The year 1999 saw the major imperialist powers engage in an unprecedented multilateral gang-up against a small country, as NATO, led by the United States but including forces from Britain, Germany, France, Italy and other allied countries, rained bombs down on tiny Serbia, the largest fragment of the former Yugoslavia.

The nominal pretext for the war was the conflict in Kosovo, a Serb province with a predominately Albanian population. A separatist movement, closely linked to gangsters and drug smugglers, received backing from the US and Germany and arrogated to itself the grandiose and misleading title of the “Kosovo Liberation Army.”

As part of its efforts to mobilize the working class and public opinion generally against the imperialist war, the International Committee of the Fourth International expanded the regular postings on the World Socialist Web Site from five days a week to six, starting the first week of May 1999.

The middle-class “left” groups, which had opposed imperialist bullying of small countries during the war in Vietnam, the US attacks on Cuba and Nicaragua, and the French colonial war in Algeria, rallied to the side of Washington, London and Berlin during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, first backing US intervention on the side of the Bosnian Muslims, then defending the bombing of Serbia.

These same groups also supported an equally reactionary display of old-fashioned colonialism, the Australian occupation of East Timor, again on a “humanitarian” pretext: the defense of the Timorese population against the Indonesian military dictatorship.

The World Socialist Web Site maintained a strong and principled opposition to the US-NATO bombing of Serbia, which killed thousands of innocent civilians and decimated much of the country’s infrastructure.

As the WSWS explained, the devastating bombing campaign had nothing to do with preventing a “humanitarian disaster,” as government and military officials cynically claimed, but was the product of an increasingly bellicose US foreign policy. Washington saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to create a “unipolar” world order, with the United States as the unchallenged hegemon.

The analysis presented by the WSWS cut through the pretense of concern for the fate of the Albanian Kosovars and revealed the real reasons for the war, most notably in a May 24 statement entitled “Why is NATO at war with Yugoslavia? World power, oil and gold,” which outlined the world-historical context of the bombing campaign.

The WSWS warned that with the outbreak of the first armed conflict within Europe since World War II, escalating antagonisms among rival powers threatened to extend the war well beyond the boundaries of the former Yugoslavia. It was the precursor to far wider and more dangerous military adventures.

Once the bombing began, tensions flared between the United States and Russia, bringing the two nuclear-armed powers to the brink of open military conflict when a US commander proposed to attack Russian troops stationed in Serbia. There was, as well, the notorious incident in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, when a CIA-directed air strike hit the Chinese embassy in retaliation for China’s alignment with Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic.

The WSWS also analyzed the origins of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the economic and social crisis of the late 1980s, which led to the demise of the Stalinist-ruled regimes throughout Eastern Europe. In the late 1980s, millions of Yugoslav workers were laid off as state firms were shut down and state services slashed. Strikes and mass industrial actions threatened the former Stalinists’ imposition of the diktats of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on the working class. The ex-Stalinist leaders of the various Yugoslav republics turned to chauvinist rhetoric in an attempt to divert widespread anger and social misery away from revolutionary channels.

This process underlay the rise of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Stalinist who came to power as the advocate of Serbian nationalism. While the media propaganda in Europe and the United States presented Milosevic as a new Hitler, he was in reality a former favorite of Washington, which backed him because he was a proponent of the capitalist market.

Moreover, while Milosevic engaged in nationalist demagogy, his words and actions were matched by those of the nationalist leaders of the component republics and provinces of Yugoslavia, who also engaged in “ethnic cleansing,” driving Serbian civilians out of areas like Croatia’s Krajina region.

The WSWS explained that the decision by the Clinton administration to bomb Serbia into submission was the product of a major historical shift in international capitalism. The 35,000 sorties by US-NATO warplanes on an impoverished country unmasked the real relations between the major imperialist powers and small nations.

In, “After the Slaughter: Political Lessons of the Balkan War,” published June 14, after Serbia’s surrender, David North noted that a vast historical retrogression was underway: “The dismantling of the old colonial empires during the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s appears more and more, in light of contemporary events, to have been only a temporary episode in the history of imperialism.”

Particularly significant throughout the bombing campaign was the role of various ex-left groups and “human rights” activists in lending support to the incineration of thousands of Serbs. North explained the social roots of this phenomenon, in which a highly privileged layer of the upper middle class had become pro-war:

The social structure and class relations of all the major capitalist countries have been deeply affected by the stock market boom which began in the early 1980s. Perpetually rising share values, especially the explosion in market valuations since 1995, have given a significant section of the middle class—especially among the professional elite—access to a degree of wealth that they could not have imagined at the outset of their careers.

The German Greens, who had entered a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party for the first time, leapt at the opportunity to declare their support for the war, with Joschka Fischer, the party’s leader and former anarchist street fighter, serving as foreign minister in the government and principal cheerleader for the bombing campaign.