162. Looking On

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By now we ought to be accustomed to "standing there looking on" while an atrocity is committed.  We stood and looked at Rwanda and Darfur and the Congo, as earlier we had looked at Biafra and Bangladesh.  I see, by Googling "atrocities 'while the world looks on'," that we have also recently looked on at atrocities in Lebanon, Algeria, Mali, the Kachin State in Burma, and the Congo again.  We looked on for a while in the Balkans.

We did not look on in Somalia (warlords stopping food shipments) or Iraq (Saddam Hussein gassing his own people).  We stopped looking on in Bosnia and needed only a glance in Kosovo.

We ought also be accustomed to reproach.  We got it in nearly all those cases.  Some was ignorant (what could anybody expect the U.S. to do in Bangladesh?), some came from too great a distance (the Kachin State in Burma), and some came from people with no constituency in the U. S. (the Tuareg in Mali — not at all like the Christians in Darfur).

Some cases taught us to re-evaluate reproach.  We couldn't stand being reproached for looking on in Somalia then we couldn't stand looking at our getting in.  We couldn't stand looking on as Saddam Hussein gassed his own people then we couldn't stand looking at what his own people, left to themselves, did to their own hospitals, schools, museums, and each other.

Now we are looking on as Bashar al-Assad commits more and more "atrocities against his people."   We can hear the reproaches coming.  And we know our government is ready to do things that will head them off.  In May General Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said "that military options are being crafted" (Fox News, 5-28-12) and in July White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that further atrocities in Syria by President Bashar al-Assad's forces should eliminate any doubt that a coordinated international response was necessary at the United Nations (Reuters).

What will the response be?  A calibrated, quagmire-avoiding response worked in Libya but can it work here?  If it doesn't, where are we?  That's hard to say but we know there's a good chance that we'd be looking at Syrian civilians, left to themselves, doing terrible things to each other.  Already the breakdown of authority in Syria is looking like the breakdown in Iraq — theft, kidnappings, inactive police stations, general lawlessness (NYT 8-10-12).

OK, but that's in our imaginations, struggling to construct the future.  These pictures are right in front of us, there, the broken bodies of five-year-olds.  Our hearts cry for action.

Yes, and so did our grandparents' hearts when the British showed us Belgian babies with their hands cut off by Germans, and so did our parents' hearts when the Kuwaitis told us how Iraqi soldiers were taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die.  The world is full of heart-users.  If you don't believe it look at that Iraqi story.  It was told by a poor Kuwaiti "eye witness" who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, acting on the advice of a hired American public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton.

All right, so you know that and the next atrocity you see or hear about you say, "OK which PR outfit is managing this one?  Which group is behind it?"  After a while your first question is a cui bono:  "Who stands to gain from the pounding of my heart?"

That's where you could end, in action-stopping cynicism, until you ask, "Who stood to gain from the heart-pounding over Hitler's first atrocities?  A lot of near-sighted, imperialist victors of World War I who produced that stupid, vindictive Versailles Treaty we'd have to force Hitler to abide by.  Act in their interest?  Not on your life."  And there you are, unleashing Hitler on Europe.

So you can't always hold off just because somebody bad is going to profit.  Sometimes you're facing an atrocity-generator you have to stop early, if you're going to stop it at all.  Decide to look on then and somebody is sure to remind you of the Big Looking On of the twentieth century, 1933-1939.  Reproach, reproach.

It's all so terribly uncertain.  Even your right to use the word "atrocity" is in doubt.  There's an 18-year-old soldier, drafted to fight in a war he didn't believe in, bleeding to death before our eyes.  But we can't call what we're seeing an "atrocity."  He's wearing a uniform and his body is 13 years older than the bodies that just moved us to tears.  So what do you call him?  What do you call war?

138. Balkan Tour (5)

5. Split to Sarajevo

Stop at the town of Mostar, where Roman Catholics, Orthodox Catholics, and Muslims all went at each other.  Many buildings after seventeen years are still pockmarked with bullet holes (which I couldn't stop taking pictures of).  Too many horrors and ironies to report.    Maybe one detail that sums them up: a cross on a hill behind the famous Mostar bridge.

The bridge was long taken as a symbol of harmony between the Muslims on one side of the Neretva River and the Christians on the other.  In 1993 this bridge, strategically insignificant, was destroyed by the Croats (Roman Catholics), apparently out of spite (the Croat leaders are still, I believe, on trial before the International Criminal Tribunal).  Then, after 70% of the city was destroyed the sides were forced in 1995 to make peace. 

We see this cross on the hill behind the rebuilt bridge of harmony and, before the guide speaks, think there has been some healing.  Then the guide tells us that the cross was put right up by the Catholics to "mark their territory."

We get the idea that everything done here makes a statement.  The rebuilt Franciscan church, with the tallest spire in town, caused us to comment on the energy of the rebuilders everywhere in Mostar.  "Yes, to get their statement made."

Our guide, Dado, was a native of Mostar.  I asked him the big question: "How do you think of yourself?"  "As a Mostarian," he said.  His first  loyalty was to his city.  He said he was thirteen at the time of the war.  Were his parents involved?  Yes, he said, but he clearly didn't want to talk about it — beyond saying that they (and he) were Catholic.

"Do you think there is genuine healing?"  Yes, he said, but it is very slow.  "Maybe it will take two generations."  "More," said Julia, our general guide, when I mentioned his answer to her.

Among the minor bad stuff here there is corruption, which we have heard about in the U.S.   Bribes.  Endemic in the "third world."  Well today at the Bosnian border one of the three officials came to the bus, spoke briefly to Julia and the driver, and walked away with three bottles of beer.  "It costs three bottles of beer to cross into Bosnia," Julia said to us.  "But it's sort of a joke."  Real beer, though.  (At the Croatian border there's a sign that says, "If you have any comments about our agents go to web site such and such.")

We're getting to know our companions better, and there are some interesting ones.  Have lunched with a couple who work for the CIA, both of them, and don't want to say much about it.  And with two sisters who were born into a German family that had come into Serbia with the Austrians 150 years ago but gotten thrown out with the other Germans who had come in with the Nazis.  They were not welcome as refugees in Germany, though, so the family moved to New York where the girls became schoolteachers near Buffalo.  Then there's Tom Dietrich, who described himself in the introductions as "an anti-trust lawyer."  We thought he litigated against trusts but no, he represents the trusts (corporations) against the anti-trusters, the government.  "Who are your clients?" MA asked him. "Anybody willing to pay my exorbitant fees," he said.

Tomorrow we'll do Sarajevo, the place most vivid in our memories of Serb atrocities.  Remember them lobbing mortars into market places and sniping at people in the streets from the hills?  And, oh yes, it's the place where a passionate Slav nationalist triggered World War I by killing the Austrian Archduke.