Ljubljana
Optimism! Here at the end. Gregor Novak, Slovenian atheist, with four years in New York City where he learned to appreciate diversity ("my friends were all either Jews or Koreans"), believes that "there will be no war." The Serbs "will not again go military, not in the short term, nor will the Croats. They've learned what that costs." He does not talk about, or apparently worry about, "animosity." Make reasonable economic improvement (boy, does a lot depend on that) and they'll come around, maybe long-term. The exception is Macedonia. Things could get out of control with the Albanians.
What I hear is that Clinton's bombing succeeded. The way to get people to stop doing what they're doing, after persuasion has failed, is to make them suffer. That's the way of all war. Here the Serbs suffered and stopped their military action. They are deterred from further military action. War brings peace, aggression benefits humanity.
"Yes," said the people of Novi Sad, "but we weren't the ones who needed to be stopped and deterred. We didn't kill and cleanse. We voted against Milosevic. And we got plastered, losing three vital bridges."
The answer to that, implicit in Novak's lecture (one of several that rebuke me for seeing so much partisanship here), is that this is what you get when you form a nation-tribe. You pay for the tribe's sins. "And," the American might add, "not equitably. Suffering-infliction cannot be balanced and fair."
"How about collateral damage? Three thousand civilians died in Belgrade."
Bombing cannot be perfect. We (the Americans taking over now) accept collateral damage when we accept our goal, to inflict suffering on the big causer of suffering. Collateral damage is an accurate, justifiable term for what a humanitarian aggressor has to figure. It's straight cost-benefit. Will the suffering of tribal bystanders, as in Belgrade, be less than the total suffering you're trying to stop, as in Kosovo? If the answer is yes you bomb and live with the results."
"Yes, but suppose it's just the tribe's leader who is making the decisions."
Who made him, or let him be, leader? It's the nation-tribe again. But the humanitarian aggressor thinks further. He thinks about making the tribe suffer so that the leader will, in his political way, suffer, and stop the tribe from doing what it's doing. Before criticizing Clinton you should ask, "What would I have done (or have him do), not by deep, retrospective knowledge, the kind academics have, but by surface, immediate knowledge, what's knowable at the time with the resources available?"
"I mean," says Clinton, anticipating Obama's answer to his counter-recession measures, "do you know a good alternative to what I did? How would YOU have stopped the Serbs?" (There's the answer to Sonia — though you'd never give it so bluntly — or to the analytical prof.)
What, Mr. Novak, is the feeling here now about Americans? "I think people believe that they stopped the war and that that was OK, but now what they do is not OK. Their behavior is outdated." (What behavior? He, or they, didn't say.)
Novak shows us how to take Sonia's word "meddling." The Yugoslav people want to be (or to have been) saved from killing and cleansing but they also want to be free to call the act that saved them "meddling."
We end with a kind of swing I haven't mentioned, the one that takes us from the sickening facts showing us what uneducated, credulous farm boys are capable of as snipers to a restaurant (or, usually, a bus) filled with the sweet music of the folk, the jolly farm folk, in their moments of togetherness. On the bus we've had Croatian folk music ("clappa," lovely), Bosnian folk music, Serbian folk music, and now Slovenian folk music.
This last, with six good strummers and great local food, was maybe the best of our restaurant jolliness and love but, adding in all the tour-ending ceremonies, we got a little impatient with it. We knew we had to get up at 3:30 (bags out at 4:00!) and we faced 24 hours of plane travel home.
You seem to be ignorant that it was the KLA which initiated the killings and violence in order to get a reaction to get international community/NATO involvement. So this shows that their terrorism was rewarded. There were some of their people sacrificed, after they started the kidnapping, torture and killing of Serbs in the province. But in the end they got it all, practically (minus northern Kosovo where the Serb population remaining is concentrated). They have PERMANENTLY left 200,000 Kosovo Serbs and Montenegrins ethnically cleansed - for over 13 years now and there's no sign that it will ever be safe for these people to reclaim their homes/property/businesses.
ReplyDeleteYou also left out the Roma/Gypsies - they were systematically attacked - entire neighborhoods burned down and then left displaced or ethnically cleansed.
Fact is that many Albanians were never loyal to Yugoslavia and had been engaging in low-scale ethnic cleansing which was even happening in Tito's time.
Even the small population of Kosovo Croats - yes there was some living in Kosovo - which left after NATO/KLA took over Kosovo. Some of these were resettled in the homes of Croatian Serbs which had been ethnically cleansed by Croats.
So actually, the U.S. rewarded pro-active terrorism on the part of the Albanians and that encouraged/strengthened them to attack northwestern Macedonia in the summer 2001.
Also, just last month, Albanians murdered four young Macedonian fishermen (about 18 yrs. old) and a middle-aged Macedonian witness to their pointblank range execution-style killings.
Macedonia has arrested several Islamist Albanians who likely were trying to spark some kind of ethic war again with that act.
The Albanian also covet parts of southern Serbia, Chameria(sp?) in Greece, some of Montenegro too.
U.S. actions helped promote the way to a Greater Albania.
Additionally, many of the terrorists who've been active in Europe and around the world, had trained or been in Bosnia during or after the war. There are radical Islamic training camps in the Balkans in thanks to the U.S. helping to bring these people over to help the Muslim side. Just as Osama bin Laden was a U.S. ally in the war against the Russians/Soviet Union. And Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser under Pres. Jimmy Carter, admitted they promoted and supported Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan to bait the Soviet Union into an invasion. He says they were glad when the Soviets invaded because they figured that war would give them their "Vietnam". This of course contrasts to their words and behavior at the time of the invasion where they condemned it and said it was so awful; but it was exactly as they wanted.
I pass on the following from Gifford Dozsee, Professor of History, Emeritus, Ohio University:
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for sharing these anecdotes with me. They have brought back many memories of my trip from Beirut through Yugoslavia to Austria, in 1953. In Zagreb we visited the Roman Catholic Cathedral where a priest on the Cathedral staff toured us through the structure, talking to us in German about the history of Zagreb, of Croatia, and of the Cathedral. After he learned that our group consisted to faculty and students from The American University of Beirut and that I, in particular, taught history, his talk became more and more politicized. In condensed form he told us that every year tens of thousands of young Croatians migrate to the USA. Those who live in Zagreb are invited annually to an orientation lecture where they are told to remember always that they are Croation (NOT Yugoslav but Croation) and that Croatia was the savior of Christianity in Europe. When the Turks came, he exclaimed, those Bosnians to the south of us converted to Islam in large numbers. But here in Croatia we remained faithful to the one true Roman Catholic Faith. Because of our staunch adherence to Cathoic Christianity, the Turks were never able to conquer Europe and hence we Croatians are the folks who saved Christianity in Europe.
Looking directly at me, he added, "When you return to the United States, be sure to teach your students about the huge importance of Croatia to World History." I have often shared this story, using it to illustrate the mind-set that facilitated the Balkan Wars of the 1990's. Once the strong control of Tito over the diverse peoples of Yugoslavia was removed, the Balkan Wars ensued. My thought at the time of the visit to Zagreb's cathedral (and later) has been: If the educated portion of the population thinks like this, it is no wonder that ordinary folks cling to narrow-minded ethnic nationalism.