Apr 99

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Notes on "Urgent Causes," Violence, and Kosovo

David McReynolds, a long-time peace and justice activist, works with the War Resisters League.

March 23, New York City

Now that NATO has given authorization for the bombing of Yugoslavia, the question is what response do socialists and pacifists have to this?

The first problem is that we are not dealing with "good guys." I know parts of the Left will try to explain away the NATO action as a steady effort to eliminate the last bastion of socialism in Europe. I know that parts of the peace movement will downplay what Milosevic has done. And I also know-perhaps most important at these times of crisis-that those of us ten thousand miles from where the bombs are going to fall really don't know all sides of the conflict. We deal with what the media gives us. Things always look different when you are standing on the ground, either in Serbia or in Kosovo. They are always more complex than they seem at this distance.

Milosevic is not a "good guy," anymore than Saddam Hussein is. Yet in both cases we should oppose any assumption that because Milosevic and Hussein are not nice, therefore NATO is. Or that because these men are not nice we have some reason to bomb hell out of their countries, impose sanctions on their people, etc. After all, in the matter of "niceness" what kind of country are we, that supported Saddam during his long and bloody war against Iran in the 1980s? Or that supported the Shah in Iran when his secret police engaged in torture at least as bad as anything in Kosovo? How selective is the anger of our TV pundits and our President, how short their memories.

NATO is taking exactly the same position regarding Kosovo that it opposes when it comes to Turkey, where the Turkish Kurds are asking for precisely the same thing as the Albanians in Kosovo-self-determination. In Turkey we oppose the Kurdish demand because Turkey is a NATO ally. In Kosovo we support the drive for self-determination because the US wants to weaken Milosevic-and he isn't in NATO.

Terrible tragedies have occured in both situations-but we hear very little about Turkish atrocities against the Kurds. Only on the Iraqi side has the US established a "no fly zone" to help the Kurds-because in Iraq, we want Saddam weakened.

The US policy is terribly cynical, as, historically, all nations' policies are. Cynical or not, the Yugoslav army is engaged in actions which should be opposed by all reasonable means short of engaging in bombing, which has no sanction from the UN, and is applied to Yugoslavia only because it is weak in relationship to NATO-not because the cause is more urgent. All during the Russian massacres in Chechnya there were no threats of Western bombing-but I'm afraid the situation is the same in Kosovo. It is a part of Yugoslavia, has been since close to the turn of this century, and contains some of the monuments most critical to the Yugoslavs as part of their history.

Yugoslavia and Kosovo got themselves into this mess when (a) Milosevic engaged in ruthless nationalism that rejected any reasonable arrangements for moderate self-determination in Kosovo; and (b) the powerful and nonviolent mass movement in Kosovo, which had won much Western support and created a virtual parallel government, was derailed by the violence of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA attacked Serbian police and Serbian civilians. Yugoslavia brutally counter-attacked.

The KLA took any peaceful accommodation off the table. Do I support the right of the KLA to use violence? Sure, any people has that right, just as I supported the right of the Vietnamese to use violence. But between supporting the right and thinking that use of violence is reasonable, there is a huge gap. I should add that while I do support the right of self-determination, I don't support nationalism, not in the US, and not in Kosovo. In the case of the Vietnamese it was not simply self-determination, but also, as in India, an effort to remove a foreign occupying force. The case for that is less clear in Kosovo, where the present 90% Albanian population was not a "steady historic fact."

The NATO bombing may be painless (for NATO-not for the Serbs) but it may also prove costly. It is believed that Yugoslav air defenses are moderately efficient, which means there may be loss of US jets. And then ground action to rescue the pilots. If the bombing proves ineffective, will NATO troops be sent in? If they are sent in (perhaps to arrest Milosevic), do we have any sense of how long they will have to stay, how fierce the fighting is likely to be?

Only in the past few days has the New York Times carried a story about war crimes committed by Croatia late in the Bosnian conflict. At that time the Croatian Army drove tens and tens of thousands of Serbs from their ancestral homes, killing many in the process. The Times noted that the role of the US in training and supplying the Croatians had never been fully probed and that charges that two Croatian generals should be arrested for war crimes might embarrass the US. At the time, the Croatian offensive was reported in the West, but with none of the anger and moral fury that had been felt when the Serbs had carried out similar ethnic cleansing. Had the war already so changed us that we had lost the ability to feel grief, sorrow, and anger when Serbian families were murdered and driven out? We were right to feel this about the Serbian attacks on Muslims and Croats-what happened to us? Will that happen again if we find NATO forces in a door-to-door fight in Serbia?

Any democratic opposition in Serbia (and it does exist) will be largely destroyed by bombing. The same is true of any hope for nonviolent alternatives in Kosovo.

There are times when those of us who believe in peace cannot provide answers. We can be as truthful as possible, see as clearly as possible, but we may not have answers. The irony is that because the US (and NATO) is so heavily armed there is a temptation to use the weapons to prove we need them and, more crucial, to fail to make any of the concessions and compromises we might make if we didn't have the weapons. One reason for disarmament is that it would make it more essential to pursue peaceful alternatives-which the US won't pursue as long as it is armed.

For the moment, beyond opposing the bombing, and opposing the Serbian attacks on Kosovo, I think we are without effective solutions. The serious problem is that I believe Clinton and NATO also are without effective solutions-but they have the ability to expand an already disturbing level of violence.

I recommend asking War Resisters League for a recent issue of the magazine Nonviolent Action which has a very good piece in it by Howard Clark. Send $l and mention that article to: WRL, 339 Lafayette St., NYC 10012. -DMcR