Has the bombing against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia brought forth any peace to Kosovo and Yugoslavia? No. Definitely not. Even though NATO labeled Milosevic as 'today's Hitler', the merciless bombing in the name of 'humanitarian intervention' can never be overlooked.
Due to the dropping of depleted uranium shells, the soil of Yugoslavia has been all contaminated with radioactivity semi-permanently. This is not all. Bloodshed is still going on between Serb residents (who find their identity in Serbian Orthodox Church) and Albanians (who believe in Islam), driven by religious antagonism.
In Kosovo, now placed under the military control of NATO and Russian forces, Albanian residents led by the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) are escalating their violent attacks against Serbs (and Roma). Over 150,000 Serb residents who fled Kosovo are still in refuge for fear of revenge by the KLA. Disregarding this tragic bloodshed, the rulers of the United States have dared to build a gigantic military base in southern Kosovo, which aims at the expansion of Russia towards the West. This nakedly shows their intention to make their military occupation of the region permanent.
In our Appeal last year, we wrote:
'NATO ceased fire on June 10th. However, this never means the end of the tragedy; it means the beginning of another one, for the NATO allies' military occupation of Kosovo is leading to the partition of Yugoslavia and adding fuel to the flames of religious / ethnic antagonism.'
As we raised the alarm, a new tragedy has been brought about in actuality by national or ethnic conflicts between Slavs and Western nations, which are connected with religious opposition among Catholicism / Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam. This could be a flash point of another warfare in the Balkans, the 'powder keg of the world'.
Workers all over the world!
This tragic reality has revealed anew the criminal nature of social-democratic governments in Europe that followed the Clinton administration of imperialist America and entered the war of aggression against Yugoslavia at that time. Today, a year later, Joschka Fischer, Foreign Minister of the German coalition government formed of the 'pink and green' parties, has lost all his vitality, turning his eyes away from the results of the bombing. This fact alone symbolizes the self-destruction of Euro-socialism and its followers.

In the present-day world which falls on the second millennium, the 'end of communism', as propagandized after the collapse of the USSR, appears to be true. However, the actual fact is that another Cold War structure has emerged, on a new horizon, between the imperialist powers led by the United States and their opponents, China and Russia.
In Taiwan Chen Sui-bian was elected to the first Taiwanese-born President; this has intensified the opposition between the US and China. The military invasion against Chechnya is still continued by the Putin administration of Russia. India and Pakistan have armed themselves with nuclear weapons. Confronted with the US-led tripartite alliance with Japan and Taiwan, China and Russia are scheming against this by bringing the whole Korean Peninsula around. This can be said to be a new framework in East Asia.
Based on its strategy for world domination whereby to deter China and Russia from 'emerging as its rivals' in the 21st century, the US government is attempting to stop the two states from banding themselves together against the US. In fact, the Clinton administration is now strengthening the NATO alliance on the basis of its new 'strategic concept' that declared the possibility of intervening in conflicts outside its area. Together with Japan, it has also started, based on the revised Guidelines for US-Japan Defense Cooperation, to build a joint war-operating system that enables the two imperialist states to cope immediately with emergencies in Asia and the Middle East, which they call 'situations surrounding Japan'. The enacted laws related to the new Guidelines are about to be enforced upon a 'crisis of the Taiwan Strait', a crisis that may break out between China and Taiwan headed by Chen Sui-bian. US imperialists will accelerate its instigation about the 'crisis of Taiwan', because North and South Korea had their first talk for reunification after an interval of half a century, based on the ideas declared in 1972: 'independent', 'peaceful' and 'reunification as a nation'. Moreover, the Japanese government has already set about 'amendments' to the 'war-renouncing' Constitution under the pretext that it was imposed on the nation by the occupation army. The government is now promoting this historic scheme on the basis of the latest series of reactionary offensives.
Faced with this trend of the imperialist world, the Jang Zemin administration of China is strengthening its ties with the Putin administration of Russia on the basis of their treaty of friendship, under the banner of 'anti-hegemonism', i.e. anti-American imperialism. The former government is thrown into aggravated economic contradictions due to its policies for 'socialist market economy'. The latter, which is dreaming of reviving the 'powerful Russia' resting on an authoritative domestic rule, has started on a 'perestroika of the Gorbachev / Yeltsin-type perestroika', sticking to the two-faced policy adopted in the Brezhnev era. That is, this government, on the one hand, is rigorously taking policies for expanding armaments with a faint hope of reinforcing nuclear weapons, and, on the other hand, has launched the offensive of 'disarmament' with the intention to form an encircling net against America and extend it to backward countries. This offensive was clearly shown in the ratification of the CTBT by the Russian Duma and Putin's proposal for US-Russian cooperation in missile shield technology put forward against Clinton's NMD.
Furthermore, under the situation of this new confrontation between the US and China-Russia, economic struggles are intensified among imperialist powers: American imperialism seeks to expand its exclusive economic bloc named NAFTA over the whole area of Latin America; continental EU states form the 'Euro land' on the basis of their monetary unification; and imperialist Japan is plotting to build a today's version of the Great East-Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, as symbolized by Prime Minister Mori's statement, 'Japan is the land of Gods centring on the Emperor.'
In addition to these struggles, over their shares of the oil resources in the Middle East and the Caspian Sea, the imperialist states of America, the EU and Japan, as well as China and Russia, are all colliding with each other.

This is the tragic, humiliating reality that we are confronted with at the present time. In spite of all this, struggles of workers and the toiling masses throughout the world are thrown into a deepening crisis as a whole, as shown in the regrettable fact that, when faced with the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, not all of them fought resolutely with the aim to overthrow their own governments.
Social-democratic governments in Europe have been shaken by the bombing in both political and economic aspects. Massimo D'Alema's government in Italy fell into collapse, and the Social Democratic Party of Germany showed its decline in recent elections. Not only this, in Austria, the neo-Fascist Freedom Party came to share the government with the conservative People's Party. Every EU country is threatened with the same nightmare, the resurgence of Nazis and Fascism in the 21st century.
The official oppositions in Japan have also revealed their degeneration. In the midst of the reactionary offensives to build US-Japan joint war operating systems based on the Security Treaty and@the new Defense Guidelines, as well as the increasing tendency to 'amend the Constitution', the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party have abandoned making any efforts to create antiwar, anti-Security Treaty struggles in workplaces or schools. They are merely demanding that the government should take 'Asian-oriented' policies for state security and foreign relations. They are playing the role of complementing from below the ambition of the Japanese rulers to build a new Great East-Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.

Friends of the world!
Now is the time to fight for overcoming degenerate opposition movements led by rotten social democrats and social-democratized Stalinists. Let us advance antiwar, anti-Fascist struggles and fights against neocolonialist rule on the basis of proletarian internationalism!

Oppose the military occupation of Kosovo by the NATO allies and Russia! We should advance this struggle in solidarity with people in Yugoslavia including Serbs, and, at the same time, call on them to struggle to overturn the Milosevic regime that has pursued its 'ethnic cleansing' policy against the people. Never overlook American imperialist rulers' schemes to provoke wars and appear as warmongers in order to destroy Yugoslavia, Iraq, North Korea and other 'anti-American' states!
Let us also oppose the military build-ups promoted by Chinese and Russian rulers on the basis of their strengthened partnership! Denounce the Putin administration committing a military aggression against Chechnya! Never allow the Jang Zemin government to oppress ethnic minorities!

Now is the time for the working class and the toiling masses of the world to advance international antiwar struggles in each country! Let us fight antiwar struggles aiming to create an antiwar International!