions, massacres and other terror against large parts of the population in many countries. The US uses to do that indirectly, by the regimes it supports financially, militarily and by providing torture specialists; Turkey has ever been treating its Kurdish nationality which is ten times as large as the Kosovo Albanians, much worse than these ever were treated. If you follow the standards applied today because of Kosovo, dozens of military blows already longtime should have been delivered against the US, Turkey and other countries. 

When from 1991 to 1995 Serbia committed aggressions against Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, when it committed fascist mass butcheries and mass rapes, NATO was very lenient and ordered a weapons embargo - hitting above all the adversaries of Serbia.

As it is said in the West itself, it is not about Kosovo in the first place, but about the precedence the decisive NATO powers, first of all the US but also Germany, want to create for their policy of "out of area" actions. Within NATO, and above all in front of the world public, they want to push through the right to militarily intervene at any point in the world, if the Western capitalist system sees a violation of its interests. Even the obstacle still in 1991 formed by the UN , the mandate of which was considered necessary for the war against Iraq, shall be made obsolete. The gathering and practical application of NATO intervention forces, especially with German participation, is for the first time to be tested in practice on a large scale. For the Albanian population of Serbia there is no real political concept, as commentators from the US themselves critically remark. 

It is the coalition of the Greens and the Social Democratic parties which for the first time since the end of the Nazi regime, 54 years ago, is using the German military for an outward aggression. It was the foreign minister of this coalition, the Green J. Fischer, whom the media so snugly use to call "Joschka", who told the parliament that it is "war against Serbia" for which his government is decided, and that it is the case of the NATO giving the mandate to itself, that is to say the invalidation of the UN charter. The congress of his party in March, 1999, expressedly confirmed him in this policy. 

It is the Green party which for more than 20 years has been worming into the support and the tolerance by parts of the population by an alleged radically pacifist propaganda. Posing itself upon a supreme moral pedestal it has been dressing down people who reminded of the fact that there are also just wars. Today this party's subservience is second to nobody if it is time to change all former declarations and to help the US to get troops for aggression off the ground.

It is the Green party which for more than 20 years has been crusading against the civil use of nuclear energy with the argument that from its nuclear by-products weapons materials can be produced. Today it is revealed that exactly these people do not have any inhibitions to entrust the biggest nuclear military power, NATO, which expressedly reserves the right for the nuclear first strike for itself, with the role of world police. 

Whoever thought that there could not exist a stronger contradiction than between anti-nuclear radical pacifism and nuclear big power arrogance, has to think about how it comes that both coincide in the Green party.

NATO's demand for the right for world-wide military intervention is substantiated, apart from hypocritival human rights and democracy phrases, by the protection of the West's interests in a secure supply of raw materials, among others. What does NATO mean by "securing the supply of raw materials"?

In the first place there belong to it the streams of oil and natural gas which traditionally flow from the Arabian-Iranian region, and increasingly also from Russia and Central Asia, to Europe, the US and the industrial centres of Eastern Asia. These streams ultimately are controlled by the US which, of course, lets its most important allies as Great Britain, Germany, France and Japan, participate in a second class position in the exploitation of these world wide resources. The dependence of almost all countries fromt this international energy monopoly yields not only global superprofits, but above all also a decisive control over their economic development. 

The example of Russia is illustrative of the fate hitting those countries which are to take the role of the energy suppliers in this system. There is virtually no development at all any more, except for the export of the hydrocarbons, everything is in decay, and development is not even wanted because it could interfere with the dependence of the country. Misery, complete lack of perspective for the overwhelming majority of the population are much worse even than under czarism, and this fact alone is completely sufficient to pass sentence because of crime against humanity on the forces from the West and from the Russian upper class itself who are responsible for this development. Also in the Middle East, the traditional oil region, for many decades no development was permitted except for a completely dependent upper class which is drowned in money, whereas any attempt for emancipation is blocked by the Western military power. 

Presently there are great efforts to get the whole production of energy and the pipelines in the whole Russian and Central Asian region, from the Caucasus to Afghanistan under Western control. There are even aspirations being uttered of a stronger taking in hand the largest countries in the world, China and India, by means of energy policy. 

What, however, is to happen if countries, if social movements hit back, if rivalries erupt, if energy ressources and pipelines in these vast regions are taken over, and the "secure supply" of Europe, Japan and other countries is in danger? Then, NATO imagines, its "rapid reaction forces" swing into action - then also German soldiers will be allowed and even obliged to go into the Caucasus again and participate in playing world sheriffs.

The development of nuclear energy which is possible especially in Europa but also in many more countries which are dependent in terms of energy policy, and which depends only to a small degree from international raw materials supply, in principle does away with this whole miserable international US-imperialist system. So at least one of the sources of the fanatism by which, particularly in our country, nuclear energy has been fought since 25 years is easily to be identified. It is about integrating Germany as strongly as possible into this system. A country the economy and population of which are fundamentally dependent on it will be all the more prone to provide its youth for the imperialist war adventures, if, for example, "there are disturbances in Asia" - it is calculated. Viewed from this side it is no wonder that the parties of the so-called exit from nuclear energy are also the parties of maximum willingness to make possible NATO's world-wide military interventionism and its precedence Kosovo. Exit from nuclear energy and NATO arrogance suit each other very well.

The world-wide energy monopoly of the US, the military interventionism by NATO are by far not the only instruments of the global dictatorship claimed and intensified by the Western capitalist system. Strategies as turning up in the reduction of population, in anti-industrialism, in the declaration of war against the ethical fundamental structures of society, attack on a much more fundamental level and have to be uncovered and fought adequately. They complement the military threat. Our group has for longtime seen both and engaged in the corresponding counter propaganda.

Today it is one of the most elementary demands that NATO's world-wide military interventionism must be resisted. Ecologism in its central components must be refuted. And the fundamentally dirty, arch-imperialist lackey character of the whole green and ecologistic movement appears in the fact that almost all its participants from top to base do not utter the slightest opposition if today Fischer talks big with threats of war and the Leo tanks and Tornado planes are transferred to the Balkans. The same reproach fits by far the largest part of the so-called left of this country, which has inextricably involved itself with the ecologistic movement and just today, when matters become concrete, is writing the criticism of NATO policy with very small letters, if it is writing anything at all. 

Walter Grobe
(Redaktion NEUE EINHEIT)   
 99/03/19
  ( a quick translation )