Editors’ Note: The following excerpt is from the front-page article by Gerry Foley in the May 1999 Socialist Action newspaper. To subscribe, send $8 for one year to SA, 3425 Cesar Chavez St., San Francisco, CA 94110.

…it has been clear for some time that the effect of the bombing has been essentially to create terror and to destroy the economy.

“The air war has halved economic output and thrown more than 100,000 people out of work,” Steven Erlanger reported in the April 30 New York Times [i.e., over a month before the bombing ended], citing “Western-trained and independent economists.”

Foley continues:

According to the April 20 issue of the Budapest daily Nepszabadsag, Yugoslav officials estimate that five times as many have lost their jobs because of the bombing.

He quotes Erlanger again:

“Although it is difficult to estimate the cost of replacements and repairs if the war stopped today, the economists said, the damage has had greater effects on the gross domestic product than the Nazi and then the Allied bombing of Yugoslavia, which was a much more rural country during World War II.”

The justification that the U.S. rulers give for the economic bombing is that the factories hit belong to Milosevic’s cronies. However, most of the industrial complexes are in the hands of bureaucrats now converting themselves into capitalists.

The core of the industrial working class created by the noncapitalist economy in Yugoslavia has been employed in these complexes, which have also been the centers of attempts to form independent trade unions and working-class opposition to the rule of the degenerating Stalinist bureaucracy.

The independent union Nezavisnost has signed protests against the NATO bombings. Its leaders have noted in a number of statements that its members are being thrown out of work by the destruction of the factories and that the war is making it impossible to continue to function.

In its April 2 issue, almost at the start of the NATO bombing campaign, the Italian left daily Il Manifesto published an interview with a leader of Nezavisnost in a Belgrade factory. He said:

“The situation in Serbia is terrible. NATO bombs every night. At the same time, the situation is terrible for the Albanian people in Kosovo because of the Serbian army. We have always been against [that] war. That is why Milosevic hates us, and why we have had a lot of problems. But now they are much worse.

“Today we have stopped our trade-union activities. If we had not done so, it would have been very dangerous for our members and for us all.

“The NATO planes are not bombing the city and its people, but they are bombing military targets around the city and the factory...Our four factories, where we had very strong trade-union branches, have collapsed in recent days — that is UTVA, [in] Pancevo near Belgrade, the Racovica DMG near Belgrade, Sloboda in Racak, and Milan Blagojevic on West Serbia street.

“My factory is the DMB [DMG?], and now it is no more. Along with me, 3,000 engineering workers have lost their jobs.

“Although many of the workers had been laid off in Pancevo, the situation is similar there. NATO bombed for four nights and fired 10 cruise missiles [at the Pancevo factory]. It is the same situation in other factories. Almost 10,000 metalworkers have lost their jobs and have no future. About 5,000 of them were members of our union.”

Foley cites the comment of one Serbian woman in response to the NATO bombing of the electric power system serving Belgrade: “This is not a military target. This is just trying to demoralize ordinary people.”

Foley rightly observes: “Demoralizing the population and dislocating the society cannot create conditions for democratic reform but only for demoralization, cynicism, and resignation.”

Thus making it easier for the U.S. and West European capitalist powers to assert their dominance and control in Eastern Europe.