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April 9, 1999
An Open Letter to Joschka Fischer
and Our Sisters and Brothers
in Alliance 90/The Greens
An Open Letter to Joschka Fischer
and Our Sisters and Brothers in Bündnis 90/Die Grünen:As American Greens, we have often looked to the German Greens for leadership and inspiration. Your electoral achievements in 1983 brought international attention to Green politics and inspired the beginning of Green Party organizing in the US and many other countries. Your current participation in Germany's Red-Green governing coalition has given us hope that progress toward new models of just and ecological economics and peace politics would be made by Germany and give renewed impetus to Green organizing in the US and around the world.
But now, we have grave concerns about the support that the Red-Green coalition, Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, and the majority of Green members of the Bundestag have given to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The very credibility of Green politics around the world may become a casualty of NATO's war if the German Greens continue to participate in it.
We agree that the repression, violence, and ethnic cleansing of the Milosevic regime against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo is horrific and must be opposed. But NATO's bombing campaign has only made the situation worse. The Serb-led Yugoslav army and paramilitaries are acting with impunity in Kosovo since the OSCE monitors and independent press left Kosovo when NATO began bombing. Now hundreds of thousands of Albanians are fleeing the violence in Kosovo, as the Pentagon and CIA predicted. The US, at least, apparently knew that NATO bombing would be a disaster for the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
How can Greens in the US credibly build an opposition and alternative to this militaristic austerity program when German Greens have gone to war in alliance with Clinton?
When the bombing campaign began, the US leadership told us its purpose was to save the Kosovo Albanians. Now, having utterly failed to meet that objective, we are told that we are at war "to save US and NATO credibility" and "to punish Milosevic." But the NATO bombing has only rallied Serbs behind Milosevic and crushed the political space for an anti-nationalist democratic alternative. While NATO bombing strengthens Milosevic, it hurts all Yugoslav people and creates resentments that will make a just political resolution of all issues in the Balkans all the more difficult.
That German Green leaders would support a US-led NATO military offensive in a non-NATO country is inexplicable to us because it encourages the US to act as a "rogue superpower" and to pursue its objective of extending NATO into the future indefinitely as its military enforcer throughout Europe and the Middle East. With roots in the anti-missile movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s and their call for a Europe without military blocs, East or West, German Greens projected a hopeful vision for a post-Cold War world at peace. Now the US and NATO are using the Yugoslav war to transform NATO from a supposedly defensive alliance into an explicitly interventionist force.
The ramifications of this change in NATO's role are a threat to peace everywhere. The ABM and START treaties and nuclear disarmament negotations between the US and Russia are now in jeopardy. Russia may now drop its no-first-use nuclear policy, which US-led NATO never adopted in the first place. The backlash in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, China, and other countries to the east has strengthened their militarist and ultra-nationalist forces and threatens to create a new cold war and the re-militarization of Europe.
We are distressed that German Green leadership could believe that an alliance with the US political and military leadership could help make Yugoslavia adhere to human rights standards. US leaders will try to impose a result that is in their own geopolitical and economic interests, not in the interests of Kosovo Albanians or any other Balkan people. As Clinton said here in a speech the day before the bombing began, "If we are going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key....That's what this Kosovo thing is all about."
This imperious arrogance of US elites is as dangerous to world peace as the bloody Greater Serbian nationalism of Milosevic is to peace in the Balkans.
If the Clinton administration had a genuine interest in human rights, it would withdraw its military backing of NATO-member Turkey's oppression of the Kurds, Israel's oppression of Palestinians, Mexico's oppression of Indians in Chiapas, and Indonesia's oppression of the East Timorese. It would end the economic sanctions on Iraq that have cost a million lives. It would call off the exploitation and austerity imposed on countries the world over through IMF "structural adjustment" policies, which had no small role in aggravating regional economic disparities and resentments and instigating secessionist movements in the former Yugoslav federation.
At home, if the Clinton administration had a genuine interest in human rights, it would not have revoked the federal guarantee of income support to low-income people and allowed one-fifth of our children today to live below the poverty line. It would not have balanced the federal budget on the backs of low-income people and allowed 44 million people today to go without health insurance. It would not have militarized domestic policy by enacting 50 new death penalties and funding a massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex that now incarcerates over 2 million people.
Clinton was seeking to expand US military spending by $112 billion over the next five years, which means under laws now governing the federal budget that this military money will come from still more cuts in education, housing, welfare, health care, and environment. Now, as a result of NATO's war, US militarists expect to get even higher increases in US military spending locked into the federal budget for years to come.
How can Greens in the US credibly build an opposition and alternative to this militaristic austerity program when German Greens have gone to war in alliance with Clinton?
No quick military solution exists to stop the ethnic cleansing now going on in Kosovo. The bombing has not stopped it, as NATO's military strategists knew from the start. A massive gound force might be able to drive the Yugoslav army from Kosovo, but such a full-scale ground war could cause so much more death and destruction that it might be a cure worse than the cause.
We are doing all we can to stop the NATO bombing campaign because it is only making matters worse. We call for an immediate cease fire by all sides (NATO, KLA, and Yugoslav forces), a re-start of negotiations, and agreement on a UN peace-keeping operation. We demand the replacement of NATO and its diplomacy by military dictate with a UN mandate to end the violence and facilitate a political resolution in cooperation with the OSCE and EU. To enforce a cease-fire and a negotiated settlement, we call for a UN-mandated peace-keeping force that excludes NATO countries that waged war in Yugoslavia, removes the Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitaries that have terrorized and forcibly removed the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, and disarms the KLA. The details of this process must be worked out through the UN/OSCE/EU, not NATO, but we demand that the US, Germany, and other wealthy countries now use the carrot of economic aid instead of the stick of military force to encourage a negotiated settlement.
We see no benefit to Greens being junior partners in a governing coalition if they are reduced to pawns in a US-led NATO policy that contradicts fundamental Green principles.
While ending the bloodletting in Kosovo and Yugoslavia must be the immediate aim, the resolution of the Kosovo issue requires a comprehensive regional peace treaty that offers economic reconstruction to all who sign it. It must aim to stabilize the region economically with a program of economic assistance to overcome the uneven development of the regions that has fueled recent Balkan conflicts. Militarily it must be part of a new post-NATO, European-based cooperative security framework that removes the meddling military forces of the US from Europe. We must undermine the delusion that the US is the "indispensable nation" that should unilaterally police the world, in the phrase coined by Secretary of State Albright that is now fashionable among the ruling elites of the US. This imperious arrogance of US elites is as dangerous to world peace as the bloody Greater Serbian nationalism of Milosevic is to peace in the Balkans.
We call on Foreign Minister Fischer and other Greens in the Bundestag to push for an end to Germany's support for NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia and to support a legitamate international peace-making process. If this causes a break in the Red-Green coalition, so be it. We see no benefit to Greens being junior partners in a governing coalition if they are reduced to pawns in a US-led NATO policy that contradicts fundamental Green principles. Let other parties take responsibility for the military disaster unfolding in the Balkans. It will do more good for the cause of peace and human rights if the Greens maintain the integrity and credibility of our principles.
In solidarity and with respect,
—for The Greens/Green Party USA
[a shorter version of this statement ran in print edition]