Unfortunately, preparations for an election campaign that will take us a great deal of time, prevent our Party from attending this important meeting. We would therefore like to greet all of you who are gathering in Belgrade, hoping to see you soon in person. We would particularly like to thank the People’s Democracy Party of South Korea and the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia for organising this meeting, and we can already inform you that we support the draft resolutions you will be discussing.
Swiss Communists consider it essential to develop an anti-imperialist platform that places the struggle for multipolarity at the centre. We already expressed our position at the recent meeting we had in Paris, but the international context continues to deteriorate and today we would like to focus on the context in Kosovo and Metohija, which risks being the detonator of an enormously dangerous conflict.
After a moment of apparent calm, the situation in this region of the world is heating up again: the Kosovar security forces have been placed on high alert and are being displaced en masse. This constitutes a provocation for the Serbian minority, which the presidential administration of the self-proclaimed republic of Kosovo has accused of ‘incitement’, going so far as to compare the situation to that experienced in 2014 in the Donbass in Ukraine: a disturbing parallelism, since it in fact presupposes the preparation for war.
Against this background of tension, the NATO contingent in Kosovo, KFOR, is blowing fire. Already last summer it announced that, in the event of escalation on the border between Serbia and Kosovo, troops would be ready to intervene militarily, evidently against Serbia, a nation ‘guilty’ of rejecting Atlanticism and US dictates. Striking Serbia – which is a militarily neutral country – serves not only to weaken China’s New Silk Road, but also to close the only airspace of access to Europe still allowed to Russia and thus completely bind the EU to the USA, thus preventing any form of dialogue and peace. In short, the North Americans want to bring a new war into the middle of Europe!
As Swiss Communists, we are very sensitive to this issue, not only because Switzerland renounced its neutrality in 2008 and under pressure from the UCK diaspora recognised the self-proclaimed State of Kosovo, but also because Switzerland currently has more than a hundred soldiers active in Kosovo within KFOR. A serious fact: Switzerland is not a NATO member, but obeys its military command and participates in the military occupation of this region in the service of the USA.
KFOR has openly threatened to intervene, should Serbia, a sovereign nation with completely peaceful and mutually beneficial diplomatic relations even with Switzerland, act in defence of its own people who are victims of the Pristina regime’s harassment. NATO’s actions are contrary to Swiss national interests and the class interests of the workers in our countries! This fact we – as the Communist Party of Switzerland – strongly denounce.
The Communist Party of Switzerland therefore considers it a matter of urgency, in view of the new geopolitical context, to immediately repatriate the Swiss soldiers stationed in Kosovo, as they are in fact part of an international contingent that could enter directly into an armed conflict: the violation of Swiss neutrality is here quite blatant! Let us not put the lives of our young people at risk to make Joe Biden happy! Switzerland, on the contrary, should support the Belgrade government’s proposal to Pristina to create a Community of Serb Municipalities, thus avoiding the escalation that occurred in Ukraine.
The communist and workers’ parties are now called upon to:
1) Affirm that the occupying NATO troops must leave the territory of Kosovo and Metohija immediately, and that this southern Serbian province must return to the motherland. Only then can Serbs and Albanians live there in true peace and prosperity! The restoration of Swiss neutrality must also be demanded.
2) Denounce the Kosovo separatism wanted by the USA and expose the reactionary and not at all left-wing role of Albin Kurti’s chauvinist regime, defended by Swiss and European social democracy. Our party has published an article on our webzine Sinistra.ch to explain who is this man: Albin Kurti is in fact linked to William Walker, the US agent who invented the pretext for the NATO bombing campaign in 1999. We should disseminate this text because the Kosovan extremist party ‘Vetëvendosje’ passes itself off as ‘socialist’ in the Albanian diaspora in Switzerland, when in fact it is anything but! It is a dangerous and violent pawn of American imperialism. Founded in 2004 on positions commonly labelled as ‘leftist’, the ‘Vetëvendosje’ party is not a socialist and anti-imperialist formation: next to banally progressive proposals used as a lark’s mirror, it actually promotes demands characterised by a deep chauvinist hatred against the Serbian people and with the prospect, in essence, of building ‘Greater Albania’ and the breaking of all negotiations with the Republic of Serbia, disregarding the Serbian minority that continues to live in Kosovo despite Pristina’s harassment.
3) Defending the Serbian national sovereignty as the key to obviating imperialist sanctions against Russia and favouring the Chinese One Belt and Road project. Serbia should not be seen today as an adversary capitalist country, but as a country that despite being capitalist is a strategic ally for an anti-imperialist policy and to keep Europe linked to Eurasia. This is the priority of the moment!
In solidarity
