Latitudes CuratorLab is a practice-based, online curatorial residency for emerging curators in Africa. In 2023, ten aspiring curators will be guided through a facilitated online residency, designed to offer practical experience in the industry and to hone their curatorial skills.
Here at Latitudes, we know that programmes focused on fostering professional practice skills for young curators on the continent are slim. For the second iteration of CuratorLab, we are extending our reach to offer the opportunity to Curators from not only South Africa, but Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, Namibia and Mozambique too. No formal training is needed and practical curatorial experience is preferred.
What Countries are Eligible?
South Africa, Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, Namibia and Mozambique
Who is Eligible?
Curators from South Africa, Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, Namibia and Mozambique.
No formal training is needed and practical curatorial experience is preferred.
What is Value of Award?
As one of 10 curators selected for the RMB Latitudes CuratorLab, you will be offered the following opportunities:
Plan and conceptualise your own show, centred on artists from your community, that will be hosted on Latitudes Online
1-on-1 mentorship by a highly recognised curator in the industry as well as with Latitudes curators
A curator profile on Latitudes where you may promote, exhibit and sell your own selection of works
Networking and peer-review sessions with curators from the continent
Curatorial professional practice sessions and handbook
All of the above will be conducted in 7 online sessions hosted weekly
As part of the programme, you will be offered the following professional practice skills while curating your show:
Understand the industry on the continent and the diaspora
Curatorial professional practice; including proposal writing, the conceptualisation of curatorial statements, catalogue and pricing structures and managing relationships
Getting out there, marketing yourself as a curator
Digital curation development
Key administrative skills
Latitudes provides:
Free curators profile on Latitudes Online
Comprehensive marketing campaign and exposure to our database of over 15,000 newsletter readers
Commission on all artworks sold as well as logistic and administrative support
R1500 stipend to cover data costs
Plus you get to keep and update your profile as long as you like!
The UK is considering shipping Challenger 2 battle tanks to Ukraine as part of a major escalation in NATO’s war against Russia.
Following talks at London’s Lancaster House last Friday with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said that sending tanks “may well be part” of the UK’s future support for Ukraine.
Foreign Secretary James Cleverly meets Annalena Baerbock, German Foreign Minister for a bilateral meeting at the UK-Germany Strategic Dialogue meeting at Lancaster House. January 5, 2023, London, United Kingdom. [Photo by Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street / CC BY 2.0]
The talks were held the same day Germany announced that it will send Ukraine armoured vehicles and a Patriot missile system. The US Biden administration has committed to sending dozens of Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles as part of a further tranche of military aid.
Asked by a reporter if the UK would respond by upgrading its military support, Cleverly said, “We will continue to speak with the Ukrainians about what they need for the next phase of their self-defence and we will continue working with our international partners about ensuring that we provide that. Tanks might well be part of that.”
Britain is the second largest supplier of military aid to Ukraine, after the US, having already sent £2.3 billion in military hardware. This includes 200 armoured vehicles—with six Stormer vehicles fitted with Starstreak launchers—along with hundreds of missiles and maritime Brimstone missiles. The Sunak government is committed to matching or increasing its military assistance to Ukraine this year.
France agreed last week to deliver AMX-10 RC light tanks to the Ukrainian military. But Britain sending battle tanks into the Ukraine war would be a major step further and provocation against Moscow. While it is an aging vehicle, the Challenger 2 tank—used by British soldiers in military operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Iraq—has had several upgrades since the 1990s and is considered one of the most reliable tanks available. The Tory government decided to upgrade 148 of its Challengers (two thirds of the total fleet of 227) only two years ago, while the Challenger 3 is still in development in a joint venture with Germany.
Soldiers of 1 A Squadron, Queens Royal Lancers (QRL) patrolling outside Basra, Iraq onboard a Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank during Operation Telic 4. [Photo: defenceimagery.mod.uk/ for reuse under the OGL (Open Government License).]
Further details emerged this week of the UK’s plans in a piece written by Deborah Haynes, the security and defence editor of Sky News. Haynes has intimate connections with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and intelligence agencies. She wrote Monday, “Discussions have been taking place ‘for a few weeks’ about delivering a number of the British Army's Challenger 2 main battle tank….
“One source suggested Britain might offer around 10 Challenger 2 tanks, enough to equip a squadron.” The “source said this in itself would not be a ‘game changer’ but it would still be hugely significant because the move would breach a barrier that has so far prevented allies from offering up Western tanks to Ukraine for fear of being seen as overly escalatory by Russia.”
Haynes cited a Ukrainian source who said if the UK sent Challenger tanks, “’It will be a good precedent to demonstrate [to] others - to Germany first of all, with their Leopards… and Abrams from the United States’”.
“Ukraine”, the article noted, “has long requested the mass-produced, German-made Leopard II tanks, used by several European allies, including Germany, Poland, Finland, the Netherlands and Spain.
“Warsaw and Helsinki have already signaled a willingness to supply their Leopard tanks to Kyiv” but were unable to supply these to Ukraine as it “requires approval from Berlin because Germany holds the export licence.”
Sky and other news sources said that a decision on supplying Challenger and/or other tanks could be made as soon as January 20 at the US-led “Ramstein” contact group of defence ministers, comprising the 50 nations flooding Ukraine with ever more advanced, lethal weaponry.
The Sunak government is currently reviewing its overall defence budget, including the military aid it hands over to Kiev. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak insisted on a pre-Christmas visit to UK troops in Estonia—which along with Poland is the base for 1,000 troops deployed by London as part of the anti-Russian Operation Cabrit—that there would be no let-up in military support for Ukraine.
Tanks uploaded on military truck platforms as a part of additional British troops and military equipment arrive at Estonia's NATO Battle Group base in Tapa, Estonia, Friday, Feb. 25, 2022. [AP Photo/Sergei Stepanov]
During his visit he spoke to soldiers of the King’s Royal Hussars, an armoured cavalry regiment equipped with Challenger 2 tanks. He arrived in Estonia after addressing a summit in Riga, Latvia, of the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF)—a military alliance of anti-Moscow northern European states. There he announced a £250 million contract to ensure the supply of artillery ammunition to Ukraine throughout 2023. The JEF was also addressed by video-link by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
While Sunak has committed to being “all in” in backing Ukraine, even announcing a review of spending provoked a frothing response from the most pro-war sections of the media in the Guardian, who declared it a betrayal of the support offered by former prime minister Boris Johnson. Hundreds of thousands of rounds of artillery was not enough when Kiev “is calling for a step-change in western assistance,” it complained.
Sunak has not yet committed to matching the increase in defence spending to 3 percent of GDP by 2030 (more than £150 billion extra in the next eight years) pledged by his short-lived predecessor Liz Truss.
Fearful of British imperialism missing out on any spoils, the most predatory forces within the political and military elite are demanding that the defence budget be ramped up well beyond the 2 percent of GDP insisted on by NATO. The Financial Times reported earlier this month, “In early December, Britain’s defence minister Ben Wallace and the head of the armed forces Admiral Sir Tony Radakin went to see Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at 10 Downing Street with an overarching topic on their minds: the UK military’s need for money.”
Wallace is a prominent supporter of Johnson, who said he would back him before Johnson decided not to challenge Sunak in last summer’s Tory leadership contest. Only days before meeting Sunak, he declared of the regular UK army, reduced by decades of cuts to 72,000 troops, “If we just want to stay at home and do a bit of tootling around, we've got an armed forces big enough.”
Wallace and Radakin’s intervention, according to the Daily Telegraph, secured a military spending “increase by more than a billion pounds to avoid a real term cut over the next two years”, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt expected to announce the increase in his Budget this spring.
Hunt is on record supporting a huge increase to 4 percent of GDP on defence, international aid and foreign office policies.
The rise is to coincide with the publication of a new Integrated Review (IR) of the armed forces. The previous one outlined by the Johnson government barely a year ago and centred on a “tilt” towards the Indo-Pacific region, away from Europe, will be torn up. Hunt declared in his November budget that it “is necessary to revise and update the Integrated Review, written as it was before the Ukraine invasion.”
Ahead of the review, Radakin in the annual Chief of the Defence Staff Lecture to the Royal United Services Institute—the premier defence and security think tank—posed the question that while the previous IR “was correct to identify Russia as the most acute threat and was the first to begin to grapple with the scale of the challenge of China… How do we manage a weaker but more vindictive Russia over the long term? Are we going to remain committed to a global outlook? And if so, how much do we invest?” Britain could “not shy away from our status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a nuclear power with global responsibilities and the 6th largest economy in the world.”
This required, “thinking big: accelerating the transformation of the Armed Forces to become even more lethal and integrated… Being even more global in our outlook.”
He proposed, “Might that mean an Army equipped with anti-ship or hypersonic missiles capable of striking the enemy thousands of kilometres away? Might it mean a British carrier regularly deployed in the Indo-Pacific at the heart of an allied strike group?”
Making clear the scale of the conflict the UK should prepare for, he continued, “Because the biggest lesson from the past year is to recognise that we are part of a generational struggle for the future of the global order.”
The immediate rise in the military budget just sanctioned is only a down payment. Everything else, above all workers’ wages, must be held at rock bottom levels as inflation soars so that the military budget can grow.
The plundering of social spending—including that required by an already collapsing National Health Service—to spend an extra £150 billion on the military this decade is a declaration of war against the working class. Public spending cuts will fund the £31 billion cost of four new submarines to carry the UK’s nuclear missiles and as many as 138 F-35 stealth fighter jets (£90 million each) to serve as the cutting edge of Britain’s aircraft carriers.
Conservative government Business Secretary Grant Shapps introduced the first reading of its new anti-strike bill to parliament Tuesday. Its main aim is to impose minimum service levels (MSLs) on emergency service workers, the transport network and then later throughout the public sector. Given the Conservative’s still substantial working majority of 69, the Bill is expected to pass later in the year.
The law will apply in England, Scotland and Wales, with Northern Ireland the only part of the UK exempt.
The legislation will allow the government to impose MSLs on six sectors of the public and private sector workforce in all the key industries. This would mean a significant proportion of workers (expected to be around 20 percent) across the economy would have to keep working during industrial action. The first three sectors to have the dictatorial measure imposed are the ambulance, fire and rail services. The legislation will then be imposed on workers throughout health, education, border security and nuclear decommissioning.
Under the new laws, the business secretary of the day will be able to unilaterally decide statutory minimum service levels throughout the public sector in the event of a strike being called.
The Bill will contain powers to sack workers who refuse to abide by MSLs during a strike. They will lose current employment protections forbidding dismissal during legal industrial action. Both trade unions and their members can be sued by private companies if they defy the legislation.
Britain's Business Secretary Grant Shapps leaves after a meeting in Downing Street in London, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. [AP Photo/Kin Cheung]
Shapps stated that the measures would be introduced and then broadened out via a favoured mechanism of the ruling class: “consultation”. He declared, “we intend to consult on what an adequate level of coverage looks like in fire, ambulance, and rail services. For the other sectors covered in the Bill, we hope to reach minimum service agreements so that we do not have to use the powers—sectors will be able to come to that position, just as the nurses have done in recent strikes.”
This voluntary element is bogus, as the government has already made clear the legislation will be imposed if not agreed by the trade unions.
Shapps cynically stated that MSLs were required to keep the population safe during industrial action, referring to them repeatedly as “Minimum Safety Levels.” He asserted, “The new ambulance strike [beginning Wednesday] will result in patchy emergency care for the British people – and this cannot continue”, adding, “We do not want to use this legislation. But we must ensure the safety of the British public.”
The reality is that the main threat to the health and welfare of the population is the ongoing destruction of the National Health Service by the Tory government. The health trade unions have provided cover during strikes, including during the first ambulance workers’ strikes last month. No one died as a result of the strikes, unlike Tory cuts.
The measures outlined by Shapps are part of the turn in the ruling class internationally to authoritarian forms of rule, which has seen the outright banning of critical strikes, such as by the Biden Administration in the US, and the frequent use of Minimum Services Levels in many countries.
Shapps told parliament, “The legislation will bring us in line with other modern European countries such as France, Spain, Italy and Germany, all of which already have these types of rules in place.”
Giving a clear hint as to where the policy is headed once the MSL precedent is set, he added in reply to a Scottish National Party MP, “If we go beyond Europe, he will be interested to hear that in Australia, Canada and many states in America, blue-light strikes, as we would call them, are banned entirely.”
Indicating the reliance of the ruling class on the trade union bureaucracy, Shapps namechecked the “International Labour Organisation—the guardian of workers’ rights around the world to which the [Trades Union Congress] itself subscribes,” which “says that minimum service levels are a proportionate way of balancing the right to strike with the need to protect the wider public.”
Tory MP Laura Farris said Shapps “could have added to that list South Africa, Argentina, Australia and Canada, all of which are members of the International Labour Organisation and have minimum service levels in essential services. In every single case, the ILO has reviewed the MSL and determined it to be a necessary and proportionate restriction of the article 11 right to strike.”
The picket line at Manchester Central Ambulance Station, December 21, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]
The opposition of the Labour Party—which has pledged to repeal the MSL legislation when in government—and the trade unions to the Bill is premised on the trade union bureaucracy’s proven role in suppressing every major struggle of the working class over the last four decades. To impose MSLs, they warned, would risk the class struggle breaking out of their control.
The unions have already allowed a battery of anti-strike legislation to pass, beginning with those of the Thatcher government (1979-91). These were all upheld to the letter by the Blair/ Brown Labour governments (1997-2010.) Party leader Sir Keir Starmer’s pitch for government is that Labour, the unions and big business must work in partnership to impose the necessary austerity agenda against the working class, utilising the authoritarian raft of anti-strike legislation already on the books.
Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner warned that “France and Spain … which he claims have these laws on striking, lose vastly more strike days than Britain.”
In its statement the TUC complained that “the proposed legislation would make it harder for disputes to be resolve…” and warned that “minimum service levels prolong disputes and lead to more frequent strikes.”
TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak said, “If passed, this bill will prolong disputes and poison industrial relations – leading to more frequent strikes.”
Neither the TUC nor its affiliated unions representing 5.5 million workers proposes any strikes in opposition to the Bill. Nowak instead seeks to divert workers opposition into appealing to MPs to “do the right thing and reject this cynical ‘sack key workers bill’”.
Speaking last Friday, during the first of two more days of national strikes by members of his Rail, Maritime and Transport union, leader Mick Lynch—portrayed as a fighting militant by Britain’s pseudo-left groups—said, “What I think they’ll [the government] end up doing is making industrial disputes intractable, so we’ll have to resort to partial strikes, we’ll have to resort to works to rule, we’ll have to resort to overtime bans…”
Lynch was forced to make a pose of opposition, but the union’s campaign is based on pleas to Starmer, who instructed his shadow cabinet not to support picket lines on pain of disciplinary action.
Lynch stated, “We’ll fight them in Parliament. The Labour Party leadership have said they are going to oppose this and they’ll repeal it as soon as they can…We need to get a change of government and change of policy and then we need a new set of workers’ rights brought in as a priority [by Starmer after a general election in 2024!].
“We’ll oppose it in the courts and we’ll oppose on the streets as well. I don’t think we’ll get a general strike as people commonly understand it, but I definitely think we’re working towards getting coordinated industrial action across as many sectors as possible and across as many unions as possible.”
Lynch concluded that none of this had to happen if the government would only engage with the unions to end the strikes in talks this week, “We’re working for a settlement. We don’t want further strike action,” he said.
Canada’s Liberal government announced Tuesday that Ottawa will purchase a National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) for Ukraine. The announcement followed a bilateral meeting between Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and US President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the “three Amigos” summit in Mexico City, which brought Biden and Trudeau together with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Ottawa’s purchase of the missile defence system is a further escalation of the US-led NATO war on Russia. Coming in the wake of the Biden administration’s pledge to send Patriot missiles to Ukraine and rapid-fire announcements from France, Germany and the US that they will provide Kiev with tanks, Ottawa’s supplying of a NASAMS battery underscores that the chief NATO powers, Canada included, are parties to the Ukraine war, and adds to the likelihood of a direct clash between Russia and the imperialist powers.
US President Joe Biden, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meet at the 10th North American Leaders' Summit at the National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023. [AP Photo/Andrew Harnik]
NASAMS batteries, according to the system’s co-designer Raytheon, provide “a tailorable, state-of-the-art defence system that can maximize their ability to identify, engage and destroy current and evolving enemy aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles and emerging cruise missile threats.” The US has already supplied two NASAMS batteries to Ukraine, with a further six in the pipeline. Each NASAMS battery is worth approximately US$200 million, based on a Pentagon contract with Raytheon from late November for six NASAMS worth $1.2 billion.
Tuesday morning’s bilateral meeting between Biden and Trudeau underscored the aggressive character of the Canada-US imperialist alliance. Stretching back over eight decades, Washington and Ottawa’s military-strategic partnership is being modernized and expanded to wage the wars of the 21st century, including by guaranteeing the US war machine access to Canadian critical minerals and deepening military cooperation between the two countries from the Arctic to the South China Sea.
On the eve of the North American leaders’ summit, Canada confirmed its purchase of 88 F-35 fighter jets from US producer Lockheed Martin at a cost of C$19 billion (US$14.2 billion). The supersonic fifth generation aircraft, which has gained notoriety in recent years due to several serious design flaws, costs US$36,000 for every hour of flight time and over US$7 million for the annual maintenance of each plane.
The purchase is one of the headline moves in Ottawa’s largest rearmament program since World War II. This program includes a more than 70 percent increase in defence spending between 2017 and 2026, the purchase of new fleets of warships and warplanes, and the modernization of the bilateral North American Defence Command (NORAD) to prepare for the waging of war with hypersonic missiles and nuclear weapons. The White House readout of the Trudeau-Biden meeting made special mention of NORAD modernization, noting that the bilateral alliance is critical for “ensuring the continued defence and security of North America.”
Since the Ukraine war erupted last February, Canada has committed $3.4 billion in aid to the right-wing regime in Kiev, including over $1.1 billion in military assistance. Canada was also in the front rank of the imperialist powers who goaded Russian President Vladimir Putin into launching his reactionary invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Along with the US and British militaries, Canadian Armed Forces’ personnel were instrumental in reorganizing and training Ukraine’s military for war between 2014 and 2022. This included helping integrate the far-right Azov Battalion and other fascist forces into the Ukrainian military and para-military National Guard.
Recognizing the importance of Canada’s involvement, the White House readout noted that Biden thanked Trudeau for “providing security, economic and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine.”
The pair also discussed further integration of Canada into Washington’s strategic offensive against China, which US imperialism currently views as the greatest threat to its global hegemony. According to the Prime Minister’s Office, the meeting included discussion of “China and a coordinated approach to the Indo-Pacific.”
Recent months have seen Ottawa significantly deepen its support for Washington’s all-sided diplomatic, economic and military drive to isolate and prepare for military conflict with China. In late November, the Trudeau government released its long-delayed Indo-Pacific strategy, which it emphasized was drafted in close consultation with Washington. The document labelled China “an increasingly disruptive global power” and provocatively pledged to step up Canada’s “multifaceted engagement” with Taiwan. In effect, Canada has declared its support for Washington’s de facto abandonment of its decades-long “one China” policy, which recognized China’s historic claim to sovereignty over the island.
No corner of the globe is spared from US and Canadian imperialist meddling. Biden pressed Trudeau Tuesday for Canada to lead a military and police intervention to prop up the pro-imperialist puppet regime in Haiti. The Western hemisphere’s most impoverished country, Haiti has experienced a calamitous social crisis over recent years, as armed gangs with close ties to the country’s security forces and traditional elites have terrorized large swathes of the country. A lack of food combined with a cholera outbreak and the virtual collapse of the economy have left the vast majority of the country’s 11 million population in destitution.
Critical to the predatory geopolitical ambitions of North America’s twin imperialist powers is their consolidation of control over key raw materials vital for future economic development, including “green” and computer technology, and the production of advanced weapons and weapons systems. In 2019, the Trump administration and Trudeau government initiated the Canada-US Critical Minerals Action Plan, an agreement to coordinate access to 17 rare earths and critical minerals deemed essential for the military and economic dominance in the decades to come. In March 2021, at their first official meeting, Biden and Trudeau agreed to a Roadmap for a Renewed US-Canada Partnership, which included a detailed section on strengthening the action plan and North American supply chains.
Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke on this theme extensively last fall. At an October keynote speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, she advocated a policy of “friend-shoring,” i.e., an economic nationalist and protectionist plan aimed at confronting Washington’s and Ottawa’s chief global rivals, above all China. Canada would focus on “fast-tracking, for example, the energy projects our allies need to heat their homes and to manufacture electric vehicles.”
These policies, dressed up with bogus commitments to defending “democracy,” supporting “green” energy and tackling climate change, are aimed squarely at Russia, one of the world’s largest oil and natural gas producers, and China, which has a strong position in the market for raw materials required for EV production. Underscoring this fact, the Trudeau government moved just weeks after Freeland’s speech to tighten regulations for investors in Canada’s critical minerals sector. The changes block “state-owned enterprises,” a euphemism for Chinese businesses, from investing in many energy and mining projects. The new rule allows the government to trigger a provision in the Investment Canada Act that gives them the power to declare investments “injurious to national security.” Following the change, Ottawa forced three Chinese companies to divest their investments in Canadian lithium mines.
A joint statement by the chambers of commerce of Canada, Mexico and the United States urged the “Three Amigos” summit to adopt an agenda to make North America the world leader in electric vehicle production based on the “competitive” advantage provided by cheap labour in Mexico, and Canada’s rich deposits of raw materials. As Flavio Volpe, head of the Canadian Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, put it, “The US has capital, Mexico has human capital and Canada has lithium, cobalt, graphite and nickel.”
Canadian and US imperialism are determined to pursue their economic interests just as ruthlessly against their supposed allies as against Russia and China. Washington and Ottawa’s “North America First” agenda for EV production and other “clean energy” initiatives has prompted criticism from the European imperialist powers, who fear being sidelined in the key economic industries of the coming decades.
At the North American leaders’ summit, Ottawa and Washington continued their sustained push to compel Lopez Obrador to reverse course on his plan to strengthen the position of state-controlled companies in Mexico’s energy sector. Billions of dollars in investments and massive profits are at stake for American and Canadian big business, with Canadian companies holding C$13 billion in investments in the sector. Last July, the Trudeau and Biden governments launched a dispute resolution procedure under the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the successor to NAFTA, to compel Mexico to make concessions.
The trade union bureaucracy, which has systematically suppressed the class struggle as worker opposition has mounted to the austerity policies demanded by the ruling elite to pay for wars abroad, is fully integrated into Canadian imperialism’s “North America First” militarist and protectionist agenda. When the Trudeau government unveiled in June 2022 its Indo-Pacific Advisory Committee, which assisted in the preparation of the government’s strategy document, one of its most prominent members was Hassan Yussuff, the former head of the Canadian Labour Congress. Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, was intimately involved in the USMCA negotiations, during which its subsequently disgraced president Jerry Dias served as a semi-official government adviser.
The German government is pursuing the declared goal of transforming Germany into Europe’s leading power and the Bundeswehr into the most powerful army in Europe. This—and not its purported concern for freedom and democracy—is why it is fueling the Ukraine war and pouring an additional €100 billion into rearmament. Germany’s war policy is not limited to Ukraine; it is also setting the Balkans on fire again.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić at the EU Western Balkans Summit in Tirana [Photo by Bundesregierung/Bergmann]
In December, Serbia and Kosovo were on the brink of a military conflict that had the potential to turn into a major conflagration. An attempt by the Albanian-dominated Kosovo government to assert its authority in the Serb-populated north sparked violent protests. Ten members of parliament, 500 police officers and numerous judges and local politicians from the Serb minority resigned in protest. Demonstrators set up roadblocks and exchanged fire with the Kosovo police.
The Kosovo administration closed border crossings to Serbia, and Kosovo Premier Albin Kurti called upon NATO to send more troops to the country and increase its Kosovo Force (KFOR) mission, which has been deployed in the region since 1999. The KFOR contingent currently consists of 3,800 troops from 28 countries. For his part, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has placed Serbian armed forces on alert and asked NATO permission to send his own troops to the area. According to Igor Simić, the former vice president of the Kosovo parliament, it was the “most explosive situation since the end of the war over twenty years ago.”
In the meantime, the situation has eased somewhat, but observers anticipate that it is only a matter of time before the conflict flares up once again.
Background to the conflict
As usual, Western propaganda has ignored the background of the conflict and instead identified a single villain responsible: Aleksandar Vučić, the president of Serbia, the country which has the closest ties to Russia of all the Balkan states. Serbia, like all other Balkan states, is seeking membership in the European Union and has condemned Russia’s military action against Ukraine. It has not, however, severed its ties with Russia and refuses to go along with the European Union’s sanctions.
In fact, the renewed escalation of the Kosovo conflict is a direct result of the aggressive policy of the European Union, which is using the Ukraine war to reinforce its political and economic dominance over the Western Balkans. Germany is playing the leading role in this process.
Since the European Union and the United States provided political and military support for the breakup of Yugoslavia into seven small states in the 1990s, the EU has admitted two of those states, Slovenia and Croatia. The admission into the EU of the remaining five, as well as Albania, is envisaged but has been repeatedly delayed.
France in particular opposed admission, fearing that further expansion of the 27-member EU would render it incapable of acting in foreign policy and further strengthen Germany’s weight. In 2019, President Emmanuel Macron vetoed the opening of accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia, a move which led to serious disagreements between Berlin and Paris.
With the Ukraine war, the EU's stance has changed. Berlin in particular is now pulling out all the stops to speed up the integration of the Western Balkan states into the EU.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Kosovo, Serbia and North Macedonia in June last year. At the beginning of November, he invited the heads of government of these three countries, as well as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Albania to a Western Balkans Summit in Berlin, which was also attended by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Then, on December 6, the first EU-Western Balkans Summit took place in Albania, with all heads of state and governments of the 27 EU member states and EU leaders travelling to Tirana.
The aim of both summits was to accelerate the integration of the Western Balkans into the EU. Several agreements were reached to facilitate the movement of goods and people and speed up accession negotiations. Bosnia-Herzegovina was given the status of a candidate country.
Germany and the EU want to achieve several goals with this.
In terms of foreign policy, the Western Balkans are to be firmly integrated into the war front against Russia, and economically cut off from the influence of Russia and China. China has financed numerous infrastructure projects in the region and is trying to gain better access to Europe via the port in Piraeus, Greece.
“An EU enlargement towards the East is a clear gain in terms of our geopolitical interests,” declared a document drawn up by the Seeheim Circle, a grouping consisting of 91 members of Chancellor Scholz’s SPD in the Bundestag. Serbia, which agreed to a three-year gas supply contract with Russia last summer and an agreement on foreign policy consultations with Moscow in September, is seen as the main obstacle.
The admission of the Western Balkan states to the EU, some of which have had candidate status for years, is also intended to create the preconditions for the admission of Moldova and Ukraine, which the EU favours for geopolitical reasons.
Another motive of the EU is to seal off the Balkan route, through which refugees from war zones in the Near and Middle East attempt to reach Europe. Serbia and Albania, for example, have so far allowed visa-free entry to nationals of several countries who then try to enter the EU-Schengen area.
Admission to the EU is linked to an extensive procedure that obliges candidates, among other issues, to abide by budgetary discipline, a demand which can only be met by massive savings at the expense of an already impoverished working class. To this end, Brussels and Berlin are working closely with the elites of the Balkan states—as they did in the break-up of Yugoslavia—and are playing off different nationalities against each other along the lines of “divide and rule.”
The Kosovo Conflict
Kosovo plays a key role in this regard. It already provided the pretext for the war in 1999 against Serbia, which stood in the way of Germany and the US at that time. On the contrived pretext that it was committing genocide in Kosovo, NATO commenced a war against Serbia without UN backing, forcing Kosovo to secede in the process.
Although the province with its nearly 1.8 million inhabitants clearly belonged to Serbia under international law, the major powers placed Kosovo under international administration. In 2008 Kosovo declared its independence and in 2013 it was recognised as an independent state by the US, Germany and most European powers.
In order to achieve this end, Washington and Berlin collaborated with forces responsible for major war crimes and maintained close links to organised crime. Several commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) have since been sentenced to long prison terms by a special court in The Hague. Hashim Thaçi, who served as a key witness to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to justify the war and later became head of government and president of Kosovo, is now also on trial in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The inviolability of state borders, invoked as a sacred principle after the Russian annexation of Crimea, was simply swept aside in the case of Kosovo.
The parallels between Kosovo and Crimea are so obvious that five EU member states still refuse to recognise Kosovo’s independence. These include the governments of Spain, Cyprus and Greece, which fear that any such recognition would legitimise separatist movements in their own countries. Ukraine has not officially recognised Kosovo for the same reason, although Kosovo is one of Ukraine’s most ardent supporters in the war against Russia.
For German foreign policy, such double standards play no role. In 1999, the NATO war against Serbia served as a welcome opportunity for the country to ditch its abstinence from foreign military interventions enforced following the crimes carried out by the Nazis in World War II and to participate in an imperialist war for the first time since 1945. Now the German government, once again headed by a Social Democrat and including the Green Party, is using the regime in Pristina to put pressure on Serbia and increase its influence in the Balkans.
Berlin’s recent advance has encouraged Kosovo Premier Albin Kurti to reassert his claim to the Serb-populated north of the country. Serbia, which continues to consider Kosovo as part of its territory, had concluded a normalisation agreement in 2013 under pressure from the EU that provided extensive self-government rights for Serb majority communities. In return, Serbia respected Kosovar institutions.
While Serbia largely fulfilled the agreement, the Kosovar side did so only in part. For example, the law on Serb majority municipalities was passed but never put into force. In fact, an unstable equilibrium prevailed. The Serb minority, estimated at between 100,000 to 200,000 depending on the source, largely administered itself and maintained close relations with Serbia, while Belgrade and Pristina made makeshift arrangements.
With his decision to no longer tolerate Serb car number plates in the Serb-populated north of Kosovo from the first of November, Kurti deliberately torpedoed this status quo. It was a provocation intended to subject the Serb majority communities to Pristina’s dictates—and was understood as such.
In so doing Kurti had the backing of Berlin. On December 11, as the conflict escalated, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Green Party) demonstratively gave him her backing. She declared on Twitter that Kosovo had reduced tensions, while Serbia’s rhetoric was having the opposite effect. Serbia’s proposal to send its troops to Kosovo was “completely unacceptable.”
This turns reality on its head. Even the conservative German daily FAZ, which usually supports the aggressive foreign policy of the German government, had to admit that in Brussels “it was noted attentively that the Serb [Vučić] behaved constructively in the recent dispute over number plates, while Prishtina sought to provoke.”
The arrogance with which Germany acts against Serbia and other countries that stand in the way of its geopolitical interests is also shown by a commentary that appeared in the weekly Die Zeit on 4 January. In language reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s infamous “Hun speech” and the war rhetoric of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, it read:
Punish Serbia, of course that sounds harsh and very imperialistic. But the EU has learned, especially in the past year, and somewhat involuntarily, that it is only taken seriously when it can also get tough and is prepared to inflict pain on others. Toughness against Russia, toughness against China and toughness against EU member Hungary are part of the Union’s necessary geopolitical coming of age. And getting tough with Serbia is overdue.
In the footsteps of the Nazi regime
As is the case in the Ukraine war, where Berlin has lined up against Russia alongside admirers of such Nazi collaborators as Stepan Bandera, the German government is also following the criminal footsteps of the Nazi regime in the Balkans. Its most important ally in the Balkans during World War II was the fascist Ustasha dictatorship of Ante Pavelić in Croatia which murdered almost a million Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croats. It maintained its own death camp in Jasenovac and had men, women and children burned alive.
The Yugoslav partisans organised themselves under the leadership of Josip Tito’s Communist Party to fight against this barbarism and the German occupation and were persecuted by the German Wehrmacht with indescribable brutality. The strength of the partisan movement was based on the fact that it united all the oppressed of Yugoslavia, regardless of their national and ethnic backgrounds, in a common struggle. Out of this united struggle emerged the Yugoslav state after World War II, which enjoyed great support among the working class.
Tito, however, had never broken with the political conceptions of his Stalinist past. He rejected linking the future of Yugoslavia to the international expansion of the proletarian revolution but tried to find a middle course between Moscow and Washington. He reacted to growing economic and social problems by strengthening nationalist currents in various different regions of the country.
The representatives of the Ustasha, who had found refuge abroad in the West with the support of the Vatican, regained influence. The German foreign intelligence service BND developed close ties with Croatian nationalists as early as the 1970s. When Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991, the government of Helmut Kohl (CDU) recognised the independence of Slovenia and Croatia at a pace that met with reservations even from its American, French and British allies.
The German initiative set in motion the nationalist fury that was subsequently supported by the US and other European powers in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Bosnian Muslims and members of other minorities suddenly found themselves living in states where they had no rights. Germany itself worked closely with Franjo Tuđman’s regime in Croatia, which revived the traditions of the Ustasha.
With the escalation of NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the wars in the Balkans and the Middle East unleashed by the US and its European allies in the past decades are breaking out once again.
This confirms that these wars were never about “terrorism,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “freedom” or “democracy,” as official propaganda claimed. They are—like the First and Second World Wars—imperialist wars for the redivision of the world between the great powers, which will lead to nuclear destruction if not stopped.
The United States and Germany have announced they will expand their training of Ukrainian troops inside their own borders, further embroiling them in a war with Russia.
The Pentagon announced Tuesday that it will train Ukrainian troops at Fort Sill, Oklahoma on how to operate the Patriot missile system, the most advanced weapon sent to Ukraine to date.
The Pentagon’s announcement is, in the words of the Washington Post, the “latest test of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threshold for Western intervention in the conflict.”
Last month, the Biden administration announced that it would send a Patriot missile battery, capable of downing Russian aircraft flying over Russian territory, to Ukraine. Last week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz officials announced they would send another battery of their own.
“Training for Ukrainian forces on the Patriot air defense system will begin as soon as next week at Fort Sill, Oklahoma,” Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said on Tuesday. “The training will prepare approximately 90 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers to operate, maintain and sustain the defensive system over a training course expected to last several months.”
Pointing to the extent of interoperability that already exists between the NATO military command structure and the Ukrainian military, Ryder added, “There has been training of Ukrainian forces in the United States before, as well as development. Ukrainians have attended our professional military education schools, they have embedded in headquarters of some of our units.”
The Pentagon official also confirmed that the US aims to train approximately 500 troops at a time at a US military facility in Germany on “combined arms warfare” involving both the Bradley infantry fighting vehicles that that are already being sent to Ukraine and the main battle tanks that NATO is expected to provide in the near future.
Ryder implied the Ukrainian troops sent to the US Army Garrison Bavaria in Germany will be training with some of the same armored vehicles that will subsequently be sent alongside them into the battlefield. “So the Bradleys should be available … at Graffenwoehr and that will be part of the training, the combined arms training that they do in Germany.”
The Pentagon’s announcement comes after US President Joe Biden announced a $3 billion arms shipment to Ukraine—the largest to date—and after Congress passed a bill allocating another $50 billion to the war. The latest weapons package included the deployment of dozens of Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, which essentially function as small tanks.
Even as they pours unprecedented amounts of weapons into Ukraine, the NATO powers are preparing to even further escalate their involvement in the war.
A major inflection point is expected to come with the January 20 summit of the Ukraine Contact Group in Ramstein, Germany.
Commenting on the upcoming summit, the Guardian wrote, “A key moment is expected to come next week when western defense ministers meet on 20 January for the next Ukraine contact group meeting to discuss future military aid. Reports suggest the US is now considering announcing at that meeting it will send Stryker armored combat vehicles.”
On Tuesday, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited Ukraine, declaring Germany’s “solidarity and support,” which “includes further arms deliveries.”
Last week, Germany announced that it would send 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles into combat.
Poland and Lithuania have announced that they plan to send Leopard 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, but that this would require Germany’s permission, as these country signed export agreements as a condition of receiving the tanks.
After meeting with Baerbock, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba commented, “Every minute during the visit, the topic of Leopards invisibly accompanied us.”
He added, “I think that the German government, somewhere deep down, understands that this decision will be made, and the tanks will be transferred to Ukraine.”
Commenting on the discussions about sending main battle tanks, a US official told Politico, “If they want to take back territory they need tanks.”
To date, the war in Ukraine has killed or injured over 200,000 Ukrainians and Russians, according to statistics cited by US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Miley.
But as the war intensifies in ferocity, it risks directly drawing in NATO members in Eastern Europe. In an interview on Tuesday, Poland’s Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak announced the formation of a new infantry division in the Eastern part of the country specifically targeting Russia.
“We know who threatens us and where… For Poland, the main threat is Russia and its imperial tendencies. That is why more troops are needed in the east of the country and that’s why a new division is being set up.” Poland, he said, is “in direct contact with the war.”
He concluded, “We take on a lot of responsibility, but we do it consciously because the further we manage to push Russia away and the greater the losses inflicted on it—the better it is for us and for the future of the democratic world.”
Expressing the reality of the growing involvement by NATO in the war, Nikolai Patrushev, a security adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin, said the conflict is “not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv,” but a “military confrontation between NATO, and above all the United States and England, with Russia.”
